The First Dinner of the Season

Tonight’s dinner had a salad with Oak Leaf Lettuce out of the backyard making it officially the first item harvested this year.

Canning Goes Mainstream

Not but two days after I bought a big stack of canning supplies and the New York times runs an article that canning is the new hip thing to do on the heels of the local food movement.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/dining/27cann.html


The article also has a good slide show which shows canning step by step and a useful link to The National Center for Home Food Preservation which also has a number of good resources on canning and freezing.

Getting Ready For Canning

After looking all over for pickling salt, I checked the Morton salt web site which listed the only store carrying anywhere near me as Wegmans.

Wegmans is a very nice, upscale grocery store with very good produce and fish as well as many other organic and natural products you might not find in the regular supermarket. In addition to the pickling salt, Wegmans also had Ball canning jars and I picked up two dozen quart jars and a dozen jelly jars and some pectin. Strawberry picking is right around the corner and I also hope to put up a lot of pickles and tomato sauce. I had wanted to do this last year, but hadn’t wanted to pay the shipping charges on the jars so it was good to find it all in one place.

Wegmans also had a display of seeds from Seeds of Change which you don’t often see. I got a packet of snow peas and will figure out where to plant them later.

http://www.espoma.com

Last week I picked up a bag of plant fertilizer at the nursery because the plants were looking a little pale. I used a product from Espoma and it worked great. The plants are a lush dark green now and are full of blossoms. The product is also all natural and organic.

Check out http://www.espoma.com for the product details and a lot of other useful information about fertilizers and plant feeding. This is a very useful web site which explains the difference between natural and chemical fertilizer, the difference between fast and slow release fertilizer and why some fertilizers burn your plants.

They also have a lawn product which I am eager to try out.

Lettuce Update

A few weeks back I posted a picture of the lettuce peeking out from under the straw mulch. Here is an updated picture with the lettuce looking almost ready to cut.

Squash and Zucchini!

I went to the victory garden this morning to weed and noticed that the yellow squash and zucchini already had small fruit on them. The fruit was small, only about an inch or so and I didn’t bring the camera because I thought this was too early in the season for anything to sprout yet. If the weather holds, they should be ready to pick in the next week or so.

Peas On The Trellis

Starting seeds from seeds is a lot harder than buying transplants at the nursery. Too cold, too deep, too wet or any of a number of other factors can go wrong and the plants will not sprout. Here is a picture of the peas. Not only did they sprout, but they found the trellis and are starting to climb on their own.