Got Organic Milk?

 Hip English Dairy Farmers in a cute rap video!



That just cracks me up!

Go Grab Your Leaves and Mulch when the sun comes out, or wait for your neighbors to rake them up and grab them! Mulch all your tender plants and in between your leeks! Cliff Mass is predicting a La Nina (cold and wet, with lots of chances for snow in town) this year. Great for Snowboarding, but less good for eating fresh greens from your yard!

I can build a small hoop house (3' wide x 5' high) to help protect your greens from the frost all Winter for less than $60! Salads in January are nice...

Fall Veggie Garden Prep Special!

We are now getting to the point where it is almost too late to plant veggies unless you have already bought the plants... So, if you want to make a new garden bed, the easiest way now is to sheet mulch and wait for spring... If you have a place in the garden that you think is a good place for your garden next spring, I can come and tell you what/when to do it, or you can have me out and I will do it for you- If you have leaves in your yard start collecting now!!

This is a great video from the originators of the Backyard Farm concept explaining why they think it is important to grow your own vegetables.

By By Tomatoes!

I finally gave up on my tomatoes... the ones that were ripe were full of slug holes, and the others were just getting waterlogged! Now of course there is sunshine. But I found that my strawberries have completely taken over the area! Yay, free food!  I am probably going to move them to underneath the cherry tree in the "fruit corner" and plant lettuces and cilantro, etc. I am finally also going to make myself a new hoophouse for the winter. I have lots of kale and chard and more volunteers at the community garden, so I am going to make sure it doesn't freeze in the Seattle cold winter that has been predicted (http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/).  My late planted (August) purple pole beans are finally growing into a pretty vine with a few beans on it. The celery is doing well, but I pulled the soil around it to try to blanch it for the next few weeks... I pulled all but the flowering leeks, and sauted some with chanterelles Marc brought home from the mountains! Leftovers were rolled into a nori for Chanterelle Sushi, Yum.

Grow Cook Eat Videos from my friend Willi!

Grow.cook.eat 
That is my friend Willi in her new cooking show Grow Cook Eat. In the kitchen with her husband Jon, and in the garden explaining how to plant and harvest the plants to optimize a small urban yard. She was a board member for Seattle Tilth and the Northwest Editor for Organic Gardening for years, and is currently working on a book called Grow Cook Eat. She a great resource for all things in the urban vegetable garden. She usually is a presenter at the NW Garden Show in February and is a regular on KUOW's Greendays Gardening Panel She has her own award winning website called Diggin Food, and she and her husband just opened a cool furniture store in Portland featuring custom, hand built furniture that is affordable. It is calledPerch, and it is in the Pearl District in Portland.  Check it out.

peace-
Jayne

Fall Harvest 2010

I love this time of stocking up.  We are going mushroom hunting, and plan to cook a bunch of sauces and store them in the freezer, and also to dry them. Even though we don't have that many tomatoes that are ripe on the vine, we do have enough to make a few dishes, and the leeks have been one of the best things we have grown- hardly any work for the effort. I can cut up a leek and make the entire dish taste better. I made a leek, carrot, celery, and burdock stock that will make a great base for either soups or for cooking rice or quinoa. 

Marc is the Souper boyfriend in the winter time! He loves to make soup on the top of our wood stove, getting up periodically to stir while relaxing after snowboarding on Sunday afternoon. I just harvested burdock root from the farm, and made a stock from it for the freezer. This stock plus an endless supply of leeks, potatoes and kale will make his job easier! You should have seen Marc's face when I showed him how to plant the leeks. He tried to put the whole 4" pot of leeks in one hole and complained that they were falling apart. I showed him that each toothpick sized leek had to be separated and planted about 2-3" apart from one another.... His mouth had dropped and he just glazed over and mumbled something about feeding the worms and walked off. I only had to weed the area a few times during the season, and I grew squash up the fence next to them. Definitely worth it!

Next year I plan to plant shelling beans to save seeds for winter soups. I was afraid they would be too much work to shell, but I think given the potential taste factor I am going to give them a try. I have Jacob's Cattle and have an affinity to them because I have a friend named Jacob who's family raise cattle in Africa.

Vegetables keep coming

Yum, Dinner!
Well, We are getting plenty of squash of all kinds out of the garden, and cukes and leeks, and green tomatoes. I forgot to take a picture of the fried green toms we made. I just cracked an egg and added a little water to whisk it up, then dredged it in flour with a little salt and pepper, and a little Thyme. I think one of the secrets to the toms is that you have to cut them really thick, and fry them for enough time for them to be cooked all the way through. The spices could have been better, but I finally got the texture right. I think we will be having a lot more of these!

Our friend brought us 2 king crabs that were caught and cooked that day on the San Juan Islands! We ate those up one day, then cooked up the shells at a soup base. We used that and these veggies to make a great soup for dinner, and froze the rest in 2 serving containers. We will see if they ever come out of the freezer, but I would add more cream and potatoes and it will be even better the second time around!

Tomato Trellis & Hoop House Time!

You might have just gotten some plants and stuck them in the ground and are hoping they do well and the soil warms up soon... well, that is ok sometimes, and especially with sungolds, and some past varieties, but not with the bigger varieties. You need to protect your babies from the cold weather, and help them keep upright and keep their leaves from touching the soil... I know that is a lot to think about all at once, but you need to start thinking about your tomato plants' needs.  1) Warm soil- you can use clear plastic to warm up the soil before you plant. Some people think that black plastic will heat up the soil, but test showed that the plastic itself heated up, but the soil underneath did not... The clear plastic really does work. 2) Warm air at night and protection form too much moisture- there are many ways to make a hoop house or temporary greenhouse out of greenhouse plastic and hoops made out of bent irrigation pipes over rebar and clips to hold the plastic in place. You can rig up some sort of angled windows supported by something sturdy like framing lumber, but be careful to make it strong enough- you wouldn't want it to fall on the plants or an innocent bystander...
If you have questions or want to purchase some of the greenhouse plastic in lengths of 20' @ 4$/ft, let me know. It is the 6mil greenhouse plastic that farmers use. email me at jayne@sistersageherbs.com- Only in the Seattle Area please!! I will be adding pictures as I get the tomato garden pictures together this season.
peace-
Jayne