Last summer I had a tremendous squash failure. My zuchinni squash grew into monstrosities that nearly choked the life out of some other plants. I was excited when I saw them flower, but then…..no fruit. None. Zero Zuchinni. I was an unhappy gardener.

Note: This is apparently because squash plants have genders! Go figure! I either had all gals or all guys but either way, I was left out of the party.

If only I had read this article on eating Squash Blossoms! I see them now for sale at farmer’s markets and hope that even if he squash fail in the fruit again, the flowers will see me through!

Check out this lovely NPR article on edible flora, especially squash blossoms.

And Kyle, I’m frightened of some forms of foraging in a city of both dogs and people peeing in public, but I simply have to also pass along this article on some wild edibles to you who live in a much more abundant and not so scary greenery.

Eating Dandelions! Next time I’m in town we should weed your yard for lunch!

Hope you are getting a wonderful harvest, my friend. Are you tracking your goods in any way?

-SuperKasey

Sorry for the suspense, but this was just too big an event for one letter.

Here is how to cook a Maine Shore Dinner.

NEW ENGLAND CLAM CHOWDER:

Place clams in cold water for at least one hour so they spit out their sand. Then place them in a pot of boiling hot water and simmer till there shells pop open. If they don’t pop, they are not good to eat.

Clams are weird looking creatures with a blackish “neck” that scoots out of the shell. Here are some pictures of clams so you can take a look.

And a big plate of them!

Shell them and cut them into bit sized peices. They go into a pot of hot water with simmered bites of potatoes and onions. Once the water evaporates, add cream and butter. Salt and pepper to taste. Add cornstarch or flour to thicken as you like.

CRAB CAKES: Ms. Cleaver has this recipe. You should read it her blog and ask her for it.

SCALLOPS: Very easy, and absolutely delicious! Roll the raw scallops in bread crumbs and put into a buttered baking pan. Stick into the oven at 3oo degrees and enjoy!

LOBSTER: Too easy to cook. Way too hard to eat. Just take the thing and stick it into a pot of boiling water. Our lobster had been in the fridge for so long, he was hardly living. We felt horrible about it until we realized we were going to eat him anyway and this was probably the best for him.

I’d go through all it takes to eat a lobster, but the photos tell a better story….

Our feast was delicious. and it looked good too.

This has been your installment of New England Cooking.

Jealous? I bet.

Take care friend, and toss your chard soup recipe my way when you get a chance.

-Superkasey

Vacations are supposed to be a break, but how can I let go of what I love so much! Food of course! FRESH FOOD! Like the kind I grow in my backyard.

The last time I went to Maine, we ate out and tried everything. This time, we ate in and cooked it all!

In the morning we hit up the local farmer’s market, where Ms. Cleaver knows a couple who quit their day job to start an organic farm. They were very excited since they just received permission to drill a well ( its the little things like irrigation, ya know). We bought some local cheese, salad greens and asparagus. Yum!

Then it was off to Harbor Fish Market, THE place for local seafood, located right on a downtown pier.

It was hard to know how to pick out seafood (I spent my whole life landlocked), but soon I made a decent selection of clams, crab meat, scallops and of course… a lobster. Mine was just a little one (also known as a chicken lobster).

Here is a picture of me shopping for shellfish.

This one I call foreshadowing.

To be continued…BraceKyle. You watch TV right? You know suspense.

I’ll be in touch soon!

-Superkasey

This comes to you from the great Northwest and my friends Mr. and Ms. Cleaver. Ms. Cleaver has her own lovely blog is growing some of her own herbs in the kitchen.

The Cleavers have another greenthumb secret in their kitchen. Worms!!! Thats right they vermicompost!

But that is all initial business. The truly fantastic thing about Maine is that they make it so easy to eat local.

With the sea on one side providing endless seafood and the land on the other providing endless organic farms, there is no limit to what can be grown and scavenged here.

One of my favorited foraged foods is a local greenery. Fiddleheads!

In case you were wondering, fiddleheads are that new growth in a fern that looks like what it is named after. Certain ferns are edible, and in Maine they grow wild in the marshland founs along the riverbeds.

Mr. Cleaver’s father used to take him out to forage for fiddleheads. They brought them home and steamed them or simmered them and then ate them. They cook and taste vey similar to asparagus. Here is a picture so you can imagine them on your table.

I want to see if there are any edible ferns for my region. I think they would be great in my front yard.

I’ll be showing more photos of local food and growing for this region as I go.

Have you foraged or picked any of your own foods recently? Maybe that can be our journey while you are in town…

-Superkasey

So we are on to the recap of day two with no dayjob. The weather cooled quite a bit, and I got to spend even more time out of doors. I weeded and I planted and I planted some more.

This all happened in my main plot behind the garage. The plans are as follows:

The look is gorgeous! I have instituted companion planting where ever possible:

Tomatoes and peppers next to peas and beans. Corn with winter squash. There are endless lists of what goes well together and what does not. I’m doing the best that I can to place them in a way where all these plants together in a small space do not disrupt each other.

In any case, the garden is together and looking good. I’m ready to leave town.

See you in the Eastern Time Zone, BraceKyle!

-Superkasey

As said in my last post, I had two days of freedom from work before my trip to Maine (stay tuned). Day One was HOT! So hot that after 30 minutes outside, I got dizzy. I took many breaks, but still managed to get my salad plot planted.

Refresher: my salad plot is the groomed bed that is not where I have been working to date. It has been untouched between my neighbors gardens. I was saving it for all items that are planted directly into the soil. Here was my plan.

I am trying two different styles of planting. Both are companion plantings: where the plants grow at different rates in a way where the roots don’t interfere with each other. In one section I lay them out in rows. In the section to the left of it, I simply scattered the seeds of the same plant varieties. We’ll see how each side turns out. For now, the rows are winning.

This was a pretty basic project, but took all day because of the heat. You can see everything that was planted in the plan. How do you like that?

Hope your lettuce is delicious BraceKyle!

Stay tuned for the word on what happened in Day Two of No Dayjob!

-Superkasey

Now to tomatoes.

Tomatoes are very important to me.  I use them in sauces and dishes all the time.  I’ve considered getting a dehydrator to make sun-dried tomatoes, too.  I love them in salads, pastas or as a solo snack.

I have two varieties of tomatoes in my garden.  I have one beefeater and one mortgage lifter.  Both are heirloom tomato plants, which means that they come from a long line of successful plants, like a produce dynasty or something.

My sister and brother-in-law visited this past weekend, and they had some advice for maintaining and pruning tomatoes.  They are both wildlife biologists and have a very large garden in their back yard in Kentucky.  Their soil is mostly clay, but they grow LOTS and do a lot of canning and jarring and all that stuff that seems like far too much work to me.

They first suggested, when buying a tomato plant (something I think is well worth it; I’m not all about growing the seedlings indoors then transplanting; with tomatoes, I am okay going with plants for a start) and transplanting it, to prune stems off up to 4″ or 6″ (if your plant is, say, 12″ tall), then planting the thing not with just the roots under the soil, but those first pruned 4″-6″, too.  This gives the plant a remarkably good foundation.  Well, I didn’t do that, but I’ll take note for next time.

Their next suggestion was about maintenance later.  As your tomato plants grow, watch for the first “Y.”  That is, watch for the first place your plants’ stems grow in pairs in a Y shape and not just in single off-shoots.  When you see that first Y, prune everything below it.  Like this.

Also, watch for a little third stem to bud in the center of the Y, and get rid of that little guy (which I have done with the plant to the left here).  This encourages tomato plants to produce fruit rather than vines.

I was also recently advised (by a season garden pro) to try to put tomato plants next to one another.  This promotes teamwork in the pollination process and gives the plants a buddy with whom to pollinate.  I should offer this stipulation: I’ve read that, if you are collecting seeds, it is not a great idea to put different varieties of tomato plants next to one another, as they will cross-breed.  If this happens, the seeds they produce won’t be pure.  They’ll be a hybrid cross-breed.

I don’t have any fruit yet, but I’m feeling good about these guys.  They are coming in around 2.5′ tall.  Is that good?  I’m unsure, but I like them.  Tomato plants have an attitude.  They are kind of like, “Oh, yeah, I’m a tomato plant, I’m hairy, and I have spiky yellow flowers.  SO WHAT? You can’t escape me, because my fruit is EVERYWHERE.  Whatevs.”

That’s how I imagine they would talk if they could.

That’s it for today, SuperKasey.  Keep digging and stay green!

I have some scary news, SuperKasey.  They’ve come.  The Deer.  Cue horror music.

Do you know what deer are?  Deer are what happened when a rat and a pigeon cross-bred.  They are just big vermin that eat everything in sight.  Oh, sure, they are cute to look at, with their big eyes and bushy tails and running from forest fires, but then they come out of the woods and get all territorial and try to trample people and eat every bushy green thing or colorful flower they can find.  They also eat bark and trash and cigarette butts.

Like I said: vermin.

So I finally took a stroll down the hill to my blackberry and blueberry bushes, and sure enough, they have struck the blackberry bushes.

Just three spots of many where deer bit off leaves.

They hit the blackberry bushes with what looks like malicious intent, but these guys are hardy and will bounce back fine, I think.  I wish now that I would have bought bushes with thorns.  It might not have done much, but it may have repelled some of them.  Maybe?

We’ve tried a natural deer repellent (some mixture of natural ingredients like urine and who knows what other things), and it seemed to work until now.

So, I’ve draped all these bushes in what is humorously called “wildlife netting” (left), as if it us used to catch the animals.  There were funny illustrations on the packaging showing a bird colliding with the netting with explosive anger.  Some kind of rodent looked shocked as it gnawed on the netting.  A deer turned and ran in fear in another illustration.  That’s good, right?

Luckily, in reality, the deer skipped the more delicate blueberry bushes, which are now bearing little fruit.

Still, I covered the blueberries bushes in the netting, too.

Deer are the main reason I support hunting, SuperKasey.  People can go shoot all the deer they want.  Fine by me.

Until next time: stay green, and may your garden be free of giant, dumb vermin.

I have missed you, BraceKyle. Sorry I’ve been such a blog bum. A short life update before the garden update. I have officially left my job, taken a week off, gone to Maine and started a new job. Its been crazy, but I was very dutiful in taking pictures and now I can fill you in on all of it!

In between the last job and Maine, I got a couple days to play in my garden. It was very welcome after staying late in the office to tie up loose ends. But when I went back to my yard to see what had happened when I was away, I saw that some restructuring was necessary on my strawberries.

Strawberries come back every year. Its hard for me to plant perennials like these as a renter. So I wanted to contain my strawberries. That way I could take them to wherever my next apt may be. I salvaged a few dresser drawers from the alley and planted away! They looked great and really made my garden.

But when I went back to visit them, the drawers were not holding up at all. It was time to try a different container.

Luckily, I had purchased a washtub (yep, you heard me. a washtub) and gingerly dug out the dirt between the plants, then cautiously and very carefully moved the plants into their new home.

And let me tell you what buster. They are soooo happy! They have bloomed and now have these gorgeous little berries on them. I’m so excited!

Stay tuned BraceKyle! There’s more where this came from, greenthumb!

-Superkasey

I’m sure that you have already experimented with some kind of DIY homemade pesticides or unguents or something.  But check out this helpful blog post from a fellow urban green thumb (she calls herself herban, ha ha.) on how to make your own all-natural pest repellent. I might try it myself.

This is a fun blog about some city-folk who went rural and became stewards of the land (I like that term; I’m going to use it more often).  This post is neat, but I love the bits about their semi-aggressive rooster.  It makes me chuckle.

I hear you have strawberries (maybe? possibly? I’m sure you’ve at least done them at some point…).  So here is a pretty mouth-watering post about making jam and ICE CREAM.  MOTHER-FLIPPIN ICE CREAM!  The entire blog is pretty tasty.  I mean, I could just lick the screen.  I could lick the screen, but I have not yet. Don’t start cracking jokes until I do, okay?

I’ve added all these folks to the Blogroll to the right, so check them out.

I know you have LOTS to tell me, SuperKasey, and I’m ready to read it all.  Stay green!