Enjoy your power, but be sure to use it for the greater good!

Who says brussels sprouts are icky? Most likely someone who hasn't had them cooked properly. The trick to cooking brussels sprouts is walking the fine line between tender and mushy. Colors tell the story: tender = vibrant green, mushy = army green. Here's a simple way of preparing brussels sprouts and kale that keeps the flavor and color in tact.

Ingredients:
1 lb. brussels sprouts, halved or quartered, depending on size
pine nuts (raw or minimally roasted)
2 gloves garlic, crushed
1 tbs. olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste
handful of chopped kale

Procedure:
Sautée all but pine nuts over medium heat until bright color develops. Add pine nuts, cook for another few minutes until sprouts are fork-tender.

Creative commons photo credit: Random Duck

Q: Our garden is in northern Pennsylvania, and the growing season ends far too soon! What can we do to extend the lettuce- and spinach-growing season?

A: As weather cools off in fall, lettuce, spinach, and other leafy crops mature more and more slowly, so you won’t have to rush to harvest the way you do when warm summer weather is on the horizon. The cool fall weather offers gardeners a big advantage, since the plants basically stop growing and you can plant a large crop all at once and then harvest over time. Instead of “going by” in a matter of days, as they do in spring and early summer, the plants last for 4 to 6 weeks in the garden, and you can harvest plants as you need them. Once temperatures drop into the low 30s/-1.1-.5C, plan on protecting plants by covering them with row covers or erecting a plastic tunnel over the rows. Be sure to remove covers on warm days and replace covers at night.

Reprinted from The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book
Copyright 2008 by Barbara W. Ellis, with permission from Storey Publishing.

Creative Commons photo credit: Del Fuego

An inspiring video about the White House kitchen garden produced by the White House press office. Enjoy the garden you helped to plant!

This video, just recently uploaded, is of the second report on the Eat the View campaign done by New England Cable News just a couple of days after ground was broken at the White House. If you missed the first one, you can watch it here.

Plants tell us a lot with their leaves. In the case of garlic, they tell us when the bulb is ready for harvest. Or do they?

Scanning some of the literature written by expert growers, we saw differing opinions on what harvest signs we should be looking for:

Garlic is mature when the tops fall over (mid July to early August).
-Eliot Coleman, Author of the Four Season Harvest

When half to three-quarters of the leaves turn yellow-brown, it's harvest time.
-Organic Gardening Magazine

Each green leaf above ground represents a papery sheath around the cloves. Once the leaf tips begin to yellow and die back, its time to dig the garlic. The lower six to eight leaves still being fully green indicate optimal harvest timing: This allots 5 to 7 protective wrappers around the bulb after curing. Our harvest here in northern New Hampshire begins the latter part of July and gets completed by the first week of August.
-Michael Phillips, Heartsong Farm

It's time to harvest garlic in the late summer when the bottom two or three leaves have turned yellow or the tops fall over.
-Ed Smith, author of the Vegetable Gardener's Bible

Harvest in summer when the bottom leaves are beginning to yellow and before more than one or two leaves turn brown (July through August).
-University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension

Fully green, yellow, or brown: so who's right? Well, in a way, you could say that all of them are. It depends on what your garlic goal is. The longer you wait, the larger the bulb. The danger in waiting too long is that the bulb will start to split apart into individual cloves. If Michael Phillips urges an earlier harvest when the plant is still upright and showing a lot of green, it's because he has a different goal: long term storage. An earlier harvest helps insure that the garlic cloves are "well-wrapped" for fall and winter feasts.

One surefire way of knowing whether your garlic is ready is to dig up a test bulb. If it's a decent size and seems well formed, then you can harvest the rest of your crop with confidence.

Q: How do I know when to harvest my tomatoloons and what's the best way of doing it?

A: One of the lesser-known vegetables of the kitchen garden world, tomatoloons offer all the rich taste of tomatoes with the lightness of, well, air. To tell when the fruit are ripe, give a gentle tug on their ribbon-like stems. If they float up again immediately, they are ready for harvesting. Fruit can be harvested with a pin as shown here. We recommend wearing protective clothing and having a receptacle ready for catching the pulp. Alternatively, the stems can be cut with scissors. Just be sure to place your hand over the fruit to prevent it from floating skyward.

Creative Commons credit: PhotoGraham

Here's an easy way to enjoy freshly-dug potatoes. Chop potatoes (Yukon Gold are pictured here, but other all purpose varieties will work fine) and toss them with olive oil and salt. Roast in a 425 degree oven about 40 minutes or until the edges are brown, turning from time to time. Prepare a vinaigrette with a minced basil, a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and a bigger drizzle of olive oil. Toss while the potatoes are hot out of the oven. They will absorb the dressing so there shouldn't be any left on the bottom of the bowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Creative Commons photo and recipe credit: Michael Newman

Q Ugh! There are great big holes in the leaves of my plants! What do I do about them?

A Large holes in leaves – or leaves that have been eaten away altogether – are one of the most common signs of a pest invasion. Here are some of the possible culprits:

Slugs and snails
If you see slimy or shiny trails on the leaves, slugs or snails are the culprits. These pests hide under mulch, rocks, and other objects during the daytime and feed at night. They pose the biggest problem in wet weather.
Controls: Trap these pests under boards, cabbage leaves, flowerpots, or other objects, then scrape them into a bucket of soapy water to dispatch them. Or lure them to containers filled with stale beer: Set containers with the lip at soil level so that slugs and snails are lured in and drown. Surrounding plants with a band of wood ashes discourages them as well, as long as you renew it frequently. Attracting birds, toads, and other beneficial animals to the garden also helps control slugs. Organic slug and snail bait also is available. The active ingredient is iron phosphate and Sluggo is one brand name to look for.

Caterpillars
Various caterpillars feast on vegetable foliage, chewing large holes in leaves or devouring leaves completely.
Controls: All caterpillars can be controlled by handpicking or by spraying with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Attracting beneficial insects will decrease problems with caterpillars, and if you see any that seem to be sick (they’ll be sluggish or yellowish in color, or have ricelike cocoons on them), leave them alone and let the disease or the parasitic wasp spread to other caterpillars. Spinosad is also effective against caterpillars.

Cucumber beetles
If you see “/6.35 mm-long yellow and black beetles – either spotted or striped – cucumber beetles are eating your veggies. Both feed on a wide variety of vegetables, and both carry various diseases that cause plants to wilt and die suddenly.
Controls: Use floating row covers on seedlings, and hand-pollinate crops such as squash and melons that need it to produce fruit. Apply parasitic nematodes to the soil to control the beetles” larvae, and spray pyrethrin or rotenone to control the adults. Kaolin clay is also effective against cucumber beetles. Be sure to clean up the remains of crops and dispose of them in the trash, since these pests overwinter in them.

Animal pests
Various animal pests can also chew leaves and plant parts, so don’t overlook them. Deer may eat entire plants, but they also can browse off the tops of your vegetables. Crows have been known to pull up seedlings and consume them, and rabbits are eager to chomp away at all manner of vegetable plants.

Reprinted from The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book
Copyright 2008 by Barbara W. Ellis, with permission from Storey Publishing.
Creative Commons photo credit: J. Star

Ingredients:
3 1/2 cups stock or water
1 1/2 pounds ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into thick wedges
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon tomato past
Large pinch saffron threads (optional)
2 teaspoons Spanish pimentón (smoked paprika), or other paprika
2 cups Spanish or other short-grain rice
Minced parsley for garnish.

Procedure:
1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Warm stock or water in a saucepan. Put tomatoes in a medium bowl, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and drizzle them with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Toss to coat.
2. Put remaining oil in a 10- or 12-inch ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables soften, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in tomato paste, saffron if you are using it, and paprika and cook for a minute more. Add rice and cook, stirring occasionally, until it is shiny, another minute or two. Add liquid and stir until just combined.
3. Put tomato wedges on top of rice and drizzle with juices that accumulated in bottom of bowl. Put pan in oven and roast, undisturbed, for 15 minutes. Check to see if rice is dry and just tender. If not, return pan to oven for another 5 minutes. If rice looks too dry but still is not quite done, add a small amount of stock or water (or wine). When rice is ready, turn off oven and let pan sit for 5 to 15 minutes.
4. Remove pan from oven and sprinkle with parsley. If you like, put pan over high heat for a few minutes to develop a bit of a bottom crust before serving.

Creative Common photo credit: Pablo76
Recipe credit: The New York Times

In youth, you look for mentors to get you going down a path. Later on, you look to them for a glimpse of where the path will eventually lead. As a beginning gardener, I exploded with questions about seeds, soil chemistry and how to predict frost. Now in midlife, I look at older gardeners and wonder, "How do they manage to keep this up?"

I've noticed that few people who garden ever retire from it. In recent years, young people have been taking up gardening, but it is still often portrayed as an older person's game, one you play after a career in something more profitable. "Doing the garden, digging the weeds/Who could ask for more?" wrote Paul McCartney and John Lennon in one of the Beatles' homier songs, "When I'm Sixty-Four." Oldsters everywhere agree. In most cases, they are far more active in their gardens than they were when they lived behind their desks. Maybe that's why they've made it this far, their joints greased with raking and hoeing, their bones strengthened from hoisting bags of peat moss into their cars and trucks, their weight stabilized by the endless dragging of hoses, their nervous systems calmed by the rhythm of weeding and their diets fortified by homegrown carrots and beans.

Among my favorite exemplars are the late Helen and Scott Nearing (pictured above), who became famous for homesteading and growing their own food. Their book "Living the Good Life" (Schocken Books, 1970) has lured thousands of readers back to the land, or at least to the home-veggie plot. Scott, who died at 100 in 1983, was a mentor to my farmer-husband, who recalls how Scott worked regularly in his garden until he was 99. I was lucky to know Helen, who still tended a large kitchen garden in her 90s, until a car accident took her life. She pushed laden wheelbarrows, made compost and ate almost nothing she didn't grow herself.

Becoming wiser is one of the oft-touted benefits of age, and I suspect that the gardeners who go the distance have learned to lift things with their backs straight and their knees bent and to vary their chores during the day to avoid repetitive stress. They do stretches, drink lots of water, watch for ticks and wear hats. They have a sense of what their weak points are, whether back, knee or shoulder, and they ease up on those so that the rest of the body can go on with the work. They have favorite implements that help them compensate for their limitations, most important a younger gardener to whom they can direct in the most taxing chores.

Take a look at the late poet Stanley Kunitz's book "The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden" published in 2005 by W.W. Norton & Co. in celebration of the author's hundredth year. In the photos he is 99, stooped and frail, but is still wielding small hand tools and carrying metal buckets. He simply kept going. I'm sure that's the trick.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.

Q I hate weeding! What can I do from the start to minimize the time I have to spend on this gardening chore?

A Up-front weed prevention will really cut down on weeding headaches in years to come. Try the following techniques:

Remove roots. Dig up and discard roots of perennial weeds and grass when you prepare soil.

Consider smothering. Instead of digging up soil, consider making a deep layer of mulch to smother weeds. This technique works best on seedling perennial weeds as well as annuals, but you”ll need to take tougher steps to control such thugs as thistles and tough grasses.

Mulch, mulch, mulch. Covering the soil surface discourages weed seeds from sprouting. Mulch established crops with up to 8”/20.3 cm of coarse mulch, such as weed-free straw. When using finer mulches, such as grass clippings, use less, about 2”/5 cm. Finer mulches can pack down too much, which holds in soil moisture, but also causes rainfall to run off without soaking in. Weed seedlings that sprout beneath deep mulch will die without emerging; if a few weeds do poke through shallow mulch, they’ll be easy to hand pull.

Pick the flowers. Even if you don’t have time to pull up weeds, pull off and dispose of their flowers before they form seeds. Pull off seedheads that you see as well. Toss flowers and seedheads in the trash, not on the compost pile. This prevents seedlings in years to come.

Reprinted from The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book
Copyright 2008 by Barbara W. Ellis, with permission from Storey Publishing.

Photo credit: Er.We.

Food Independence Day (FID), KGI's inaugural celebration of local foods and edible self-reliance, was a booming success. We harvested a bumper crop media coverage including local and national radio interviews, countless blog mentions, a feature article in the Washington Post and a story by the Associated Press which was picked up by numerous newspapers, large and small, across the country. In addition to reaching millions of people with our "eat local and grow your own" message, we had over 6000 people sign on to our FID petition and pledge. We also had expressions of support and participation from the first families of 9 states: Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and West Virginia. In the case of Maine, the governor's office issued its own press release July 2nd urging Mainers to celebrate Food Independence Day by sourcing their holiday meals locally. None of the this success would have been possible without the active and inspired participation of our partners, the IATP Food and Society Fellows Program and the Mother Nature Network. Many thanks to all who made Food Independence Day a success worth savoring.

If you could choose between a golden egg and golden goose, which would you choose? Unless you live in a small apartment or have a severe case of goosaphobia, you'd be birdbrained not to choose the bird. Not only would it provide you with golden eggs, but also a little "black gold" for your compost pile.

This fairy-tale choice is so clear that you'd think it'd be easy for us to see similar real-world opportunities, but many of them literally slip right through our fingers each year in the form of seeds. When we plant seeds, most of us are thinking "eggs" when we should be thinking "geese" and I include myself in this group. I don't do nearly as much seedsaving as I could. I don't have just one excuse but a whole list of them which, conveniently for me, is the same list I use for not flossing my teeth.

While I'm still a bit birdbrained about seedsaving, I can proudly say that my garden has become the golden goose of garlic production. Not only did it produce enough to meet my family’s needs for a whole year, but we grew enough bulbs that we didn't have to buy any seed garlic. The bulbs we harvested last summer and cloves we planted last fall are now producing a bountiful harvest of garlic scapes just as our storage bulbs are running out. And the next crop of fresh bulbs won't be far behind insuring the cycle continues.

I realize that one suburban family's supply of garlic may seem like a small victory for global food security, but garlic's more of a bellwether crop than you might think. It can be successfully grown in diverse soils and climates, used in a wide variety of dishes and yet it’s a crop which curiously few home gardeners grow themselves. Why? I imagine that many take it for granted because garlic like so many other foods these days has been set "free" upon the world and is no longer bounded by the seasons and geography. It's available whenever, wherever, and however we want it, in bulbs, minced, and flaked.

When we dig deeper, though, we learn that what appears to be the free market at work is not quite what it seems. China accounts for 78% of the world's garlic production while the US ranks fifth with 1.4%, the majority of that coming from a single county (Santa Clara) in California. So, technically-speaking, garlic shoppers at large US grocery stores do have a choice, Chinese or Californian, but it’s not nearly as big or diverse as they think.

With July 4th and other independence day celebrations just around the corner, people will have other options to ponder as they plan their holiday meals. For too many in the US, the “choices” will be Bud or Miller or an industrially-produced hotdog or an industrially-produced hamburger. I don’t know about you, but I think our national holiday deserves better than barbecued mystery-meat and water-flavored beer. I am encouraging everyone I know (and 50 governors I don't know) to think outside the big box store mentality this July 4th by sourcing their holiday meals as locally, sustainably, and directly as they can. In doing so, we discover other ways of procuring good foods and eating that are better for us, our local farmers, our health and that of the planet.

Moving towards food independence doesn't mean having to do everything and grow everything on our own. It's about learning what we, our soils, climate, and local farmers can produce, effortlessly or with some coaxing, and committing to eat more of these things when nature offers them up to us. In doing so, we discover that we have more choices and freedom than we realized.

Plus, in striving for greater food independence for yourself, your family and community, you’ll be joining a revolutionary tradition that transcends time, cultures and borders. The battle for food independence is inextricably entwined with the history of political independence. Whether it’s the “Sons of Liberty” tossing crates of tea into Boston Harbor or hungry French peasants storming the Bastille armed only with farm tools and stale baguettes (a lethal weapon, if you've ever been on the business end of one), history offers inspiring examples of what small bands of people can achieve when they put their mind to something.

So, don’t just celebrate your independence this summer, savor it in all its freshness, localness, and drip-down-your-chin juiciness. We can’t know it for sure, but I suspect it’s what the “Founding Farmers” would want us to do.

This article and accompanying artwork are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you choose to republish them, please include a link to http://foodindependenceday.org.

As a 14-year-old, she picked up a spade and joined with the rest of wartime Britain in the Dig for Victory campaign. Seven decades later, though no longer wielding the spade herself, the Queen, 83, has again embraced the "grow your own" movement.

For the first time since the war, fruit and vegetables are to be found in an allotment-sized plot in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Called the Yard Bed, Buckingham Palace's 4x10 metre plot is in a challenging, north-facing area to the garden's rear, tight up against the Gardeners' Yard. "Not ideal, but it is the only open space available, because everything is so landscaped," admitted deputy gardens manager Claire Midgley, 32, one of eight gardeners at the palace.

Challenging Prince Charles in the eco-stakes, chemicals have been banned. Liquid seaweed is being used to feed the plants and garlic to deter aphids. Mulch from the palace compost heap was used to bed in and the palace borehole will irrigate the crops. Any weeds will be burned by a machine using the same liquefied petroleum gas that powers Prince Philip's taxi, which he has used for decades to drive himself anonymously around the capital.

In 1918, as part of Queen Mary's war-time austerity drive, the 175-yard herbaceous border was ripped out and planted with "an abundance of royal turnips", a historic moment captured on film and preserved by the British Film Institute. During the second world war, the same border was again employed, though for a more varied crop, as food rationing gripped Britain and encouraged George VI to enforce the government's message and coax yield from every available patch of earth. Vegetables were also grown at Windsor Castle, where Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret spent the war.

Today, there are no turnips. Instead, a charitable organisation, Garden Organic, has donated six suitably named rare varieties from its Heritage Seed Library to be nurtured on the allotment. Thus climbing French bean Blue Queen and dwarf French bean Royal Red are already planted and to follow will be Northern Queen lettuce, and Golden Queen, Queen of Hearts and White Queen tomatoes. Surrounded by sage, other crops already in situ include Beefsteak and Sun Baby tomatoes, runner beans, Stuttgarter onions, Musselburgh leeks, Fly Away carrots, Red Ace beetroot, broad beans, chard and sweetcorn.

Garden Organic's chief executive, Myles Bremner, said: "The fact that this is the first time that food has been grown at the palace since the second world war will undoubtedly bring about the Dig for Victory analogies, but the challenges for self sufficiency and a need to re-skill a generation in how to feed itself resonate even now. What is important is to put people back in touch with food and how to grow, and hopefully the palace allotment will be a driver getting more people to achieve this."

Article source: The Guardian