Garden Progress at Last!!

We've had a long stretch of rainy, cold weather that made it seem as though summer would never come. Not to mention that the community garden doesn't open until May 18 (!!) As the rain poured down and the gates stayed closed, my small seedlings turned into wild beasts, threatening to take over our guest room.

'A few more days and we'll eat the cat.'

Last week we had a decent stretch on sunshine, and although I didn't want to be that person to jump the gun and plant all of my babies just to be killed off by a late frost, we did roll up our sleeves and start building our garden. You see, we're going a bit overboard this year: in addition to our 20x20 plot at the community garden, we're doing a small 6x4x12 raised bed right outside of our apartment. We're going to plant everyday veggies there like lettuce, spinach, and basil, as well as some tomatoes and some other varieties to compare how they grow in the bed versus the garden.

First, we tore up the sod under where the bed would go. We went for the more eco-friendly, gas free tilling option by using a manual tiller (in other words, Brian couldn't figure out how to get the roto-tiller the neighbor loaned us to start!) The blisters are still raw...six by four sounds small until you have to tear it up yourself!

Brian earning his keep, and putting his back into tilling

It turned out that we have really, really good soil for a base. According to the Vegetable Gardner's Bible (buy it now), roots are the most under appreciated, misunderstood, and most important part of a plant. Yes, we could have just plopped down a weed barrier and poured our topsoil on top of it, but plants shoot down a lot of important biomass down into the earth. We wanted to make sure that there was nothing in the way.

In addition, our soil is a well drained loamy-sand. There were far fewer rocks than anticipated, and so many fat earthworms that I'll never be buying bait again. Worms are another indicator of healthy soils.

Yum!

 We dug post holes for the corners, and settled the frame that Brian has build. We then filled it with a 50:30:20 mix of topsoil, peat and compost. Of course, not a few hours later it started to rain, and the forecast doesn't show it stopping for another week. Stay tuned for the transplants, if they haven't eaten me by then!

Brian adding the finishing touches to our first raised bed

Rainy day activity - Tea Napkins

Now that we're a little more settled in our new barn, we've been having more folks over for dinner and keggers cocktails. I tend to go all out for these get togethers - loads of appetizers and deserts, using my fancy serving ware, and then...paper towels? Not super classy and most of all, not super fun. I also don't feel like buying paper napkins, because they're #1 wasteful and #2 there not super versatile, they're just...napkins.

So that brings us to cloth napkins. They're stuck in the worlds of fancy restaurants and thanksgiving dinner at Grandmas. Wrap your head around how awesome they can be! They're cute, reusable, cheap, and you can go nuts making them in different style for every season.

Sure, you can go buy fabric napkins at a place like Crate & Barrel, and pay $8 a piece for them. Better yet, you can dust off your sewing machine, pick up a few yards of cute fabric at JoAnns, and kill a few hours making however many napkins you'd like. For the following project, the total cost per napkin came to less than a dollar per napkin.

Cutting mat and quilting ruler, useful for so many projects!

You'll Need:

• Fabric (1.5 yards made me 9 12" tea sized napkins. Try to get a fabric without a lot of stretch and a non-linear pattern, you'll find it much more forgiving) 
• SHARP scissors
• Regular weight thread
• Sewing Machine
• Iron with steam function
• Measuring devices - I find that the quilting ruler and rotary cutting mat are well worth the extra dough for projects like these.

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Lazy Corners

1. Pick out your material. I wanted something spring/summer flavored, and cheap. This fabric was $3.99 a yard. The irregular pattern means I don't have to worry about the print looking crooked like you do with a line pattern. Also, the less stretch it has, the easier it will be to iron straight seams.
2. Decide how large you want your napkins. Full size dinner napkins are around 14". Take into account seam allowances  (for my 12" napkins I cut 13" raw) and the width of your material.
3. Measure and cut. I forgot to pick up a soluble fabric pens, so I used a soft pencil on the backside of the fabric to mark my cuts. They will get rolled into the seam.

Ziggy to the Zag stitch

4. Using an iron with the steam on, roll over 1/4" of fabric and crease flat. The steam will help really set the crease. If your machine doesn't have a serger, you'll have to roll the edge over a second time and press again. This ensures that all raw edges are wrapped up and sewn inside and you won't have to worry about frayed edges. If you do have a serger...I'm jealous.

5. At some point, you'll have to decide what sort of corner you want. You can do the lazy, folded over corners like I did, or you can do a mitered corner (think hospital bed sheet). My fingers aren't nimble enough to hold the fabric in a mitered shape, let alone holding it to iron. If you did 1/2" seams, it would probably be a lot easier. The mitered edges do look a lot cleaner, there's no arguing that.

6. Sew away! I used a zig zag stitch because it's more forgiving if you're not doing an absolutely straight line, which I definitely don't have the patience for. I find the ZZ also did a better job at locking down the seam. None of this applies if you're a lucky bastard with a serger.

7.  That's it. Throw a party, then throw these bad boys in the wash. Enjoy over and over.

Finished product!

Growing at Home Part # 2 - Seed Starting

When you live in a place like Vermont, you have this pesky little thing called a 'short growing season' which, when combined with our 'long winters', pose a challenge to those of us that can't have a green house. One solution to this problem is starting your seeds inside in the early spring so that by the time you move them outside you've got toddler size plants ready to take on the world!

Seed starting takes time up front, a little bit of cash, and lots of patience. Not all of your seedlings will start, and those that do my inexplicably die when their still babies. I haven't nearly mastered the craft yet, but the following is what I've picked up over a few years:

SOIL: Soil is dirt is soil, right? I took a Plant and Soil Science class in college, and if the professor overheard you talking about dirt, you'd lose 5 points for the day. Yes, it's that serious.

What we've used this season...we've had great luck with our seeds so far!

To boot, not all soil is created equal. Were you to walk into Home Depot, you'd see potting soil, transplant soil, top soil, moisture retention...there's a designer soil for every need. For seed starting, I do go ahead and use specific seed starting soil. Why? There's cheaper soil out there! For starters, seed starting soil is designed for just that. I'm all for mixing up other kinds of soil, but seeds can be finicky enough as it is without sticking them in some inhospitable dir...er, soil. Starting soil tends to be better balanced for moisture retention, air circulation, germination friendly nutrients, as well as being clean of any bad guys (microorganisms) that have it out for your babies. This year we bought organic mix from Gardeners supply, and I'm not even finished my first bag. It's not cheap, but it does go a long way and as far as I can tell has been worth it.

CONTAINER: You have your seeds, your soil - now what to put them in? I've tried a few things over the years, from yogurt cups to the plastic wells and this year onto peat/manure pots. I moved to the peat pots for a reason: come transplant time, a season has not gone by where my roots were heavily damaged from taking plants out of plastic containers. This contributes significantly to transplant shock, and sets my plants back a good week on the growing schedule - a week I can't afford to lose up here in the mountains. Peat pots are cheap, provide nutrients to your plants as they compose and, best of all, you just pop the whole thing into the ground. Come transplant time, make sure you bury the pot completely, covering the top edges with at least a half inch of soil.

Our basil and cilantro seedlings in peat pots

WATER: Seems easy enough, right? If it's dry, add water. If it's too wet, don't add water until dry; repeat step one. That may work for some of your houseplants, but seedlings are exceptionally susceptible to wild swings in moisture. My healthy inch tall cilantro seedlings were dead after a day and a half of no water after a soaking. I left the lid on my grow dome after some seeds had sprouted, resulting in dampening off disease (tip - as soon as seeds have sprouted, take the cover off!). More dead plants, their green blood on my hands.

Water can also be a terrifyingly strong force to weak little roots systems, tearing soil from tiny little root hairs, bending fragile stems. This is why when I'm dealing with young plants, I only use self-watering systems, or watering from below. Water starts at the bottom of tray and is absorbed up through the peat pot and the soil till it reaches the roots. It's faster and easier to water this way, and it's much gentler on the plants.

Tomatoes in a fish tank where the stay warm and wet, just like they like it (Grow dome in the background).

In addition to plastic trays that you can get at any home goods store, I keep my humidity loving plants in a fish tank; it was $11 at PetCo. I can throw a clear lid on for extra humidity, I simply pour about a 1/2" of water in every other day to keep them moist, and most importantly - the cat can't eat them.

HEAT: There are two things that wake a seed up from suspended animation - water and heat. They're still under soil, so they don't really give a crap about light yet. Water was manageable, but as I mentioned in an earlier post I have an affinity for cold farmhouses. I thought lights might do it, but the spectrum of light that makes a good growing light doesn't give off a lot of heat. So this spring, I cracked the piggy bank and picked up an official seedling heat mat:

 True to my Maine roots, I got the double wide. I have enough room for the fish tank, half a seed tray with  the lid, half of one without. The best part? It seems to be working! My seeds are sprouting days to a full week ahead of what they were last year - this is a huge advantage. After the grow light, if you can spare $50 this is the tool that could be your germinating missing link.


LIGHT:  See prior post for DIY light. My 4ft' home depot lamp is still at the cleaners getting desmoked, so I bought a relatively overpriced lamp at Gardeners Supply. Other than being much shorter, and only one bulb, it does have a reflective hood. I'm not so sold I'll be getting more, though I do like that you can chain multiples together.

If money weren't an issue, I'd be so down with one of these bad boys

FERTILIZE: While it may be tempting to fertilize the crap outta those suckers - don't. Remember how sensitive the little guys are, and the special seed starting soil already has what the seedlings need to get started. We'll wait till they're older before we add anything.

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I won't lie and say 'There! That's the basics!' because what I just dribbled all over the internet doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. The above have been my experiences, but I fail and flail every year and learn a little more each season.

Post up your seed starting stories!

Growing at home - a start to your garden - Part #1

It's hard to find fresh veggies in the dead of winter in New England. The selection at the grocery store is thin, and was is there has been flown or trucked thousands of miles. Living in small town Vermont, we're limited to blah tasting freezer veggies or tubers. Not too exciting, eh?

Yum?

It should come as no surprise that as much as I love buying fresh food and veggies, I love growing them even more. Despite winter being my favorite season as far as playing outside goes, I desparately miss getting my hands dirty and feeling the warm sun on my back as I work my garden. Why not bring some of that into winter by growing a garden indoors?

There are a few options when it comes to growing your veggies into winter. Cold frames are an excellent option for extending your season, and if you've got the space and the $$, go for a greenhouse or a sun room. If you're like us, with a tight space and an even tighter budget, you can try a grow table. A grow table is a flat surface with a grow light over it. Easy enough, right? You can buy these things pre-made, starting around $140 from major players like Burpees and Gardener's Supply Co. While they are snappy looking, those were way above our meager budget of about $100 (supplies, planters, soil, seeds).

Originally I had designed a wooden platform with side arms from which a grow light would hang. This would involve some carpentry skills and patience. As soon as I got to the store, I saw wire metal shelves for $30, the same that we have in our kitchen and storing our gear. The shelves are movable, and the mesh strong enough to tie supports to and hang the lights from. Plus, the unit is free standing, unlike the table top one I designed. When not in use for plants, I can dump junk on the shelves. Finally, this would take three minutes together, as opposed to gawd knows how long for a hand built one. Throw in the $12 hanging 4' shop light and two grow bulbs for $8 each, I had what I needed - more, really - for $50. We assembled the unit, setting the shelves at good heights for us, suspended the light from the top rack, and BOOM! - a grow table. But now the question is, what to grow?

Wee baby lettuce sprouts

I felt a little weird checking out of the home depot line with everything I needed to start a small scale pot growing operation loaded into my cart, but I guess because it's Vermont, no one really thought anything of it. The new setup took only a half hour to put together, and I started with lettuce, basil, cilantro and rosemary growing in window box size containers. I set the light on a timer so that it was on 18 hours a day.

  Plants need a lot of things to grow, and it's important to know which of the variables we can control. As far as container planting goes, we can control light, warmth, and depth of soil, as well as added nutrients. I feel that our biggest challenge as growers - especially indoor growing, where mother nature isn't helping out - is understanding and manipulating these variables to our advantage.

Within days I had lettuce sprouts.  A few more and I could see little baby basil poking their heads through the soil. The hardest part about growing these inside was keeping the damn cat from digging in the soil. Of the above listed 'controls', the only one I had a hard time managing was the warmth - our apartment is in a drafty old farmhouse, and keeping it at 55* still cost us $300 in the winter. Lettuce likes cooler weather, but many herbs are regular summer temp plants.

******

For a while, that's where my experiment ended. When my lettuce was an inch and a half high, we had a fire in our apartment. The heat was off two days, then the temporary propane heaters had the apartment at well over 100* for a day after that. Every houseplant, seedling, batch of herbs - dead. Several cubic feet of soil in the trash, poisoned by toxic smoke. It was only by the grace of the Compost Gods that the worms survived and then it was only barely.  Things will have to wait until part two to get growing again...

Springing out of Winter!

So it's been a while since we've posted, and a lot of that had to do with a fire in our apartment that put us out of commission for a while. Add that to work picking up, and you've got a few months of winter that fly by like a unicorn racing for the ark.

As the slower season approaches, the family and I are looking forward to maintaining this better. And watch out - it's garden season, and my trowels are out!


Best, Mo

New Old Standards: Bread

Just in case you haven't picked up on it, I've been obsessed with bread making. I enjoy creating things with my hands in general and to create bread, one of the building blocks of civilization, one of the oldest prepared foods at 30,000 years old (you read that right, THIRTY THOUSAND)....rocks my socks off.

It's not easy, that's for sure. You have to start with the basics and work your way up. Here are the two pages from my 1978 Betty Crocker cookbook that started my bread revolution. These two pages have all of the information you need to get started successfully and includes the white egg bread recipe, my go to sandwich loaf. In the spirit of copyright violations, here they are:

And then there was Pie.

We had a pretty casual Thanksgiving, just the two of us and our good friend Alex. I had to work all week and the day of, so poor Brian had to make all of the sides and the bird itself. My contribution? The Pie.

Yes, holiday Pies are a proper noun. They are the finale of a day long preparation and fast; the last character on the stage before the curtain falls. The last thing you have to remember your meal by is the Pie.As you read earlier, I had made a pumpkin pie earlier in the month, so the obvious choice for our dinner was apple.

I've had some issues with apple pie in the past. Apples were too tart, or not enough. Filling was gooey or was just very dry. What makes a good apple pie is an exact science, one that I hadn't figured out yet. I have about a dozen mediocre pies under my belt (rather, hanging just over my belt!) so if this was going to be my only contribution to our first wedded Thanksgiving, you betcha it had better be good.

None of the recipes in my 8 million cookbooks had worked for me, so I struck out on the scary path to internet recipe hunting. When you Google 'Apple Pie Recipe', the search engine tells you there are 'About 1,490,000 results'. Which one is the best? Sites like AllRecipes.com usually have good choices, but I've found the results for a lot of there things to be average. So, I used a different rule: The more old school the website, the better the results will be. And boy, did I find a doozy: My Home Cooking. It had everything I was looking for: cheezy graphics, broken links, directions written for a five year old, and the self proclaimed 'Best Apple Pie on the Internet!' Despite the crazy old lady persona the site has, it has very clear instructions with lots of photos.

Careful, she means business.

I started way too late, and was pretty cranky to be peeling a half dozen apples when all I wanted to do was go to bed (I'm thinking about investing in an apple peeler...we'll see!) The last few times I made an apple pie I used Granny Smith's, but I found them to be a little too tart and I had a hard time getting them to cook all of the way through.  I settled on Mac's - according to the illustration in the Shaw's produce aisle, they're a notch sweeter than the GS but still on the tart end of the spectrum.

I also added a cup of oats that weren't in the original recipe.My final tweak was to try a lattice crust instead of the flat crust. I always find that regular crusts get ugly and stretch around the apples, and it can cook unevenly. The lattice is a lot easier than it looks, the key is to start in the middle and work your way to the edges. I used a pizza cutter to cut the strips of dough for the top. The last step that seems easy to skip but you really, REALLY shouldn't is wrapping the edge of the crust in tinfoil when you bake it.  It keeps your crust edges from getting too brown or burnt. Remember, it's just the edges, not the entire top.

The pie got rave reviews, from Alex and Brian and the kids at EMS. Apple pie, I have conquered thee!

It would look even yummier if the stove top were clean.