agriculture

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Freezing basil

July 12, 2016 Freezing, In the Kitchen

When it comes to preserving food for later use, you can go complex (think canning) or easy. Although last week we did both, I’m just as excited about this simple-as-can-be technique for freezing basil. One of the most disappointing things about cooking in the winter is the drop in flavor as you move from fresh to dried spices. Follow this method to help preserve the basil’s flavor as close to fresh as you can get! Frozen Basil Cubes Ingredients: – Basil – Olive Oil Method: 1. Pick basil leaves off of stems. Rinse and spin leaves in a salad spinner. 2. Figure out how many cups of basil leaves you have. You’ll need about...

Summer for real

July 9, 2016 Weekly Updates

And just like that, real summer sets in. We got to coast through most of June with relatively manageable temperatures, especially as nighttime lows continued to fall at least into the 60s. But with the start of July came reality! It’s been in the 90s for the last several days and, boy, is it hot. I’ve been doing my best to stay out of the garden in the hottest parts of the day. However, with plenty of crops that prefer cooler temperatures still in the ground, it’s important to provide some overhead watering during the heat of the day to help keep them cool and prevent them from going to seed and...

More and more

July 3, 2016 Weekly Updates

With a good day of rain this week, the soil finally got a decent soaking after several weeks of intensely dry weather. Almost immediately, everything looked greener and bigger. The tomatoes are shooting up, requiring a new trellis line every week, and I got a small first harvest off of the bush beans this morning. To date, we’ve harvested over 42 lbs of food out of the garden since May 26! About a month into harvesting, we’ve now had a good amount of time to see how things are growing and how much we are able to use. As a result, this week was a great time to reevaluate our year’s plan for the garden....

Vertical gardening, simply

June 30, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools

Using the vertical space in your garden is a great way to get the most yield out of a small area. There are tons of inventive, more complex vertical gardening systems, but you can still take advantage of vertical space while staying simple. It’s common to provide trellis support for crops like tomatoes and beans, but other crops like cucumbers, winter squash, and melons can be trellised vertically as well. All of these plants are expansive growers, creating a lot of green leaves and stems in proportion to the amount of fruit produced. Because of this, they can take up a significant amount of ground space, which can easily be freed back...

The crop pests cometh

June 24, 2016 Pests, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

There’s always that brief window in the year when I think, “Maybe this year is the year that I’ll have the perfect, pest-free garden.” And then they arrive! Despite a relatively light spring in terms of pest damage (we did have the broccoli annihilated by cut worms, but little else was affected), they’re here at last. The eggplant leaves are becoming speckled with the tiny, pin-prick holes that are the signature mark of flea beetles and, more severely, cucumber beetles have arrived to feast on the previously perfect squash and cucumber plants. If in your garden you’re noticing ragged holes on the leaves of these plants with the outside rim of...

All that empty dirt

June 18, 2016 Weekly Updates

The weather gets warmer, the plants grow bigger, but there’s still some bed space yet to be planted, something I’ve gotten asked about a lot recently. Even though it looks like an oversight, the empty beds are actually completely intentional and provide more than an occasional play space for my son! Coming from larger farms where there are always beds either waiting to be planted or having just been emptied of crops past their prime, this is something that seems natural to me. Still, it is much less common in smaller gardens where it can look like nothing more than a waste of space. In fact, it can be the opposite, providing an opportunity...

Aphid honeydew

June 13, 2016 Pests, Tips & Tools

Are you noticing a lot of ants in your garden? This could be a sign that you have aphids, tiny insects that love eating a wide variety of plants. When aphids eat, the sugary plant sap is ejected from their bodies, created what is called aphid “honeydew.” Ants of course love to eat this sweet excretion and are therefore attracted to areas with high densities of aphids. But don’t worry too much. With the exception of grey aphids, which are a serious problem for brassica crops and appear more in the later summer and fall, I have rarely if ever had aphids be enough of a problem that the plants haven’t been able...

May showers

May 8, 2016 Weekly Updates

There hasn’t been much opportunity for gardening this past week. By Mike’s calculation, we hadn’t seen sun from one Saturday to the next. Instead, it’s been a steady succession of rain, clouds, and more rain. After weeks of weather that had been mostly warmer and dryer than average, this real spring weather came as a bit of a shock to the system. But at least it saved me from time spent watering all the seeds planted last week! And, with the rain’s help, we have the first germination in the garden, with both the spring mix and arugula shooting their cotyledons (or first leaves) above the ground. In the midst of...

It’s go time!

May 3, 2016 Weekly Updates

The deer fence is finally up, our biggest project and necessity before the garden can really get going. It turned out to be both easier and more complicated than I expected. Because our garden is built on a moderate incline, we had to bunch the fencing at some of the posts to prevent the change in elevation from causing unwanted slackness. However, the whole process was faster than anticipated, with the entire fence up and ready to go in about two-and-a-half hours. And we were immediately reminded of what all the work was for as several deer watched us finishing up at dusk. Worrying that the deer would run right through the fencing in the dark, we...

The giant killing machine

April 23, 2016 Weekly Updates

What does your family like to do for fun? In our time off, we like to dig giant trenches throughout our front yard! I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we’re crazy. A little over a year ago, we bought this house with a beautifully seeded lawn sloping down to the front door. And now we’re systematically tearing it apart, first breaking the sod up by hand and then with a tiller and now digging trenches as deep as we can get. Well, it’s all in the name of rodent control, more specifically groundhogs. I’ve worked on farms with groundhog pressure in the past and, as you well know if you’ve experienced the...

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