growing – Peacock Orchard

Mulching the garden, my positive and really negative experiences

My beautiful niece and nephew came over to assist with some farm chores for cash. I picked a terrible one for them. I tend to pick pay tasks by how little I actually want to do them. I have a 5 year old hay bale in the lean-to I’ve been picking away at over the years. I finally want it out of there and moved to the garden areas for mulching.

I love mulch for it’s ability to suppress weeds (as I’m a lazy gardener) and it’s ability to hold in moisture. I’m terrible at watering too. My tomatoes and peppers are valuable to me. There is nothing like home canned spaghetti sauce and salsa. I need these things to really take off. So mulching them is worth paying for, and not hauling hay, more so.

I am nervous about this though. I mulched our largest garden last fall in the hopes of suppressing a lot of weeds. What we got instead was an infestation of ground squirrels. When dead babies started showing up we actually worried about the plague. That garden has been completely abandoned at this point. It did have a high point though. One snowy day we looked out the window to find this:

Isn’t it the most glorious stoat you’ve ever seen! That little stoat spent a week murdering every ground squirrel it could find. We haven’t seen one in that garden since. Hasn’t stopped me from abandoning the garden though. The ground squirrels will repopulate the tunnels, it’s just a matter of time. Still, we have some anti-squirrel around and that feels pretty darn amazing.

So you can see why I would be rather nervous about mulching the new gardens. It is done though, or at least part of it is. The tomato and pepper part at least.

Nice in progress picture. It’s a tire surround and makes the entire thing a raised bed. Tomatoes in the middle and peppers in the tires. Nice soaker hose running through the entire thing.

I made sure to leave plenty of room around my tiny plants. They would be larger but I prune off most of the leaves and plant them as far up the stem as possible. I had amazing results with it last year and I’m not messing with success!

Stay tuned for a story about the sleep over hysteria that followed this mulching chore!

Vintage Chick Feeder as herb garden

I’m so excited to have found this piece in an antique store recently. It is going to look amazing on the new island, or the table. I have options. I’ve started the herb seeds in it today. I’m interested to see how good I am at growing them indoors. I’m usually a pretty big failure at it. Anyway, take a look and keep an eye out for this amazing piece. Would make a great organizational tray, drink caddy, etc, etc.

How to grow and use lemongrass with a recipe

Lemongrass is such a wonderful plant. It can be used in cooking, to deter bugs, to make tea and medicinally. WebMD even has a page on it:

Lemongrass is a plant. The leaves and the oil are used to make medicine.

Lemongrass is used for treating digestive tract spasms, stomachache, high blood pressure, convulsions, pain, vomiting, cough, achy joints (rheumatism), fever, the common cold, and exhaustion. It is also used to kill germs and as a mild astringent.

Some people apply lemongrass and its essential oil directly to the skin for headache, stomachache, abdominal pain, and muscle pain.

By inhalation, the essential oil of lemongrass is used as aromatherapy for muscle pain.

In food and beverages, lemongrass is used as a flavoring. For example, lemongrass leaves are commonly used as “lemon” flavoring in herbal teas.

In manufacturing, lemongrass is used as a fragrance in soaps and cosmetics. Lemongrass is also used in making vitamin A and natural citral.

How does it work?

Lemongrass might help prevent the growth of some bacteria and yeast. Lemongrass also contains substances that are thought to relieve pain, reduce fever, stimulate the uterus and menstrual flow, and have antioxidant properties.

Source

I wanted to grow lemongrass for a different reason, the oil attracts bees. As you know we built our own beehives. I do not want to buy a package of bees, I’d rather attract a swarm. To do that I needed lemongrass essential oil. Husband has been wanting to try his hand at making essential oil, so I just needed the lemongrass. I went to our local oriental market and bought all the lemongrass they had. I put them in a jar of water until they’d sprouted roots, then I planted them out to the kitchen herb garden. They have really taken off. I’ve harvested some for lemongrass chicken and loved it.

Lemongrass

Thai Basil

Here is Daughter helping me prep the lemongrass. Ok, she’s just chewing on it. She informed me she didn’t like eating grass.

Such a cute face!

Stripped of stalk.

All I did to prep the lemongrass was strip off the base leaves, cut the white base of the stalk off, wash it and chop it up to be added to dinner. The recipe I gathered inspiration from is this one. As usual, I didn’t follow the directions and modified as I saw fit. I used bean noodles, sliced chicken breasts, carrots, and green onions. I did not use fish sauce, cuz yuck! O let me just tell you my recipe:

Lemongrass Chicken with Bean Noodles

Ingredients

1 serving bean noodles
Olive Oil- enough to coat bottom of pan
2 large lemongrass stalks or 5 small ones.
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried ginger
10 leaves fresh thai basil
1 carrot sliced thinly
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 TB brown sugar

Directions

Cook bean noodles as directed on the package.

Add lemongrass, ginger, oil and garlic to a medium skillet and sauté until fragrant. Add the sliced chicken and cook through. Add lemon juice, basil and brown sugar and coat chicken. Next add the noodles and warm through. Remove and serve in a bowl with carrot curls and green onions.

Add spice, to taste with sriracha or red pepper flakes. My children do not like spice and so we kept it optional.

I think bean sprouts would be great in this dish but I didn’t have any when I first made it and it was still great.

Cooking noodles

Cooking the lemongrass, garlic and ginger.

Browning the chicken.

Delicious!