Garden Talk

The seeds are sprouting now--broccoli and Savoy cabbage are first of course. The tomatoes will be next, possibly the celery soon after, then the leeks and bringing up the rear, the peppers. All other seeds will either go into the garden as is, or be started later in the greenhouse.

I found an inexpensive way to start my seeds in the house this year. I saved my yogurt and cottage cheese containers for just this purpose. We poked holes in the bottoms of the containers, filled them with seed starting soil, and zipped them up in baggies. Voila! Miniature greenhouses. So simple and I cannot think why I haven't done this before. Live and learn. I have the containers in pans so I don't ruin my table top when I water them later on--if I need to. They may not even need it before I move them outside to the greenhouse.

I have to laugh every year when I look at the tomato seeds I buy. This year's selections? Lemon Boy, Yellow Pear, Mr. Stripey, Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Better Boy, Early Girl, Amish Paste, Sweet 100's, and one or two others I can't recall. I know, I know--overkill. But each one is unique in flavor and use! Which ones can I not grow? That's like asking my mother which of her thirteen children she should have gotten rid of. Not possible.

The greenhouse is still in the box. I bought one online this year from OutdoorEdge, through eBay. What's it like? I don't know yet. I think it's going to be pretty flimsy and I'm worried about how it will hold up in our high winds. But Larry seemed to be finding all sorts of things to do besides build me a new pole greenhouse (last year's was in a bad location and now we use it to house the wood splitter) so I thought I'd give this a try. I'll post pics when we put it up so you can see what it looks like--and how easy/difficult it is to assemble. At $109.00, I figured it might last a couple years anyway, but not much longer.

What else is going on with the gardens:

• Larry hauled 3 loads of ancient manure from our son's barn and spread it on the gardens


• He also burned a pile of brush on one garden--nice addition of potash


• Today he plowed one garden and will plow another tomorrow if the rain holds off


• We've decided to put up electric fence to keep the deer out. Last year they ate more green beans than we did

That's all the garden news for now. What's been going on in your garden?

A Quiet Winter Weekend

Saturday was a cold and snowy day. We spent it doing errands in town and visiting friends in Charleston. It was a good way to spend an otherwise dreary day.

Today I decided to cook enough dinner meals to last us for the week. It was another cold day with snow sifting down anyway--not enough snow to be exciting, but just enough to let us know it was cold out there and a good day for inside work. Larry, bless him, spent a few hours outside anyway, restacking the wood in the shed to be ready for the predicted storms this week.

He also brought in some potatoes, and I noticed that they are keeping very well in the potato bin in the cellar. Here we are at the end of January, and the potatoes are firm and showing very few signs of sprouting. I wish I could remember the variety of red potatoes we grew this year. They have been excellent in production, health of the vines, keeping ability and especially flavor.



I used the potatoes along with a roast I found on sale and other vegetables to make a good pot roast,

and then combined chicken, noodles, carrots, onions, celery, chicken broth and herbs to make a thick chicken noodle soup. Just the thing for this cold, blustery day.

This evening I sat down finally and ordered my garden seeds. I am shocked to see how the variety of seeds available each year dwindles. This year Gurney's dropped the lemon cucumber that I love; I had to look elsewhere for the Royal Burgundy bush beans too. I did not locate seeds for Gypsy peppers but still have a few places to look. Garden Huckleberries seem to have disappeared too.

I used to love all the unusual things Gurney's offered, like cotton seeds, tobacco, and broom corn. Some of these items are a thing of the past and only the commonplace seeds seem to be left. I was thrilled to find the lemon cucumber seeds in the R.H. Shumway catalog. I've never ordered from this company, but I'm doing it this year to get my little yellow cucumbers. This year I will save my own seeds as a safeguard against the possible loss of a future source. Scary.

Here's the rough recipes for the soup and pot roast. I can't give exact ingredients because I didn't measure anything:

Chicken Noodle Soup

I used boneless chicken tenders, cut into chunks. (I think the package was about 1 to 1.5 pounds)

Cook the chicken in a small amount of olive oil in the bottom of the soup pan until all sides of the chicken looked cooked. Add about 3-4 cups of chicken broth (or abut 2 cans), and about twice as much water as broth.

Cut up one large onion, about 5 regular carrots and 3 stalks of celery. Add to the soup pot.

Add 2-3 bay leaves, crushed rosemary and thyme to your taste (I used about 1 teaspoon of each), chopped garlic, about 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper, a teaspoon of salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper.

Let this simmer under the vegetables are tender. Bring to a boil and add 1/2 pound (more or less, depending on how thick you want your soup) of egg noodles.

Cook until the noodles are tender. Remove the bay leaves. Serve with rosemary bread or your favorite hot bread.

Pot Roast

Sear the roast on all sides in hot olive oil. Move the meat to a slow cooker and add chopped carrots, onions, celery and potatoes. The amount depends on the size of your slow cooker; I have a big cooker and I used about 2 cups of carrots, 1 cup on onions, 1 cup of celery and 4-5 cups of potatoes, I think. Add water to cover.

Add 2 teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce, 2 cubes of beef bouillon, 2-3 bay leaves, chopped garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Cook on high until a meat thermometer shows the meat is done.

If you like, you can thicken the broth with a mixture of about 3 tablespoons of corn starch in 1/2 cup of warm water. Dissolve the corn starch thoroughly by mixing it with the water, and add to the liquid in the cooker.

Cook on high for a bit longer, until the broth thickens. Then reduce heat to low until you are ready to eat. Serve with your choice of breads and a green salad for a hearty, satisfying winter meal.

Fall Colors

Just because there are no flowers in bloom right now doesn't mean there aren't colorful things to find in the garden. A few branches of red spirea brightened my living room this week. This is one of my favorite shrubs--it's low-cost, easy to grow, has pretty clusters of tiny blooms in spring, and in fall it turns such gorgeous colors. When the leaves fall off, its reddish branches make neat winter bouquets, or can be used in twig wreaths with great effect. The twigs also look cool tucked into the branches of a country Christmas tree.

More Fall color, but not as apparent as the spirea: packets of seeds I collected over the weekend to save for next year's garden. So often I forget or am just too burned out to collect seeds, but while the apple butter was cooking I took a few minutes (that's all it takes, really) to collect seeds.

What did I get? Tall Cosmos, dwarf marigolds, purple bergamot (or bee balm), sweet basil, Cleome (I call it Queen of the Garden, and it's also known as Spiderflower), copper fennel, annual hollyhock, and a few others I can't recall. It felt like riches as I sealed each envelope.

Saving them is easy: wait until the seeds have ripened and are falling from the plants; strip them off and put into an envelope, seal and save. I put mine under a warmish lamp for a bit just to be sure they were completely dry and won't mold on me.

I wish I'd gotten out earlier and saved a few more, but I'm happy with what I got. Are you a seed saver? What did you collect this year?