Let's Get Growing

Two things that can frustrate a hopeful gardener are weeds and slow growing plants. Planting your garden through agriculture plastic can be a cure for both of those worries. Here’s how to get growing.

Why gardening can: calm the soul, ease food security worries and lead to self empowerment even as the world seems to be going crazy during the coronavirus crisis.

A good green bean harvest meant we could feast on dilly beans this year. This was our first season of pretty good success with beans. At least in our eyes. Success looks different to different people. Let me explain that last year we were only able to save 11 ounces of beans… carefully packed away…

You may be growing Coriander and not even know it. It’s what comes after your cilantro plant bolts Our coriander was truly a “learning by living” experience. We had an extended cool, spring season. Many of our herbs thought summer had gone and started “bolting” into flowers. It took about a month after the white…

Check out this frugal gardening hack. Why pay full price for stuff to tie-up your tomatoes? This is actually Christmas wreath tie I bought at Walmart. I picked it up the day after Christmas for 75% off… they were basically giving it away. This is what we like to use to tie-up our tomatoes. It’s…

Hunting for sweet potatoes on a sunny Sunday. Sweet Potatoes are one of Amy’s favorites. The kids like them too, especially with a little cinnamon. Our summer crop yielded a handful of the red-orange beauties. Most of them were found peeking above the heavy clay soil (we mixed in a heavy dose of compost this…

Jalapeño Poppers, with or without the heat. When we lived in Arizona, we had access to heat, both in temperature and in foods (especially  jalapeños). We ate with friends who would joke about spicy foods- “That’s not spicy! That’s like toothpaste!” We’ve had deep fried jalapeno poppers with oozy yellow cheese from restaurants- this is…

Jalapeño jackpot makes a tasty Jalapeño Popper Cheese Ball At the end of the summer, our garden struck the jackpot with jalapenos. I preserved Cowboy Candy, prepared Make as you Go, Pico de Gallo, and made Jalapeño Poppers near the end. The Jalapeño Poppers got me to thinking about incorporating these flavors in a different…

As summer’s end brought inconsistent weather, autumn stepped in, and we began to bring in less and less tomatoes. This just about puts a damper on canning tomatoes. We had too many to have for just sandwiches, but not enough for major preserving… What can you do? Use the tomatoes for a refrigerator jar of…

Call it “Candied Jalapeños”, “Jalapeño Candy” or “Cowboy Candy”, it’s just yummy! Our nephew’s family joined us for a gathering and brought a tray, a block of softened cream cheese, and a jar of sliced jalapeños in a sweet, clear syrup, and dumped it over the cream cheese. There were crackers and tortilla chips to…

There’s nothing like garden fresh tomato soup. After a couple sessions of canning tomatoes from our garden, and a few rounds of B.L.T. sandwiches, we needed another way to enjoy them and boy did we find the answer with this tomato soup recipe. Our dining room table has become the place to unload our rolled…

1st corn crop brings less than an ear-full but more than “needed”. We are celebrating, knowing that we can check off one more item from our Homegrown Thanksgiving Menu! Corn! This success will taste so much sweeter come Thanksgiving when you consider how much adversity we faced with our crop this year. Second time is…

Few things make me smile the way a pumpkin makes me smile. I know, it sounds weird, but I just love pumpkins and have this dream of someday growing a state fair champion pumpkin. In the meantime, we’re doing our best to have a real pumpkin patch this year and are experimenting with a way…

It’s a beauty of a beetle but bad news for plants. Shiny, metallic colored insects hanging out on orchard leaves and vegetable plants. They are beautiful, but when they consume what we are trying to grow and leave behind skeleton leaves, they become a menace. It seems that this beetle, known as a Japanese beetle, are…

They say potatoes are easy to grow, they’re right. They say that potatoes are about as easy a crop to grow as anything you might try to plant. If our first harvest is any proof, they’re right. We hauled in a total of nearly 10 lbs. In our first effort! It was an exciting experience…

Observe before planting your garden. When we moved into our home we knew we wanted to have a family garden. The first summer we resisted starting one though. Why not just dive in? We could have, but we would be blindly going for it without the most important method of learning…. Observation. Lots and lots…

Thanksgiving menu items An update to our “Inspired to Try, Homegrown Thanksgiving Challenge”. The Thanksgiving menu is ready to share, think we can pull it off? We’ve got our starters, main course items, and desserts. The menu items consist of food we are currently growing so we can prepare to save them for November- and…