Category: Garden uses

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A garden dinner in winter

Wes cooked up a very nice dinner with garden harvest storage and some ground venison courtesy of Paula!

Black tepary beans soaking this morning.
The food! Ground venison from Texas with achiote spice I brought back from Colombia a few years ago, corn, black tepary beans from our garden flour tortillas from scratch, and salsa verde from our garden tomatillos.
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Kohlrabi and cabbage in dinner

The chef served a pork and tofu soup this evening with rice.

The soup contained (in no particular order) carrots, garlic, shiitake mushrooms, the round chunky mushrooms whose name I can’t remember, sweet baby bell peppers, Sichuan chile peppers, pork back strap (from Paula), tofu, soy, dashi, kohlrabi slices, cabbage, and kimchi (from Paula too).
Between the chopsticks you can see the green shred of cabbage and the kohlrabi slice. We’d never had kohlrabi before. It sort of just blended in with everything.
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More survival reports

I went out to get the kohlrabi and cabbage for Wes and uncovered some more areas.

The tops of most onions seem frost damaged. Not sure about their bases. We’ll see if they grow back this week or if I need to go get more.
Adjacent snow covered onions seem similar.
The chard is definitely frozen. Will be interesting to see if it comes back from its base or if I need to reseed it. Tucked under it is a ragged little cabbage.
I cut the kohlrabi at the base. Most of the leaves are in good shape, too.
The cabbage (left) and kohlrabi (right), harvested and set on the snow.
The Dutch corn salad greens are as hardy yet tiny as ever. I think from reading recently they don’t get much bigger, so I guess you’d need to plant a lot more than I do?
At the edge of the front nook, these strawberries and mealy blue sage were
Another towel and tub protected area. Strawberries look good and so does the oregano in the upper right corner (at the edge of the snow).
I think the sad little standing cypress has survived!! I put a bit of mulch around it after my last visit to it (when it looked very sad). The other front nook one and both backyard ones are still covered by snow.
By the time I got done outside Wes had trimmed up both the kohlrabi and the cabbage for use this evening.
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Last book report for tonight I promise: “Gardening with Prairie Plants” by Sally Wasowski

Gardening with Prairie Plants was SO BEAUTIFUL. Mom gave it to me a few weeks ago and it was just filled with magnificent pictures of prairies and prairie gardens throughout the Great Plains. I really also liked how it paid attention to the different regions (wetter and drier, north and south), so it has lots of good info on plants native to each region. It mentioned some medicinal and edible uses of native plants too though it refers to other more complete sources. Did I mention the prairie photos? Definitely added to the favorite references spreadsheet.

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Another book report: “Grow Cook Eat” by Willi Galloway

Grow Cook Eat by Willi Galloway had a lot of useful tidbits I hadn’t found elsewhere, such as soil temperatures for germinating (the Johnny’s seed catalog seems to have air temperature? or so I assume, as it’s not specified) and some sections on mustard greens and bok choy. I have added it to my spreadsheet of useful books.

For those interested in cooking (aka not me anymore), it also had a lot of recipes and talked about eating parts of plants that aren’t usually discussed, like radish seed pods and various flowers of vegetables.

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Loofah processing

Wes has been cleaning and bleaching the loofahs and has put them out to dry in the yard on a string.

I’m surprised Briar didn’t bark at the loofahs. Maybe she’s getting jaded to human shenanigans.