Today at the Farmers Market

I’ll have organically-grown tomatoes!  I only have about fifteen pounds, so get there early if you want some.  I’ve got a basket of red ones and a basket of yellow and orange ones.  Price is two bucks a pound–which, by the way, is the same price as conventionally-grown supermarket tomatoes, last I checked.
I’ll also have [...]

Deep Sea Potato Diving and a Special Summer Pickle

It was so hot today, I don’t know what I was thinking digging out a thirty-foot row of fingerling potatoes. But they needed to come out, and I needed to put in some fall beets. So I went at it, and got one of the rows of Australian Crescent Fingerlings out.
At one point, [...]

CSA Newsletter: Volume 4, Issue 12

Flying Tomato Farms News
A newsletter for members of Flying Tomato Farms C.S.A.
Vol. 4, Issue 12
GARDEN NEWS:
Not too much to report on the garden news front this week. I’ve planted a couple fall crops—fennel, daikon radish, and rutabaga. Those crops get water daily, but the rest of the crops are doing pretty well with [...]

Putting Food By: The “Good Book” of Food Preservation

I own a few different books on canning, drying, freezing, and other food preservation techniques. But Putting Food By is the one that everyone interested in home canning and food preservation should own. The first edition was published in the year of my birth, 1973, and it has been fully revised and updated [...]

Sharpen your Knives; Fill your Freezer

One of my favorite “convenience” foods in progress:
Every summer and fall, I chop up tons of peppers, tomatoes, summer squash, and eggplant in bite-sized pieces and roast them in a baking dish ’til done. Sometimes I add a little basil or rosemary, sometimes just the usual salt, pepper, and a drizzling of olive oil.
If [...]

Save our Starbucks? Gimme a Break!

When Starbucks announced on the first of July that it would close 600 stores, a cry of anguish went out from suburbia. “Where, oh where will we get our consistently over-priced & burnt-tasting lattes?” they moaned.
Soon thereafter, a new website went online, called Save our Starbucks, or SOS (how cute) encouraging regular customers to…
tell [...]

Chokecherries, Onions, and a Crockful of Community

Yesterday morning, while I was speedily harvesting a few last minute additions to my SD Blogophere picnic dish (plus the cukes, which always need picking), our neighbor Kathy stopped by and asked if I thought Harry would mind if she picked the chokecherries along the road.
Now Kathy furnishes me with all the horse manure I [...]

SD Bloggers’ Picnic (a.k.a. Blognic)

I see I’m not the first to post on yesterday’s events–though to be fair, I think I had the longest drive. Then I spent most of today mowing, harvesting, planting daikon radishes and rutabaga, and harvesting chokecherries, half of which I am cooking down for juice, the other half I packed away in the [...]

Hey, little feller…Oh! Big Feller!

This little blurry thing with the white stripe in the middle is a tiny swallowtail butterfly caterpillar.  He (or she) is so small, I can’t even get a good focus.  He’s maybe 1/4 inch long.
This is what this little feller will look like in a little over a week (he’s about two inches long):
If you [...]

Web Video on Suburban & Rental Property Gardening

Reading through Organic Consumers Association “Organic Bytes” newsletter this morning, I came upon this link to a half-hour video on suburban farming–otherwise known as turning-your-lawn-into-a-food-source gardening.
What’s interesting about this particular video is that it diverges slightly from the ideas of permaculture in that it takes into account our mobile population. So many folks who [...]