Madame Robin

Madame Robin finally settled down on the light fixture between our garage doors. She stayed there through doors opening and closing. She was having trouble building her nest on the fixture, so I added the longer sticks you see below the nest to give her some stability. Hope to get some pictures in the nest after the babies hatch.

Sorrel

Sorrel: Rumex acetosa
I rarely see common garden sorrel being grown in vegetable or herb gardens and I guess it does have an unusual taste. The basis for the Eastern European sorrel soup, sorrel is a pretty, little green plant with sour, lemony leaves. The young leaves can be used (sparingly, to taste) in spring salads and gives them a nice bite. Sorrel is easy to grow, having few pests. It likes a sunny spot in the garden and will grow in a clump that should be divided every 3 to 5 years. Leaves are harvested young and very definitely before the plant is in flower, after which the leaf turns bitter. Several cuttings can be made before the plant sends up its flower spike. I have only purchased sorrel plants, and have not started it from seed.
The main use for sorrel in my kitchen is sorrel soup, which is a lovely green, sour, lemony dish. To make it:
Ingredients:
I large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 T unsalted butter
4-5 medium potatoes, peeled and diced.
5 cups tightly packed sorrel leaves, or half and half sorrel and spinach (and you can use lesser amount of leaves)
1 t. grated nutmeg
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. freshly ground black pepper
2 quarts stock (chicken or vegetable)
1/2 cup sour cream
1/4 snipped chives, if desired, for garnish

In a 4 qt. saucepan, melt butter and saute onion and garlic until lightly colored (about 15 minutes). Add potatoes, sorrel, nutmeg, salt, pepper and stock to the sauce pan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, 50 minutes. Allow to cool enough until it can be pureed. Puree in a food processor or blender. Reheat. Serve with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of chives. Can be frozen. Makes about 10 cups.
Happy eating! And Happy gardening!

Robin in the Sun

After some nest building on an outdoor light fixture and ablutions in the bird bath, this robin was preening and posing for me on the garden gate!
Happy bird watching...and gardening!

Sweet Potato Update 2010

I am experimenting with two methods to produce sweet potato slips this year:
1. The traditional suspend in water method (see photo above) and
2. I cut a sweet potato in half, lengthwise, and buried it in soil less mix, cut side down, and watered it.
Do I have a winner? Well one of the water grown potatoes rotted and was tossed and neither of the other two have sprouted. The sweet potato buried in soil sent up it's first sprout yesterday! (in less than a week)
It may be that this is because #2 is planted in a seed flat that I easily placed on a heat mat (sweets love their heat), but I don't think I can really do that with the ones suspended in water. Next year, I will start all of them using method #2.
Happy gardening!

Ginter Gardens

Ginter Gardens
I have been to Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond more than 100 times. If you are in the Richmond area, it is certainly worth a visit. It is especially nice on a cool gray day to take a walk inside the conservatory. But today I did something I had never done there before- I used the library there. I love libraries and I love gardens, so you can imagine what a pleasure it was to work on a project in the library. I am sure that there are more extensive botanical libraries than this one, but it is new, nice, comfortable and the librarian was very helpful (plus it is not far from my home). I found the botanicals and herbals I was looking for, along with a great book on the botanical and zoological art work of William Bartram (son of the American botanist and plantsman John Bartram of colonial Philadelphia) and other neat books on colonial gardens (a recent interest of mine). I intend to go back, very soon, to look up more information on colonial gardens, medicinal/dyeing/cooking herbs, home orchards, and native plants. Above are a few photos from the garden today, outdoors and a few in the conservatory (pansies/violas, paphiopedalum orchid, spiral ginger, clivia). I will write a full field trip report on it sometime soon!
Happy Gardening!

Garden Frugality

The $64 Tomato (and $7 head of broccoli?)

You maybe have heard of the book by this same title (Alexander, W. (2007). “The $64 tomato: How one man nearly lost his sanity, spent a fortune and endured an existential crisis in the quest for a perfect garden” a good read, BTW). Whenever I look at some glossy catalog with some new system for growing, trellising or maintaining vegetable plants, I think of that title and the concept of garden frugality (oddly enough, not as much for flowers, as those are totally for pleasure maybe?). Probably because how I was brought up (that is, I was raised to calculate the cost of a restaurant meal to me versus to the restaurateur to pick the best value, I remember being carefully instructed by my father on wiping the peanut butter off the knife onto the opposing piece of bread so as not to waste it-it short, I was raised by someone who lived though the poverty of the great Depression). I look at each gadget with the following questions in mind:

1. What is the cost?
2. How likely is it to increase yields? Or is it a matter of convenience, fashion or appearance?
3. How long will it last?
4. What is, then, the per pound or per unit price of this gadget? High? Low?

If an item is largely for ornamental purposes or will not last long or does not greatly increase yields, it fails my test. I know that some of this is hard to do, for example, how was I to know that that “noodlehead sprinkler” ™, which guides water to parts of the garden that needed it, would break after a few months use? I did get a refund, but did not have a way to know in advance that it was fragile (except maybe wading through product reviews, which I would be happy to do for a larger purchase). Same with the “increase yields” question, it is hard to do, but these are just “thinking points” and do not require exact, numeric answers, just some general sense of the reason for the purchase and likely outcome. (On a related note, people have been gardening in dirt with seeds and water and digging sticks and doing just fine for a long time- I know there have been improvements, but that special hydroponic tomato growing system is not one, unless your goals are to garden in an unsuitable area, like on a high-rise terrace, and grow a few pricey tomatoes and herbs. This is fine as a pastime and conversation starter if you enjoy it, but is not frugal gardening).

I know there are other reasons to garden than to get inexpensive, tasty, organic food and pretty flowers. For example, I certainly am more willing to spend a little more money on ornamental features for my ornamental flower garden, because my goals there are different than for a veggie garden. And I guess one could feel the same about vegetable gardening, and I have seen some lovely ornamental features in them. All in all, this position may not be entirely consistent, but the goals I have for each type of gardening vary. So figure out your goals, what is it you want out of gardening…

Visit my garden pod cast, Virginia Organic Gardener, by clicking on the Pod Bean button on the left side of this page or itunes and….Happy Gardening!

Ladies and gentlemen, start your sweets!

How to start sweet potatoes

Last year I had good success with starting and growing my own sweet potatoes (which I served for Thanksgiving dinner!). I started them in the traditional way, show in the photo above. Take a sweet potato, put four toothpicks in it (perpendicular to the potato), suspend the rounder end in a jar of water, and put in a sunny window. When the sprouts (called slips) are about 6 inches long, you can either cut them from the plant and directly plant them into the garden, 2 weeks after last frost (they need really warm soil, as the are a tropical vine) or you can pot them up and let the roots form.

I am also going to try another method this year- split a sweet potato in half lengthwise and bury it, cut side down, under some light soil in a plant flat, under light on a heat mat. This way the roots will form well and the slips should be well rooted. The time to do this, in order to plant at the end of April/beginning of May, is NOW! You can use sweet potatoes from the grocery, though might want to order or buy certified disease-free potatoes or even the slips themselves from a nursery.

Visit my garden pod cast by clicking on the Pod Bean button on the top left of this page and...as usual, happy gardening!