Mk Neal

Love them almost any way. The last few years, I’ve gotten to like them in more savory dishes. Through blueberries into wild rice pilaf at the end of cooking, for example.  A relative of mine often brings an arugula-sweet corn-blueberry salad to potlucks. It’s amazing.

Some helpful tactics:

1. Wipe down the walls and counters where they walk daily, with your favorite cleaning solution. This disrupts the pheromone trails that they follow.

2. Bay leaves wedged in window and wall cracks and crevices where they enter. The ants in our area don’t like that smell.

3. A fine layer of diatomaceous earth in the areas they frequent. A vinyl applicator bottle like they sell at “beauty “ supply stores works great to blow the powder into crevices.

Hi Julbug! Pawpaws are a fun backyard crop, if you have the space. One reason seeds are hard to come by, thought, is that the seeds can’t be dried and stored. They only sprout if kept moist. If you want to start from seed, best to get your hands on a pawpaw fruit. You may be able to find some at farmers market in fall, like end of September.

Also, you need at least two trees to get fruit. Stark Brothers sells pawpaw seedlings, that’s where I ordered mine some ten years ago.

Ok, I am going to give this a try next season. My blackcap raspberries are out of control.

I got a couple of chefmate stainless steel pans with copper bottom for $1 each at second hand store. Practically nonstick if used properly, lightweight, and oven friendly. I actually like them better than my cast iron for most uses, which I did not expect.

Only downside is that while the copper bottom is great for gas stove, it makes them unusable on induction cooktop.

Outdoor be “army worm” caterpillars, or rabbits if they are in reach of rabbits.

Russian way of cooking overgrown zucchini: slice about centimeter thick, dredge in flour that has a lot of garlic added, pan fry in oil. Serve with sour cream.

Mark Reed wrote:

I like rice a lot, especially wild rice and although I doubt I could ever grow it in serious quantity, I'd like to give it a try in my little garden pond but not sure where to find seeds.

There is actually a variety of wild rice that is native to the river ways of Indiana, but had almost died out. Some of the Myaamia folks in Ft Wayne area had found some a few years back and were working to reintroduce it in that area. I heard about this from Dani Tippmann at a Miami Heritage Days event in Ft Wayne some years ago.

It’s not a garden plant, though. Needs to grow in flowing water and needs seasonal fluctuations in depth, is what I heard.

I let my radishes self-seed in the garden based. This time of year, they come up thickly and I pull up handfuls of young radish plants before the roots start to swell and cook them whole. Great in soup or steam sautéed as a side.

I had plans when we first bought our house. There was even a “pantry” of sorts in the basement that could have been modified rather simply. However, after a few years I realized that our yard is not large or sunny enough to produce enough root crops to make such a cellar worth the effort. If I had an acre, or half acre even, I think I would want one.