Food Storage Revisited

.... I should also clarify that if you live out in the country and have a big vegetable garden you will need a larger pantry or basement. We are urban dwellers with, at best, a tiny vegetable garden (which has been neglected this year while I work on the house). That said there are some big differences between the kitchens of the 1920s and the kitchens of today that present new challenges. Some of those changes: We have a lot more kitchen gadgets and...

Read…

Parkway Plantings

...asses for agriculture in this country have taken all the flavor out of our vegetables. Rapa da Foglia senza Testa, i.e. rabe without a head. Yet another bitter vegetable, this is a kind of turnip green that looks kind of like broccoli rabe, except that you eat the leaves. A bit susceptible to bugs, but we had a successful crop last year. Carrots – Carota Pariser Market. This is a small round carrot that French folks apparently like. Around the wir...

Read…

Our New Straw Bale Garden–Part I

...l be a solar powered fountain. We’re going to experiment with a straw bale vegetable garden in our backyard, inspired by Michael Tortorello’s article in the New York Times. The plan is to grow in the bales and harvest the resulting compost for use in permanent raised beds (that have yet to be built). We’ll keep growing in bales until we have enough compost for the beds. The problems presented by our property–lead and zinc contamination and a backy...

Read…

Should I Put Coffee Grounds in a Worm Bin?

...is my takeaway. If and when someone studies the issue to determine a safe percentage, it would be unwise to recommend the practice, given the results of the referenced paper. Coffee grounds also form large anaerobic clumps worms don’t like. Clearly, they prefer vegetable scraps and large amounts of fluffy carbon material like cardboard and wood shavings. Now wouldn’t it be great if Elon Musk would fund local Extension Service home gardening resear...

Read…

Rucola Selvatica A Foglia D’ulivo: the arugula you’ve never heard of

If I could boil down my vegetable gardening advice to one sentence it would probably be: just grow stuff that does well and tastes good. Let some other schmuck fight aphids on those Brussels sprouts. Another bit of advice is that you can never have enough arugula. The stuff at the market is wilted, tasteless crap. Grow your own and you’ve got an incredible diversity of arugula varieties to choose from. This year I grew two varieties from Franchi,...

Read…