Aug

11

Cooking Without Abundant Tomatoes

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Cory Ramey writes about how several chefs are Living Without Abundant Tomatoes on Mark Bittman’s Bitten blog this afternoon.

My own cooking tends to the tomato-heavy, and I’m looking for ways to cope with the dearth of fresh, organic tomatoes and the concomitant high prices I’m certain are on the way.

We’re still hopeful that our crop can be saved. I’m going out to check them again this evening. My Soap-Shield should be here by the end of the week and that’ll hopefully buy us some more time if we do get it.

Mar

7

Gardening

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We began scouting out the garden this evening.

As a child, my parents, sister, and I worked in a set of raised-bed gardens, at one time even practicing a modified form of square foot gardening. (Why yes, we did watch a lot of PBS growing up. That’s what you do when you don’t have cable and the only television station you get with any consistency is from the local university.) Two of the beds measure roughly 16′ x 6′ and a third bed measures roughly 24′ x 5′. There hasn’t been a garden planted there in at least fifteen years. We are going to remedy that this year. Clearing the grass and brush so we can rototill the soil will be quite a chore, but I think it is worth it to grow some quality vegetables.

We’re starting with a few selections from W. Atlee Burpee & Co.:

Our ultimate goal is to raise an all- or mostly-heirloom organic garden. For this first season, however, we’re going to rely on a few minor chemicals like MiracleGro, probably a pesticide or two like Sevin later in the season, and are only attempting a few easy heirlooms.

We are starting some of our seeds indoors, including tomatoes, green peppers, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and probably the summer squash. Since we don’t have any south-facing windows and receive poor sunlight through the windows we do have, we are also assembling a grow-light. We’re using a simple four-foot, two-bulb shop light we found at Lowe’s for under $9 and two four-foot GE plant lamps. The plants themselves will grow in those little just-add-water peat pellets, to be transplanted to larger pots until we can get them in the ground after the last frost (around mid-April here in Zone 6).

Farmer's Market.