Gardenfork's Posts - The Green House

My good friend Bobby is a professional window glazier. In this episode Bob shows us the right way to remove the old glazing compound and apply new compound. I ve wrestled with this for years and Bob shows how to do it easily. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media

We had dinner at Chris and Cheryl s house on Thanksgiving. Amazing food made by amazing people. All we had to do is show up. Nice. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media Player

Last week we visited with Patty Hulse at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, who showed us the cold frames they built and use throughout the winter. Very nice. Thanks to my friend Tony, ( the man who knits ) for helping with the camera. An episode on knitting is in the works. Click here for Quicktime Click here for iTunes Click here for Windows

While trolling the web a while back I came across Jo s food blog, Amuse Bouche, which i think is very well written. I read Jo s recipe for Chicken Vesuvio and decided to try it, as it used a dutch oven, my favorite kitchen pot. I did change up the recipe a bit, and of course, forgot ingredients, and also suggested, wrongly, that Jo lives in the midwest. In other words, normal behavior for eric. click here to play in Quicktime click here to play in Windows Media Player

I love cornbread, and I m always looking for the ultimate cornbread recipe. Here we pit Mark Bittman s recipe against an organic cornbread mix. Have a favorite cornbread recipe? Send it in, we ll try some more cornbreads soon. click here for QuickTime click here for Windows Media

We ve already had 2 frosts here, and I wanted to continue the salad green season. In this episode we build a cold frame out of easily found materials. The vent I use on one end of the cold frame is available from Charlie s Greenhouse, I ve also seen them in the big home improvement stores, they are used to vent crawlspaces. Sheperd Ogden has a good book: Four-Season Harvest, that goes into great detail about growing thru the winter, he should know, he lives in Vermont. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media Player

White beans, be they navy beans, yankee beans, great northen beans, are great in soup. This is my really simple fast recipe for white beans. This can be cooked with canned beans or dry beans. Dry beans take longer, but if you have time, great. I use a pressure cooker to cook my dry beans. Being a strong proponent of the KISS [keep it simple stupid] theory of life, this soup is a charter member. Beans, onions, garlic, olive oil - cook and you are done. The version we do here is dressed up a bit with cheese rinds and oregano, but again, it doesn t need this to taste great on a fall evening. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media White Bean Soup Bag of White Beans or a large can of beans 1 onion, chopped Chopped Garlic Options: Chicken or vegetable stock Cheese rinds Oregano, Marjoram, Rosemary, Sage Pesto If you have dry beans, cook them and save the cooking water. Saute the onion until golden clear. Add the beans, and bring to a simmer. If desired, add seasonings and cheese rinds. If you have the time, allow the beans to simmer so the flavorings work thru the soup. If not, after 10 minutes, its done. For a decadent flourish, add a splash of olive oil or pesto to each bowl just before serving.

Its not hard at all to change the disc brakes and rotors on most cars. Here s how I did it on my Dodge Caravan. Use this video as a intial introduction. Consult your car s repair manual for the exact procedure for your vehicle. Be sure to jack up your car on the frame and to use jackstands. Also be careful of brake dust, as its not healthy to breathe. About.com has some good instructions as well on replacing your disc brakes. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media

OK, one here for the fork part of garden + fork. Another recipe from Jamie Oliver s Happy Days with the Naked Chef. Real simple to make, and in the time it takes to bring the water to boil and cook the pasta, you are finished. Anchovies have become a favorite in our house. I have to admit I had an aversion to them for years, but they are great, and healthy for you too. They cook down into little bits of nothing and give off a great flavor. We are improving on the lighting in the kitchen, so you can at least see my face in most of this episode. More improvements coming. click here for QuickTime click here for Windows Media Player A viewer suggested we ask you all what you d like to see us cook. Send us an email by clicking on the link on the left side of the page, tell us what to cook.

Hostas are ubiquitous in our area. They do well in shade, and we have plenty with all the tall trees around us. These plants are very easy to transplant, so if you have some in one area and would like to have more in another, watch how we do it. I ve traded hostas with several neighbors, I m partial to the large leafed blue-green varieties. You can check out more info at the American Hosta Society. Slugs love hostas, so do deer. We don t have a large numbers of either one, thankfully. click here for QuickTime click here for Windows Media Player

OK, its pretty obvious that I am not always the expert, knowing just enough to be dangerous can be problematic. Take my knowledge of potato pests as an example. I learned a lot about potatoes this summer: not to always accept what seems like the obvious answer. Jumping up and down about Colorado Potato Beetles before looking at all the clues, in hindsight, was not the smartest idea. This episode spans the summer, so I cut it into two parts for easier downloading. Potato Saga Part 1 Potato Saga Part 2 Potato Saga Part 1 Potato Saga Part 2 Any hints on what caused the leaf wilt, please post a comment. Thanks.

Nothing like coming up to the house to find large portions of your tomato plants stripped of their leaves. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media File The Tomato Hornworm is the caterpillar of the Five Spotted Hawk Moth, a relatively non-descript moth, but in its caterpillar stage wreaks havoc on tomatoes. In the video I talk about the eggs of the parastic wasp, then I realized later the white protrusions from the caterpillar are the cocoons of the braconid wasp, not its eggs, which is even better, as soon they will hatch and parasitize more Hornworms. If you want the whole insect story, check out the Tomato Hornworm page at Wikipedia. I have heard about cardboard collars one can put around a young tomato plant to prevent the Hornworms from crawling up the stem. Another way, according to Wikipedia, to reduce the resident population is to rototill the garden, as this will destroy hornworm pupae in the soil.

The boss gave me a new cookbook: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, by Jamie Oliver, and I found a recipe for Pork Filets over Rhubarb. This interested me because i ve never seen rhubarb used in such a way before. So this merited a try. We re going to have to improve the lighting in the kitchen up at the house, as once again the video is pretty dark. I contemplated re-shooting the whole thing, but i thought it wouldn t be as fun on a re-shoot. And the whole idea here is low-tech, simple stuff. I promise the next kitchen shoot will be better. Click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media File

Rhubarb is a quintessential part of New England summers. It grows so well some consider it a weed. Many will recall an aunt or grandmother who cans up rhubarb jelly/jam. I like it, especially at its simplest, as a crisp or cobbler. I cooked this up by myself so please appreciate the dexterous one handed camera work and flattering close up photography of myself. Mark Bittman in the NY Times had a recipe recently for rhubarb soup, which we may try here as well. click here to watch the video in QuickTime click here for wmv The best place to get more info on rhubarb is The Rhubarb Compendium, a website run by a guy named Dan. I d be interested in hearing from readers with their rhubarb musings and recipes.

You can eat what most people call a weed. Dandelion. Wikipedia has some good info on dandelion, though I don t agree you have to always cook it down before eating. There are plenty of us who like it raw. If you like mustard greens, you ll like dandelion. You can grow it in your garden, it will last longer into the summer than most any other green. I think the horticultural version is milder, and I prefer the wild version. I was walking around the barn this weekend looking for dandelion, there is still a bunch of it around depsite the record heat wave. Don t harvest it from roadside areas or where you dog(s) like to hang out. 10-4? click here for QuickTime Click here for Windows Media

You can eat what most people call a weed. Dandelion. click here for QuickTime click here for wmv Wikipedia has some good info on dandelion, as well as how to cook it. I don t agree that you always have to boil dandelion before eating it. In a salad with other strong ingredients, it holds its own just fine.

Until the heat of summer knocks them down, loose leaf lettuce is one of those low maintenance pleasures of gardening. There are a ton of varieties of lettuces/salad greens (which we ll go into in future episodes) right now we are growing a bunch of Deer Tongue and Antares, both from Fedco. Loose leaf lettuces can be harvested and then they grow again. All you do is cut the lettuce about an inch above the soil line with a scissors, and it will grow back. If you plant a few rows every two weeks, you can get lettuce for most of the growing season. With row covers or cold frames, you can harvest lettuce almost year round. Eliot Coleman, in his book, the Four Season Harvest, writes at length on how to prolong your lettuce growing season. Robin Follette writes about meeting Eliot Coleman in her Farm Garden blog click here for QuickTime click here for .wmv

Rhubarb is a quintessential part of New England summers. It grows so well some consider it a weed. Many will recall an aunt or grandmother who cans up rhubarb jelly/jam. I like it, especially at its simplest, as a crisp or cobbler. I cooked this up by myself so please appreciate the dexterous one handed camera work and flattering close up photography of myself. Mark Bittman in the NY Times had a recipe recently for rhubarb soup, which we may try here as well. click here to watch the video  The best place to get more info on rhubarb is The Rhubarb Compendium, a website run by a guy named Dan. I d be interested in hearing from readers with their rhubarb musings and recipes.

If you don t know that these are, you will soon. They taste great, and are easy to cook. click here for QuickTime click here for wmv If you want to order seed garlic to plant this fall, I suggest Filaree Farm. They pack your shipping box with the local paper, and its interesting to read a local paper from somewhere else. We ll have an episode later this summer on planting garlic.

I have a small patch of potatoes this year, and here we ll show you how I hilled them. Most of the new potatoes that grow from the seed potatoes will grow above the level of the planted seed, so you have to either plant the seed potatoes in a deep trench that you fill in, or hill up soil or mulch above the soil line. click here for QuickTime        Click here for .wmv In this episode we talk about Colorado Potatoe Beetles, and the spray mentioned is called Novodor and is available from Fedco. You can also get floating row fabric and seed potatoes from Fedco. Additional information from the University of Georgia: Potato Production in the Home Garden or this site http://www.thegardenhelper.com/potato.html

Bill is something of a puttanesca expert, so when I started making it, naturally there were comparisons. My in-laws were up at the house for the weekend, and its pouring down rain the whole time. Joan requested this dish, so I gave the camera to Bill and started cooking. We had already started drinking wine (blame the consant rain and the presence of my father-in-law), hence we neglected to turn up the lights for the camera, so the first part of the episode is a bit dark. You would expect more from guys who make their living doing this, but no. I m blaming the wine. click here for QuickTime click here for .wmv  After cooking this dinner, I was thinking about the debate of straining the tomatoes, and I think, if you have the time, you should not drain them, as you lose a lot of flavor by draining the liquid. Instead, take the time to cook the sauce down, thus concentrating the tomato flavor. I based my version of puttanesca on one from Mark Bittman, but with regard to the amount of each ingredient, it all depends on what you like. Here is the basic outline: Cook some anchovies and garlic in olive oil Add canned whole tomatoes Cook down sauce Add chopped olives - oil cured are best- capers, and oregano (or italian seasoning mix) cook for a few minutes more. Bill prefers this served on rigatoni pasta. The beauty of this dish, aside from the great flavor, is that all the ingredients can be stored in the cupboard forever. All the ingredients are in cans (unless you want the oil cured olives, Bill) If anyone has other suggestions for how to keep pasta warm without it sticking together, please leave a comment. Thanks, eric.