Rebecca Norman

I used tetrapaks before, and now that I'm gardening in the US, I'm saving milk cartons for: starting cucurbit seedlings. I like how I can simply dig a hole, see if it's deep enough, then stand the carton in the hole and peel it away from the roots while pushing the soil in around it. This doesn't disturb the infamously delicate cucurbit roots and always works for me.

Burra Maluca wrote:And also establishing things like a chive bed, which will give me green onions to use for many years to come with no extra effort.

I want to give a call out for perennial scallions, sometimes called "welsh onions" or Japanese negi. They are perennial, and in my experience high producing, and they're much more like green onions than chives are. I mean, I grow and use both.

I find wintercress, Barbarea vulgaris, to be horribly bitter when raw (but tasty cooked) while a friend of mine insists that it just tastes sweet to him.

Haha, I only just tasted bittercress for the first time a few days ago and it was delicious, not bitter to me at all! It tastes like arugula (rocket) when it's just right and not spicy at all. (And BTW arugula was rarely too spicy/hot when I grew it in the high desert. Go figure!)

I see repeated allegations that modern people are just soft and don't like bitter food. That's not what's happening with me. I do like some bitter foods -- for example I love bitter gourd and am planning to grow it this year. And that's really very bitter. And I like some other bitter vegetables. So that's not why I didn't like the specific bitterness of this plant.

And then some people in this thread say their Good King Henry is not bitter. I wonder if maybe in the high desert environment I was growing it in, it was more bitter than usual.

Can someone who is growing and liking Good King Henry post a photo of the "shoots" that come up in the spring? When I grew it, there were no shoots but a rosette. I remain confused about the usefulness of this plant!

I think it looks stretched out and etiolated, trying to find light.

I grew it for a couple of seasons but as others mentioned, I found something slightly unpleasant in the taste. To me it was kind of a metallic taste or something. Not fully unpleasant but not really nice. Sometimes boiling it and discarding the water before cooking it with oil and onions etc helped and it came out fine, and sometimes even that didn't make it good. Maybe once it starts forming those little flower buds, flowers or seeds, its flavor goes that way?

I grew it in the ground in a greenhouse, and it was very productive. In winter it would die back to the ground or close, but in spring it would rebound. And yes, the older leaves turned yellow and fell off on their own as part of the normal growth habit.

I've used the baking soda trick with old beans and it really works. I don't add it while soaking -- I've always added after I tried cooking the beans, but after the normal amount of time cooking they hadn't softened. I added a little baking soda and it fizzed impressively, indicating the beans had gone acid. Stirred that in and added a little more, and if it still fizzed, I stirred it in and added a tiny bit more. Then after a little more boiling the beans softened. I've done this in a couple different houses. I add lemon juice or tomato afterwards to counteract the baking soda flavor, and they are fine.

Rebecca, have you ever done canning? It's really easy to can fruits that are acidic, because generally they only require water-bath processing, not pressure-canning. It's really easy to can juice or puree, and then they are shelf stable. Months later you can open one and add a little to water to flavor it.

The Humanure Handbook is an amazingly useful reference book for composting toilets, even if you are not using its bucket system.

The book recommends using sawdust that has been left to be damp and weather for at least a few months. Rougher things like wood chips or shavings leave gaps between them that small flies can climb through, whereas sawdust makes a tighter layer, but is still light and quickly decomposed.

I mix coffee grounds from a cafe with sacks of dry sawdust and water the sacks till damp. They heat up within a day, stay warm for a couple weeks, and then cool down. The resulting cover materials is a silvery grey weathered wood colored sawdust, pleasant smelling. Good stuff.

If peat moss is giving you flies, try fine sawdust. If it's too dry it rolls off and doesn't make a good seal, so it's better to have it predampened and preweathered.

I've ground various different dried fruits and vegetables in an Indian "Mixer-Grinder" which as far as I can tell is the same as what is called a blender (countertop blender) in the US. Indian ones usually have a choice of 3 different jars, all stainless steel, with slightly different blades. They are generally in the range of 1000 - 1400 W.

The key has always been to have the fruit or vegetable bone dry. If it's still got a little leatheryness to it, it won't grind to a powder, but if it's absolutely brittle dry, it will.

Powdered dried fruits like apricots and tomatoes run the risk of absorbing humidity from the air and then glomming into a big hard lump which is very hard to break up again.

Powdered apricots or apples can be sprinkled right onto buttered toast as an instant jam and are very delicious.

Powdered tomatoes are incredibly delicious, and form an instant puree or paste.

Powdered eggplant is sweet, unexpectedly so. But it's not super useful. I thought I'd use it to thicken things but somehow I never needed to.