Ever wondered what is the best way to cook different kinds of potatoes? Russets, fingerlings, white potatoes, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, and blue potatoes. Here’s a guide to potato varieties and how to use them best.
Homemade biscotti are nothing like the dried-out versions you find in coffee shops. These twice-baked Italian cookies are crisp, nutty, and eminently delectable. Make these biscotti with local hazelnuts or use pecans for even richer flavour.
Wondering how to grow a healthy garden in the face of weather extremes? Protect your plants using microclimates. Here are 13 easy ways to protect plants from wind, rain, cold, heat, and drought.
Cold frames protect vegetables from cold, wind, rain and frost, and extend the growing season.
Adapting your growing area to protect young plants from wind, rain, cold, heat, and drought is key to a successful garden. You can do this by creating microclimates—specially designed areas in your garden that offer protection from the elements, so that your plants can thrive.
Microclimates are small areas that have different growing conditions from the surrounding region. These spaces can shelter plants and seedlings that are not strong enough to survive weather extremes. For example, a microclimate such as a wind buffer or a sun trap (a space that captures heat and sunlight) can shelter plants from cold. In drought conditions, a cool microclimate, such as the area under a tree canopy or an umbrella, can shade the plants beneath it and retain water to minimize heat stress.
As climate change brings more weather extremes, it is more important than ever to build microclimates into your garden. The predictable weather patterns we knew and counted on are becoming unpredictable. One week the weather may be hot and sunny—perfect for tomato transplants. The next week a cold wind pushes over young plants and chills their roots. When you create microclimate shelter areas in your garden, you help plants not only survive, but flourish during unpredictable weather.
A set of screens can simplify the task of cleaning barley seed.
Gardeners who save seed, or grow and harvest grains, know that separating seeds from their pods or husks can be a time-consuming job. While large industrial growers use machines to thresh and winnow seed crops, home seed savers can look to a number of simpler tools to accomplish the task. Once cleaned, seeds stored in moisture-proof containers can last for several years.
Here are six devices for separating seeds from debris and chaff:
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Kohlrabi is a fast-growing member of the cabbage family with an edible bulb.
With its tentacle-shaped leaves and green or purple bulbs, you might think it’s an alien life form. It is, in fact, kohlrabi, a cool-weather brassica that grows abundantly in South Coast British Columbia and provides a crisp, nutritious addition to salads and stir-frys.
Available in British Columbia from June to November, kohlrabi is named for the German kohl (cabbage) and rabi (turnip), which is more or less how it looks—somewhere between a cabbage and a turnip.
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Ripe tomatoes bring a sweet, sharp tang to this simple side dish. Broiled with virgin olive oil, white wine and parmesan, stuffed tomatoes are great as a vegetarian entrée or a side for grilled meat or fish.
Beneficial insects can be a gardener’s best resource for protecting crops against destructive pests. Beneficials include pollinators, predators and parasites. By attracting a large enough population of helpful bugs to counteract plant damaging insects, you can keep your garden healthy using nature’s method of pest control. Planting flowers and herbs that build habitat for beneficial insects also helps make your garden resilient to climate change.
RECIPE
If you want to add more plant-based protein foods to your diet, green pea dip is a simple, nutritious choice. This fresh, light dip is an alternative to chickpea hummus, and is high in protein, minerals and vitamins.
Green pea dip makes a good appetizer or a lunch spread, and is a stand-out at dinner parties with its amazing bright colour.
You can make green pea dip with frozen peas, or with fresh shelled peas from the garden. If using fresh, it takes about three pounds of peas in the pod to produce three cups of shelled peas.
Peas, once out of their pods, begin to lose their natural sweetness and become more starchy. So, unless you use them just after shelling, they will lose some of their sweet flavour. Luckily, because frozen peas are quickly chilled just after shelling, they retain their natural sugars and work perfectly in this recipe.
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Study the weeds in your garden and you can learn a lot about the soil. Although we’ve been trained to regard weeds as a nuisance, they actually offer many benefits to gardeners and farmers. Not only can they tell you about the condition of your soil, but they can also add nutrients, minerals and humus to your growing area, serve as companion plants, and attract pollinators to the garden when other flowers are not yet in bloom.
Is eating organic food better for your health? Does it have more nutrients than conventional food? A landmark analysis of organic vs. conventionally grown food provides answers.
No surprise, but good news. A comprehensive study from Newcastle University confirms that organic food is better for you and the world. Analyzing 343 studies on the differences between conventional and organic crops, the science team found that organic foods have more healthy antioxidants and have dramatically lower levels of toxic metals and pesticides than conventionally grown crops.
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By growing open-pollinated plants and saving seeds, you’ll always have enough for next year’s garden.
Seed shortages and rising food prices have generated huge demand for backyard gardens. Unfortunately for gardeners, this need collides with a rapidly consolidating seed industry. Dominated by a few global companies, seed corporations are determined to substitute patented seeds, which must be repurchased each year, for open-pollinated seeds, which gardeners can regrow indefinitely.
As gardeners, you can counter this trend by planting heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, and saving your seeds. This does more than simply save you the cost of buying new seeds each year—it builds diversity and resilience in the environment and our food supply.
Starting a seed-saving garden is easy and depends on two things: 1) willingness to let your plants go to seed, rather than tidy up as soon as they bear fruit, and 2) choosing heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. Open-pollinated plants grow true to type, which means that (unlike hybrids) their seeds produce the same kind of plant as the parent. By selecting seeds from plants with the best flavour, size or other desired characteristics, you can create a garden most suited to your tastes and microclimate.
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