More Mushrooms

After we took the mushrooms from the one side, you can flip it around and spray the other side to get more mushrooms and it worked really well!

We're hoping to do a stir fry soon.

1st Harvest Monday!!

Left: Before Harvest
Right: After Harvest


So up to this point we've had a tiny bit of lettuce and about 2 cherry tomatoes, so I haven't been posting for harvest Monday, but today I am happy to report that I have a harvest! All of the lettuce we planted was ready for harvest, just in time for J's birthday dinner. The lettuce was delicious, with a great flavor and crispness. And, along with about 5 cherry tomatoes from our Aerogarden it made the perfect dinner salad! Yay for a harvest!Generally, for your birthday in our house, you get to pick whatever you want for the whole meal, so to go along with the homegrown salad, we had some homemade macaroni and cheese and J requested that I bake him a pineapple upside down cake. I've enver made one before, and I think I've only eaten once once, so it was quite the challenge, but I think I did pretty well. And it was darn tasty!!

Happy Birthday J!

Potatoes

My starter potatoes finally arrived, so I'm pre-sprouting them before planting in my trash can. Yes, you read that correctly.

J is the big potato fan in our house, so he got to choose the type. Harder than it sounds - there's so many! Since we're low on space, we can only grow one kind so J decided to automatically eliminate the kinds you can buy for pennies at the grocery store. He wanted something unique and delicious, so he finally settled on the blue kind from Pinetree Garden Seeds. I chose to buy from there because it's fairly local (Maine) and was recommended by another blogger.


My favorite gardening book suggests pre-sprouting by putting each seed potato in its own section of the egg carton, spraying with liquid seaweed and letting them go in a sunny area. So we'll see how it works!
Do you pre-sprout potatoes? What kind(s) are you growing this year?

Bread Baker

I said earlier that I wanted to start putting more of my attempts at cooking and baking on the blog, but I haven't been very good about that. I had last Friday off of work (perk of working at a private, Catholic university) so J and I headed out to Newton to check out some stores. The first is one J discovered a few weeks ago and had been dying to show me. No photos, but that's probably best because China Fair is one incredibly shady joint. I was pretty sure we were going to get stabbed in the alleyway that led to the super-sketchy door, and then once inside I figured we'd be abducted and sold into slavery, but luckily neither of those things happened and we just ended up buying WAY too much kitchen stuff. Among the things we got was a dough container, which I'd been thinking about getting for a while.
Then we went next door to the New England Mobile Book Fair. This place is equally sketchy, but more popular, and we've been before. It's a dangerous place filled with discounted books on every subject imaginable. We usually go and each find about 20 books we want, but then talk each other out of most of them. It's a good system. Unfortunately it didn't work this time because we spent enough to get a free T-shirt or tote bag and to get 3 more stamps on our "Loyalty Card".
Anywho, I should get to the point of this suddenly very long story. I bought Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day to try my hand at baking bread. This is partly because I love baking and partly because my poor wallet can't afford to keep going to When Pigs Fly. We got home and my impatient side took over and I make a batch of the basic bread, which the book says you need to master before moving on. That's hard. The other recipes look delicious!
So I used our stand mixer (seriously, how did I live before this thing?) to whip up a batch of dough and then let it rise. Nerd Alert! Yeast is awesome!! 2 quarts of dough became 4 quarts of dough in about 3 hours just sitting on the counter.
Saturday morning we baked. Form the loaf, check. Pizza stone in the oven, check. Pan on lower rack for water, check... wait a second. Folks, putting a glass Pyrex pan in the oven, letting it preheat to 450 degrees and then pouring water into it results in this.

I do not recommend it.

Luckily the bread turned out fabulously and we then made two more loaves and had eaten all of it by the end of the weekend. Sorry there's no photo of the finished product, it was too yummy to stop and take a photo before inhaling. I'll try to exert some self control on the next batch.
As long as you don't shatter a glass pan in your oven, it really does only take about 5 minutes. Guess that's what the authors meant by mastering the recipe.

Cold Weather Plants

There are a few things I planted quite a while ago, but I don't think I've mentioned them here since. All the cold weather plants are loving the cool Spring we're having. At least something likes it.
My kale is finally starting to take off. I think I transplanted it too soon from the seedling tray, and I think I was keeping it too warm at first. It didn't look like it was going to make it for a while, but it's pulled through and seems to be enjoying the greenhouse. I keep the door of the greenhouse open all the time, unless we have a frost warning, so it gets the cool temperatures at night and doesn't get overheated during the day.
The peas are really slow growing. I guess I expected they'd be larger now. How long after sowing should they start flowering? According to my records, these peas were planted 1/22 and sprouted 1/27, but they still seem tiny for being 3 months old, no? I've also added a few more seeds in to keep them going - yay succession planting. One round of seeds on 3/11 and another round last weekend, so I'm hoping they'll do better. The second and third set also got inoculant, so hopefully that will help.
Spinach and carrots are still small, but growing strong. Can't wait for a delicious salad! And speaking of salad, my very sad looking outdoor lettuce is looking decidedly less sad lately. It might even be ready for eating soon. Sorry there's no photo of that.

Seedlings

Now that we're supposedly past the last frost date (though we've had two frost warnings since, but I haven't seen any) I've started hardening off my seedlings. This is an important step, according to all the books and blogs I've read, so that they don't all just die when you put them in the ground - or in my case, in pots.
It's a bit like training for a running race I guess. You start with low mileage - in this case mileage is time outdoors - and work your way up to the full distance.
So far I've put them outside for just a few hours at a time, and only on days that are nice. I don't want them getting rained on quite yet. This past weekend offered two glorious days, so the seedlings took a field trip outside. Friday they sat on the porch, but Sunday they stayed in the greenhouse. It was windy and they were getting blown over. The greenhouse door was open, so they got some breeze, but not the full force.
I'm hoping they'll be hardened off and ready to plant in their final containers outside in about two weeks. However, the weather forecast calls for rain the next 8 days (oh joy) so we'll see how that goes.
Anyone else hardening off seedlings?

Tomato Update

So the tomatoes finally turned red! And once they completely ripened, boy were they delicious!
Our makeshift support system with the rubberband was failing, so we added some extra support. Yes, it looks ridiculous, but if it gives me good tomatoes, I don't really care.
A few more are starting to turn red, so hopefully we'll have an overabundance of tomatoes soon.
I think I had said I hoped for tomatoes by Easter and that worked out well!