Tag Archives: from scratch

DC State Fair – Even You Can Enter the Fermented Vegetable Contest

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Our fridge: filled with delicious things in glass jars

 

Our own DC State Fair celebrates the growers, the makers, the brewers, the bakers and the fermenters.

Fermenting vegetables?

It’s not just for the Germans, Koreans and bachelors who never clean their fridge.

You can do it – do it this weekend.

You don’t have to grow your own veggies to ferment, just bebop yourself down to your farmers market, buy some stuff to ferment and get to it.

It does take a little planning. Get details below, but you will need non-iodized salt (such as sea or Kosher), an acceptable vessel (a clean glass jar with a lid or a crock) and some recipes call for non-chlorinated water.  You don’t need full-blown canning supplies. See how easy it really is:

  • Dr. Ben Kim: He wants you to buy stuff from him, so block those pop-ups, but his How to Make Kim Chi gives step-by-step pictures and cheer leading.

Once you’ve filled a few jars of fermented, locally grown, organic, hand-picked, biked-it-home epicurean treasure, you’re ready to register for the DC State Fair Fermented Vegetable Contest!  (Note: Your veggies do not need to be organic, local or transported by bike to be eligible to compete.  DC State Fair suggests reading over these researched recipes for fermenting success.  Only 50 entries can be accepted so get busy and register, $5 per entry.)

If your drunk roommate tosses your kimchi at 4:00 a.m. thinking it’s an appropriate time to clean the fridge, you should still join the 2012 DC State Fair fun Saturday, September 22nd, 2012.  As part of the Barracks Row Fall Festival along 8th Street SE on Capitol Hill, there will be a little something for everyone.

Even your hungover roommate.

Fall Gardening – Double Up and Catch Up

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Fall gardening.

Fall gardening frustrates me. We don’t have deer coming through our DC neighborhood but the squirrels pick up the slack for garden carnage. Fresh pots of soil read as “First Month Free” on a U-Store It for squirrels.

We also loose the midday sun behind the neighbor’s house way before first frost sets in, abruptly turning our full-sun back yard into a shade garden.

As a glutton for punishment, I’ll slide in under the wire this weekend with a scaled-back agenda of spinach, mesclun mix and radishes.

The fall gardening opportunity for some crops has passed, but check the following resources for your zone to feed that fall gardening bug:

  • Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: Growing Guides & Library (excellent info for everyone but planting dates are for the Southeast and mid-Atlantic)
  • Washington Gardener Magazine: The August Enews gardening checklist can’t be beat for the mid-Atlantic
  • Johnny’s Selected Seeds – Growing Guides (some of the tools are spreadsheets, but good info)
  • D. Landreth Seed Co – No “when to plant” look-ups, but sit and watch their home page as images of what you should be planting now rotate through and you’ll get excited for fall gardening.  Since 1784… Landreth has been around.

If you’re kind of done with gardening for a few months – you enjoy it but don’t really want to talk about what happened over the summer – don’t sweat it.  Fall harvest festivals abound with pick your own apples, pumpkins corn and ready-to-buy jams and pickles.

If you’re hard-core, you stopped reading this post at about the second line, you already have most of your fall seeds in the ground.

But do you have your bulbs ordered?

DIY – Pin It to Win It Clothespin Bag from Onion Sack and Coat Hanger

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Now your clothesline needs a clothespin bag.

Search Amazon or Etsy to do it up right with an attractive vintage-looking one like my mom had, or make one yourself for free in a few minutes.

Materials Needed:

1.  Plastic mesh vegetable sack used for onions or potatoes

2.  Wire coat hanger (I took the trouser wire off a broken fancy wooden suit hanger)

3.  Wire cutters and/or wire snips

See the photoset above for the basic idea and cruise internet pictures of clothespin bags if  you’ve never seen a clothespin bag.

A Few Notes:

1.  Before assembling, test that the mesh of your bag isn’t so big that clothespins fall through.  If you are going to the grocery store to buy produce for the bag, take a clothespin with you to check.

2.  You don’t have to weave every hole of the mesh through the coat hanger, you can skip a few holes between weave points.

3.  If you have a really deep mesh bag but don’t want a really deep clothespin bag, customize your depth by cutting some off the top before weaving it onto the coat hanger.

4.  A nice perk to the plastic mesh bag – it doesn’t hold water at all and it dries super fast after a rain.  If your clothespins live outside in the bag, they’ll dry quickly, too.

5.  I’ve used mine for about a week and love it.  The only small drawback is the clothespins can get a little caught in the mesh as I take them out.  Given my bag took very little tools/time/skill/materials to assemble, and it looks cute, I’m OK with it taking an an occasional extra half-second to grab them from the bag.

Whether you’re hanging laundry outside to show off your cute linens or to save the planet, you’re in it to win it with a totally reclaimed clothespin bag.

DIY – Take-it-Down-to-Party Clothesline

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Airing out your laundry isn’t just for TMZ.  Drying in the sun brings benefits other than saving electricity.  There’s a knack to it, but like all things done for millenia but abandoned for progress, the internet can tell you how to do it.

Staking out a sunny spot to dry your wash can be easy if you happen to have existing structures to support your clothesline.  For city dwellers, especially in the Mid Atlantic and Northeast where back yards are narrow and often bordered by high wooden fences, take a look around for a pair of potential clothesline anchors.  Consider between the corner of a tall deck and the fence, between a pair of opposing windows with sturdy iron security bars or between a pair of tall iron staircases such as we have.

Wet clothes are heavy, so your clothesline supports need to be secure.  Don’t bother tying it to that rickety wooden fence post that sways when you lean on it.  If you live in a condo or a neighborhood with an association, check the bylaws before you buy your clothespins, clotheslines can be considered shabby and may not be allowed.

For the industrious, a few ideas for building a traditional clothesline from scratch are here, here, and here.

See the photoset above for a simple take-it-down-at-will clothesline for a busy apartment building back yard.

A Few Notes:

1.  Our single line hangs a set of sheets or about a half-load of laundry (from our less-than-full-sized washer), which is fine.  I’m not doing this to unplug the dryer for good, I don’t want to inflict our underpants on our apartment building.

2.  I used a turnbuckle I picked up for cheap to make the clothesline easily detachable.  In theory, I can take up the line slack with it but it’s tiny and have much of an impact.  Any kind of sturdy carabiner or clip will work.

3.  To secure the clothesline to the staircase, I wrapped the line multiple times then tied a square knot.  I used two half hitches to knot the line to the turnbuckle.

4.  Give your laundry a shake as you take it down to knock off any hitchhiking bugs.

5.  You do need clothes pins.  It may drape heavily as you hang it but laundry lightens as it dries – a slight breeze will send your favorite tee off to the dirty corner of the yard (or alley).  Thankfully, hardware stores, drug stores, dollar stores and Target sell clothes pins.

6.  A laundry basket rules, but if you’re short on space, a clean reusable shopping bag or two works well.  It gets damp from the wet laundry but you can clothespin it to the line inside-out and upside down (pinning the bottom to the line so it doesn’t catch wind like a sail and blow away).  It’ll be dry before your laundry is.  (For large capacity, there’s always the mega-useful Ikea bag.)

String one up and soon you’ll be singing to your clothes out on the party line.

Kitchen – Sautéed Kale with Garlic and Mustard Seed

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#SundaySupper

That explains this recipe.

Our farmers market saw its second Sunday today and we brought home two different kales for dinner.  One was very tender and tasted like mustard greens, the other had slender tear-drop leaves that grew from a stalk.

A few days ago Bren, from BGgarden, turned me onto #SundaySupper and Family Foodie on twitter.  The mission is to get families around the table for Sunday sinner.  Family Foodie asked me to share what we made from the farmer’s market tonight.

Behold – My go to kale recipe.  I can do this blindfolded now.  It always comes out tasty.  Some nights it’s stunning.  I tweak it, use multiple kales (sometimes together, as in tonight), multiple mustard seed varieties, more liquid, less liquid, sometimes cook it very quickly, sometimes stretch it out a bit with the fire low at the end, I reheat it the next day and I make it at least once a week throughout market season.

Recipe: Sautéed Kale with Garlic and Mustard Seed

  • Bunch or two kale: remove stems, tear or chop greens
  • 1 – 2 TBS olive or peanut oil
  • Salt: 1/4 tsp kosher or coarse
  • Garlic: Few cloves peeled and chopped (do not mince, should be pea-sized or larger after chopping)
  • Mustard seed: 1 or 2 tsp, any variety
  • Optional: 1/4 cup liquid (broth, water, apple juice/cider) see below
  • Heavy bottomed skillet over med-high heat:  Heat oil and mustard seed until seeds sizzle (tiny bubbles form around mustard seeds).  Add kale and toss with a pair of spatulas/wooden spoons until well-coated with oil and mustard seed seems distributed.  Sprinkle with salt and garlic and toss again.
  • If you want tender kale:  Add about 1/4 cup liquid (water, broth, apple juice/cider, etc) and immediately cover losely with lid.  Let it steam a minute or so then toss kale in the skillet.  Cover for another minute if you desire more tender kale.  Uncover and let liquid cook off, tossing kale with a pair of spatulas to move what’s on the bottom of the skillet to the top.  Before the skillet goes dry, turn kale out into wide shallow bowl.  Top with garlic, mustard seed and any liquid from bottom of skillet.
  • If firm kale is desired:  Loosely cover with lid for 30 – 60 seconds to let steam with its own moisture.  Remove lid and toss kale until cooked to desired doneness.  Keep the kale moving as you finish – use a pair of spatulas/wooden spoons to move what’s on the bottom to the top and mind the garlic, trying to keep it moving with the kale.  Turn out into wide shallow bowl.  Top with garlic and mustard seed from bottom of skillet.
  • Can’t decide:  Shake  you kale after washing but don’t let it dry.  Cook as firm kale above but be careful – the hot oil will spit and sputter.  It’s manageable, just be warned.  The water droplets help steam the kale just enough.

The times are not exact.  You can’t really mess it up, you can add more oil and liquid (if using) as needed.

You can wash and prep the kale the day before.  It stores best if you salad spin it, pat it dry or air dry before bagging it.

Don’t mince the garlic – it will cook too quickly, burn and taste bitter.  You don’t really want the garlic to even brown (the browner, the more bitter).  I’ve cooked the garlic to a crisp many times – it’s fine.  Try not to, tenderly cooked garlic refines the dish and lets the kale flavor shine.

If overcooking the garlic makes you nervous, cook it in the oil over medium heat first, until just tender and still white.  Remove the garlic, add the mustard seeds to the oil and proceed as above on med-high heat.

The mustard seed adds a wonderful nutty flavor and looks nice.  You can add a little flaked red pepper while cooking if you want to make it spicy.

If you cook you kale the firm method (without adding liquid), a few edges may brown or crisp.  This adds great texture.  However, don’t let all the kale brown and crisp in the pan or the dish will end up tough and chewy.

I’ll update this post if I ever find the original recipe.

The only way this dish could be easier is if the kale washed and prepped itself.  Or if another family member did it.

Post-publishing note: Antsy over posting a recipe for something I cook on the fly, I’ve refined a few lines above.  Please share how your kale turned out!

Sowing – DIY Salad Crate Via Melissa and Doug

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Free seeds.

I have 28 packs of seeds I ordered and scheduled on my sowing calendar, but for the free seeds, I lack a plan.

I attended the Washington Gardener Magazine Seed Exchange a few months ago and found a fun selection of seed packets in the swag bag.  I was already splitting seeds with friends and gave a few packets away.  Where to plant the ones I kept?

Our apartment building has one trash can out back and I noticed our neighbor’s toy wooden crate from their Melissa & Doug Band-in-a-Box set on top.  This is such an annoying piece of packaging (we have similar toy wooden crates from M&D products).  It’s a fair-sized wooden crate made solely for the purpose of making you feel kitschy and earthy about the product within.  It’s not quite sturdy enough for a toddler to really be trusted with and it’s not flimsy enough to immediately toss when you open the package at home.

It’s a marketing ploy in small wooden crate format.

I saw it there on top and immediately thought of the free seeds:

- Botanical Interests Lettuce Mesclun Asian Salad Greens (21 – 45 days till maturity)

- Thompson & Morgan Organic Beet Bolivar (British site, I could not locate them on the US site) (70 days for full-grown beets)

- Peaceful Valley Cherry Belle Radish (20 – 30 days)

If I harvest the mesclun mix as young greens and the beets as babies, I only need a container that will last about two months.  After that, I’ll keep cutting mesclun mix greens until the summer heat stifles them or the crate falls apart.

The photo set tells how I turned a tossed toy crate into a petite salad garden, inspired by Life on the Balcony’s pallet garden.

DIY – Seed Starting – Step One [LOST POST]

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I wrote this post two months ago (January 26).  I looked it up to add a link to tomorrow’s post and, what do you know, I never posted it.

Oops.

This spring all out of whack, everything is blooming a few weeks early with the steady warm weather, but I’ve pegged mid-April as DC’s date of last frost.  That’s based on a few internet searches, not gardening experience.  I usually run out in late May and buy a slew of young plants at the garden center, this is my first year aggressively starting my own seeds in spring.

The post is still relevant so here you go.   Happy seed planning!

STEP 1:  Find a seed source: local hardware store, garden center, online seed swap, local seed exchange, neighbors, online retailer, etc.

I chose Southern Exposure Seed Exchange because they are in the same plant hardiness zone as I and have an amazing selection of Southern heirlooms at good prices.  They promote seed saving and traditional plant breeding to counter the loss of crop diversity.

STEP 2:  Loose your inhibitions and imagine yourself growing more than you could possibly ever know what to do with.

STEP 3:  Now actually read the seed package or catalog guide to see what veggies/flowers/herbs might suit your situation.  The Living Garden has a great how-to on choosing seeds.

STEP 4:  Choose your seeds.  (Buy, barter, order or swap.)

STEP 5:  Make a chart or mark a calendar plotting when to start the variety of seeds you’ve chosen.  All the information you need is in the catalog and/or on the seed packet.  And there’s always the internet.

DIY – Tray Those Boots!

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Boot trays fix everything.

Deciding you need a boot tray makes you at least pick up all the shoes so you can situate the tray.

Even if the boots aren’t lined up nicely within, it’s at least a notional corral for the shoes.

Or a square upon which to pile them.

I wanted to make one for B’s toddler boots for as cheap as possible, however, if I had seen them at Target for $5, I would have just bought one.  I made ours for $6.

Materials needed:

1.  A cardboard box that fits the boots in need of a tray.

2.  Scissors/utility knife/box cutter if the box needs cutting.

3.  One 20-yd roll of colored duct tape.

4.  Pebbles.

What to do:

1.  Cut the height of the box, if needed.

2.  Methodically cover the entire box with duct tape.

3.  Place an inch or two of pebbles within the newly-taped box.  They let your wet and muddy shoes dry and keeps your boot tray looking tidy (by masking the mud).  M. Stewart says you should still clean the tray regularly.

Where to get pebbles?  Garden centers, hardware stores…  Mini Manor got hers at Ikea.

A friend of mine has a too-deeply-pebbled alley driveway and let me take what I need.

Me parking in her alley one mid-afternoon, jumping out with a shovel and contractor’s bucket, filling it with driveway rocks then driving off was a step I wished I had caught on camera for this instructional.

DIY – Reclaimed Sidewalk Land

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Sick of the weeds and trash last summer cornered away between our  fence and the sidewalk, I dug it all up with a trowel, a borrowed shovel and leather work gloves.

I found a chair leg in the weeds, a recycling bin’s worth of glass in the dirt and untold broken bricks.

$27 later it was a mulched little patch with bargain perennials and clearance annuals since it was already early summer.

This spring it hosts a few clearance grocery store tea roses, an annual whose name I forgot, a thick row of smiling pansies, poppin’ crocus and a few nodding daffodils.

B loves saying “Hi, Pansies!” to them so much that she can spot other people’s pansies from the car now.

We rent.

Despite this, the land reclamation is moving along the fence this spring – I have big plans for that neglected little Weedtown out there.

I am so completely ahead of the game this year – I’ve had a bag of mulch and a bag of humus & manure mix out there waiting for me to dig this mess up.  I got them a month ago.

Neal found a $5 well-worn shovel for me at the flea.  That, my trowel, cultivator, leather gloves, classy pink plastic hospital pan (my constant garden project companion) and that 80-degree Sunday afternoon last weekend turned Weedtown into Mulchburg.

Mulchburg is still edgy, though.  I stopped pulling the large chunks of glass out about 10 minutes into it.

DIY – Thermal Mass for the Cold Frame

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My cold frame does not have a hot bed (a layer of manure a few inches below the floor to create heat as it decays), and it only gets a few hours of sun at this early point in spring, so I wanted to add thermal mass.

Thermal mass is simply extra material that will be heated by the sun during the day and then will give off that heat after the sun goes down to maintain the warm temperature of the cold frame.

Online suggestions included painting milk jugs black and filling them with water.  It was already night so I didn’t have time to paint jugs, plus if I painted my bottles and jugs I wouldn’t be able to recycle them later.

All I really needed was black water.  It would absorb the heat better than the clear water and I could just pour it out when I’m done with the cold frame.

FOOD COLORING.

Every art class since kindergarten demonstrates that mixing all the colors makes black.  I dug out my Target-brand food coloring left over from Christmas and got to it.

It worked like a charm – one good squirt of each color into each container made inky-black water perfectly suited to add thermal mass to the cold frame.

As I arranged them inside the cold frame itself, in the dark with a flashlight, I wrapped a few of the bottles in aluminum foil to help reflect the precious little sunlight that was making it into the cold frame in early March in our city back yard.

DIY – Recycling Bin Seed Starting

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How to Start Your Own Seeds:

1.  Fantasize about all those home-grown vegetables you see repinned a thousand times on Pinterest.

2.  Remind yourself mankind has grown his own food for thousands of years.

3.  Scour the internet for more detailed DIY pages than the one you area reading this second.

4.  Realize you may not actually be ready to really do this but, determined, keep digging online.

5.  Go nuts and order a ton of seeds.

6.  Justify all these seeds by building a cold frame from scratch out of reclaimed materials (my cost: about $20).

7.  Justify the purchase of a $45 automatic vent opener for said $20 cold frame because you spent $60 on all those seeds and you don’t want them to cook in the cold frame.

8.  Find exactly the DIY solution you need at You Grow Girl for saving cash by making your own seed starting containers (because you’ve already maxed out your annual garden budget).

9.  Justify your friends’ suspicions of your hording by hording saving (er, upcycling) three reusable shopping bags worth of toilet paper tubes, fruit containers, egg cartons and yogurt cups by your entry way.

9.  Get your calendar, your seed catalog and your internets and determine your Date of Last Frost and work backwards in the calendar to plan your seed starting dates.  Or cheat and use this handy What to Plant Now clickable map.

10.  Get your seed starting medium, dig a chop stick out of the drawer to poke holes in the dirt and go for it (per the instructions from your seed packet or seed catalog).

11.  Place your seed starting containers in the cold frame and hope.  And leave town for two weeks and leave the whole thing in your amazing neighbor’s care.

DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

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Determined to finish this thing, I headed out with scrap table legs from a broken kiddie table, some wire and my drill.

The Univent automatic opener I installed works by means of a piston driven by a compressed-gas cylinder that expands or contracts with the temperature. The opener is amazing but I needed an easy way to latch the lid open to allow access to the (anticipated) seedlings within the cold frame.

I fashioned a post with a loop of wire at the end that hooks to a screw on the lid – it works like a charm. I can prop the lid open, work inside, unlatch it, and the Univent resumes the work of keeping the lid open or closed based on the temperature.

The automatic vent opener (the Univent) instructions read horribly. Ikea should contract its instruction-writing services out… I corrected a mistake I made the day before and was officially in business.

I finished the cold frame a few weeks ago, on February 27th, and March proceeded to be one of the warmest on record. It’s like bringing your umbrella to insure against rain.

Post Publishing Note:

This is 6 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )

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Have I mentioned I constructed this cold frame hastily?

Even my trip to Community Forklift was barely planned, I was rummaging through the cabinets of door hinges while they announced they were closing in five minutes.

I set about installing the cold frame’s glass lid with a vague notion of how I would get the not-quite-appropriate hinges to fit and about 45 minutes to execute it.

By the time I finished, I had a working glass top, a Univent auto opener installed correctly and a few large gaps where there should be none.

I called it a success and returned the next day with a fresh plan to fix the gaps.

Post Publishing Note:

This is 5 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

Bonus: Closer Look – The Univent on the Cold Frame

DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )

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I painted it.

Super fast.

Our neighbors had old paint they donated and I had some cheap brushes left over from past projects.  Actually, this entire project got me digging through my project supply stash.  I have leftovers from projects I completed long ago don’t even remember doing.

Spring cold frame = spring cleaning.

Post Publishing Note:

This is 4 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )

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Last Saturday I gathered all the cut pieces I had hastily cut and proceeded to hastily put them together.

This whole thing is based on me looking at a few online plans and sketching it out super quick.

Because I have a toddler.

It went well considering I used screws that were too long to put it together too fast from plans not well planned out.

 

Post Publishing Note:

This is 3 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)