Thanks Dawn

They sound great. I can't wait for it to grow now, wish I'd planted it earlier LOL.

Chard and Sausage Soup. Hmm, I'll trade you for my wife's recipe for Potato, Leek and Bacon Soup which is my favorite "winter warmer"

I'm very lucky to have a wife who cooks great meals using fresh ingredients (I'm the assistant veggie chopper upper). Checkout operators at the store often say "I bet you make everything from scratch" And she does mostly.

In the summer though she gets a bit of a break from the range as I do the BBQing and she makes great salads.
Should anyone on here like to try some of her recipes I've put a link up to her blog. Check it out cos there's some tasty but simple to make dishes (Shameless Plug)

Mick.

Here is a link that might be useful: Jan's Cooking Blog

Dawn,
Tnx for the chard recipes. I am growing chard for the first time ever. (Bright Lights). The colors are beautiful. My family never grew or ate chard. In Dick Raymond's book (The Joy of Gardening), Dick sed "I just love chard", and now I do too! We've had it twice. The recipe I used was almost a twin of your second one, but the difference was 1/2 cup of white wine sted your vinegar or Lemon Juice.
And I have a question for you. Will recently harvested tomato seeds germinate and grow or do they need to be dried for a longer time.
I have recently purchased some of the cluster tomatoes at grocery store and they didnt taste like air. They really have some taste. My wife and I decided to grow some and see if they will continue on. I know they are probably hybrids, and I know the consequences, but as I always say LIVE AND LEARN.
Tnx, Bill

Hi Bill,

Hope all is going well there!

You're welcome and I hope you enjoy the recipes. I still need to find the soup one and add it.

I think that tomato seeds which have been fermented, dried, and then allowed to sit for only a week or so are supposed to sprout. I know that, if you let them sit and ferment for too many days, they will sprout right there in the fermentation container.

And, lots of people get good results from saving seeds from hybrids. In some cases, their F-2 generation is virtually identical to the F-1 hybrid. It does help if you plant several of the saved seeds because some of them may produce fruit virtually identical to the tomato from which you saved seeds, and others may not.

And, several times some folks have reported (on the Tomato Forum) cutting open good (not rotten) tomatoes and finding sprouted seeds right inside the tomato....I don't remember how or why that happens.

Dawn

I had never realized you could use swiss chard interchangeably with spinach in recipes. I may give that a try!

I'm the only one that will eat spinach at my house. And I get tired of it pretty quickly. Somehow, that lump of green goo in the freezer does not look very appetizing later on in the year, though I do have a good recipe for chicken rolls filled with spinach and cheese that even the guys will eat, and that's how I usually use it. Sometimes I sneak a little into soup but since my mother used to use up all her leftovers that way (even lime jello salad but that's another post), I don't want the fellas to start giving my soup the old "fish-eye" like we always did my mom's.

I just tried something different, and I think I'm going to like the results. I got about five gallons of spinach out of the garden, cleaned it and put it in the dehydrator. After the leaves were dry and crunchy, I broke them up with my hand and poured the results in a jar. I have about a quart of dried spinach now that I plan to use in spinach dip and some of my other recipes. Won't take up any room in the freezer and looks kind of pretty in the jar.

Ilene,

What a great idea! Have you ever tried drying melons or cantaloupes in the dehydrator? It intensifies their flavor and they are so yummy!

Dawn

Well, let's see... I don't think I've dehydrated cantaloupes but I have done watermelon, tomatoes, peaches, bananas, apples and (a back porch project ONLY) onions and garlic. The grandson likes to make jerky. Last year I pureed cantaloupe and poured the puree into popsickle molds. I enjoyed guilt-free frozen snacks for quite awhile, and thought that next time, I might add a banana or two.

I am SOOO enjoying being retired. In the two months so far of retirement, I've dug out tons of Bermuda grass, had two garage sales, and planted lots and lots of things in my raised beds and surrounding areas. I'm in the process of moving my iris bed and that is a big job I would've never tackled while I had a full-time job. It's so muddy out there now that the work is slow going. I'm just preparing the bed now (putting the edging in and getting rid of more Bermuda!) So I have a long way to go. But, I have lost 15 pounds, and my back is giving me a lot less trouble now that I'm not sitting in a chair all day.

Every morning I take my cup of tea out on the back porch and survey all the growing things. It's a real treat to see what has bloomed while I slept. The poppies from seed planted last winter are in bloom now. For the first time in a long time, I have had time to plant flowers as well as veggies. The veggies are looking good, except for the fact that my tomato plants are green and beautiful with lots of flowers that don't seem to be making any fruit.

I still have peaches and apples on the trees, the grape vines that I thought were dead weren't and they and the new ones I planted are flourishing. The finch that lives in the gourd house under the grape arbor sings her L-O-N-G song to me while I'm out there working. And the dog is finally learning not to bark at passers-by after he and I had a little discussion or two. Yeah, there've been disappointments -- losing nearly all my plums to the wind, having to plant again to replace things zapped by late frosts, a wintersowing experiment that worked only somewhat, the dog in a freshly-planted flower bed (barking at passers-by) and now all this rain. But there are things to rejoice about.

Ilene,

It sounds like your retirement is off to a wonderful start and I am so glad you'e enjoying it. I have a little mud, thanks to that 2.6" of rain we got the other day, but our soil should dry pretty quickly since it was bone dry before the rainfall. Your mud seems to be an ongoing thing this year.....unfortunately.

The photo of the poppy is gorgeous. I planted poppies after we bought the land in 1997 and they've reseeded here, there and everywhere (including in the middle of the dirt/gravel road one year). They always surprise me by popping up where least expected.

I was only outside for a couple of hours this morning. We started out with 100% humidity for the third day in a row and once the temperatures heat up a little, it is unbearable outside. I'll go back out at about 3 or 4 o'clock, once the temps. start to drop a little.

The garden looks really good to everyone who sees it, except me. And it isn't that is doesn't look good to me, just that it looks "behind" where it normally is by the end of May. What do I expect? We still had low temps. in the upper 30s and 40s in early May, so it would be odd if the garden wasn't "behind".

I suspect by mid-June the garden will look about the way it usually does in mid-June, except the corn is still going to be behind. Some years I pick early corn by Memorial Day weekend....this year there is no early corn, and the regular corn won't be ready until July. That's the breaks. At least I have corn. Last year's rain wiped most of it out, so I hope we harvest a good crop this year.

There is no rain in our forecast here for a few days and I only have a couple of things left to do in the veggie garden. I have one area of the flower border that needs to be weeded when it dries out a tiny bit more. I'm seeing snakes more and more, but only one rattler, and so far none in the garden that I've seen. The venomous snakes are my least favorite part of living here. I just hate them.

I have one guinea who lost his or her mind and started roosting up high in the chicken coop (which has a high, peaked roof) about 4 o'clock yesteday and still hadn't come down as of a few minutes ago. Finally, I went out with a rake and chased it down off its' perch and out of the coop. It headed straight for the drinking water, and I came back inside. Hopefully, now that it is down, it will go out and eat and do other guinea things like prowling through the tall grass,
flying madly from tree to tree and squawking and yakking like an idiot. I don't suppose we'll ever know why it sat on a perch for 22 hours.

It is never dull around here, rain or shine.

Dawn