Edible Houseplants
A year or so ago I read Growing Tasty Tropical Plants in Any Home, Anywhere: (like lemons, limes, citrons, grapefruit, kumquats, sunquats, tahitian oranges, barbados … black pepper, cinnamon, vanilla, and more…)
What did I get? A black fig, dwarf avocado, dwarf banana, dwarf mango, meyer lemon and a dwarf guava.
I potted up most of them already, the banana I might plant in the back garden and dig it up this fall. Hopefully I’m on my way to producing delicious tropical fruit in my windowsills. I’ll keep you posted on how they do.
Do you grow any edible houseplants?
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So Long Carpet
We’ve been wanting to get rid of the living room carpet since we moved in. Carpet isn’t among my favorite things, I dislike that it can’t be cleaned. And by cleaned, I mean scrubbed and mopped. I suppose you can get a carpet cleaner, but that doesn’t get all the stuff out that falls down below the padding. Even though we wanted to get rid of the carpet, it wasn’t on the to-do list until later.
We woke up yesterday to find that Lucy had gotten sick sometime in the night. The carpet bore the brunt of it. Thus, the carpet was ripped out, yesterday.
This is exactly why I don’t like carpet, when we pulled up the padding this is what was underneath. It makes me cough just thinking about it. No doubt getting rid of this carpet will help a little with the dust problem here in this house. Underneath there is subfloor that has been sanded, stained and sealed. It’s actually much better than the carpet, and better than what we thought we’d find underneath. We’re still undecided as to what to do for flooring in here, most likely wood, but we may just leave the floor as is for a while.
What’s your favorite floor covering?
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MMMMMM – Guacamole
Last Saturday I talked about the box of avocados we purchased from a small farm in California. Since we have 18 avocados to eat we’ll be eating them for every meal. The first one was ripe yesterday, perfect for Cinco de Mayo! I made guacamole and we had it in our omelets.
My guacamole recipe is simple: 1 mashed avocado, 1 diced jalapeño (right now I’m using fire roasted pickled jalapeños I made this summer, here’s my recipe for those), 1 Tablespoon of Greek yogurt (this adds probiotics and helps keep the guac from turning brown), juice of one half lime, salt and pepper to taste. I also often add a few teaspoons of olive oil to help the guac maintain it’s green color and stop oxidation, it also adds to the smooth texture.
Mr Chiots used to dislike avocados very much, he wouldn’t eat them at all. Whenever we’d eat at Chipotle I’d order guacamole. He’d try a little each time and soon enough he was ordering his own little tub of it for his burrito. Now he’ll polish off a half an avocado for breakfast.
Last night for dinner we had fajitas with guacamole. This morning we’ll probably have sliced guacamole with our eggs. I’m trying to freeze some guacamole to see how it thaws. If that works I’ll have another box of avocados on the way to stock the freezer.
What’s your favorite way to eat avocados – or do you not like them?
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Celebrating Our Pigs
Yesterday we celebrated Easter with our neighbors and their family. Both of our families are a long ways away in Ohio, so we are thankful to be included in their celebration. This year, we provided the ham, which came from one of our pigs.
Since we slaughtered them ourselves here on the farm, I was in charge of curing the hams myself, which was a little scary to say the last. I used the Cider Cured Ham recipe from the The River Cottage Meat Book. Our hams all weighed in at 25lbs or higher (our scale only went to 25 lbs and some topped it off).
It’s been hanging on our back porch since I took it out of the brine back in January (one went into the freezer for later). We took it out and boiled it on Saturday night for a few hours to reduce the saltiness, then we coated it with brown sugar and cider reduction and hot smoked it for 4 hours with apple and cherry wood. Needless to say, it was AMAZING. If you’re lucky enough to raise and slaughter your own pigs, I highly recommend this recipe, it’s not cheap, but it’s FANTASTIC and so easy.
We were super nervous as we took the ham to it’s final destination. I had never cured a ham before, we had never smoked a ham before, we had no idea what it would taste like. The yearly Easter meal isn’t really one you want to mess up with a bad ham. We had faith in the recipe, but were still nervous. That was until Mr Chiots tried the first bite when they were carving it. Needless to say, it was a hit and I’ll definitely be using this recipe for future hams. We’re scheduled to pick up piglets in about a month.
Do you celebrate Easter? What foods do you use to celebrate?
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New Seed Starting Area with a View
I finally have a dedicated seed starting area. For my entire gardening career I’ve been starting seeds on the dining room table, which isn’t a big deal, until you want to eat dinner and there’s potting soil, seed flats and seeds all over the place. There was a built in desk area upstairs that was not being used for anything but a plant stand and I decided it would be perfect.
There’s plenty of space, cupboards for storing seeds and supplies along with a long counter that can hold all manner of supplies. The best part is that it is bathed in nature light, it’s right in front of a nice window that looks out over the hill beyond. I can watch the chickens as they scratch around on the lawn below.
The flats are also in plain sight every time I go up and down the stairs making it very easy to monitor their progress. It’s the perfect spot!
Do you have a dedicated seed starting area?
