Today in Our Garden @birdsblooms #NJ #gardenchat Growing food teaches us not to waste food or water

Today in Our Garden

Use it or lose it!
Food Appreciation

Our gardens exhaust us during August. Now is about the time every season when we slack off in the fight against fast growing weeds and make time to enjoy the birds and blooms. We also start collecting seeds for next years plantings and are busy canning and preserving in the kitchen.

As we think about all there is to do... food is ripening at a rapid rate. Use it or lose it!

• Picking and preparing fresh, organic, homegrown foods gives us a total appreciation for our food and our environment.

Vegetable gardening also makes me wonder: Would people eat less if they grew and prepared their own food? We know scientific studies show that people do eat more fruits and veggies when they garden, but would they eat less overall?

Tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes are ripening faster than we can pick them! Favorites include Chocolate Cherry tomatoes (shown). Harry cooked our first homegrown San Marzano tomatoes and made 5 quarts of pasta sauce so far with more tomatoes cooking down now. We freeze the quarts.

As gardening cooks, we want to savor and not waste what we plant and harvest. Cooking down a stockpot full of homegrown, ripe, plum tomatoes (with added basil, garlic and onion) made us realize that it sure takes a lot of tomatoes to make just one quart of sauce.

Onions
Garden space needed for growing onions has made us appreciate the abundance of onions always available at the market. We picked our first Ailsa Craig onions yesterday. Most green tops died back and the onions easily pulled up from the soil.

We probably should have picked the onions sooner. And, we weren't sure what to do about the dirt on them? We rinsed the dirt off. The onions are now air drying on a table outside. As you can see, their shape is teardrop and not large and round. 

The fun of gardening includes learning from other gardeners. Stay tuned for updates on how to grow bigger and better onions. If you already know - please share.

Grapes
One of our best years! Mom even helped pick the grapes off the stems. We picked 13.5 lbs. from one, established red grapevine, which made 12 pints of organic grape jelly.

Cow Peas
Cool beans: Fagiolo Nano Dolico -dall'occho: Italian black-eyed peas climbed up into our tomato vines this year - another garden first for us. I didn't realize they climbed. The pods hang like green beans and can be eaten green or left on the plants to brown. I've been picking them as they turn brown and plan to make Hoppin John with homegrown black-eyed peas for good luck in the New Year. 

To release the peas, rub your finger along the pod edge. If the bean is dry enough, the edge will split like a zipper and the beans can easily be dumped out.

Acorn Squash
Look what I found this morning! We have acorn squash growing from rotten squash rejects that were tossed in the beds last Fall.

Happy and Healthy Gardening! 

Related Links
Backyard Gardening, Grow Your Own Food, Improve Your Health 
GardenCuizine Recipe Baked Nutty Acorn Squash

Blog post and photos Copyright(C)Wind. All rights reserved.

Growing Onions #GardenCuizine

Growing Onions

We're growing onions for the first time this season! Rather than growing onions from seed, we ordered a bunch of Ailsa Craig onion sets (seedlings). Mom planted a batch for us today while Harry took a short video of us, which hopefully we'll post for you in the future. 

Onion Nutrition
As I tweeted earlier today, onions add flavor and healthy nutrients to foods; including dietary Fiber, Vitamin B6, Vitamin C, Quercetin (anti-inflammatory, flavonoid) and plant sterols.

Types of Onions
As you start shopping for onions you will come across many varieties and descriptive terms such as: "long-day, intermediate, short-day (10-12 hours of daylight)" onions. Here in NJ where day length can reach 14 hours, we're able to grow long-day onions, such as Ailsa Craig - a large yellow onion. 

Where can you buy Onions for Growing?
Our Ailsa Craig open pollinated, English heirloom onion sets were ordered from Territorial Seed because someone I know grows that variety and orders their onions from them. There are many other reliable garden suppliers online too that sell onions. Shop around and have fun. Ours were back ordered, but arrived just in time for planting in early spring as promised. 

I opened the box as soon as it arrived yesterday so the dormant onions could breath. Even though the suppliers planting guide said to keep the seedlings dry, I moistened a paper towel and wrapped it around the roots overnight. 

Onion Sets
Today, I removed the paper towel and cut the rubber-band that held the group of onion sets together. Then sorted them - putting aside the smallest sprouts and grouping the larger sprouts in groups of 6. The smallest were planted in cell packs that I am keeping outside so they can grow a little more before transplanting them to the garden. 

All the larger sprouts got planted in a raised bed 4 to 6 inches apart and about 1-inch deep. The raised bed is located in full sun and provides compost-rich, loose soil and good drainage. We opted not to use a pre-emergent herbicide as the supplier recommended because we grow all our produce organically.

Stay tuned for more updates on growing onions. 
Thanks Mom!

Related Links
Phytochemical and Health Properties of Onions
Benefits of Quercetin (in onions, apple skins, tea and red wine)
Blog post and photos Copyright (C)2015 Wind. All rights reserved.