Seed sale - Seed Savers Exchange

Need an excuse to stock up for next spring? Seed Savers Exchange has a number of 2014 season heirloom seeds and organic seeds at 50 percent off. While it's a somewhat small selection, it's a way to stock up on tomato, cucumber, flower and other seeds at a reasonable price. Seed starting is just around the corner!

Missouri Botanical Garden Photo Tour

When my sister suggested an afternoon at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St.Louis, I had to admit I was skeptical. After all, we had a 3, 6 and 8 year old in tow; not to mention the summer heat. I expected wilted kids and wilted plants.

Was I wrong. 

The Missouri Botanical Garden - one of the oldest botanical gardens in the United States - was a wonderful place to stop for the afternoon. All of us enjoyed wandering the grounds, seeing the statues and stopping to smell the flowers. For those needing to be a little more hands-on, there was a "smelling garden" (herb garden) as well as a Children's Garden to enjoy.

Here are some of the late June moments we enjoyed at the garden:

The Linnean House, a conservatory and greenhouse that dates to Henry Shaw's time. (Shaw founded the botanical garden in 1859.)

 I loved the looks of many of these gardens and would love to copycat this!

 The ponds and fountains were a huge attraction for my 6 year old.

The iris and daylily gardens gave me much to add to my wish list. More than 1,500 irises and 1,800 daylilies are thriving in the botanical garden.

Want to visit? Children are free; adults are $8. The children's garden has an additional $5 fee; however, our children had a great time without visiting the area. Learn more at mobot.org.

Making refrigerator pickles

This morning we took the dive and for the first time attempted to make our own refrigerator pickles. Finding a recipe that had ingredients we had on hand was a bit tough though. We settled on a "kid-friendly" recipe -- which was great until I realized I yanked most of my random dill the night before!

So we are attempting this recipe by substituting the 1 cup fresh oil with six drops dill essential oil that I had gotten from a summer pack and hadn't yet determined what to do with it. While my 8 year old has already declared we are on the way to Flavortown with this recipe, I think I'll wait until the cucumbers at least get into the fridge first! :)

Garden reboot

A worn-out garden in July doesn't mean you're destined for a garden fail this year. This is the perfect time to yank out and start fresh.

Let me start with my confession: Weeds won out - big time - this summer. They thrived; my plants did not. When I returned from vacation this week, I found tons of weeds, a sad, one-strand tomato plant with two sadder tomatoes on it, wimpy bean plants that had been eaten alive. I could be discouraged; instead I looked to the future.

First, it's just the right time for fall planting. I am ripping out weeds in squares and replanting with beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, carrots, radishes and other cool-weather plants.

Second, look for those little surprises. I was shocked to find that while my tomato plants in the garden looked pathetic, there were a half-dozen tomato plants that had self-planted from my compost bin! Two of them were thriving - one of them was as tall as my bin - and I am letting them stay put. The others have been carefully moved and replanted to my garden so my husband can mow.

Third, remember that the warm-weather growing season isn't quite over yet. You may be able to still find some clearanced plants at local farm stands or farmers markets, or plant some short-term seeds (think: lettuces or radishes).

And finally, don't rush to rip out so quickly. My bok choy and lettuces that bolted are now about to seed - meaning less work for me later!

What are your favorite tips for rebooting your garden during the summer?

Second-Chance Gardening

Yes, the drought destroyed my spring garden, but I'm not giving up hope. After all we're only halfway to frost date!

Today at the Green Phone Booth, I'm sharing plans for my second-chance garden.

Easy worm bin for vemicomposting

Vermicomposting has been on my list of things to try, but I will be honest in that I've been a bit reluctant to step foot into the world of composting with worms.

After an evening composting class where I saw a worm bin - created out of a file box - I figured it was worth a try. My oldest child is obsessed with worms, and after all, didn't they want a pet?

The owner parted with a cupful of worms, and armed with directions, we created our worm bin in about five minutes.

I reused a styrofoam cooler that was used to ship insulin to me. It's been collecting dust in my garage for a year, as I've never really known what to do with it. 

I poked holes for air in the lid.

Inside, we added the recommended mix of worm food: Shredded papers (newspapers and others), a banana (covered to deter fruit flies) and some dill and weeds. We mixed in the container of worms and, well, worm poop, and are letting them do their thing!

My little guy's job is to feed the worms - I learned that  a pound of worms might eat 1/2 pound of food each week, and they love banana peels and eggs. My oldest's job is to make sure the environment stays damp but not drippy.

It will be an interesting experiment to say the least!

Not your mama's Gardening badge

I realize many kids don't realize that a carrot comes from anything but a plastic baggie, and that many others have never had the thrill of playing with those "helicopter" leaves. But I had to admit, for our soon to be second-grade girls, the Plants badge for Brownies was just too rudimentary. (Particularly since they did the gardening journey series in kindergarten.)

The great thing about our Girl Scout council is that they encourage adaptation of badge requirements to fit the girls' needs. So we took advantage of the idea, and tossed the whole Plants Try-It on its side. (I should note: This badge was being retired and nothing remotely was taking its place, a miss I think for the Girl Scouts!)

Instead of seed starting and plant rubbings, here's what our Brownies are doing this month:

Planting a vegetable garden for the sisters who live at our church's convent. The girls got a huge kick out of starting their seeds last year and planting the garden, which fed the nuns all summer. So much so that we're having another planting night later this month, after the risk of frost has passed.

Growing their own mushrooms. Thanks to a very kind donation of mushroom kits from Back to the Roots, the girls are growing their very own oyster mushrooms. The kits themselves are being divided into sections of 4 to 6 mini-mushroom kits.

Experimenting with seed paper. After getting a cute wildflower seed paper from the University of Kansas during a fundraising campaign last month, I contacted the alumni association about getting seed papers from envelopes with bad mailing addresses for the girls to try out. (If that fails, I'll make my own homemade seed paper to share with the girls. Making homemade paper during a Brownie meeting can be the epitome of mess!)

Making pressed flower and leaf cards. I found this great activity on education.com that we'll be sure to try!

What other great ways have you found to teach children about plants and gardening?

Mushroom fail (or success...)

Mushroom growing has been a fun adventure for my kids ever since we got a kit at Christmas.

I figured it'd be a great activity for my gardening-loving Girl Scout troop. We were blessed to receive a donation of mushroom growing kits from Back to the Roots. I started a demo one, which went like gangbusters.

Today, as I went to divide up the packages and prep the sample for next week's gardening night, I realized that the others did as well!

It is a really cool example of seeing how mushrooms develop; it's just disappointing the girls won't get to enjoy it! They're right -- truly no green thumb is required! ;-)

Back To The Roots Mushroom Kits are actually pretty affordable experiments in gardening - they retail for about $20 on Amazon.

Mama made compost!

Composting may be nature's fertilizer, but I'll be the first to admit that I'd been a bit scared by the concept. Close neighbors and the possible smell of rotting produce put me off for years.

My husband finally pushed me over the edge with a gift of a compost bin two Christmases ago, and we discovered the results of our first attempt at composting this spring!

Today at the Green Phone Booth, I'm sharing my initial foray into composting. It's even easier than I'd thought...

Bunny "baskets" for the garden

Baskets from the Easter Bunny have been something I've struggled with since becoming a parent. I don't want the kids overrun with trinkets, or worse, drowning in sugar, but there's something fun to the tradition of a little treat on Easter morning.

In recent years especially I've worked to simplify the kids' baskets, adding a small religious book or item or a toy that they can enjoy. Last year, The Bunny brought "harvest baskets" - large baskets that the kids have since used to harvest their beans and tomatoes from the garden.

This year, we're taking a different spin on it. Noting my kids' love of (OK, fights over) watering our plants with the hose, we're investing in cute watering cans which will be used as the "baskets" this year from The Bunny. Keeping with the theme, my little guy will get his own pint-size gardening tools, and my daughter will get a flower ring she pined over at the Girl Scout shop.

You could easily add seeds or other fun items to the mix, but in our home, we're well stocked-up.

Are you doing any alternate Easter basket ideas this year?

Gifts for the gardener or locavore

Looking for a gift for your local food lover or gardener? Look no further than your bookstore. There are several great ideas for your friends and family who love to enjoy homegrown or home-cooked local foods.

Cookbooks I'd recommend are chef Emeril Lagasse's Farm to Fork and Daniel Orr's FARMFood. Both put a priority on locally grown produce, evident in the variety of ingredients used. These aren't your boring iceberg and romaine lettuce salads here - think watermelon, feta and arugula, or a corn, tomato and lobster combination.

Gardeners will drool over the new book, Heirloom Life Gardener, by Baker's Creek's owners, Jere and Emile Garrett. You know them by the tome they produce each winter, filled with oversized photos with a rainbow of produce. My bright husband pre-ordered this gift, so it arrived just days before my birthday. He's definitely on my nice list. This doesn't disappoint.

A bit more academic in tone but great reads, Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth or Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman are great ways for gardeners who want to complete the cycle of life to better use their gardens throughout the year and save seeds from year to year.

Happy reading!

Originally published at the Green Phone Booth, 2011.
Note: This post contains affiliate links, which helps support this blog.

Herb harvest

Threats of frost kicked my preservation into high gear. Today at the Green Phone Booth, I'm sharing a few ideas for quickly using up the last of the season's herbs.

Second-chance gardening

While my neighbors have sadly ripped up their gardens and mourned a bad growing season, I'm back for more. Today at the Green Phone Booth, I'm sharing what's starting to grow in our fall-season garden.

Chinese Red Noodle Beans: A Great Find!

Purple beans, yellow beans, grean beans. Now we're happily adding red to our mix.

After last year's happy discovery of asparagus beans (which strangely enough the wasps happily hung out at all season), we opted for another variety of long beans this summer: the Chinese Red Noodle Bean. An heirloom variety, the red long beans easily grew more than 18 inches long, and the vines taller than myself.

The red noodle beans took little more than bamboo poles to climb and water to grow - no extra care or skill required - are still producing in this heat when other plants - my purple bush beans included - aren't.

I found this interesting tip from rareseeds.com: Harvest by thickness not by length, but take caution not to wait so long that the seeds bulge, which means the beans are too fibrous.

If you're looking for ideas to try these with, most recommend a stirfry, often with garlic or chilis, or try this recipe for glazed long beans from the Food Network.

Saving bok choy seeds

Bok choy (or pak choi) is a great discovery for our Chinese food-loving family. The challenge is finding it just right. The stores offer huge, foot-long bok choys; the farmers markets on rare occasion offer small ones with more flavor, but they also aren't bred to sit on your refrigerator shelf.

So this year, we decided to try our hand at growing baby bok choy from seed from one of our heirloom catalogs. The problem? With our rainy spring, we started too late, and they bolted quickly.

It took a lot of research to find out anything about harvesting these seeds. If you're interested in saving seed, you have to wait until these little pods that form turn brown, then you can harvest them.

You'll want to split the pods in half - which you can easily do by hand - and both sides will likely have tiny balls of seeds covered with a small film. Reminds me of "ants on a log." Just peel the film back and dump into a container.

The seeds I've found are very prolific and easy to harvest, though it does take time. It's great if you love bok choy! In fact, once this heat wave passes, I'm excited about a fall planting.

Interested in trying bok choy? I have so many seeds that I'd love to share. Leave a comment if you are interested in some seeds!

Shade vegetable gardening?

Growing vegetables in the shade would be a huge triumph for me. I'm cursed/blessed to have half my yard be shaded due to the direction of my house. Cursed for gardening; blessed because my kids have a shaded area to play outdoors!

And as I continue to push the boundaries of my raised beds, the idea of gardening in the shade has greater appeal. Apparently I'm not alone. From what I'm able to see, the general consensus is leafy vegetables like lettuce, seem to be ok.

Root Simple has tried other veggies with some success:

• New Zealand spinach


• cucumbers


• tomatoes (not as much growth as in the sun, but they are fruiting)


• Swiss chard


• dandelion greens


• raspberry (Really! I had just purchased another bush...)

Colleen Vandereim from organicgardening.about.com puts this rule of thumb forward:

Basically, a good rule to remember is that if you grow a plant for the fruit or
the root, it needs full sun. If you grow it for the leaves, stems, or buds, a
little shade will be just fine.

After checking out this list of shade-tolerant vegetables, maybe I need to rethink my planting for this fall, as my flowers begin to die back. I see possibilities ahead!

First Harvest

The first harvest of spring is something special. That little confirmation that you did something right, watching tiny fingers joyfully pluck radishes from the soil. The satisfaction that you're helping make a meal out of something you grew in your tiny backyard. And hearing that you're "the best cooker ever"--it's just icing on the cake!

Mother's Day Seed Cards - A Preschool-Friendly Project

Mother's Day is fast approaching, and I wanted to do something fun for the grandmothers this year. Being hours away limits my options, however.

Remembering that last year, my daughter wanted to buy her grandmothers flowers, I stumbled on an easy solution that's simple to mail and easy to make: simple watering can seed cards. This 10-minute project was a great solution for my preschooler and kindergartener to help with, as well.

I found a watering can template at Family Fun magazine and printed on some cardstock, let the children color them and then cut out the cans and slots at the top and bottom of the can. There, I inserted a small package of flower bulbs that could be planted in our region through June.

Simple to make, easy to ship, and the grandmas get flowers after all!

We also did a variation of this for the teacher appreciation week next week, which my kindergartener insisted on signing herself.

Linked to Motivation Mondays at alifeinbalance.net.

Friends in low (and high) places: My attempts at companion planting

Companion planting is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those who think too much.

Last year, I tried mapping out what could and shouldn't grow together, based on several books. I thought I'd finally have the answer...until I put it all to paper. It was a mess. In the end, I overplanted and undersucceeded at much.

Fast forward a year, and Jenn at the Green Phone Booth and I are still scratching our heads about the notion of companion planting. But this year, I've opted to stick with what I know has worked for me, and what I actually want to experiment with.

My garden journal showed previous attempts at radishes and carrots, which I remember to be a success. Thank goodness my kids eat both. And if the ground ever dries up and my root plants haven't rotted already, we might have another shot at that.

Tomatoes and herbs? Check. Love growing basil, oregano and garlic along with my tomatoes, and it's worked well in the past. (Not to mention, it's easy for harvesting together!)

And the whole three sisters' thing? Corn, beans, and squash: I'm actually considering trying that this year, given that my new love - asparagus beans - and the thai beans my friend gave me last season wound all throughout my garden late last summer. Climbing up a corn stalk might be worth it, even if we have a tiny lot!

What I've learned? Use advice as a guide, not an absolute given.

Blessing of the Sprouting Seed

We place our trust in God for the big moments in life, but all too often we forget the influence in the little details. Generations prayed to their dieties for help with their harvest, yet in our whirlwind society, where our food comes from often - beyond the doors of the grocery store - doesn't get a second thought. This weekend, the kids and I finally started our first batch of seeds indoors. An attempt at tomatoes, leeks, ground cherries, cucumbers, broccoli and more. While I wasn't initially looking at heavenly help with my feeble attempts at seed starting, I stumbled across this and felt it would be fitting for my family, especially my oldest as she learns more about her faith. I found this prayer in a 50-year-old book, "The Year and Our Children," and thought it was perfect to share with our little green thumbs. This morning, we joined together to share "The Blessing of the Sprouting Seed."

To Thee, O Lord, we cry and pray: Bless this sprouting seed, strengthen it in the gentle movement of soft winds, refresh it with the dew of heaven and let it grow to the full maturity for the good of body and soul.