Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Garden Produce and A REAL Mushroom


Neighbor Ronda brings her gorgeous produce around the neighborhood on early weekend mornings.

What colorful, tasty organic vegetables! I went back later and picked up 8 cups (packed!) of basil and arugula leaves and made four more batches of pesto sauce to freeze. Ronda suggested making some arugula pesto with added lemon juice, and it was delicious!

Ronda also inspired me to try painting some purple eggplant with her successful gardening efforts.

This is a picture of our back patio Sunday evening.

Is this some amazing mushroom?

Actually, the one on the left sprung up spontaneously from a potted plant of succulents and petunias. The one on the the right is ceramic and was purchased from a local nursery.

Can anyone tell me the variety of the little brown mushroom?

Monday, August 4, 2008

Stepping Stones Personalized

Family Crafts was the informative internet source I used for a quick tutorial on how to make stepping stones. If you look into making stones for your garden , you will find many resources. Another good tutorial can be found at The How-To Site.

A few summers ago, I made six stones from one bag of quick drying concrete and some dye, and they are still holding up well in our garden. I won't go into specific details of how to make the stepping stones, as the references will give you all that information. However, two quick notes from experience: 1) large plastic planter saucers heavily slathered with Vaseline are excellent for molding concrete; 2) do not use wooden items for embedding. (And remember to date your stones, so that archeologists in later years will know exactly when we Coloradans were busy stone building.)

Middle school friend Cassidy helped make eight more stepping stones from one 60 lb. bag of Quikrete, water, and one bottle of red concrete dye. Each stone is personalized in some unique way with plastic buttons and trinkets, ceramic flat pieces of found art, keyrings picked up from various vacations, foreign coins, pieces of colored glass, Scrabble tiles, glass beads and discarded jewelry embedded into the concrete. We liked the results. Cassidy will further color some of her stones with latex paints after the Quikrete dries completely.

Often, stones have a layer of chicken wire for added strength, although these stones are not likely to break into pieces. Cassidy and I did not bother to put wire reinforcement in the middle of our stones since they are for decoration, not pathways.

Cassidy at work and with completed stones:


For half a morning's time devoted to this project, and with a little help from a young friend, our gardens will soon welcome these new stepping stones.


Now it is time to start collecting objects again to make even MORE garden delights.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Making Pesto to Freeze

As the gardener of six little struggling basil plants, I could hardly wait to harvest some of the herb to make pesto.

A few years ago, a friend had given me some frozen pesto sauce (delicious!) and I recall her saying to add cheese and butter to it after thawing and before using it.

That thought set me on a quest for a pesto recipe specifically for freezing purposes. This is where I found one: Pesto for Freezing (Food Network).

Using that recipe, but halving the ingredients because the basil is as precious as hen's teeth, and there was not two cups full yet available from the plants, here is a picture of the pesto in process.

And the bottom picture shows the miserly amount gleaned from those six basil plants, with added garlic, spices, olive oil and pine nuts.

So, basically, the only difference in preparing pesto sauce for consumption in the future by means of freezing is:

1: add just some of the olive oil to the blender, reserving the remainder for a "topping" in the freezer container (to retain a layer to help preserve it);
2: add the Italian cheese AFTER the pesto is thawed

Now we have about 3/4 of a cup of prepared pesto which will be enjoyable when the cold winds blow.

Hopefully, those basil plants will keep producing leaves, and there may be enough pesto by the end of the summer for several meals.