Farmer Dollissa

at Sneer HQ

recent posts

about

Bio Goes Here

  • Back in Action, Basil Edition

    4 kinds of basil
    • Sweet basil
    • Mammoth basil
    • Spicy globe basil
    • Thai basil

    Last year and early this season I tried to grow basil from seed. Although they’d sprout, they never got much bigger, and didn’t transplant well.

    We bought some sweet basil plants this year. This month, we went to our local garden store for the first time, Fedder’s Feed and Seed. They had an herb sale and we bought 3 new basil varieties.

    I cooked up some basil chicken with the sweet basil and spicy basil. It was amazing! I’m saving the thai basil I picked for another meal, it smells very strongly of licorice.

    To preserve the basil, I picked it, put it in an ice cube tray, then added olive oil. It becomes a butter-like consistency and I can just toss the cubes into the pan when cooking.

  • Fall and Winter, At Once

    Our garden boxes, flowers, herbs, and veggies are covered in snow. Don’t make me go out there!

  • The Flowers

    One of the highlights of the garden is our pollinator garden box. It features lots of butterfly, bee, and bird-friendly plants. You can almost always walk right over to it and see at least one butterfly and a few bees. It’s where most of our flowers are, but we have a few more scattered around.

    • A marigold, we think!
    • Mums
    • Some little flowers
    • Butterfly bush
    • The pollinator garden
    • Mums
    • Marigolds
    • Marigolds galore
    • Mums
    • A lone marigold
    • Flowers in different beds

  • Backyard Compost Fun

    After a friend of ours wrote a great book, Composting for a New Generation, we obviously wanted to get started right away. While we didn’t yet get worms for under our sinks like we threatened, we’ve got some more classic compost set up in our yard and going strong.

    Fancy Compost Setup

    We bring out all of our coffee grounds, vegetable cuttings, and egg shells to the big black bin we have. The lid unscrews and we move aside our brown matter (usually dry leaves, sometimes some ripped up newsprint) to toss our new stuff in. Then we cover it back up and poke some holes with a pitchfork. Sometimes we also throw in our unsuccessful crops, like many of our overripe cucumbers and mouse-eaten tomatoes.

    • The bins
    • Dried leaves and twigs
    • Compost fodder

    So far, we have at least a few inches of dark happy soil that looks delicious and nutritious to our plants. We haven’t used any yet since winter is on its way, so we’ll probably use it all in Spring for all of our new vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

    We are only using the black bin right now, but once we get more into it we’ll use both. I like the spinning kind, but we haven’t need it yet.

  • Do the Nast(urtium)

    Soon, this will all be a gigantic salad. Or an equally gigantic nasturtium pesto.

  • First Fall Vegetable

    I picked this little guy on October 17. Radishes are full of nutritious goodness and help with all sorts of ailments, apparently. I’ll never know because we don’t eat them. Well, not yet.

    We will figure out some tasty way to eat them, maybe in a soup? In any case, this is the first vegetable we’ve grown by sowing the seed directly in the ground outside. I’m so glad they are all growing! There are 4 or 5 left.

  • Garden Fashion – Socks Over Pants

    These are my favorite sneakers and they are now reserved only for gardening (they are pretty dirty). Since we don’t use any pesticides, and because nature hates us just a little bit, we have lots of bug friends and foes in our garden.

    Stylishly tucking my pants into my socks keeps me relatively safe from mosquitos and other bitey bois.

  • No More 2018 Tomatoes

    • freshly picked red tomatoes and a red Jalapeno pepper
    • freshly picked green and red tomatoes in different sizes

    In the past week it’s gone from hot and sunny splendor to frost temperatures at night and today, a windstorm. I probably won’t have any ripe tomatoes anymore this season to pick, so here’s some pictures of our harvest from this summer.

    We grew large tomatoes, grape tomatoes, and jalapeño peppers. We aren’t really big fans of spicy food, but the pepper plant is still doing great! I used the green tomatoes to make fried green tomatoes for the household and a few guests (we fried some of the red grape tomatoes too!). We used the ripe red tomatoes for a few different pastas and soups.

  • Growing Sprouts – First Batch

    Growing Sprouts – First Batch

    We started growing sprouts in our kitchen downstairs. We ordered a variety pack of blends on Amazon from a place adorably named Sprout House. We started with 4 of the blends about 4 days ago, on 9/17. With some friends, we each chose one blend to start and started soaking them. We’ve watered them once or twice a day since then (we are supposed to do it a little more, woops!) and the largest seeds are becoming pretty big sprouts already.
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started