Jennie Little

Recently decided to cull both the garlic press and the garlic peeler as unnecessary. Put the peeler in the "dupe" drawer as when I'm processing a lot of garlic it will still be useful, but that's only 1-2 times a year.

This was an interesting read though!

Pearl Sutton wrote:

Faye Streiff wrote:When I think of all the tools I’ve laid down in the garden or pasture when we were working on projects, never to be found until a year or so later when they were rusted and useless....

Not related to pockets, but I paint all my tools hot pink. I got tired of trying to find them. Not my first choice of color (I'd rather they were purple) but most visible against the grass and dirt.

A young man who worked for me was raised by his Grandma with his sister. He worked in theater staging: putting up/tearing down shows, etc. His tools kept getting stolen. He went out and bought pink paint and painted his tools pink. Because he was raised by females, he's not worried about his machismo much and he was able to stop buying tools!

I bought some tree collard starts from the late, lamented Botanical Gardens. Kept them inside til they were 6-8" tall and I was trying to figure where to plant them?

The chipmunks ate them down to the ground. No Tree collards for me! I decided that I would never grow them outside, but only as a house plant.

FYI

Pearl Sutton wrote:....when thrift store shopping is fun because the employees either ask "what IS that thing? We wondered!" or say "Oh neat, you know what that is! We were wondering if anyone would know and buy it!"
And the other half of it, when you can text permie friends pictures of odd stuff at the thrift store, and they reply "Yes please! All of them!!" or "ooooooh! YES!!!"  

Last time that happened to me I bought a "waterless cooker" being sold as a "camp cooker" for $3. I use it about 3x a year to make an entire meal in one pot. I love my instant pot, don't get me wrong, but the waterless cooker came with a rack and 3 triangular pots that sit atop it. I can cook a chicken on the bottom and all the veg on top, one burner, one set of fuel. Total win!

Okay. I planted a clary sage plant about 3 years ago at the back of my veggie garden. It has grown and prospered and is now producing young plants. Fine.

Aside from using the leaves as a green compost (laying them on the ground) I haven't done anything with the plant: leaves, flowers, seeds, or stems.

What do you do with it?

TIA

I grew giganti beans this year, the vine is still out there, the last of the beans on it I hope will dry. The vine is beautiful. Before it started to get cold, we had a hummingbird who'd come daily to the blooms.

I couldn't find giganti beans sold as seed, so I bought some from a gourmet food company. We ate most of the package and I planted a few....

That vine makes me happy.  I love going out and looking at the huge pods every day. I hope they mature/dry before we get a hard frost or 10/15 when I will pull the vines.

We had tree work done early this spring. My veggie garden this year made me happy.  Some things just didn't work: the old cherry tomato seed that did grow (very little of it) never flowered. Some of the potatoes/onions just rotted because of all the rain. But, I did get potatoes, onions, leeks, and green beans, shell beans, and some for drying.

This was the first time, ever, that the garden produced enough food to affect our food budget. The giganti vine, one red onion, a seeding lettuce, and the chickory which gives us radicchio every spring are the only food plants still in the veggie garden. The rest of it is weeds which need to be pulled and the beds mulched or beds which have been mulched.

When I pulled the pea trellis, I planted garlic in the bed, so we'll have more green garlic and scapes next spring. And we might have enough bulbs next year? I was shocked, the farm stand where I've been buying my weekly produce has garlic stalks for $4.99 each??? EACH? That seems insane for a crop you basically have to do nothing to get..! Everytime I think about that I take another head of garlic out there and tuck it in the ground.

First I don't have a proper root cellar or any way to make one. I have used wooden crates and wood baskets. I have tried newspaper strips, wood shavings, and also sand. None of them seem to work. All of them the carrots either rot or dry into rope fibers.

So, how do you overwinter your carrots?

TIA

https://cfileonline.org/technology-mitti-cool-a-clay-refrigerator-that-runs-on-evaporation/

Id love one of these...

I recently completely reorganized my recipes.

I now have two binders.

One is "ingredients," things like candied peel, baking powder, garlic salt, etc. that I make to go into other recipes and aren't usually eaten alone. The second binder holds regular recipes. I organized it by how things are cooked (stove top, baked, etc.) and the recipes in each section are sorted by main (usually fresh or from the pantry) ingredient. So, potato-tomato soup is in the soups/stews and filed under "potato".

The last thing I did was make a pretty comprehensive list of fresh fruits/veg and list the recipes I use them in.

Making the ingredient binder helped -- I was always looking for my curry powder or garlic salt recipe in the midst of all the others... the fresh food index I expect will also help.

Do you do something like this? What? How do you organize your recipes?

In the spring when it seems I can't keep up with the fresh greens, I dry extras. I make two bottles of mixed greens every year: one savory, one peppy. I add these, as appropriate to soups, stews, salad dressings, etc. the rest of the year.

Sure beats all the green slime I added to the compost before I started doing this!