Get To Gardening Already!

Plant something! Spring has sprung and it is never too late. At the farm we are still planting cool weather crops and have started direct seeding the warm weather veggies too.

If you have any planting questions, leave them below and I will answer them!

Gardening Love to all my readers who have hung on this long!


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The Little Vegetable That Could - live through anything

The Little Vegetable That Could - live through anything: 

Better at Beets

Beets just made our list of favorites. Not even kidding. My kids went back for seconds of beets and nothing else.

Here's how it played out:
I pulled the beets and hosed them off. Then I scrubbed them with a soft vegetable brush. Chopped off the leaves, but left a couple inches of stems. Two different sources told me that would keep them from bleeding out like before.

Then I set them in a casserole dish, covered them tightly with foil and baked them. At 350 degrees, they were in there for way too long. I got busy and didn't check them for over an hour. I was cooking some chicken too, and for some reason chicken takes a long time for me. So they were both in there for over an hour.

I finally got them out...

Balcony Farm Update

The balcony farm is growing, but not getting enough light. 

This is what it looks like and you can tell it needs more light two ways:
The plants are leggy. That is garden talk for floppy and stretched out.
The plants toward the back are pale, like they need nitrogen. I put a few more pellets of fertilizer on them, but I feel like they should not need it. The fertilizer we put on initially is a 3-4 month fertilizer. I guess we'll find out if more was too much pretty soon.

I also felt like the squash plants should be larger. That is another reason...

That's Not Blood

Scrubbing with a Brillo pad removed most of the skin, and soil.

That's not blood. It is beet juice. Wear gloves. Beets are the new kale. Right after the broccoli greens. Hipsters are going to be so healthy! And broke! A small bunch of beets, meaning 3 beets, at the grocery near my house, is $3!


Peeling the beets though, that's what they are hiding. You'll have to look it up to find out that peeling beets is equivalent to peeling moon rocks. All those beautiful Pinterest recipes only show the pristine, tempting, amazing-looking dishes filled with shining, deep red, super-foods that will make you live forever! They gloss over the peeling-the-beets part.

It also released their bloody essence.

Essentially, folks recommend cooking the beets first. Have you seen that Pinterest Fail website? That's how that worked for me. The beets bled...

Kitchen Garden in a Bag!

Our sophisticated way of drilling drainage holes.

Once there was a tiny, tiny patio, without a plant growing on it, although a number of plants had died there.

The patio belonged to a twenty-something woman, who ate a lot of drive through food, but yearned for better health. The young woman had an old friend who knew how to grow food. They decided to plant vegetables on the tiny patio.

They were working with a budget the size of the patio, so buying containers was out of the question. They decided to plant the kitchen garden right in the bags. They bought...

Broccoli Leaf Chips!

Broccoli lost its head.

These broccoli leaf chips are some kind of delicious.

Here is how to make their salty, melt-in-your-mouth, delicate tastiness:

Cut the leaves off and toss them with olive oil and sea salt.

Bake them in the oven at 400 degrees for 5 minutes.
Take out the crispy ones and put the others back in the oven for 5 more minutes.

Repeat this until all the broccoli leaves are crispy.
They may be brown. At first they might look like they have turned to soggy mush. They crisp up though.

Yum.
Yum.
Yum.