It’s been a long time since I last posted and with reason: there hasn’t been much to say about a garden covered in snow for several months. But that snow is now gone, the days are warming and the Earth says it’s time to get back out there, so here I am!
Tag: collards
When a plan comes together
It’s early July and as I look around the booming garden I’m reminded of that catchphrase of Colonel Hannibal in the A-Team (the original 1980s show, not the movie remake!): “I love it when a plan comes together.” It wasn’t so long ago that I was drawing up this year’s schematic of the garden layout…
Microgreen Acres Is the Place to Be…
It may be cold and gray outside but inside the microgreen garden of this Suburban Farmer is heating up as my first winter batch of greens begins to sprout. A few radish trays have shot up quickly under the LED lights (as they always do). The dill is still a little sleepy but should come…
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
There’s far too much obsession with perfect food — so much so that one article in The Guardian said that Americans waste up half the produce harvested because it doesn’t meet standards of shelf beauty, despite being perfectly edible. Gardening at home has helped me develop an appreciation for ugly — ahem — “interesting” produce….
Gardening is Messy
Gardening is messy, but it’s filled with happy accidents. Not too long ago my pepper plants were looking a little yellow and nutrient depleted so I gave them a compost refresh around the base. Instead of using compost from my enclosed box filled with mostly kitchen veggie scraps, I used the nearby open pile where…
State of the Garden: December 2017
Today was our first snow of the season and the garden is now well and truly dormant. The sage and collards are drooping from their snowy cover and the mulched leaves that will enrich next year’s soil are tucked under a layer of white. I’m extra glad that I took some time yesterday to harvest…
Kiwi Cranberry Dijon Salad
When you eat a lot of salads, you have to keep things interesting with some creative ingredients. While I have lettuce in the garden for only a brief time before the days get too warm and it bolts, collard greens stay with me from summer, through the fall and right into early winter. They’re my…
Veggie Beauty
Sure, vegetable gardens are great for all the fresh produce, but if you don’t let any of the plants go to seed you’re missing some spectacular floral displays. Here’s some eye candy:
The Glory of Collards
They’re green and they’re great. After growing them for the first time last year, collards have become one of my favorite vegetables. I knew they were somewhat frost tolerant so I left my plants in the ground at the end of the season to see if they survived the winter here in Zone 6. Well,…
Return of the Collards
August and September were sort of like StarWars: The Empire Strikes Back for my collards: it was one slogging fight after another where the good guys (my collard plants) were constantly being beat back by overwhelming forces of caterpillars bent on their destruction. Being pretty adamant about not introducing pesticides into my organic garden, I…
Gray Day, Green Harvest
It was a gray day here with heavy rains, but the harvest from The Suburban Farm was all green. I pulled in almost a pound of collards… Some spinach… The first pick of my lettuce with some dill… And some cilantro I plan to use in the next day or so… Apologies for the bad…
The Suburban Farmer 