Fresh asparagus? You Can Grow That!

Right about now your local grocery stores will begin having asparagus at a pretty decent price, since asparagus is what they call "in season." (To us in northern areas of the country this means that growers in warmer zones south of us are beginning to harvest asparagus.) But you could be looking forward to harvesting your own uber-local asparagus from your back yard in a year or two if you plant some asparagus crowns this spring.

Start with healthy crowns, purchased from your locally-owned independent garden center. Find a sunny part of the garden that is well-drained and won't be disturbed each year, and till the soil deeply. If drainage is poor, build a raised bed. Soil preparation is VERY important for perennial crops like asparagus, even more so than for annual crops that you harvest and replace each year.

Add compost or composted manure to add organic matter to the soil. Then dig a trench 8 to 12 inches deep and 12 inches wide. If you plan more than one row, space the rows 3 to 4 feet apart. Sprinkle in a complete fertilizer, mix with the loose soil in the bottom of the trench, then make a low mound of soil in the bottom of the trench with the enriched soil.

Space the crowns 15 inches apart on the mound, spreading the roots over the sides of the mound. Cover the crowns with loose soil about 2 inches deep. Water in well. As the shoots emerge, fill in around the shoots, but don't cover the growing tips. The trenches should end up filled to the soil level or just above if you don't have raised beds.

Don't cut any spears the first year. Keep the bed well-watered the first year, and mulch to keep the soil moist and the weeds down. Harvest lightly the second year, and as desired after that. Your own, fresh asparagus patch.

Grass Fed Meats

Ask your meat market or local food purveyor for grass fed meats (or raise your own.) They have more vitamins and minerals, a more nutritious fat profile, and are healthier for the environment. Oh, and they taste better, too!

"Anything But Sushi"

I'm sitting here, quivering, in my eagerness to get started on what will be my best garden ever! (Isn't that what we all think when we begin each new garden?)

I've got great plans for what to grow and for what to eat this spring. My first attempt at arugula will be with a packet of Wasabi Arugula from Renee's Garden. Arugula is a peppery green that can be used in a salad or cooked into a stir fry. This one, from the name, will be even hotter than the usual varieties.

Most people who know wasabi think of it as a condiment for dipping sushi. It is a Chinese horseradish, many times more potent than common horseradish. Which brings me to the title of this post.

For several years when we would go to Chicago to visit our younger son, he would ask what type of restaurant we would like to go to, and he would get the answer from me, "Anything but sushi." As a dyed-in-the-wool sushi lover, he could only take that a few times until he said, "OK, we're going out for sushi." The first time we let him order a variety of styles of sushi and sashimi for us so we could decide whether we liked it or not. And guess what? We LOVE sushi! It's fresh-tasting, and surprisingly filling.

Anyway, to get back to the arugula... I'm hoping the wasabi arugula lives up to its name. A peppery bite would add another layer of flavor to a summer salad. I'll let you know how it turns out. Now if I can only convince myself not to plant it all at one time. (It never seems like very much when you sprinkle those tiny seeds in that seed furrow, but when it begins to produce, I am buried in greens.) A little arugula goes a long way.

Focus for 2012

The focus of this blog for 2012 will be self-reliance. I'm going to concentrate on becoming less dependent on the grocery store with their dubious produce and meat sources and more reliant on my own efforts to grow fruits and vegetables, and doing more toward producing my own meat and eggs. And as I learn, I'll share my successes and failures with you so that you can do it, too, if you've a mind to.

As you may remember, we have a small flock of chickens for producing eggs. They are now beyond their peak laying age and we'll be replacing them with a mixed flock of peeps in the spring. And we'll butcher the hens and the rooster for stewing meat. When the weather moderates, we'll be adding rabbits to the meat mix.

The blueberries should begin to produce this year, and the strawberries will be plentiful now that the deer can't eat them. We'll have more grapes, and we'll add more raspberry bushes. Come along for the ride... Oh, the places we will go!

Planning on Canning?

Here is a neat Facebook page about canning and preserving that might give you some helpful ideas.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day January 2011

There is a reason they call it "the dead of winter."

There are some Garden Bloggers Bloom Days when I have to decide what to show you and what to leave out. Today, however, there are two things in bloom indoors and nothing, of course, outside. (The outside is basically white-- covered in snow-- in Ohio.)

Indoors we have my poinsettia, still hanging on from Christmas. I have actually remembered so far to water it each week and it is doing well but for a few leaves that have browned, curled and fallen from the base of the plant. Still, not to shabby.

And, as usual for this time of the year, my salmon amaryllis (variety unknown-- a pass-along plant from one of my favorite families) has begun to bloom just when I need something to cheer me up against the long winter ahead. The plant itself looks stressed, but the blooms have begun and more are coming.

Other than that, I'm getting along by reading seed catalogs and dreaming of the sun on my back and the dirt underneath my nails. I can make it, I can!

Food Porn

The Huffington Post Food Section has an interesting discussion today about Food Porn-- those luscious, almost-too-good-to-be-real photos you seen in some magazines and a lot of food blogs. There were a lot of very strong opinions expressed by the participants, and a lot of very... um...sensual comparisons of food porn with other porn.



What do you think? Do you like these images? Or do you think they are unrealistic and discouraging to those of us who are lucky if we get the food to taste as good as the recipe suggests, let alone look as good?



Me? I think that as long as you aren't anorexic and using the images as a substitute for really eating, food porn can't be bad. I like to look at photos of unblemished flowers and garden vegetables, too, but I don't actually expect my gardens to look like that. They just give me a goal to aspire to.