“I like food, food tastes good.” – Descendents
The food that we grow ourselves is special and its only natural to want to honour the work you put into it by making something spectacular. In this section you’ll find information on preparing, cooking, preserving, canning, storing, eating, and using edible plants.
Garlic scape (aka garlic flower) season is pretty near finished in my neck of the woods and I was sad to see it go. Yesterday I preserved the last of the scapes that I planned to harvest, leaving the rest to mature and produce bulbils that I will scatter about for next year (you can …
Serviceberry season is here! Davin and I were on a staycation last week, and if you follow my social media accounts, you will have noticed that I spent a lot of time foraging for summer fruit. This wasn’t on the agenda, but the season is so short — when it comes you have to act …
“…increasingly I am finding it very hard to justify that sort of tidy up, very designed garden over the fact that it’s an ecosystem and I care much more about the insects and the other animals, birds, than I care about my own aesthetic being.” This week we take a trip across the pond (as …
Violets (Viola odorata) and (V. sororia) are a spring flowering plant that really don’t get their due. In the midst of so many flashy, bold, spring blooms, they’re nearly forgettable. Violets are a “weed.” They pop up in lawns, aggressively claiming space pretty much wherever they want. They’re seen as “common,” and the generally held …
A few years back, we spent a week at Rancho la Puerta, a spa in Tecate, Mexico, an hour or so south-east of San Diego, California. I had a great time exploring the landscape of the coastal Baja California desert chaparral and the many fascinating cultivated and wild plants that thrive there. I didn’t do …
Fresh sage blossoms are a tasty garnish in savoury, tomato-based beverages. Fortunately, it feels like my toothy saga is nearing the finish line. After a few consultations, I opted for an extraction of the offending tooth. It had a significant crack, and due to an experience Davin had some years ago and the options presented …
Header hand drawn by Davin Risk Over the last year I’ve posted about some of my experiments in dyeing fabrics and threads with plants gleaned from my garden to be used in my winter, off-season stitching projects. Since then I have expanded beyond my own garden to use plant materials foraged from the world beyond. …
A Way to Garden Radio – I recently appeared as a guest on Margaret Roach’s weekly podcast to talk about Holiday gifts to make using plants and things gleaned from the garden. Click here to listen for free. To get your Holiday gift giving started, Margaret is giving away two garden-themed tees from our shop, …
Have you heard about this? According to an article I read this morning in The Atlantic, linguists are recognizing the word “because” as a preposition, or what they are calling the “because-noun.” I generally try to steer clear of Internet-inspired turns of phrase, because, annoying and overdone. I like the hint of irony behind this …
Yesterday afternoon 20 gorgeous, and very large pumpkins/winter squash arrived on my doorstep courtesy of my friend Uli. She had gone out of her way to purchase many of them from a local farmer to use as Halloween decor, and a few others were given to her for free. Knowing that they would only rot …
Illustration by Davin Risk If you’ve been following my Instagram over these last weeks, you will have noticed that I have gone out foraging for apples with a friend on a couple of occasions. In that time I have received a few requests for more info, i.e. how I do it, what are the subtle …
Recently, my friend Margaret of A Way to Garden inquired about harvesting her first big bounty of tomatillos and turning them into salsa verde. If you grow your own tomatillos, late summer is when their papery husks start to plump up and split, signalling that they are ready for harvest. The fruit tends to ripen …