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Gooseberry Fool taste test

Bowl of gooseberries

Fourteen years ago, Mom sent me her family recipe for Gooseberry Fool. Foolishly, I waited over a decade to give it a try. I also tweaked the ingredients a bit based on other recipes on the internet (and on Mom’s memory that the Fool she ate as a kid was thickened with an egg).

The recipe I used:

  • 1.5 cups of gooseberries, washed but with the stems and tails still on (plus a few raspberries)
  • a bit of water
  • 1 Tablespoon of sugar
  • 1/3 cup milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup whipped cream (ours was homemade, but I assume you could use the stuff in the can)

Cook the gooseberries and sugar over medium heat with just enough water so they don’t burn. Once the berries burst, remove them from the heat and send them through a foley mill (or use another method to get rid of the skins and most of the seeds).

In a separate container, mix the milk and egg well. Pour the eggy-milk mixture into the gooseberry puree and return to the heat, stirring constantly until it bubbles and thickens.

Cool the new mixture completely, then stir in whipped cream. Top with a raspberry if you have any left.

Gooseberry fool

Then it was time for the taste test.

Anna: “It’s okay, but I like the raw berries better.”

Mark (who’s only so-so on raw gooseberries but hates to complain about food I put in front of him): “Hm. It’s… Um… Did you say there’s also the option of chocolate cake?”

I guess there’s a reason Gooseberry Fool isn’t a mainstream recipe any more…

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Kohl wheelbarrow demise

What about the Kohl lifetime warranty?

Not so fast. Kohl tools have a generous lifetime warranty but Kohl products do not.

They still sell the same 6 cubic feet Kohl model…now it’s 179 dollars.

Wooden replacement handles are 19 dollars which hopefully will give us many more years of hauling.

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Garden experiment updates

I’m sure you’ve been waiting with baited breath to hear how various experiments panned out. Wait no longer! Results are in.

Quirk cucumbers

Quirk cucumber

Of the new vegetable varieties we’re trying this year, the Quirk cucumber, has already proven itself a winner. They’re sweet and tender and at least as productive as our other cucumber types. Just keep in mind that they mature quite small, so pick when you can still see the dried-up blossoms on the end.

Highly recommended! We’ll definitely be growing these again next year.

Overwintering a garden under a pool cover

Weed-free spring garden

Remember how my mothers-in-law laid down an old solar pool cover over their garden beds last fall? They didn’t plant until around the frost-free date this spring and left the pool cover on until just before planting.

By the time they took it off, nearly all of the maple leaves they’d topdressed the beds with had melted into the soil and the entire area was completely weed-free. Even weeks later, they’re only seeing very mild weed pressure, suggesting that seedlings sprouted under the pool cover then died. (My mind is blanking on which garden writer recommends a similar technique, but using black plastic. Maybe you can refresh my memory in the comments?)

 

Planting spring vegetables early vs. late

Planting spring broccoli early vs. late

This experiment involved planting some broccoli seedlings early enough that their tops got a little nipped then setting out seedlings started inside at the same time considerably later. The expected tradeoff was that the early planted broccoli would grow more roots at the expense of their tops while the later planted broccoli would grow more tops at the expense of their roots.

The results are a little more mixed on this one. The early planted broccoli gave me the results I always get (because I usually plant at the first possible moment). They headed up at various sizes — some huge, some tiny, many medium. In contrast, the late-planted broccoli were more regular in size — all on the small side of medium — and they headed up one to two weeks later than the early planted broccoli.

When thinking of this in terms of overall yield, it’s important to note that we keep picking side shoots for a long time from our spring broccoli. That’s a data point in favor of the early planting, even though some of the early broccoli made teensy little initial heads.

That said, it’s nice not to have all of my excess broccoli needing to be frozen at once. Which is an argument for hedging my bets by planting both ways in future.

 

How about you?

Any garden experiments you’d like to share results of with the with the world at large?

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How and why to garden for moths

Moth diversity

I usually focus on food gardening instead of ornamental gardening both on this blog and in life, but I couldn’t resist sharing some of the pointers I learned at a fascinating library talk last week. Jim McCormac, one of the authors of Gardening for Moths regaled us with a hilarious, beautifully illustrated, and inspiring presentation about why and how to attract moths to our yards. I was definitely sold!

 

Gardening for MothsWhy moths matter

Jim started off by pointing out how important moths are to parts of the ecosystem many of us care about deeply. To start with, lot of those pretty birds I spend so much time photographing enjoy moth caterpillars as a large part of their diet. In fact, moths suffer about 99% mortality between the egg and the adult stage, proof that caterpillars are close to the foundation of lots of food chains. Then, as adults, moths become a favorite food for bats (who will help clear up your mosquito problems, so you definitely want them around).

Moths are also important pollinators, especially for orchids. Any time you see a flower with a long tube or nectar spur, that’s a hint that it’s pollinated by one of the long-tongued pollinators — hummingbirds, butterflies, or very likely moths.

Moth diversity is also astounding. The book covers five states and parts of three others, an area that contains a couple of hundred species of butterflies and a whopping 10,000 species of moths. And since many moths are small and/or active only at night both in adult and caterpillar forms, new species are being found frequently enough that even that huge sum is likely an underestimate.

 

How to encourage moths

Chickadee with insects

If you want to encourage moths in your yard (and you should if only to feed all the pretty birds!), the simplest way is to plant native species in your flower beds. Like butterflies, many moth caterpillars are host-specific, so they often turn up their noses at plants we bring in from other continents. In contrast, some of our natives are especially heavy hitters when it comes to caterpillar munching — white oaks, native grapevines, sugar maples, and redbuds are great species to start with if you want your local moth population to explode.

Like fireflies, moths get confused by lights at night, so turn off unused exterior lights to give them a wing up. Finally, leaf litter is an important habitat for moths along with lots of other native critters, so don’t rake in the fall (or at least set aside some wild areas as reservoirs for the natives).

One big warning, though: once you start paying attention to moths and their caterpillars, you’ll get sucked in by the colors and patterns. If you get hooked on lepidoptery, it is not my fault!

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Styrofoam Ant Tunnels

What are these extremely small white particles appearing out of nowhere?

It took me almost a year to figure out some ants were making a home in a section of our styrofoam.

We don’t like toxic chemicals so I just removed the offending styrofoam and will have to replace it with some of the itchy stuff.

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SharkBite connectors for amateur plumbers

Fixing a plumbing leak behind a washing meachine

We got a good deal on our current trailer in part because the pipes had been allowed to freeze over the winter. Our first round of plumbing repairs seems to have held up great, but a new leak popped up behind the washing machine recently.

I love small spaces and Mark hates small spaces, but he’s the DIY pro while I’m a rank amateur. So he figured it was worth splurging on two SharkBite connectors to turn the project into child’s play.

This child didn’t push the new pipe into the top of the bottom connector hard enough the first time, so I got a big spray of water in my face. But a little more elbow grease did the job and, in the end, I was very proud of my accomplishment.

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Growing in the gutter

One challenge of our deck growing area is the shade it gets from close by structures.

The new experiment is to see what we can grow in this gutter area that escapes some of the shade.

A 10 foot section of aluminum gutter is about 15 dollars with another 15 on end caps and hardware.

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Harvesting the first hairy vetch for mulch

Hairy vetch starting to bloom

Remember my disappointment in summer-planted hairy vetch? Well, that patch kept growing slowly throughout the fall and winter, then took off like a rocket this spring. I needed some mulch this week and didn’t mind the vetch bed staying in cover crops for another year, so I actually cut when only the first few blooms had appeared. Harvest was extremely simple — a lot of stalks ripped out easily by hand then I used a toothed sickle to cut through the rest.

Rolling a ball of vetch

For the first bed that was entirely vetch, I rolled my cut cover crops up into a big snowball of greenery and pushed them down the hill to the broccoli, who have been treated with worm castings but still need more nitrogen (plus mulch). The vetch covered up an area about three times as large as the original spot it had been harvested from, although we’ll see how much the greenery melts down as the stems die and dry.

 

Co-planting rye and vetch

Vetch and rye cover crop coplanting experiment

Next up was taking a look at a rye-and-vetch co-planting. Like the other vetch bed, this patch of garden soil needs serious improvement (thus the focus on a nitrogen-fixer like vetch). Unlike that other bed, I planted in fall instead of summer.

In this area, I wanted to determine which did better — rye planted solo or rye interplanted with vetch. So I divided the bed up into stripes, the first one vetch and rye, the next one rye only, etc. The idea is to make sure any difference I saw between plantings wasn’t due to the part of bed they were planted in.

Conclusions? First of all, it’s clear that rye does much better in excellent soil than it does in poor soil. When we’d planted it in Virginia, our rye used to grow to my shoulder. These beds barely make it to my waist.

The vetch, in contrast, did quite well here (although only about 60% as well as the summer-planted vetch-only bed). The bands with vetch produced about twice as much total biomass as the rye-only bands did. Would a vetch-only band have produced yet more? Hard to say since my vetch-only bed was planted earlier in the season than the rye-and-vetch bands. Sounds like we’re due for another experiment this fall.

 

Moving hand-harvested mulch around

Homegrown garden mulch carrier

As a side note, the firewood tote carrier we no longer use turns out to be awesome for moving cover crop mulch around. If you’re hand harvesting, you can lay clumps into the carrier as you cut them, then the tote bundles them up nicely as you wander across the garden.

Homegrown garden mulch

And here’s about a third of the area I mulched with handcut cover crops over the course of a bit over an hour. Yes, I did yank up blooming arugula and cut some comfrey leaves also to round things out. I’m now tuckered out but very pleased with my free mulch.