Your Small Kitchen Garden is for people who grow--or who want to grow--their own food, though in limited space. We explore how to grow vegetables and fruit with emphasis on expending little effort and energy. Please come share with us in our lazy garden.
My small kitchen garden sometimes pushes up so many butternut squashes that there’s no chance my family will eat all of them. This inspired me to set some on the grill. Now grilled quash provides a fine counterpoint to the baked, mashed, and cubed squash dishes I’d repeated so many times over the years.
My small kitchen garden sometimes produces way more of a particular vegetable than my family will eat. Worse: when we have too much of a type of vegetable on hand, it’s easy to fall into the trap of preparing it the same way again and again.
This happened a few years ago with butternut squash, and I developed a great urge for a quick but different way to prepare it. After some thought, I decided to exercise my grill: it seemed that a big slab of squash would perform much like a slab of beef or pork. The result made me very happy and I hope it will make you happy too. Follow the instructions in the photo captions to make your own grilled butternut squash.
If you try this, please let me know what you think—or share whatever variations you feel are noteworthy. Grilled squash goes especially well with smoked poultry or just about anything else you prepare on the grill.
Before you start on the squash, start your grill and leave it on high so it’s hot when the filets are ready. A vegetable peeler removes skin from a butternut squash; it helps to rest the squash on a firm surface and draw the peeler down toward that surface. After peeling the squash, cut off the stem and the blossom scar.
To cut up a squash for grilling, it helps to have a big honking chef’s knife. Be cautious and always cut toward a cutting board with the hand that steadies the squash safely above the knife’s blade. My first cut goes down the center of the squash, but notice that I start the cut through the seed end before standing the squash up and forcing the knife down through the neck.
I scrape the seeds out of the squash before slicing it into filets. The filets are about a quarter to three-eighths of an inch thick. Notice again that I start each cut at one end of the squash, cutting down and through (I’m not pushing the knife toward my hand in the center photo… just down toward the cutting board). This first cut acts as a guide when I stand the squash on end and work the knife down through the length of the fruit.
Once I’ve cut out all my squash filets, I paint them on one side with a thin coating of olive oil (left). Then I sprinkle on cayenne pepper and black pepper (center). You could add salt at this point if you like. I finish with a light distribution of brown sugar which I press into the oil with my fingers so it will adhere when I put the squash on the grill.
I place the squash filets seasoning-side-down on my grill and immediately paint the unseasoned faces with oil. Then I season them as I did the other sides. I put the cover on the grill and let the squash cook for just three or four minutes. Then I flip the squash and cook it for another three or four minutes. CAUTION! The squash may be soft when you flip it, so work a spatula along the length of each piece before lifting it off the grill.
Grilling caramelizes the sugar, but the charring usually adds complexity to the flavor of the squash; don’t reject it just because it looks singed. If six to eight minutes on the grill doesn’t get your squash filets soft, put them back on the grill or finish them off in your microwave oven. This grilled squash is soft, sweet, and savory with a touch of heat. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Your Small Kitchen Garden has kept me very busy this summer, but I haven’t been able to write much about it. I’ll tell that story in an upcoming post. Fortunately, my brother is passionate about many gardening topics, and he sent me this piece about benefiting from one of the weeds that probably grows in your garden.
Kris’s last guest post was about making sauerkraut, and it has been very popular. So, I’m pleased to offer up his take on how you should treat purslane, this very common weed.
Weed Eating, no Machines Required
by Kris Gasteiger
Purslane is a succulent whose leaves and stems are distinctive among most common garden plants.
Down here in Bowie, Maryland, the season is passing, but up in Pennsylvania and New York, you may still have a chance to harvest one of the best vegetables we don’t tend to grow intentionally. Purslane!
Around here, purslane is a warm season weed of disturbed ground (Gardens for instance) as it is in most of the eastern US. In France and India, it is grown as a garden vegetable and there are different cultivars which tend to be more upright than our local weeds.
I let my purslane get six to twelve inches long before weeding it out and taking it to the kitchen. This week, I picked about five pounds in ten seconds when I encountered a giant plant and its twin in one of the beds I take care of for the city of Bowie. It is best harvested before it flowers and goes to seed. The seeds give it a grittiness that’s unpleasant at best and the stems toughen as they age.
Purslane takes hold easily on bare ground, and so shows up in gardens all over the northeast. If you usually toss it in the compost when you weed, at least once take some to your kitchen and serve it up with a meal.
In the kitchen, I pinch off the roots and any thick tough stems. Leaf Miners can infest purslane, so check for and remove any affected leaves. Rinse the purslane in a sink of cold water, lifting it to drain in a colander while you get ready to cook it. (It’s good raw in salads and sandwiches too.)
To cook your free greens, put some good olive oil or butter in a big pan, saute a clove or two of minced garlic in the oil, and add the damp purslane before the garlic begins to change color. Stir until the purslane wilts, and serve.
Options: include herbs of your choice (basil, thyme, oregano, dill…), some lemon juice, onions, a dash of hot sauce or cider vinegar, bacon, ham, or fat back. Be creative, it’s all good.
Purslane goes well in cream soup, omelets, quiche, and any other recipe in which you would use a green vegetable; it even pickles well.
Nutritionally, purslane has a lot of vitamin C among other nutrients and minerals. It is one of the few land-based sources of Omega-3 fatty acids.
This beauty isn’t quite ready to harvest. Yes, it’s a tomato. I believe it’s of the Andes variety… it’s a paste tomato with very little gel, few seeds, and delicious flesh. Pick a green tomato at your own peril. You can coax a green tomato to ripen, but the results are rarely satisfying.
Vine-ripened tomatoes are NOT better than tomatoes that ripen off the vine. Still, there is such passion for vine-ripening that kitchen gardeners perpetuate the lie; they claim a vine-ripened tomato is noticeably better.
Ripen Tomatoes Well
Last summer, Your Small Kitchen Garden blog challenged the conventional wisdom that store-bought tomatoes are horrible because they ripen off the vine. I argued that store-bought tomatoes are lousy because they are lousy cultivars: ripened on or off the vine, they grow up to be flavorless and wanting in texture.
Then I explained how I harvest, and I insisted that my “picked-pink” tomatoes are just as good as their vine-ripened counterparts… in fact, that picked-pink tomatoes are better because they don’t crack or develop “green shoulders.” Please read the original post here: The Vine-Ripened Tomato Lie.
I’ve enjoyed the insights from readers who have shared their opinions. Some are adamant that vine-ripened tomatoes are dramatically tastier than picked-pink tomatoes… and I won’t argue with their experiences. In my experience, if there is a difference, It’s insignificant and I’d be happy to prepare a scientific double-blind taste-test of several varieties of tomatoes both vine-ripened and picked pink. I’m confident that 99% of participants in such a test would not be able to distinguish between the two.
Tomato Nutrition
One person who read my original post on this suspiciously declared that picked-pink tomatoes lack the nutritional qualities of vine-ripened tomatoes. The visitor went by the name “Dr. Tomato,” lending a sense of authority to his or her comments. I conceded that it’s possible there are nutritional differences, and asked Dr. Tomato to provide links to the research that supports the claim.
My first tomato harvest of 2010 is a very large paste tomato that I’ve picked-pink. The tomato has just started to change color, and it will finish on my dining room table. Had I left it on the plant, a rain storm could have caused it to crack… and direct sunlight could have made it develop green shoulders.
Dr. Tomato probably wasn’t listening, because the links never materialized. Then, yesterday another commenter “sided” with Dr. Tomato. This left a bad taste in my mouth: I hate arguing about facts. If something is so, then opinions about it are meaningless. When a yardstick is 36 inches long, you seem a little silly to say, “In my opinion, the ruler is 37 inches long.” A simple measurement can settle the issue, so why take sides? I went in search of facts about tomato nutrition.
What Science Says
Turns out food science enthusiasts have done some research on ripening tomatoes off the vine. I read several (incredibly dull) studies full of science-writing gobbledygook and have reduced the obtuse language to a few simple factual statements:
At the peak of tomato season and then some, there are hundreds of tomatoes ripening on my dining room table. In this photo, the youngest tomatoes are in back, with the oldest – ready to eat – in front.
2. Some picked-pink tomatoes develop MORE lycopene (the antioxidant) than vine-ripened tomatoes do, others develop LESS lycopene. This seems to depend, in part, on the temperature at which you ripen the picked-pink tomatoes, and, perhaps, on whether you’re growing the tomatoes hydroponically.
So, you won’t become malnourished if you eat picked-pink tomatoes. Because there are so many advantages to harvesting tomatoes this way, once again I encourage you to try it and decide for yourself: When a tomato starts to turn from green to red—when it already has pink skin—pick it and set it in your house to finish ripening (I fill bowls with picked-pink tomatoes). When it’s fully-ripe, taste it next to a freshly-picked vine-ripened tomato.
If you taste a difference, is it enough of a difference to make you pass on the advantages of picking pink? Whatever you decide I hope we can still get along… and thanks for considering this heretical suggestion.
Yes, some of the broccoli has gotten away from me. I’ve planted the same variety for two years, and in both years it has produced tiny heads. I kind of loose interest in it, though we do eat most of the side shoots. This winter I’ll be shopping around for a breed of broccoli that makes giant heads… the tiny yields I’ve had lately aren’t worth the garden space.
It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, an event that happens on the 15th of each month. Founded by Carol over at May Dreams Gardens, Bloom Day beckons garden bloggers the world over to post photographs of what’s abloom in their gardens. Most of these posts have pictures of beautiful flowers in gorgeous ornamental gardens. Alas, my small kitchen garden isn’t about pretty.
Still, I love the blossoms nearly as much as I love the vegetables… and seeing them heightens my anticipation for the harvest that’s likely to follow. Things are doing extremely well this season. Early heat followed by drought has finally relented to several days of rain and more typical summer temperatures.
Here are the flowers I photographed this afternoon in my small kitchen garden:
I haven’t planted dill this year, but there are many dill weed blossoms in my small kitchen garden. The flowers attract all kinds of insects. If I let the dill go to seed as it did last year, I imagine the planting bed will be a veritable lawn of dill sprouts in the spring.
The oregano jungle has rebounded from some autumn and spring culling. The flowers are delicate and they provide beautiful contrast for nearly half the growing season. Still, I need to be more aggressive culling this fall; the oregano patch increases about a third in size in a season.
Onion blossoms make me happy. The globe of tiny flowers emerges in late spring and lingers for weeks. I cut a bouquet of onion flowers for the dining room table, and they’ve filled the room with a delicious onion aroma for nearly a month. I don’t encourage you to harvest your onion flowers; I had missed a few bulbs last fall, and what sprouted this spring needed to go to make way for the 2010 crops.
We’ve eaten bell and poblano peppers from the small kitchen garden this year, and there are dozens of banana peppers ready to harvest. Happily, there are many pepper blossoms which portend a massive harvest. I expect I’ll pickle a lot of peppers… and probably give away a whole bunch of them.
This sad specimen is an early cucumber blossom on a plant growing in a container. This is the first time I’ve grown cucumbers, so I’ll probably do some research to learn about what bugs eat cucumber blossoms… I haven’t seen this kind of abuse on my winter squash blossoms in past seasons.
The potato blossoms here stand above the background of the cardboard tube in which the plants are growing. I wrote about this project in a post titled Plant Potato Towers in your Small Kitchen Garden. In two of three planters, the potato plants have grown up through an accumulated 3 feet or more of soil. I’ve stopped adding soil, and the plants have gone on to grow well above the containers and produce flowers. One of my neighbors has asked me to invite him when I tip the containers over and dig out the potatoes. He’s as curious as I am to see how things come out.
Oh, the tomato blossoms abound! This has been the season of the great seed-starting debacle: I planted a whole bunch of seeds indoors, and they didn’t sprout. So, I planted again as many. This second batch sprouted about when the first batch sprouted; I ended up with double the seedlings I’d intended. After giving away many tomato seedlings, I crammed 84 plants into my small kitchen garden where I have traditionally planted 24.
While photographing flowers today, I found the very first barely pink tomato of the season! This may be the largest chili-pepper-shaped paste tomato I’ve harvested, and many more on the plants are just as big. Why did I pick it when it’s so under ripe? I explained last season in a post titled The Vine-Ripened Tomato Lie. This baby will finish ripening on my dining room table.
This photo appeared in an earlier post where I dubbed my peach tree the year’s overachiever. Blossoms covering every branch resulted in peaches covering the entire tree. The load is simply too much to ask of the slender peachwood branches, so I’ve culled, perhaps, 150 young fruits from the tree.
I’m encouraging people who grow peaches in their small kitchen gardens to kill peaches. It’s already late in the season to be doing this, but if you live in the north, killing peaches now could improve the quality of the coming harvest. Even if you don’t see much benefit this season, you’ll know better when it’s peach-killing time next spring.
Grow Large Peaches
Peach trees can be awesome producers. They are gorgeous in the spring when flowers cover every branch. However, when the petals fall, leaving six-to-ten peaches per branch, it’s a good idea to kill some of those peaches.
Left to mature, a peach-laden tree produces golf-ball-sized fruits. These are as delicious and nutritious as larger peaches, so if you like golf-ball-sized fruits, you can leave them alone.
However, the weight of all these small fruits can stress branches and cause them to break particularly during heavy rain or wind. So, you can protect the health of the tree by removing a whole bunch of peaches while the peaches are very small. Ideally, you do this within a week or so after petals fall.
A terrific bonus of reducing a tree’s peach load is that the peaches you leave behind grow much bigger than they would have had all the peaches remained. Leave only two-to-four peaches per branch, and they’ll likely grow to the size of racquet balls… or even tennis balls. To grow larger peaches, it’s important to do the culling early… the closer it gets to harvest before you cull, the less effect on size you efforts will produce.
Home Peach Growing Mistake
A commercial peach grower once told me: The biggest mistake home growers make is that they leave too many peaches on the tree. You have to be tough and break off all but three or four per branch.
It’s hard to do! When your tree is covered with grape-sized peaches, it’s easy to imagine a bounteous harvest. But I promise when that harvest arrives, you’ll be picking very small peaches. In years that I’ve failed to cull, I’ve used my tiny peaches to make jelly; they were simply too small to bother with in fruit salads and pies.
To provide encouragement for timid peach growers, I’ve made a video to show that I cull aggressively. I wish I’d gotten to it a few weeks ago, but even if I don’t get monster peaches this year, I’m confident the ripening fruits won’t overload and break the tree’s branches.
Growing potatoes the old fashioned way is a silly undertaking in a small kitchen garden. However, planting in a garbage can (or something like a garbage can) could produce far more potatoes in a smaller footprint.
Growing potatoes isn’t a great use of space in a small kitchen garden. A single potato plant can sprawl over a four-foot-diameter circle and it might produce only a pound or two of potatoes. What’s more, if you can buy from a potato grower, you might get ungraded potatoes at amazingly low prices; I usually buy a 20 pound bag of ungraded potatoes for three dollars.
The other side of that coin is: growing your own potatoes is fun. Over the years, I’ve squeezed in a few potato plants, and I’ve always enjoyed the little Easter egg hunt of digging for potatoes when the plants’ stems die back. This year, I’m trying something different.
Garbage Can Potatoes (almost)
Potatoes aren’t particular about their growing conditions. When I was very young, I heard often of the “rocky soil of Maine” as ideal for growing potatoes. The neighbor farmer who plowed my family’s kitchen garden each spring told us we could put potatoes on the ground and cover them with straw, and they’d produce spuds. So, unless you get late blight in your garden, you’ll probably get a few keepers however you plant potatoes.
I bought the smallest seed potatoes I could find, but each had enough eyes that I could cut it into at least two pieces. Some, I cut into three pieces, trying to leave ample material behind each eye.
But some years ago, neighbors told my parents about garbage can potatoes and I’m trying this growing method in 2010.
The idea is: you put a few inches of soil into a garbage can, set seed potatoes on the soil, then cover the potatoes with a few more inches of soil. When the potato sprouts reach about eight inches above the soil, you add more soil, leaving just the top few leaves sticking out. As the plants grow, you add soil periodically until you’ve filled the garbage can. At that point, you let the plants go and they finish up naturally: setting flowers and then seeds, and then they dry up.
At that point, you dump the garbage can and, supposedly, you find it filled from bottom-to-top with potatoes… maybe five pounds or more from a single seed potato.
Stretch Your Seed Potatoes
After a day, the cut faces of the seed potatoes skin over. This protects them from infection when you plant them. They’ll keep for several more weeks, though you need to plant them before they dry out completely. I crowded the seed potatoes in my makeshift garbage can planter. It wasn’t really a garbage can; I used 3.6 foot sections of a large cardboard carpet tube. With 4 seed potatoes in each 20-inch diameter tube, the plants will be tight. I’ll use a lot of compost as I fill the tubes because I expect the plants to argue with each other over resources in such crowded quarters.
Seed potatoes usually sell by the pound. This may be frustrating when you want to set ten plants and the garden store’s potatoes are large: ten seed potatoes might weigh three or four pounds.
The good news is: you don’t need ten potatoes to start ten potato plants. You can cut eachseed potato into pieces… ideally leaving three or more eyes in each piece, though a potato piece with only one eye can grow into a productive plant.
In any case, to start ten potato plants, buy three or four seed potatoes at the store and cut them up at least a day before you intend to plant. Let them sit in the open air so the cut surfaces skin over before you put them in the ground. (Some growers suggest that you dip the cut faces of seed potatoes in sulfur—it kills microbes and adds a bit of acid; potatoes prefer acidic soil.)
Food Potatoes will Grow
The more you read about planting potatoes, the more you’ll read that you should never plant potatoes packaged for eating; always buy certified seed potatoes. This is good advice, but it’s a dogmatic overstatement. Of course food potatoes can grow into productive adult plants.
Here’s the deal: To produce certified seed potatoes, growers must raise plants under the watchful eyes of government certification agencies. The intent is to ensure you don’t plant bacteria, viruses, and fungus in your small kitchen garden. Potatoes grown for food have no such oversight; even the best-looking food potatoes can introduce pathogens into your planting beds.
So, you can grow potatoes from your food stores, but there is greater risk than if you hold out for certified seed potatoes. If you’re a hobbyist, and you won’t be sad about losing a handful of plants, experiment. However, if you’re counting on a decent potato harvest—and especially if you’re planting a large patch, follow the dogmatists and stick with certified seed potato.
While I wait for frosty cold nights to end in the spring, weeds grow wild in my small kitchen garden… but alongside those weeds: volunteer herbs! Here, a cilantro plant that must have rooted in the fall keeps pace with a thistle plant whose tap root probably reaches nine or more inches into the soil.
As the owner of a small kitchen garden, I have a lot of enthusiasm for volunteers. The volunteers I’m talking about are the ones that sprout in my planting beds in the footprint of last year’s plants: their parents.
Of the plants I grow, the most successful at reproduction are cilantro and dill. Both toss hundreds—maybe even thousands of seeds onto the soil from about mid-summer until early winter… and dozens of those seeds manage to take root in the spring before I get into the garden. Tomatoes also try to procreate, and succeed occasionally when a fruit falls from a plant and I leave it to rot on the mulch. I’ve even had the occasional squash plant emerge from seeds I can only imagine some rodent or bird dropped during a trip from my compost heap.
Hindrance to Planting my Small Kitchen Garden
As much as I love the volunteers (they provide fresh herbs weeks before I’d harvest any from seeds I plant intentionally), they interfere with my gardening. I try to work around them, but invariably I have to excavate huge patches of them to make way for other produce I wish to plant.
Sometimes I transplant some volunteer herb plants, but mostly I try to harvest them before I till. Dehydrated homegrown herbs have so much more fragrance and flavor than commercially-packed herbs. It’s astonishing how much like fresh herbs they smell and taste.
The day I excavated furrows for my tomato plants, I needed to weed out hundreds of volunteer dill plants and dozens of volunteer cilantro plants. Here’s a three-minute video I recorded in the garden as I harvested herbs:
My daugher and I attended a tweetup of garden writers, landscapers, and other enthusiasts in upstate New York. On the way, we stopped for a day of rock climbing in the Gunks. That’s my daughter about 35 feet up the cliff face on our second climb of the day.
My small kitchen garden is a busy place in mid spring, and I hate to travel during this critical time of year. However, the announcement came out recently across my online social network: come to a tweetup in upstate New York.
I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to meet in-person the people with whom I interact regularly on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Some I had met last autumn, and looked forward to seeing again. Others I’d not met in person, but I enjoy them so much on line that I was excited to know they’d be at this gathering.
Great Venue for a Tweetup
Our host for the tweetup was Margaret Roach who is an accomplished garden writer. You can visit her garden online at A Way to Garden blog. Margaret’s yard/garden is delightful… a terrific assortment of gorgeous plants and landscaping features that could hold my attention for hours. And, while Margaret’s emphasis seems to be on ornamental plantings, she also has a kitchen garden: a collection of raised beds in which vegetables were already coming on.
Had no tripod on this trip, so we enlisted my daughter to take the group photos. This is one of three she shot with my camera. She took better shots with other cameras, though this isn’t too bad.
Usually, I snap a whole bunch of candid photos of people at social events… this may be my most favorite photographic pursuit. At Margaret’s tweetup, I was not in top form. I shot many photos of people and plants, but I repeatedly caught the people with unflattering expressions on their faces.
So… my photo collection from this event is a bit heavy on foliage and flowers. I hope they provide some sense of how fine a day I had visiting.
Dual Purpose Trip
Margaret Roach’s kitchen garden features a dramatic rhubarb patch that was in full-bloom during the tweetup. I encourage you not to let your rhubarb flower, but if your emphasis is ornamental rather than food, this display could add drama to your landscape
In considering this trip, I knew that between Margaret’s home and mine, I would pass quite near the Shawangunk mountains. There there is a rock climbing preserve where I used to climb 30 years ago. My daughter enjoys climbing, and she decided the bother of waiting out my tweetup was an acceptable trade for a day of rock climbing.
So, my daughter and I drove to the Gunks on Friday evening and slept there in our car. We were on the rocks by about 9AM, and we climbed until 2PM. It was very satisfying, though I tried to rearrange some rocks with the top of my head and succeeded only in irritating my scalp.
After climbing, we drove toward Margaret’s and within a mile or so of her house found a State Park that allowed camping. Social activism alert: That NY State park (and so, probably all of them) has added a surcharge for out-of-state visitors. I will not be camping in NY State parks as long as this surcharge is in place. There’s no stupider way to try to recover budget shortfalls than to charge tourists more to be in your state than you charge people who actually live there. If you want to bring more money into the state, run a marketing effort in which you offer discounts to visitors from out of state. Of course, if your parks already draw to capacity, do what you want.
Anyway… my daughter did homework and some cross stitch while I socialized and toured the gardens. My small kitchen garden is a week behind—I’d have planted potatoes, carrots, and peppers had I been home. Still… the tweetup was well worth the time away and the nearly 4-hour drive. I so look forward to the next gathering of garden writers, gardeners, and gardening enthusiasts.
Here is a slideshow of some of the photos I created during the tweetup at Margaret Roach’s garden. I hope you enjoy it:
This is a robust display of strawberries in my meager deck planters. I look forward to the year when I finally create a large strawberry planting bed that produces the entire 40 or so quarts of berries we typically consume in June.
My small kitchen garden produces a mere handful of strawberries each year. That’s because I have a few planters each holding three or four strawberry plants. Eventually, I’ll add a generous raised bed bursting with strawberry plants but for now I satisfy my cravings with berries I buy from other local growers.
Yesterday, I saw on sale at the farmers’ market strawberries that had travelled from Lancaster… only sixty miles south. My planters sport a half dozen green berries that may be ready to pick in another week. These events spurred me finally to produce a video I shot last spring: How to make real strawberry shortcake.
What I mean by Real Strawberry Shortcake
At decent restaurants, I’ve seen pound cake with sweetened strawberries listed as “Strawberry Shortcake.” At grocery stores, I’ve seen sponge cake labeled as “Shortcake” and displayed next to fresh strawberries. I’ve had visitors who assured me they were quite familiar with strawberry shortcake… but who had never even seen a classic, traditional shortcake. Sure, all those strawberry/cake combinations are tasty… but they’re not really strawberry shortcake.
When strawberries are in season, a large serving of strawberry shortcake makes a delicious, well-balanced meal. I recommend that you not make shortcake with strawberries that grew more than sixty miles from your home; they’re just not as good.
A true shortcake is a lot like a biscuit: a little flour, shortening, and leavening: the same ingredients you might use to make pancakes from scratch. Of course, biscuit-making involves cutting the shortening into the flour, rolling out dough, and cutting rounds for the baking pan.
I’ve reduced making my own shortcake to a very simple procedure that eliminates cutting in shortening, rolling dough, and cutting out rounds with a cookie cutter. The approach I use doesn’t make a perfectly flaky biscuit, but the dessert isn’t strawberry biscuits, and the only complaints I’ve received about them is that I make the servings too large.
Actually, three or four times a year when local strawberries are available, I serve nothing but strawberry shortcake for dinner. To those who complain about the sizes of the servings, I apologize. Don’t mess up the part you’re not going to eat; I’ll deal with it, thank you.
Here is my video production of how to make the strawberry shortcake you’ll eat if you visit in June at Your Small Kitchen Garden. It’s just over eight minutes long. If you try making shortcake this way, please let me know how you like it:
In 9 days my pile of lawn clippings had shrunk. On top, it looked as though all the grass was drying out.
I’ve explained in earlier posts how I add humus to my small kitchen garden; a task that every kitchen gardener should perform at least annually. In a post titled Small kitchen Garden Soil Preparation 2, I explained how I usually excavate only where I’m going to plant: a full row for seeds, or individual holes for seedlings. To the holes and furrows I dig, I add compost.
But this meager compost-application isn’t the only way I add humus and nutrition to my soil. I explained my composting and mulching activity in a post titled Compost for my Small Kitchen Garden: I explained that I mulch around my vegetables with lawn clippings.
Miracles of Mulching
Mulch is awesome… and a heap of lawn clippings can do a lot of work for you. Here’s an example of the power of mulch:
Nine days ago, weeds in my kitchen garden bed were in fine shape. They had grown unchecked since the ground thawed, and many were in full bloom. Amazingly, there were forget-me-nots in full bloom; seeded, apparently, from a bed a quarter of the way around the house from the vegetable garden.
When I raked the mound of clippings aside, I revealed very dark, decomposed material. The clippings were already breaking down into the soil. In some years, I’ve added clippings whose original depth would have totaled four feet. By the time I finished in the garden in the fall, those clippings were nearly completely gone: rotted away while the vegetables grew.
Also nine days ago, I mowed my lawn for the first time this season. The grass and weeds were tall, and I ended up creating a pile in my garden that was about two-and-a-half feet deep, three feet across, and eight feet long.
Here’s the point: I made the pile of grass clippings directly on the weeds growing in my planting bed. I didn’t cut the weeds; I didn’t stomp them down; I simply piled on the clippings.
Yesterday and today, I started tilling. The pile of grass clippings had shrunk to about half its original depth. I used a rake to move the heap aside so I could dig, and lo, the weeds I had buried only nine days earlier were all but gone! Better still: the clippings had already decomposed significantly!
This is, of course, the whole point of mulch: it keeps weeds down and it decomposes slowly, releasing nutrients into the soil. It also holds in moisture: When I tilled where the grass clippings had been, the soil was moist and easy to work. When I tilled soil that hadn’t been covered, it was drier and harder to dig into.
Mulch Your Small Kitchen Garden
If you’re one of the lucky who doesn’t have enough lawn clippings to mulch your garden, look for a reasonable substitute. I’ve seen people lay down old carpet, cardboard, newspaper, and black plastic in vegetable gardens to suppress weeds around the desirable plants. Leaves will also work, though it’s best to shred them before applying them as they may move around easily in heavy winds.
Whatever you choose, mulch! If for no other reason than to reduce your need to weed, mulch!
Two caveats if you use lawn clippings as mulch:
When it rains, the clippings will throw off a distinctive odor. The odor doesn’t arise from older, decomposing clippings… so you won’t get the odor if the clippings sit for a few days before it rains. In any case, the odor goes away in a day or two.
Grass clippings stick to your feet. Leave your gardening shoes outside, or brush them off thoroughly before you go inside!
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