life on garden time
Some tastes are summer in your mouth. This is one of them. When the weather gets gloomy, and the great overcast sky of Seattle forms a continuous ombrey of silver-darkening-to-slate with the damp pavement, this is the flavor that recalls sun on your neck and trips to the lake. This is also the recipe that [Continue Reading...]
This is one of those dishes that, as a caterer, I could charge $3 per piece for and people would happily pay it. Perfectly fresh figs topped with homemade fresh lemon ricotta and sprigs of organic spearmint. Can’t you just hear the cash draining from wallets everywhere? Actually, figs are a beast to work with [Continue Reading...]
Do you need pectin to make jam? I used to think so. I followed the recipe on the inside of the pectin box slavishly for 7 years before I broke free of the pectin bonds. Every year, my strawberry jam tasted exactly like the strawberry jam of everyone else who wore the Sure-Jell shackles. The [Continue Reading...]
It’s unofficial Preserve Week here at Northwest Edible Life. I know because my floor is sticky with canning syrup and my refrigerator smells like pickle brine. It’s hard for me to think of anything else but putting food by right now, so I’m going to be talking jams and pickles all week long. I hope [Continue Reading...]
Piles of ripening, and occasionally over-ripened, fruit, such as have been gracing my kitchen for about the last six weeks, bring with them fruit flies. Man I hate those little bastards. Fruit flies just…appear. And once you have some of them calling your kitchen or your peaches or your compost home, they will swell to disgusting proportions [Continue Reading...]
You know how people say “easy as pie,” when something couldn’t be simpler? Well, sorry pie, there is something simpler, and tastier: the galette. Oh, sure, you might argue that a galette is just a French pie, and in a way you’d be right. But this flat, simple, rustic (galettes are always described as rustic, which I find [Continue Reading...]
The whole idea behind the Backyard Orchard Culture method is to prune trees so that they produce an extended harvest of manageable quantities of fresh fruit rather than one really big harvest all at once. This is achieved by planting trees with different ripening times and keeping them small through aggressive but thoughtful pruning that includes annual summer [Continue Reading...]
About a month ago, I talked about our plans to attempt the high-density fruit growing method called Backyard Orchard Culture. Well, plans have become reality and the mini-orchard is planted! A few weeks ago our bare-root trees came from Raintree Nursery. A box arrived that was about the size of me. I was very excited to see the [Continue Reading...]
This weekend has been a total whirlwind. We’ve been building a coop for our new chickens and planting fruit trees like crazy. I had hoped that I’d have a nice, wrapped-up project to write about for Monday morning, but the truth is, as I write this post at Sunday at 10 pm, none of our [Continue Reading...]
I have struggled for a few years with a desire to have more fruit trees than my 1/3 acre lot can accomodate. A third-acre is actually pretty big by urban standards, but only one-quarter of our property is given over to edibles. The house, driveway, paths, shady areas and kid’s play area (aka lawn) take [Continue Reading...]
I went back to Sky for another Saturday of fruit tree education. Bill Davis of the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation took point and was assisted by Dan Vorhis of Sky (you may remember him from last weeks pruning class). The lecture portion of this class wasn’t as rewarding as the pruning class last week. [Continue Reading...]
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