The rising price of gas is effecting everything in our life from airline ticket prices to the price of food in the grocery store.  Perhaps it is time to go back to the way of our grandmothers and look to our garden to feed our families.  I have fond memories of working with my grandfather in the garden and then with my grandmother in the kitchen snapping beans and canning those vegetables we didn’t immediately eat. 

I took a look around the “net” to find a few sites offering recipes using the food harvested from our gardens. 

Keeping the Castle offers 50 Spring Recipes using the “fruits of our labor.”

Gardening Tips had a whole lists of resources and recipes to help you feed your family from your garden crops.

Check out these French recipes using ordinary garden fare.  It doesn’t have to be yellow bean cooked in peppered milk and served in a little side dish - you can really get “restaurant” creative with the foods from your garden.

What’s your favorite garden recipe?

Photo courtesy of Get Rich Slowly

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My mother used to tell of how her mom would make her go in the backyard and pick dandelions for supper.  As children we’d cringe with all the appropriate sounding “ewwwww” and then quietly eat whatever vegetable she’d put in front of us.  Anything was more appealing than the thought of eating the weed we associated with white tuffs of seed that we’d blow into the wind. 

But dandelions are in fact amazingly tasty.  Mother Earth News recently published an article by Roger Dorion entitled Wild About Dandelions in which he shared his recipe for Wilted Dandelion Greens Salad.  The first ingredient is bacon – so he had my attention.  According to Roger:“All parts of the dandelion are edible and have medicinal and culinary uses.  It has long been used as a liver tonic and diuretic. In addition, the roots contain inulin and levulin, starchlike substances that may help balance blood sugar, as well as bitter taraxacin, which stimulates digestion.”Read the entire article and check out the recipe. 

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Have you tried blending your own tea?  Herbs for Health offer a wonderful article on the benefits of tea for refreshment, relaxation and medicinal purposes and offer these few suggestions for blending your custom tea:

• Use only three or four herbs in each blend.
• Include herbs that use the same brewing method, e.g., decoction or infusion.
• Use herbs that complement each other, such as a peppermint leaf with young dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) leaf—both are digestives and mild detoxifiers, but the mint adds flavor and fragrance to offset dandelion’s blandness.
• Add flavorful or fragrant herbs, such as strawberry fruit, rosehips, blackberry, lemon balm, anise hyssop, chamomile, mint, fennel, cinnamon or clove.
• To dry herbs, hang branches upside down in a cool, dark, dry place until brittle; or spread small flowers or clippings on a tray or in paper bags to dry.

It’s a great time to start your seeds indoors.  I just planted six different varieties this weekend and look forward to nurturing them even as the snow falls out doors.

 Do you have any recipes for tea made from the herbs in your garden?  Share them here.

photo from Tea Time Nashville

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As the weather cools, pets are indoors more often and looking for great play toys.  If you don’t want your ferns, African Violets and holiday plants to become the toy of the day - consider this spray recipe from Marc Morrone of the Martha Stewart Show:

Make Pepper and Garlic Spray
Tools and Materials
1 quart water
4 tablespoons red-pepper flakes
2 tablespoons garlic powder
Misting bottle
Strainer

Pepper and Garlic Spray How-To
1. Mix water, red-pepper flakes, and garlic powder.
2. Strain solution.
3. Pour into misting bottle.
4. Spray plants.
It’s safe for your plant leaves and yet the smell will keep pets away from chewing on the leaves.  One additional tip from Marc is to let the solution sit for a day before straining and using on your plants for the highest potency.

Marc offers a series of tips for protecting your plants from pets. 

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Do you have an herb garden?  There’s nothing more delightful than to walk into your yard and select fresh herbs for your evening meal.

As the fall approaches I will begin the process of making holiday gifts from the garden and I wanted to share a few recipes from Jim Long that I found at Herb Quarterly you might consider trying this season.

Garden Seasoning Blend

Use this mixture for soups, stews, roasts, chicken, and vegetarian dishes. Add about 2 tsp of the blend per small cooking pot during the last 15 minute of cooking.

1 cup parsley

1/4 cup basil

2 T marjoram

1 T dried onion flakes

1/4 t garlic granules

Mix ingredients together and store in a cool, dry place.

Classic Bread Mix

Add this flavor to the bread mix in your bread machine.  Add 3/4 T of the mixture per loaf for herb bread.

1 cup parsley

1/2 c onion flakes

1/2 c celery leaf flakes

2 t garlic powder

2 t marjoram

Blend together and store until ready to use.

Can’t you just smell that herb bread baking?  Yum. 

Need help drying your herbs?  Here is a great article on air drying herbs.

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I’ve never been much of a bird watcher; can’t tell you one from another except by their color, but I love watching the birds at our birdfeeders.  Birds bring a beautiful garden to life. I enjoy the fact that a wide variety of birds can peacefully co-mingle on the edges of my birdfeeder eating their fill until the next meal.  With the exception of the occasional squirrel or crow - all seems to be peaceful, like a scene out of the Secret Garden. 

I recently stumbled upon a new recipe that attracts woodpeckers, northern flickers, black-capped chickaddes and nuthatches from Birds and Blooms magazine.

2 cups lard

1 cup crunchy peanut butter

2 cups quick cooking oats

2 cups cornmeal

1 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 cup raisins

1 cup wild bird food

Melt lard and peanut butter together over low heat. Remove from heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Pour into plastic molds or containers. cover and store in the freezer until ready to use.  

Actually, until you add the bird food it almost sounded pretty tasty!  Hope the birds think so.

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