Living Homegrown

Just Back From The Garden Writer's Association Conference

I just returned from Raleigh, North Carolina where I was attending the GWA Garden Writer's Conference.

Wow!

My head is still swimming with all of the information and ideas I got while I was there. It will take me a few WEEKS to decompress!

There were some wonderful tours of some beautiful gardens (which I will share with you soon) and I met some truly incredible people there -- Many I have "known" through Twitter and Facebook. It was great to match a real face and person to the on line picture I had known.

And many other people I met were new to me. But all were creative, enthusiastic and down right fun to hang with!

I still have to download all my photos and put together a few posts from the garden tours, but wanted to post this photo of our last night there. You can tell that we were dead tired, but still having a blast!

Thanks to Laura Schaub for taking the photo (@Interleafer on twitter and blogging at Interleafings).

Back row L to R: Helen Yoest @HelenYoest, Teresa O'Connor @SeasonalWisdom, Joe Lamp'l @JoeGardener, Erica Glasener @EricaGlasener.

Front row L to R: Susan Cohan @SusanCohan, Billy Goodnick @Gardenwiseguy, Shirley Bovshow @EdenMaker, Jayme Jenkins @ahamodernliving, Susan Morrison @susanlmorrison and ME! Theresa Loe @GardenLiving. 

Not pictured: Christa Hanson @tinkhanson, who we discovered was upstairs at the time singing Karaoke! Wish we hadn't missed THAT!

More to come...

Canning Across America

Have you heard about Canning Across America?

It is a very cool new informational website with tons of canning info! I am actually a little late in posting this because the big "Kick-off" was three weeks ago...But the mission is still going strong -- and will be going strong all year long.

Here is the mission statement for this group:

"Canning Across America is a nationwide, ad hoc collective of cooks, gardeners and food lovers committed to the revival of the lost art of “putting up” food. Our goal is to promote safe food preservation and the joys of community building through food.  The weekend of Aug. 29-30 is our kickoff, with how-to classes, demos and home canning parties in cities around the country.  Think of us as a one-stop resource for events, recipes, inspiration and safety how-to on anything under the canning, preserving and pickling umbrella that will continue throughout the year. Won't you join us?"

You can bet I will be joining them as I am doing my own canning this fall.

Check out their website for more great information!

"Give Me A Shot Of Basil" - Homegrown Cocktails

I ran across this interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how some bars are growing their own cocktail ingredients.

While some bars and restaurants contract with local growers to get fresh-from-the-garden ingredients, many are now just growing their own!

"Within the city, patios and rooftops are being used to grow garnishes. The Fifth Floor restaurant offers three homegrown 'Herb Garden Cocktails' - a Sagerac with fresh sage leaves, a rosemary cocktail and a version of the Lonsdale with basil leaves."

General Manager of The Fifth Floor asks, "How many restaurants or bars can say that they pulled the herbs being used in their cuisine and cocktails from a garden less than 20 feet away?"

Well, according to this article, more and more restaurants are doing just that. Sounds perfect to me!

Penny's First Egg!

Look what Penny (our Barred Rock chicken) gave us the other day!

Her first egg. 

We sat around staring at it -- Trying to decide what do to. Do we scramble it? Hard boil it? Bake it into something?  It was all just too exciting. So, we ended up waiting until the next day and making pancakes with it. 

Delicious.

Long Distance Gardening

We just had a whirlwind summer! In the last two months my family has been to Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Wyoming and Arizona. Yes...we did all that in just TWO months. Whew! What were we thinking?!

Although it was fun to be jet-setters, we are a bit tired of living out of suitcases and glad to be home in our own beds. My dear friends took care of my gardens and my chickens. All fared well. But boy...it is good to be home.

As for the garden, a few things got away from me while we were gone. But between trips, we managed to be home to enjoy most of the deliciousness of our garden including the corn harvest (it was awesome), the zucchini, Italian summer squash, bell peppers and of course...tons of tomatoes. The onions and tomatoes are still hanging on. I think we have a few more weeks of produce from them.

I even managed to collect some beautiful Indian Corn from the school garden we planted last spring. The corn was grown in the third grade "Three Sisters Garden". I dried the corn for the teachers to use in their fall decorations.

 

Don't you just love the purple husks? So pretty!

I will be harvesting herbs over the next month or two and planting a fall veggie garden. (Come on Snap Peas! YUM!) So good to be home!

I have gathered quite a collection of interesting gardening information, ideas and tidbits through my travels that I will be sharing here over the next few weeks. I'm also going to post on how I inoculated some logs with mushroom spores. Curious???  Oh yeah...Fun stuff!

Stay Tuned!