Delicious Cauliflower

...onsidered a regional specialty. It has a lovely, rich flavor. I never knew tomatoes and cauliflower could be such good friends. The ingredients are pretty basic. And we all have a lonely can of tomato paste on the shelf that needs to be used, don’t we? We’ve been eating it hippie style, over brown rice, but it would be more elegant over an herbed pilaf, or it could be used as a side dish. I suspect it would be good cold, too, but we’ve never had l...

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Picture Sundays: A Keyhole Bed and Straw Bale Garden in Texas

...le Gardens, self watering 5 gal plastic buckets and two hay bales (coastal Bermuda hay) that have a wooden framework on top containing bulk landscaping compost from a local nursery. My plants are growing super fast and my tomatoes are loaded. This looks to be the best garden I have ever had. Judging from the fencing it looks like you’ve also figured out a way to deal with the deer. Thanks for the pics John and good luck with the garden!...

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Straw Bale Garden Part V: Growing Vegetables

...nted in the bales are growing. I got a late start on planting–I put in the tomatoes, squash and basil in mid May/Early June–just in time for the cloudy, cool weather we have here in early summer. Check out the difference between the tomato I planted in a bale on the left, compared with a tomato in one of my raised beds. The tomato in the bale is doing a lot better. The bales are home to organisms that support healthy vegetables: mushrooms and worm...

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Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

...a jar, some little jar malingering in your fridge, like pesto or sun dried tomatoes in oil or olive paste. Stuff beans into pita pockets along with some salad stuff for lunch. Okay, you get the idea. Oh, and you might ask why you can’t use canned beans from the store for all of the above. The reason is that they’re terrible. To make them taste decent, you have to flavor them and cook them, so you may as well start from scratch. Now on to the how-t...

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Our Disastrous Summer Garden

...was stunted and anemic. It seemed incapable of growing past 8 inches. Our tomatoes grew well, produced a fair amount of fruit and then abruptly dried up and croaked. We planted zucchini too late and it got a bad case of powdery mildew. The raccoons figured out how to bust through the bird netting that was supposed to keep them out of the vegetable beds. They completely obliterated two out of four vegetable beds. With the exception of our pomegran...

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