Garden

Upside-Down Tomatoes

While much of our steep lot is shady, we have plenty of sunshine on our driveway. My husband, however, is steadfast in his refusal to rip up the concrete to put in a garden. Not to be dissuaded, I came up with an alternative plan to utilize the space: upside down tomatoes. You’ve seen those Topsy Turvy contraptions, right? I decided to create one of my own with a bucket I had on hand to see how well it works. It took about two hours, including paint drying time. If you’re not painting, you’re looking at 20 minutes or so. Click through for my step-by-step photos if you’d like to give it a try, too.

Radish Leaf Pesto

By Kris Bordessa

Radishes are one of the fastest ripening crops a gardener can plant. If you’re aching to have something – anything – that you grew yourself on the dinner table, radishes are a good bet. They’re one of the earliest crops you can plant, and are ready in just 3-4 weeks from planting date. But don’t stop at eating the rosy roots. I discovered a couple of years ago that the radish leaves are edible too. (I have no idea how I grew up without knowing this!) My writing colleague, April Paffrath, shared a recipe for radish leaf pesto on Wicked Tasty Harvest a couple of years ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Spicier than pesto made with basil leaves, radish leaf pesto is a fabulous way to stretch the harvest from an early spring garden. I’ve served it over pasta, and my kids love to spread it on crackers or in mozzarella grilled cheese sandwiches. It has a tendency to maintain its bright green hue without discoloring like traditional pesto does, so it’s a nice bet for a pretty springtime appetizer, too. If you know me at all, you know that I didn’t make this without modifying April’s...

New Chickens, Orange Blossoms, and Peas

By Kris Bordessa

I added three new hens – six months old and already laying – to the flock last week. We’ve had Danish Brown Leghorns in the past and really liked them for their hardiness, so I was happy to find these. My friend Kate asked for pics of the new chickens, so I figured I’d take the camera out for a spin on this beautiful Superbowl Sunday. (Incidentally, if you’re a fan of Disney World, you should check out Kate’s book.) Two of the three new girls: The handiwork of one of the new girls: You know how the idea of regrowing celery is popping up all over the internet? Here’s what it looks like in action: I will never win any photography awards, but this is a baby egg plant. The plants were started back in oh, late October, have handled the cooler temperatures and are now starting to fruit: No snow, but we’ve got snow peas: Green Surinam cherry: I really wish you could smell the orange blossoms. The fragrance is just divine. And yes, those are aphids: Not just a camera gone crazy. See the little black spots against the...

Make a Worm Composter for Less than Five Bucks

By Kris Bordessa

Apartment dwellers and urbanites often lament the lack of options for composting in homes with limited yard space. If you’re not the kind to get all squirmy over worms in your house, I highly recommend vermicomposting as a method for composting your kitchen waste. You can buy ready-made worm bins, but if you’re even a little bit handy and have access to a drill you can make one yourself for under $5. Here’s what you’ll need: 2 nesting buckets (or three; see note at end of post) 1 bucket lid a drill fit with an 1/8″ (or so) bit newspaper worms (You’ll need red wigglers for this; if you have a friend with worms see if you can have a handful. Otherwise, you may need to buy some, which will put your expenses up over $20 – still less than a ready-made bin.) Click through for step by step instructions complete with photos.

Harvesting Bananas

By Kris Bordessa

Awhile back I promised my friend Jane that I’d take a video of our next banana harvest. She lives in Washington state with her family, and none of them has ever seen a banana growing, let alone harvested. Since someone asked about growing bananas last week on the Attainable Sustainable Facebook page, I figured it would be fun to share the video here, too. As you can see, the bananas (these are apple bananas) are harvested while they’re still green; they’ll be ready to eat in about a week. I wish I could share some of the ripe fruit with you all – fifty pounds of bananas is a LOT of bananas!

Plan Now to Share the Harvest Later

By Kris Bordessa

It’s that time of year when – for many of us – scouring seed catalogs for potential garden additions stands in for actually getting our hands dirty. While you’ve got time (and not dirt) on your hands, you might want to consider organizing a method to share your eventual harvest right in your own community. Just imagine back fence trades – your abundance of zucchini in exchange for some of your neighbor’s prized turnips – a little bit larger in scale. Call it vegetable commerce if you will. Sonia Martinez and Kim Hoffman, both part of the leadership team for Slow Food Hawaii, envisioned a way for backyard gardeners to barter their abundance with others in the area. Share the Harvest is the result. Modeled after the successful Freecycle program, interested parties sign up to become a member of Share the Harvest and swap, trade, or barter anything that is food related. Fresh produce, baked products, preserves, dairy products, or even plants and seeds are fair game. Members who have an abundance send in an ‘offer’ listing what they have available and what they’d be interested in trading for. The message goes out to the list and anyone can...

Guest Post: Victory Garden

By Kris Bordessa

You may know Christina Le Beau from her excellent blog, Spoonfed. Or you might follow her on Facebook. But today, I’m happy to have her guest posting about her recent experience with vegetable gardening. Here’s Christina: I’ve gardened for years, but always flowers, never fruits or vegetables. We’ve had token edibles — containers of tomatoes and herbs, squash sprouting from the compost bin — but no proper vegetable patch. Not that I haven’t wanted to plant one. I just… haven’t. With our CSA, several farmers’ markets and lots of u-picking to keep us seasonally sated, it just wasn’t a priority. But, as happens around here, my daughter had other ideas. For her 7th birthday in December, we’d given her Lanie, the tree-hugging, butterfly-loving, camping-happy American Girl doll that Tess had decided was her vinyl doppelganger. Soon after, we read the Lanie books, and before March was over, Tess (and Lanie) had spent hours plotting a tiny stone-bordered garden and building a compost pile. Never mind that both were dismantled for other projects. The proverbial seed had been planted. As spring brought rain and mud, Tess scrounged some old pole-bean and lettuce seeds (that we never got around to planting...

Saving Seeds: Basil

By Kris Bordessa

Straw Bale Fail

By Kris Bordessa

(If you’re reading this on the front page, click through for more images.) I’ve been gardening for years, but the idea of planting in straw bales is new to me. I ran across this post about straw bale gardening earlier this year and was intrigued enough to mention in on the Attainable Sustainable Facebook page. It seemed like a perfect way to add a garden to a space that was less than ideal for growing. My own garden space is severely sloped and we were in the process of terracing it with rock walls to create more usable space when my husband’s job took him off the island for an extended period. Without my rock guy, I was stuck – until I remembered those straw bales. I did a little reading and learned that straw bales could last a couple of years in the garden. If they lasted that long, why couldn’t I use them to retain my garden? I’d have the level planting space I needed, plus I could grow more vegetables right in the “wall.” I enlisted my teenagers to help me move the bales into place (they’re awkward and a bit heavy). The good news: the...

Eradicating Gophers

By Kris Bordessa

Gophers are not a problem here in the islands, but as a longtime California gardener, I know how damaging they can be. If you’re new to gardening, you may not have given these underground pests much thought – yet. One minute, there’s no sign of them; the next minute one of your pampered plants has completely disappeared. That’s right; these rodents can pull an entire bush bean or tomato plant into their hole! If they’re working on a larger plant and can’t pull it into the hole, they’ll quietly gnaw the roots until the plant is damaged beyond saving. I’ve lost a fair number of young fruit trees this way. Signs of gophers are easier to spot than signs of moles. Gophers leave behind mounds of dirt that can be up to 12” in diameter where they’ve pushed the dirt out of their tunnels. Moles leave long trails of slightly raised dirt across the ground’s surface. Moles can make a lawn unsightly and do occasional damage to plants as they tunnel by, but they’re generally not as damaging as gophers. In fact, moles actually eat underground insects so technically, you could consider them to be “organic pest control.” So,...

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Garden

Upside-Down Tomatoes

Radish Leaf Pesto

New Chickens, Orange Blossoms, and Peas

Make a Worm Composter for Less than Five Bucks

Harvesting Bananas

Guest Post: Victory Garden

Saving Seeds: Basil

Straw Bale Fail

Eradicating Gophers

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