Buying seedlings, but not from a giant corporation.

I’ve decided to buy some seedlings.

*gasp*

I know, I know. This whole time I’ve been talking about starting everything from seed. It’s better to start from seed because then you don’t risk bringing in the diseases and pests that might be hanging around your local Lowe’s or gardening center. Besides, the seedlings at our local Lowe’s looked pretty badly taken care of the last time we were there.

So, what put it in my head to buy seedlings, then?

Well, it’s almost June. June is when our CSA deliveries begin! Yay! We’re excited to have the fresh vegetables come in while my tiny seedlings are still attempting to grow. I went to our CSA’s webpage the other day to see if they’d decided on a start date for our deliveries yet (they haven’t – it all depends on the veggies) and what did I find but the annual heirloom tomato sale.

I’m not really interested in growing tomatoes. We get a ton of gorgeous tomatoes once the share starts coming in, and our friend Justin has been working on growing his tomatoes for months already, so his are going to be fabulous. We’re going to do some veggie swapping with him for sure, assuming that I’m able to get some veggies out of my seedlings.

A little poking around on the website made me realize that they have other seedlings, too, not just tomatoes. Obviously, these are people whose growing practices I support – I can’t wait to eat the food they grow this summer! It’s also a way for me support the farm a bit more since they do so much for the members. We really have one of the best shares around this area, in my opinion.

I am, of course, also a little nervous still about how small some of my seedlings are still, especially the herbs. I’m hoping that they’ll all prosper and be awesome, but buying some seedlings is another way for me to guarantee that we’ll have a crop of veggies in our backyard this year. Charlie and I talked it over a bit, and at the terrific price the CSA was offering – $3.00 a seedling/set of seedlings, depending on the plant, with a 16.5% discount if you buy at least $30 worth, we decided to go for it. (I don’t really know what they’re supposed to cost, but for super organic plants that are leaps and bounds ahead of mine, that are also contributing to the well-being of all the happy veggies I’ll get all summer, it seems quite fair.) They’ll come in 3″ pots and they’ll already be 6-8″ tall!

So what did I buy? Mostly herbs! Our thyme and marjoram are doing ok, but not fantastic, and our rosemary is doing pretty well if not a little spindly. I was planning to start the other herbs from seed outdoors when it got warm, but since the other ones have come up so damn slowly, I decided to secure my awesome herb garden a bit more. I bought five basil seedlings (large leaf Italian variety) – we’re going to be making some awesome pesto to put up for later in the year, two Greek oregano seedlings, one extra German thyme seedling, just in case, and two moss curly parsley seedlings.

And, since I couldn’t help myself, I decided to get two black beauty eggplant seedlings. We grill those suckers all the time in the summer, and probably will even more frequently since Charlie just got a brand new fancy grill for his birthday. I think I’m going to grow those in containers, but I need to do a little bit more research first. I’m hoping that Farmer Rich will be at the pickup on Saturday to give me a bit of advice!

The downside is that we missed the date for the pickup that’s near us, but the upside is that we get to go for a nice drive in the “country” and possibly stop in to see our friends Teresa and Mikey, who live not too far from the plant pickup location and are moving all the way to Texas next week.

Still haven’t killed off my plants…

Just a quick report on the seedlings…

I believe it was that cold snap that we had that slowed down the growth around here. The temperatures have warmed up and the seedlings seem to have some obvious growth again, and I haven’t even had a chance to give them any compost tea yet. (Last weekend was AIDS Walk NY, which involved a training for my volunteer shift on Saturday and then very early rising on Sunday – it was actually so cold and dark when I left that it didn’t occur to me to set the seedlings out before I went for the day!)

The scallions gave me a bit of a scare a few days ago. All of a sudden, most of them seemed to have part of the plant that was curling up and turning brown! I worried that somehow I had killed them! I noticed, though, that that seemed to be where the seed had been attached, and that that part just kind of fell off. When that happened, the scallions were stronger than ever and began to grow even faster.

I’m also happy to report that all of the broccoli and kohlrabi have so far survived the transplanting that I did! They look fantastic and the true leaves are coming in much stronger now than when they were very crowded. Next stop, some compost tea! I’d like them to be a bit bigger before I put them in the ground but it’s getting pretty close to the time that I think I just have to do it. They just seem so small! I know they can only get so big in these tiny pots, though, so into the yard they’ll have to go. The temperatures are nice this week and hopefully they’ll stay that way.

Thinning the Seedlings

This is what my seedlings look like today after transplanting the broccoli and kohlrabi to give them some more space.

Lately I’ve been getting super jealous of Charlie’s mom’s seedlings. She’s growing ampalaya, a type of bitter melon that’s used in a lot of Filipino dishes. We started our seedlings at about the same time (she may have even started a few days later than me) but hers are growing like champs. Mine seem downright puny next to hers!

Part of this, I know, is because I am using an organic seed starting mix, and she is using some crap-filled soil. It’s got fertilizer in the mix. When I originally went to go pick up my seed starter, I had a ridiculous time trying to find organic. I went to our local Lowe’s and definitely couldn’t find it myself on my first visit, and I was told they didn’t have any. I went home, discouraged. On my second visit, I asked someone else, and they said that they only had organic potting mix, and explained to me that potting mix is heavier than seed starter, so they recommended getting that and mixing it with something like sand or vermiculite to make it lighter. Well, the organic potting mix bag was huge and much more than I needed, so I decided against that. On my third visit, I was determined to leave with something. I spoke to someone else who told me to just use the organic potting mix as-is. Well, at home, I already had some potting mix, and Charlie’s mom and one of my books had said not to use that!

Charlie and I wandered around the store for a while longer, and we stumbled across the peat pots, very far away from the rest of the gardening stuff. I decided at that moment that peat pots were the way to go for a beginning gardener like me, and picked them up. I was bitching and moaning about how I couldn’t believe that they didn’t have the organic seed starter, when Charlie rounded an end-cap and said, “Uh, you mean, like this?”

Apparently no employee on any of our visits had known of its existence.

Anyway. The organic factor is probably one reason that my seedlings are small, but also, we had a cold snap here in the tri-state, and it was gloomy for a few days with very little sun. And finally, I think I didn’t thin my seedlings enough, so today I set out to do that since we got a beautiful day of sunshine. If it is the fertilizer thing, I’m going to address that by feeding my seedlings some compost tea that we’ll make from the stuff in our worm bin.

It took me a really long time (a couple of hours) to carefully separate the tiny root structures and to replant each of them. I happened to buy eggs in a cardboard crate this week, so I poked a hole in the bottom of each of those for drainage and planted my extra broccoli and kohlrabi seedlings in there. Some of them had four little seedlings to a peat pot cell, which was obviously far too many. I thinned them down to one per cell, and I have about sixteen healthy looking broccoli plants and I think about 16 healthy kohlrabi plants. I didn’t touch the other plants much – I’m doing a lot of this by trial and error, so when I want to attempt something (like thinning out/transplanting) I’ll try it with just one first to make sure it doesn’t kill the plant, so I have a few more trials going on like some thinned out scallions and putting a cell of herbs in a bigger pot.

Other exciting news is that while my melon seedlings have had their very first true leaves for a while, but I can see the second ones creeping in now, too! They’re really growing, slowly but surely.

I also started some lavender from seed today in a cute colander. It’s too late, really – you’re supposed to start 8-10 weeks early according to the package, but, you never know. I might get some this year and I might not, but it’s a perennial, so if I have any luck, I could have some next year.

I also had one rogue seed plant itself! I believe it’s one of those helicopter seeds that fell into the seed tray and helped itself. I decided to go with it and transplanted it to its own cell. If that is the case, then it’s probably a maple tree! So cute and funny that I started one totally by accident.

That’s the farming update for now, except for a reminder to myself to wear sunscreen the next time I go out.

Corn-Off-the-Cob Bread

Look at those fresh corn kernals! This came out moist and held together, but had that nice crumbly texture once you started to eat it.

Charlie and I make rice and beans all the time – a really hearty, vegetable laden dish that’s super filling and we can both agree on. We usually make the rice and the beans separate, but today, I ventured into making the meal in our slow cooker. Since this meant that the meal was one big stewy bowl, instead of two sort of separate components of rice and beans like we usually make, and since we were out of the blue corn chips that make our rice and beans a yummy treat, I felt like I wanted to serve some cornbread on the side. And, of course, there was that small component of anxiety about disaster, that the meal would not live up to our normal excellent rice and bean standards (that, admittedly, Charlie usually cooks most of while I do the prep such as chopping veggies). So… cornbread was in order, just in case it sucked.

The other thing that was really drawing me to make cornbread was that the last time I went crazy in the bulk foods section of our local natural foods store, I got this awesome cornmeal with a very coarse grain. I go nuts in the bulk food section semi-regularly. Most of the time I can control myself, but then, I’ll go in for one item (in this case, the cranberry acai granola) and leave with seven types of beans, four kinds of flour, six spices, two kinds of seeds and some nuts. The cornmeal I got is a beautiful bright yellow color, and it looks like it will be perfect in symphony with some of the fresh corn left over from the BBQ that happened at our house this past weekend.

I’ve only ever made cornbread from a box, so here’s hoping this recipe (made up after seeing a whole bunch of different ones online, as usual) turns out great. I had to stop making cornbread from a box a while back once I realized that Jiffy cornbread mix is not vegetarian! Who would have thought that a box of mostly cornmeal would manage to sneak some animal product in there?

Anyway. One way I think I might be able to improve this recipe is with the presence of corn flour, which we don’t have in the house. Ok, that’s a lie. There’s some in the basement. It was used at some point for when our vermicompost was looking a little sad, since those little worms loooove cornmeal, and it makes them hardy or something. But, ya know, I figured I’d stick with the flours that are in my kitchen, not my basement, and maybe I’ll pick up some corn flour another day to test a variation of this recipe with again.

Ingredients

1 uncooked, husked ear of corn
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 cup coarse yellow corn meal
1 cup 1% milk
1-2 teaspoons salt, depending how salty you like your cornbread
2-4 tablespoons natural sugar, depending how sweet you like your cornbread
1 large egg
6 tablespoons melted butter
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Carefully cut the kernels off the cob and set aside. Grease a pan to bake in – an 8″x8″ brownie pan or a 8-9″ pie pan will be just about right, but I’m sure it would make great muffins, too.

In a stand mixer (or large bowl), combine the sugar, melted butter, salt, baking powder, wheat flour, and all purpose flour. Mix thoroughly. Add the egg and mix again. Alternate between adding a bit of the cornmeal and a bit of milk until both are fully incorporated. Do not overmix the batter.

Fold in the fresh corn (and the cheese, if desired). Pour into the prepared pan.

Bake at 400 degrees F for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Chai Ice Cream with Shortbread Cookies

This recipe has been a long time coming, and I know a lot of people have been waiting for it. Sorry it took so long! I have a huge backlog of recipes to post.

So, I am in absolutely no financial situation to be buying frivolous stuff right now, but luckily, I’m in this focus group where when I participate, I earn Amazon gift certificates. And, I have so many banked right now that I decided it was time to treat myself to something I’ve been wanting since I got my KitchenAid mixer last summer: the ice cream attachment.

I ordered it online, and I excitedly unboxed it one night with Charlie. We were in our bedroom, and I was sitting on our bed, and he was in our comfy chair. I took the components out of the box, and….

….was horribly disappointed. The bowl is SO heavy! I suppose I should have read how heavy the actual box that was shipping before I ordered it, but I’m terrible about things such as spatial relations and estimating weights and that type of thing. I’m lucky that now after tons of practice I can estimate a teaspoon and a tablespoon! Even with the bowl unfrozen, it was very unwieldy for me and my arthritic hands. I knew it would be even worse when the bowl was frozen, since I have Raynaud’s Syndrome, which commonly goes along with RA and/or fibromyalgia. Raynaud’s makes it difficult for the blood vessels in your hands to circulate enough blood to your limbs, and instead, all of your blood goes to your core. It means that my hands and feet are cold all the time, and sometimes numb and hard to move, but especially when I touch cold things, like, say, my frozen extremely heavy ice cream bowl. I just didn’t anticipate that it would be this difficult.

Anyway, Charlie and I talked it over, and I considered sending it back. Since it was so heavy, though, it probably would have cost almost as much to pay the return shipping as it had cost for the discounted item! So, I decided to keep it, and we decided that it would be a “together” project… one that I would only do when Charlie or another buddy was around to help me with the bowl. (I can just imagine dropping that frozen thing and breaking some frozen toes – yikes!)

When I finally got over my initial disappointment, I decided I’d make ice cream for when our friend Jack came over that weekend. Jack doesn’t like chocolate, and that’s somewhat limiting in terms of ice cream flavors! All of us are very into tea, however, and I had recently received a shipment of tea from The Tea Table. I knew I had some Masala Chai that would be super yummy in ice cream.

I get my groceries delivered from Peapod, and I didn’t have time to look up recipes, so I guessed at what might be in ice cream. Turns out, it wasn’t what a lot of recipes recommended, but it definitely worked.

Finally, I came up with the genius idea of adding shortbread cookies to the ice cream… that way, it would be like having milky tea and cookies all in one, which I am a huge fan of after living in London. So here it is… Chai Ice Cream with Shortbread Cookies!

Ingredients

2 cups 2% milk
1 cup heavy cream
2/3 cup sugar
6 “teabags” (I used loose leaf tea, so this is the equivalent of about 12-18 grams of masala chai)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
a dozen shortbread cookies, cut into chunks (I used Keebler “Sandies”)

Directions

Freeze your ice cream bowl according to manufacturer’s instructions – mine has to go in about 15 hours in advance.

Heat milk, cream, and sugar together in a saucepan on the stove on low-medium heat until they reach about 170 degrees, stirring occasionally. If you don’t have a candy/tea thermometer (I sure don’t, but probably should with all the tea I drink!) Alton Brown tells me that I can just carefully watch the edges of the pan for bubbles. When it starts to bubble, turn off the heat. Dunk your teabags in for a good 5-6 minutes, depending on the brewing instructions on the tea. In other words, steep them for the longest time that your tea recommends.

Remove tea bags (try to squeeze them a bit so that the really concentrated tea brew will stay in the pot, not in the tea bags. Add the vanilla and stir.

Cool the mixture in the refrigerator completely. This may take quite a long time – plan on at least 4 hours.

Pass the mixture through a sieve to take off any skin that may have formed. Prepare the mixture according to your ice cream maker’s instructions, adding the cookies in the last few minutes.

Transfer to a shallow plastic airtight container. Freeze for at least 2 hours to achieve hard ice cream consistency.

Red Ribbons

Edit: AIDS Walk was a huge success! Charlie and I both beat our fundraising goals for a collective total of nearly $900. To date, the 2010 AIDS Walk New York has raised over 5.7 million dollars!

As I mentioned over in my latest post about farming I’ve been very busy lately with our yard sale to benefit AIDS Walk.

I don’t really have any recipes that I made up to go with this post, since it’s stuff you’ve seen before, a recipe borrowed from elsewhere, or a post I’ve been meaning to get around to. (I should really buckle down and commit to posting at least 3 or 4 times a week. Like, “Go to the gym, and post on my blog!” It would be good for me!

But you see, I’ve been extremely busy and getting my exercise lifting boxes of books, hanging hundreds of items on hangers, and sorting everything from chandeliers to flower painted teapots to a giant map of the USA that gives some electronic direction when batteries are in it, I believe. Scary!

Anyway, all of the goods were for our yard sale, which was a few weekends ago, to benefit AIDS Walk NY, which is this upcoming Sunday, May 16th. In one weekend, we managed to raise almost $500 with the help of dozens of our friends who either gave us their awesome stuff to sell or came to help hawk this funny looking red bathing suit and these electric green kitten heels. (Ok, I wore them once and only once!)

When I finally got around to baking, it was one of those “everything went wrong” days, but we managed to salvage it pretty darn well. Bread meant to be sold as loaves got sliced and spread with jam instead. The cupcakes fell a bit, but we were able to save them with our lovely decorations! My environmentally friendly brownies were a hit, too, and I piped ribbons onto them as well. :)

I had some help in the kitchen on Friday from my friend Emily, who wanted to help but was sort of like, “I don’t really bake! Tell me what to do!” which was a huge contrast to Bo, who helped in the kitchen on Saturday. I basically told him what I wanted, and he went to work! He even cut back the sugar in the recipe he was using…. just like I would have. Good work, Bo.

Bo made these cute red ribbon cookies with a cookie cutter that a stranger on the internet sent me after hearing about my project. Thank you, friend! The cookie cutter is awesome and was perfect. These cookies are based off of a standard no-fail recipe, with slightly less sugar, a bit more flour, and no time to refrigerate the dough!

I fixed up a cream cheese frosting, then made a bit of it an intense red using Wilton’s Christmas Red Icing Color. I refrigerated it for a few minutes, then shoved it into my new piping bag (can you tell I don’t decorate much?) and used what I believe was probably a #59 curved petal piping tip, also by Wilton. I practiced one on the side, and I was in a hurry and my arthritis was bothering me, but I think they came out great!

All in all, the sale was a great success! We’re looking forward to the walk on May 16th, and then taking a break til next year! Or… well… at least until the polycystic kidney disease walk in the fall… :)

Busy, sick, but still growing! (& a calamity explained…)

I’ve been so busy, and then so sick, lately, that I have totally ignored my blog and practically ignored my seeds. I’ve definitely ignored my Gardening for Dummies book, and I need to read more in that to figure out what to do now that my seeds are turning into something!

Charlie and I do a lot of fundraising for AIDS Walk NY, so you’ll see some baking posts coming along soon about those. And then, after our huge yard sale to raise money for AIDS Walk, I was so run down that I went and caught strep throat in addition to the big ol’ flare that I was having of my chronic stuff. Charlie has been diligently putting out my seed tray in the morning, watering the lil guys, and bringing them back in at night, though.

So far, I have not killed off an entire crop of anything. The catnip refused to grow to begin with and I have no idea why, and so did the rosemary, but I had very very few seeds left to plant. I’m not worried about the rosemary because we have a plant started already that’s doing quite well. The other herbs… I admit that I don’t really have any idea what’s going on with them besides that they’re not dead, and that if they were not labeled, I could not tell them apart at this time.

However, the scallions are doing fine, the broccoli finally came up after I re-sowed them again, the kohlrabi are starting to get tiny, tiny true leaves, and my melons are doing fantastic!

I should be proud, right? I’m a new gardener! I’ve never done this before! I even had a huge calamity!

[What calamity?]

Well, you see, I had patiently sowed all of my seeds one Sunday afternoon. I’d saved up my spoons to do it because I knew it would take some energy and I knew it would be asking a lot of my arthritic hands. We prepared the kitchen table so that I could work without the wind blowing anything away. We laid out my peat pot, a spray bottle, and my friendly watering elephant, Harold. (Harold looks like this, but it’s not actually Harold, so you’ll have to see Harold in action another time…)

I carefully planted each seed so delicately. I used a chopstick to pick up those tiny seeds and to drop them into the little homes I’d made for them. Once they were all done, I put the plastic dome on top to keep them warm and humid, and I lovingly taped the packages of seeds closed for the next time I’d want them – perhaps another round of broccoli and kohlrabi in the fall?

Everything was set where it was supposed to be. I’d expressed my concerns about the cat, but was assured… “No, no,” I was told. “He’ll be fine. He’ll leave them alone.”

I went to bed.

The very next morning there were hushed whispers and shuffling about the house. No one wanted to tell me what had happened.

But I knew. I knew that the cat had knocked over my seed tray. He spilled everything out. He ruined the spoons I had wasted and could not get back, and I had to save some more to do it another day. And it was days before I had the energy to do it all over again.

This, I swore at the cat, was worse than the time that he puked on my new flip flops. I mumbled at him some more as I refilled the trays with the organic seed filler. I conceded that although this was bad, it was not as bad as when I had just moved in with Charlie, and he, the cat, had left a dead baby bird on the floor of our bedroom, and I was the one to discover it.

Yeah… that was worse than having to re-do the seed trays, even if there wasn’t really enough rosemary left to plant, even if I might be short on seeds in the fall, and even if we do have rogue seeds popping up in odd places from time to time… and it’s usually thyme.

Coming soon: Why did I go organic? And how the hell did I manage it with the service I got at Lowe’s???