Enriching the Soil of Your Life
If you love apples, apple festivals, and orchards or have an apple variety you need identified, I have a great resource for you!
We were blessed and excited this fall to have kindly neighbors that shared with us from their gnarly, old apple tree that is never sprayed with chemicals and that is a variety with a natural disease resistance.
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It’s a crazy thing to watch your special tomato plants slowly die with quantities of beautiful green fruit still hanging there. The drooping leaves turn yellow preparing for winter – the fruit hangs lower. Usually, most of those tomatoes won’t have time to ripen before it is time to chop out the vines.
There are two great times in the season for green tomatoes: first, in July when you have a bumper crop and want to take advantage of the unique flavor of an unripe tomato. The second is late fall, just before a killing frost. Years past, I let my small green tomatoes fall victim to frost and become garden compost, not realizing the many uses for this green fruit.
Now every autumn, usually right before hard frost, I determine the unripe tomatoes in the garden will get a chance to fulfill their destiny, and so I gather them all.
Green tomatoes, when roasted, are not especially beautiful. Are you ready for that truth? While still in the roasting pan they look a bit like an attempt at camouflage. However, they are remarkably tasty – mouthwatering tasty. You wonder why no one ever told you about this before….
According to Wikipedia, “the name bonbon – or bonbons – refers to any of several types of sweets, especially small candies enrobed in chocolate.
“The first reports of bonbons come from the 17th century, when they were made at the French royal court. Their name arose from childish reduplication of the word bon, meaning ‘good’.”
But not only do these morsels (modeled after Reese’s Cups) taste good, my bonbons are actually good for you!
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Are you as swamped with tomatoes right now as we are? Did you know that there is an healthier alternative to canning them?
Freezing produce was not a viable preservation method back in Grandma’s day. Grandma canned instead – hot hours of work. Even though freezing isn’t perfect, it is as close to eating raw as you can get and it is easy.
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You can harvest celery seeds if you can grow it. It is so simple and you can do this with many of the plants you may already be growing in your garden.
Do you remember this spring when I posted that you could regrow celery? Well, yes you can, but there are some things to know first!…
March thru April and September thru October can be prime times to plant a cool weather garden. The spring and fall garden really does have some advantages for the vegetable gardener.
There’s no sweating through hot and humid weather, swatting at bugs, and no need to lug around the hose or watering can. Greens and lettuces are ideal candidates for cool-weather gardening in nearly every part of the country. …
