Summer fruits and berries have been in abundance these past weeks and the experience of foraging, picking, eating, preparing, and preserving them has conjured up all sorts of memories from my past going right back to early childhood when I discovered a black currant bush and onward to my teens when I did fruit picking …
As promised I’ve made up a list of herbs and spices that can be used to flavour pickles. Many of these can be grown at home! Pickling Flavours From the Garden Basil Bay Laurel leaf Bergamot flowers (never tried it, but would function similar to oregano) Caraway seed Celery seed Coriander seed Dill seed & …
Last week my friend Margaret of AWAYtoGarden.com and I were chatting on Skype and she asked me what is in my pickling spice mix? The question threw me for bit of a loop since I didn’t really know. Unless I am writing a recipe for publication, I rarely pay too much mind to how I …
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 …
Our gardens reflect who we are, what we need, and what we like. I am a tinkerer. I like to experiment, mess about, and explore. I am curious. I like insects. I like to grow plants that are useful. I like diversity. My garden is filled to overflowing with a wide range of useful and …
All of the books will tell you (even my own), that you should not allow your garlic plants to produce full flowers. Cut them off when they’re still closed (called scapes). And it’s true. If you want to grow big, juicy garlic bulbs you’ll need to cut off the scapes as they emerge in early …
This morning I finished putting the most recent episode of the What’cha Growin? podcast together and had set it to upload when a message popped up saying that I had surpassed my monthly space allowance and would not be able to post anything more this month. Whoops. The thing about audio files is they’re big: …
Late last summer I tossed a few flowers from the garden into jars and covered them with boiling water to make a “colour tea.” I then tossed in little bits of cotton thread to see what would happen. This wasn’t about anything that I had read in a book. I didn’t use any mordants. I …
Many of the flowers on this plate have come from early spring veggies and greens that are bolting in the early summer heat. All of them make for good eating, and the pollinators and beneficial insects like them, too. Allow the plants to mature and you’ll have free seed to sow in the late summer/early …
“Everybody right now who is gardening (and who lives long enough), will eventually be a disabled gardener, it’s just that some of us encounter disability earlier than others do.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the physicality of gardening. When I was younger I was well aware of the financial, time, and space limitations …