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Cornucopia

16 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by wystansimons in healthy eating, sustainable living

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Tags

fall gardening, herbs, permaculture

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWv2O_MDIqF/

This has not been a stellar year for the Simons gardens, as I may have mentioned before. And even so, EVEN SO, once you start really paying attention to what is growing in your yard it is amazing what there is there to eat.

For instance, how about this. Scrolling through Instagram (cell phone use has spiked these past few weeks) I found this GORGEOUS photo of steamed Brussels sprouts leaves wrapped around meat and rice. Looks yummy. I thought this even a thing? eating the leaves of plants from the brassica family?? Brassicas are the cole crops, that is broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, etc. That’s great news for us since we can grow the leaves pretty well. It’s what comes after that just doesn’t work out. At this moment I have big beautiful  leaves on plants that will probably never see broccoli heads or Brussels sprout bulbs climbing a stalk skyward. At our house, if the chickens don’t break in and get them, them get MUNCHED by caterpillars — or could it be voles?

I went out into the garden with a flashlight tonight, and harvested a quick handful of  beautiful Brussels sprout leaves from the two stalks that survived, and chopped them into my Indian/Asian fusion invention (chopped onions with tons of curry, tumeric, and garam marsala, ground meat, diced scavenged thin-walled peppers and last of the green tomatoes, currant, diced Granny Smith) and we ate this over steamed cabbage noodles. (Thin slices of cabbage steamed, another idea that I stole from Instagram, many thanks to Amara and Martin!) I meant to get a photo for you all, but it was so good…we ate it all up without a technology stop in the middle.

It was difficult year for the Simons Gardens — first cold, then dry, then very wet, and cold again — just contrary! our green beans, tomatoes, and pepper plants struggled!! — and yet. And yet the soil gave us enough peppers for lots of salads and some to slice up with onions and freeze. The garlic heads didn’t grow large, but three bunches are dried and hanging on the kitchen wall. Jars of dried herbs lie in the cupboards – lavender, sage, oregano, thyme stored with  leftover stay fresh packets from vitamin bottles to preserve them.

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We didn’t get that many cherries from our trees, but more than before. We ate and froze some  blueberries, black raspberries, and strawberries. We did great with salad greens! Grew onions for the first time ever.We only lost one hen over the summer, and the little chickens raised by the adoptive mother last spring have laid their first little girl eggs.

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Then let’s not forget the piles and piles of pruned crape myrtle that I made everyone cut into sticks and stack on the kindling pile!  Looking over this year in our gardens as we wrap up our harvest, I’d say yes, in spite of the frustrations we’ll do it again. It can be maddening. But we love growing things. And there is something to be said for learning to let things go, recognizing how little we control, appreciating what good arrives in our basket or on our plate.

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There is always more to learn, always more to understand about the way weather and soil and insects and even irritating #*%#!! voles operate together, a symphony that we hardly understand.  So we make guesses. We chop down tall foliage to create more light, raise beds higher to ease our aging backs, build new enclosures to better rotate the chickens, and set up rain barrels locally in more gardens to simplify watering in the coming year.

But for now as cold creeps over the ground, we’ll cover our beds with leaf mulch to rest them and us for a season.  Enjoy the fireside. Crush the dryer sock full of lavender in the laundry room….and dream of what might be possible next season…

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Using Your Garden: Lavender

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by wystansimons in herbs, Using Your Garden

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Tags

herbs, lavender for dryer scent

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Hi dear readers – this is the first of a series of segments that I will thread through my garden and chicken posts, talking about putting the many things that pop up in your garden to USE in your home. After all, how do you know what you want to grow if you don’t have an idea what you would use it for? And so much knowledge of how to use plants (and weeds!) has been lost, in the era of the supermarket. Today’s subject is DRYER SHEETS or more accurately, giving your laundry a nice scent without buying any of those chemically scented thingys.

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I have always felt that it can’t be that difficult to do-it-yourself dryer scent. And since I hate and therefore do not use chemical scents, yet am certainly wifty enough to leave the wet laundry sitting for too long, forgotten and accumulating nasty odors, my towels and sheets could really use some perfume help.  So for years now I’ve been messing around with how to use homegrown lavender.  I tried laying it between sheets or towels (pretty crumbly on re-entry). I tried different kinds of bags,  which always seemed too small to have much impact on a load of wet stuff.

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Plus it was difficult to fill the bags without making more mess, and awkward stuffing lavender into a sack.  And the bags seemed to leak leaves.  Lavender is a fine natural product, but that doesn’t mean your dryer likes it as much as you do. Since it was kind of a pain, I forgot to use it all.

My conclusion: this needs to be more simple, and more effective, to be worth doing. Until today.

 

 

 

 

Here is solution, result of my many messes:

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Using an old sock, and tying the top, allows a lot of area for the lavender leaves to make contact with the tumbling damp laundry. Tying the top of the sock makes it pretty sure that the plant material will stay inside. And look how easy it is to fill it up! (I just figured this out this morning.)  No mess!!

So, how do you get started? Plant lavender in a sunny location. In summer pick leaves and flowers. (They say pick early morning for greatest potency with all herbs)

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DRYING lavender is easy peasy.  You can simply hang it upside down, out of the sun, in nice dry weather. I throw mine in a dehydrator, since I live in wonderful moist Maryland (ps this is a GREAT product for gardeners, I highly recommend getting a dehydrator, particularly because it is much less scary than the pressure cooker canner (which I also got second hand, am terrified of, and have yet to use)). But if you don’t have a dehydrator, simply place the leaves on parchment, or a paper towel, on a baking sheet and put into the oven at it’s lowest setting (about 170 degrees). A convection oven is ideal, since the circulating air will help – you want to dry the lavender, not cook it. The idea is to preserve the essential oils in the plant. Once the oven is warm, you may even wish to just leave the oven light on. When the plant is crunchy dry, store it in a plastic bag, or a jar (and add some of those little “keep fresh” sacks left over from vitamin bottles etc to help keep the herb dry.)

Voila!

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November Herb Roundup

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by wystansimons in Uncategorized

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Tags

herbs

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Trum the bulldog sniffs November’s herbs

Today I picked a lot of herbs hoping to really use the summer’s growth instead of just the fraction I have in the past.  It’s a bright sunny day in early November, and the little I know about herbs is that you should pick them in the morning, and on a dry day.

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Drying lavender

During the summer I picked some herbs and dried them in my old way, hanging bunches upside down out of the sunlight until they were crunchy.  You want to avoid sunlight because it will bleach out color and flavor, but you want to pick a place that has some light and good air movement, so they dry quickly and don’t mold instead.  I tried out drying some in the dehydrator we bought (used from Amazon) for drying fruit.  Herbs done this way were ready much faster of course, and also it was reliable even in humid Maryland summer weather.  Although I enjoy the job of crumpling the dried herbs off their branches and bottling them up, I tend to put it off — and off — so those hanging bunches can get kind of dusty.

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Excaliber Dehydrator full of oregano, rosemary,and thyme

To avoid the avoidance, I stored my dried herb bunches in ziplock bags this season as I went along, planing to 20141111_100007process them when the press of summer gardening demands lightened up.  Today I began to process those bags — WOW what a fragrance! –  rubbing the leaves and branches inside the bag, and then with my fingers, pouring them through a funnel into glass jars.  There they wait to become stews, soups, season baked chicken, etc.  I use a lot of herbs when I cook.  Naturally you want to store the jars of herbs out of sunlight also.

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Lavendar to make dryer sachets

Since herbs grow very easily it makes sense to grow our own, which are fresher and potent beyond belief, organic without trying, and almost free compared to store bought. During the summer I use them in their fresh, and also semi-dried state stealing from the drying bunches — but it sure is handy to have them inside when I need them!  I should never imagine that it will be so Martha Stewart al fresco to run outside and harvest them right when I need to be getting a meal on in a hurry.

So I am glad that writing this blog reminded me to put them in jars for the winter.  Every year I get a little better at taking full advantage of what my suburban gardens can bring to our table.  Every year there is more to bring.

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