The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

Our Indian summer is here for several more days but it won’t last forever.  Frost hit in some low lying areas a week or so ago but many gardens are still going strong.

Some plants in the vegetable garden can tolerate light frost; others have no resistance to it.  Basil is one of those crops that can’t take even a hint of frost.

I’ve taken the time to collect some of my basil now before the frost hits here.  In the past, I’ve dried basil in a food dehydrator.  Many of the subtle flavors seem to be evaporated out doing it that way but it stores well and keeps most of its green color,

Last week I chopped a quart of fresh basil and poured olive oil over it to keep it fresh.  There is nothing new to this method. For years, people have been preserving basil in olive oil.  I found out just recently that botulism could form in the basil-oil mixture if it is kept at room temperatures for more than a few days.  Even if the mixture is refrigerated, botulism can grow.  The only safe way to keep basil and oil mix is in the freezer.

I froze a couple of pint jars and brought one out today just to check it.  It’s frozen solid; I’ll have to let it thaw a little before it will be easy enough to scoop out.

Some people put their basil-oil mix into ice cube trays and then freeze it.  Later, they take cubes out of the freezer as they need them.

Next year I think I’ll watch out for ice cubes at the garage sales.

Bob

Here we are, it’s the last day of November and I just got our garlic in the ground a few days ago.

Regular readers  of this blog already know that fall is the time of year that you plant garlic.  Garlic can be planted in the spring, however you will end up with bulbs half the size of those planted in the fall.

I think there is still some time to get your garlic planted, I wouldn’t wait too much longer though.

If you have a helper in the garden, decide who is going to go out and find some garlic cloves to plant while the other stays behind and prepares the area to be planted.  If you are by yourself,well then, you’ll have to do both.

Check the garden centers for garlic cloves, if they are out, a farmer’s market stand may have some that can be used for planting. The garlic purchased in a grocery store produce department will most likely have been treated with a sprout inhibitor and will not be good for planting. Sprouting is what we want. I used my garlic that I saved from this years crop.

Your garlic spot must be free of all weeds and kept that way during the growing season because garlic does not compete well against weeds. If you are planning on amending your soil with compost or peat, now’s the time to do so.

Break apart the garlic bulbs into individual cloves just as you do in the kitchen, only this time you won’t be running them through the garlic press.

Plant the cloves into the soil about 2 inches deep and about 6 inches apart. Place the root end down. You can just push them down into the soil with your finger or dig a furrow like I did here.

Planting garlic into a 2'' deep furrow

Cover them up with soil and let them  go until the soil freezes.  During this period, the cloves will grow roots.  Hopefully we will have a mild December which will allow our late planted garlic some time to develop those roots. No fertilizer is needed for now, we’ll apply that in the spring.

Garlic cloves ready to be covered

Once the ground freezes, cover the bed with straw, compost or other type of mulch.  It’s much better for the garlic if the soil is kept at a consistently cold temperature (which the mulch will provide) than to be freezing and thawing over and over through the winter.

In the spring we will remove our mulch and add fertilizer, garlic is a crop that needs a lot of plant food.

We’ll revisit this project again at mulching time and fertilizing time.

Bob

I know we discussed herbs just a couple of blogs ago, but since I re-potted about 50, four inch, root bound pots of Stevia into six inch pots today, I thought it might be a fun idea to write a little bit about it.

For those of you who are not familiar with Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana), it is an herb just starting to gain attention by the general public in this country. In South America, however, it is commonly used as a natural sweetener. Cane sugar is also a natural sweetener but Stevia is up to 300 times sweeter and has no calories!
I was introduced to Stevia about 6 years ago when I obtained some seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine. It is a quite startling sensation to pick a green leaf off of a potted plant and taste that overwhelming sweetness. In its raw state right off of the plant, I think it has a slightly “green” taste along with the sweetness. After a little preparation, the green taste disappears.
You can purchase Stevia at most health food stores as a powder or liquid, or you can grow your own from seed. It is a tender plant, much like a tomato, so if you grow it outside, treat it like an annual. I find that in the greenhouse it tends to attract whitefly (a common greenhouse pest) more readily than other plants. It commonly grows from 18″ to 30″ tall. You would think that it would look like something really special, but it is a “plain Jane” in the garden and could easily be mistaken for a weed.
Japan and Brazil have regulations banning artificial sweeteners. So instead, the soft drink bottlers in those countries use Stevia for their diet pop. We are talking about companies such as Coke and Pepsi as well as the local brands.

In case you were wondering about the title, Honeyleaf is just another name for Stevia.

Those 50 or so pots of Honeyleaf will eventually be given away as gifts. Those folks will use the leaves to sweeten drinks ( 1 Tbs dry = 1 cup sugar) or brew a cup of Stevia tea.

Gotta go and check on my sweeties,
Bob

Actually, there was a lot of sneezing going on. Have you ever tried crushing a one gallon zip lock bag full of dried cayenne pepper and packing the resulting product into tiny containers?

Today we prepared and packed herbs to be given away for people to use for preparing their holiday meals.

There was about a dozen or so packets each of sage, rosemary, cilantro, cayenne, and oregano. We also picked coriander seed this fall, but it is very tedious and time consuming to pick any kind of volume. We ended up with only about a snack-sized zip lock bag full of coriander.

I sowed two flats of thyme late in the summer but never got them planted, they have been frozen and snowed on but still look happy outside. I wouldn’t recommend doing it that way. I will probably pot most of them into larger pots sometime during the next couple of weeks. I’m sure we should be able to harvest enough for our personal use later on this winter.

The plan this spring is to expand the number of varieties of herbs we plant.

Freshly dried, home grown herbs are a delight!
Rhyming and thyming,

Bob

small recloseable bags   http://www.stockpkg.com/Zipper-Bags_c_79.html