Forks in the Dirt

Find your new favorite by comparing twelve tomato varieties with me.

Did you know that tomatoes have been bred for different purposes for centuries?

Some are perfect for popping in your mouth, like cherry tomatoes. Some are meant to balance out that bacon on a BLT, like the huge heirloom slicers. And some are best for making sauce, like the thick and meaty paste tomatoes. And then there’s a million variations in between!

With over 10,000 known tomato varieties this is of course a very limited list, but also based on my nearly 20 years of growing tomatoes in the north.

Nothing says fresh summer flavors more than Green Goddess dressing!

Grabbing handfuls of all the herbs and creating a magically delicious while nutrient dense topping for things from salads, to chips and sweet potato fries couldn’t be easier. It is literally dump, blend, and pour (or dip).

Let’s make it easy to preserve your harvest! Harvesting and eating from our garden is what we work so hard for. And there’s nothing like those sun warmed tomatoes, or is there? What about homemade tomato soup in February, or strawberry jam in January?

Being able to preserve your harvests to enjoy longer somehow tastes + feels even better. It also feels like the step between being a gardener and a modern day homesteader. Let’s get you capturing those flavors to savor throughout the seasons!

Many of us are getting back into preserving our own food for so many reasons—the better nutrition, reducing food waste and our carbon foot print, more control of ingredients. Not to mention most of these ways are easy and a great way to feel more connected to our food!

We love bird baths AND we love our huge Rhubarb leaves—so we decided to combine them into this easy DIY Cement Rhubarb leaf bird bath!

We also had gigantic leaves and a partial bag of concrete at the same time as a broken bird bath bowl. So this was a project begging to be done!

This is DIY project is truly easy enough for the kids to help with. There’s a little prep, some fast action while pouring the cement onto the leaf, then patience while waiting to dry. The only fussy part is removing any stuck leaf material by scrubbing off the cement after it has set. From start to finish, ours took a few days to complete- and will last years!

Let’s get you growing rhubarb!

Rhubarb combines some serious garden nostalgia with punchy modern takes on how we eat it. There’s so much to love about this perennial plant, so let’s dig right in!

• First off, rhubarb is a vegetable, not a fruit, even though we treat it like one.
• Second, it was originally cultivated in the far east over 2,000 years ago and used medicinally, for cleansing the body, stomach issues and reducing fever.
• Thirdly, only eat the stalk. The leaves are toxic and contain oxalic acid, which can build up in the kidneys and cause kidney stones and even failure.

These local plant sales will start your garden off right! Good for your garden, the pollinators, your harvests and the community.

Plants grown for these sales are not treated with Neonicotinoid pesticides, are non-GMO, locally raised by experts- and the sales directly benefit some great gardening programs.

Listed in Chronological order- ladies and gentlemen, save these dates!

Local Plant Sales

Choosing local flowers can have as big an environmental impact as the food we buy!

With Mother’s Day coming up – which accounts for about 25% of all cut flower sales in the U.S. annually, I thought it was time to dig deeper into the dirty side of floriculture and look into the growing trend of local flowers…

Did you know that cut flowers are one of the biggest offenders when it comes to being sprayed with synthetic pesticides and herbicides. And with a nearly $60 billion industry in the U.S., Americans bring a lot of those sprayed blooms home and then seat themselves around them for meals…