Indoor Gardener bruschetta

It's easy to be swept away by gardening books. Everything seems so fun, and if you're lucky enough to fall for plants that are easy to grow, everything after that is a breeze. Only when autumn comes do you realise that you have a problem. Suddenly you have squashes as big as rugby balls*, the chard are bigger than you and your turnips are humungous. Being a newbe you realise that those glorious gardening books may tell you that this and that vegetable tastes good, but they seldom expound on how to cook them. What do you do with all this? How do you prepare them to make them taste good instead of just being healthy?

An indoor vegetable gardener has to find the answers fast, because the gardens produce all the year around, and if you're not alert you'll soon drown in leaves. (You may remember that I had problems with a lively sage last year.) My nasturtiums are now big enough to harvest from, so I've started to make up recipes. Nasturtium tastes like cress, a strong flavour that lends the plant to use like something in between a spice and an leaf ingredient (use it like leek, if that's a better description). It grows extremely fast, so I haven't any other homegrown vegetables to combine with.

Thanks to tomatoes from the grocery store (don't worry, they are ecologically grown), I've been able to experiment with a bruschetta. I've yet to find the right balance between tomato, nasturtium, salt and olive oil, but I wanted to share so I urge you to have fun experimenting with the recipe. (My big dream is to use not only homegrown tomatoes, but homegrown oil from the tiger nuts.) This is what I had for breakfast this morning.

Indoor Gardener Bruschetta
1 portion

• 1 slice of white bread
  
• 4-6 cherry tomatoes
  
• 4-6 nasturtium leaves
  
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
  
• salt
  

Chop the tomatoes and the leaves together, put them on the bread (toast it if you have the patience and want to add some extra luxury), drip some olive oil over it, put on some salt and eat.

***

*I've yet to see a newbe harvest their squashes when they are the right size, ie. 20-25 cm (8-10 inches).

So, how's it going? 2007-08-13

Time for a new suite of photos documenting my experiment.

Let's start with my thripsberidden herbgarden. I do apologise for the blured photo; I have a disagreement with my camera. I want to take nice close ups, it says it can't. However, I've sprayed this garden with clean water from the dryer several times a day this week. The plants seems to do better, although they are not 100% healthy yet. The new leaves of the parsley have less dry spots than the old ones. I still don't know if this treatment is enough, but it looks hopefull.

This is my root garden. Everything is growing like weeds. Time for another 'thinning sallad'. And I owe an apology to my hubby after the post complaining about him making sallad before I could photo the plants I thinned out. I did tell him to do so. My only excuse is that hunger tend to affect memory...

In this garden I worry about the tiger nuts. They seem to hang their leaves, and are thinning out. The nasturtiums are doing better, although I'm not content with their spindly look. Next time I sow them I'll have to plan and place them different.

Perhaps I should put them together with these. Tiger nuts are classified as a noxious weed in the US, and here you see why. These plants are about one and a half months old, and have already filled their pot as well as the space above. I'm playing with the thought of dividing the gang next time I get around to do bigger things.

My calamondin is blooming. It's for the sake of this plant that I keep dryerwater in my spray bottle nowadays. Dryerwater is almost 100% free from calcium, something citrus trees don't like. This week I've tried to spray the calamondin three times dayly, since this seems to be the right amount for it. Every time I keep my schedule it starts setting flowers like this one. My next purchase for my indoor gardening hobby will be plastic bottles to store water and fertilised water for this baby.

Lastly I'll show you why my indoor gardening has been low key this week; I'm tied up in another project. As you can see even some of my indoor gardening items has yielded to this, since my gigantic pot was a too god drying rack for our wood to be ignored. The strawberries for the kiddo are waiting on the balcony, and I do hope they'll survive the rough weather.

Ain't that the life?

Today I took my first harvest from the turnip/carrot/scallion box and added nasturtium leaves to that. Unfortunately my husband made sallad of it before I had a chance to take a photo.

Selfwatering containers are gold...

To the right a perfectly healthy garden, to the left no Alaska Scarlet seedlings

Yesterday I donated blood for the first time in my life and I feel tired, much to my own surprise. Somehow I always think that things that are stressfull to the body wont affect me. After all I lost half a liter of blood (a pint) and was entitled to chose a small gift. Unfortunately the donors' giftshop doesn't have containers and other gardening related items, so I got myself a steel thermos instead. I've always needed a thermos free from tea and coffee residues. Now I can drink my hot water in a more environmentaly friendly way since I can boil and save a bigger amount at the time.

To celebrate my valiant sacrifice to humanity I went to the library and borrowed books about composting. I meant to borrow one - as you may remember my ration is one gardening book and one language course, but the first composting book I found was rather thin. After a small quest I found two more that were thin too. When I realised that I wont be able to visit the library two weeks from now I kind of lost it. I borrowed all the books about composting and four more. Plus a language course.

My gardens have been neglected these last two days. I'm sitting in the sofa corner feeling good, faint and beautiful. They're fine anyway. The selfwatering containers are doing an outstanding job. On the other hand my Alaska Scarlet won't raise above the soil. When I soaked nasturtium seeds they've grown in about two days, now I've waited for five. That's a big difference. The most frustrating thing about it is that the osmocote balls looks exactly like a seedling trying to get above the surface. I confuse them every time I take a peek into the container.

Don't forget to vote in the poll on what I should grow in my giant terracotta pot. Interestingly enough the standings are the same on Parkettodlaren and Indoor Gardener. In both polls the strawberries for the kiddo takes the lead.

Tiger nut haircut

First a photo from my own balcony. It's more minimalistic than the french balcony I showed you a couple of days ago. I had other things to do in April and May when I normally plan and plant my outdoor stuff. The strawberries had survived the winter and the pansies were coming along nice, so I decided to stay content. Right now I think it's boring and am planning the autumn and next summer (wine or blackberry, hmmmmmmm...). The chair is a gift from the company where my hubby works right now. They gave him two for the summer, and since they seemed to match the balcony I left them there. (If anyone from this company reads this I wouldn't be ungrateful if you decided to give us a complimentary folding table ;-) )

Today I made some major works on the garden haunted by thrips. After three weeks of treatment with soft soap spray it looked like this.


The common purslane had turned quite old and the nasturtium seemed to consist of withered leaves, eventhough green ones where budding at the end of the branches. The only things thriving was the tiger nuts, so I decided to tear everything away except them.


It's a shame throwing away such big heap of things that would do better in a compost. The longer I'm working with indoor gardening, the more I feel the need for composting. Unfortunately my flat often is too warm for a vermicompost, so I've started to look for ways to use a real one indoors instead. Colleens (In the Garden Online) variety seems promising, eventhough I have a feeling I'll have to store it on the balcony. (Since there are flats without balconies I feel like it's cheeting using mine.)


I gave the tiger nuts a haircut too. They looked like a dull tuss of grass (and that's what they are) so I decided to spiff them up a bit. Don't you think this hairdo looks nicer on the windowsill? I'm not sure the plants will survive the stress being cut down like this but the prognosis is good; tiger nut is a weed to fear. In the rest of the soil I sowed the last of my Alaska Scarlet nasturtium seeds. This time I didn't put up with 'frills' like putting seeds in water 24 hours and presow them, I just put them into the soil and covered them up. The last thing I did was to sprinkle osmocote tab fragments over the surface, and then realisie that they looked edible. I spent quite some time trying to cover them up without disturbing the seeds (twoyearold in da house...).


I took this picture to show how I've started to document my cultivations. I'm not sure on what to do with the facts gathered, or if I should copy them to something else, like a notebook. These days I'm only documenting to get a feeling for how long it takes between sowing and harvesting and how different kinds of soil and fertilizing are affecting the plants. (I haven't made a note on this box, but I do know that this contains the cheap seedling soil that packs together and suffocates the plants if I'm not keeping it moist.) Note the green line between the dry and the wet part of the barrier between the soil and the leca; it's algae. This is the last time I fluff the soil, sow some stuff and tell myself it's gonna work. The next time I'll have to empty the box, sterilize everything and start a new garden from scratch. This is something that will be an indoor gardener routine.

The good, the bad and the ugly

In general I try to stay away from memes, but I couldn't resist this one. Colleen with In the Garden Online invented it. In short I'm going to show those parts of my garden that didn't turn out quite right. You can't always succeed, aned sometimes the most accidental sowing or planting turns into a beautiful flower. This can be good to keep in mind when the yearning for perfection threatens to deaden your entusiasm. So, here they are

The ugly

Waily, waily! This is my calamondin. The branches in the middle are completely dry, it suffers from lack of iron, and dry spots on the leaves hint at another pest or illness. This is my constant reminder that, eventhough I've learned much, I'm still not an expert gardener. A good thing is that oodles of flowers are blooming right now.

The bad

Yes, this is bad. This is my thrips garden. I started spraying it with soft soap sollution regularly, but the soap burnt the leaves. As it is today I don't which damage are made by thrips, and which by soap. Perhaps I tear it all away - except for the tiger nuts, which grows like weeds.

The good

This is a pot full of things I didn't have the heart to throw away. The pansies are former table decorations sinced Easter. Every advice concerning pansies orders me to pick dried out flowers to enhance the flowering and my reaction to this is
"Do I have to?"
The marble leaves are nasturtiums, "Alaska Scarlet". Two plants were left when I had planted everything I needed indoors. I was tired, had overworked myself and was out of time so I just planted them in this bin on the balcony. No acclimatisation period or any other frills, I just put them there.
"If they live, they live!" was my only thought about it.
I hope they have time enough to sprout some flowers. The red will be perfect against the blue pansies.

A happy day

My bin haunted by thrips. I've just sprayed it with pesticide and am cutting away the leaves with most injuries.

I've had an outburst of energy today. Not only did I sterilize seven litres (two gallons) of leca (and I did it without burning down the house, jay!), I washed two plasticboxes, cleaned a window and boiled my bridal veil. (The veil is made of nylon and is normaly the separating barrier between leca and soil in my selwatering containers.) Appart from that I've treated my nasturtium/tiger nut/purslane garden for thrips. I was hoping to sow something in my boxes too, but the evening came faster than I thought.

You've reached an higher level of gardening when you recognize more pests than aphids and takes the trouble to fight them. It was a strange feeling to think
"Shiny, dry areas on the leaves... aren't that thrips?"
I took a look at the back side of an dry leaf, and when I knew what to look for I spotted those cigarrlike little animals at once. A quick glance in my small garden pest encyclopedia proved me right. I was right! I knew something! Spooky...

Tomorrow I'll plant a bin with vegetables - nothing special, just turnip, carrot and onions, if nothing gets in the way. When you spend your life together with a bearded man and a twoyearold anything can happen.

Smoke gets in your eyes

Right now I'm tidying up my little gardens. They have been abandoned while I've been battling flues and eyeinfections. Every now and then I stop and ask myself if I've really been that ill. In some cases I've been driven to desperat messures. To save the bigger part of my seedlings I planted the tigernuts and nasturtiums in the same container and the same soil as I used for the carrots and the turnips. You shouldn't do that, I've been told, and now I know why. Some desease in the soil, or perhaps some bug on the purslane, have now affected all of the plants in the bin. The leaves of the nasturtiums are all bumpy and have dry areas drained of all moist. Only now do I realise that I should spray them with something, or at least figure out what the problem is.

Unfortunately I'm not coherent yet, and the reason is my eyeglasses. They are sixteen years old. My last pair of contacts was infected with the eyeinfection so I'm forced to use my glasses instead, and they are not up do date with my eyesight. My brain has to put a lot of extra effort on interprete the pictures delivered, and less power are left to actual thinking. The last days have been full of Duh! moments. For one thing I've lost about five dollars paying doubble fees on the bus.

But the worst accident was with the aluminium pan I found in the metal recycling bin. You know; you need some kind of container if you are going to sterilize soil in the oven. I don't want to use our regular kitchenware, and it feels wrong buying new stuff. So, when I found the pan in the metal bin I thought "Bingo! Finders keepers!"

I won't be ashamed of using this pan for soil. The teflon layer inside has been ript several times, the outside is burnt black, and how does a pan like this end up with all those dents? What did they do? Slammed the cupboard door on it? Jumped on it? Ran over it with a car? Perhaps they did all this and some more too, but I can never know for sure.

The pan was smeared in something sticky. The dishwasher would take care of that (dishwasher detergent is extremely corrosive) so I didn't worry about it. On the other hand I smeard some of the goo around while carrying the pan, and when I used the kitchen cloth to remove it I didn't feel like using the cloth for kitchen chores any more. But a stRong woman knows what to do; I decided to boil the germs out of the cloth.

I've actually saved an old saucer just to be able to boil my kitchen cloths. I took the saucer out, filled it with water, added some washing up liquid and the cloth, put this on the stove on the hottest area and myself in front of the computer...

I woke from my computer coma about an hour later smelling smoke. I warned my hubby and returned to the kitchen to get some nose spray (to be able to detect the source of the smoke). I didn't need to sniff around. In front of me I found an dry saucer with a charcoal cloth glaring at me with its embers.

Duh!

I'm going to the optrician at tuesday, and then I'll have to wait a week for my new contacts. Untill I get them I'll try to stay out of the more firery chores of gardening. But I'll sterilize some leca tomorrow - those of you who can; pray for me.

Evil twins

One of the reasons I wanted a citrus bush is that they smell so good when they bloom. We gave my mother in law one and it perfumes the entire flat with a scent of orange and jasmines every time. That's why I was surprised when I started to smell liquid manure around my calomondin.

First I blamed the farmers around Uppsala. In this place you're never far from a field in need of fertilizer, especially not in the spring. Then I started to think over the fact that the smell was located around my citrusbush. Lastly I started to look, and found a shy flower under a leaf.

It does smell like liquid fertilizer, but better. As if liquid fertilizer was an evil twin of a smell, and that smell was calomondin. I have mixed feelings, but prefers to take the flower as a kind of flatter; I do some things right at least. If I continue in this way I'll soon have new little citrus fruits for my marmalades.

Things are progressing in my seedlin boxes; the ordinary nasturtium have 'hatched', and the strawberries are on their way. Soon I have the entire collection firmly stuck in the boring phase.

The first salad

From left to right: carrot tops, common purslane and turnip tops.

When I started this experiment I had an idea of neat pots with vegetables growing to the right size and then stopped, kind of. Whenever I felt for it I could harvest a salad or perhaps some tigernuts to give my family healthy eating and my friends allergy friendly culinary experiences. Whenever I felt for it...

However, the project is more and more coming to this:
"Oh my GOD! The basil/purslane/turnip/carrot will soon ask for citizen rights! We have to have a sallad before they are taking over the flat!"
That's why we had a salad today.

The salad was a bit heavy on the turnip side - turnip tops are hairy and will probably do better in a warm dish (prepared "like spinach", no doubt). The son made faces. I was more prepared and mixed my greenery with the rice and got a kind of pilaff that was surprisingly filling. Can't recommend the taste, though, I'm looking forward to the day when my nasturtiums have grown big enough to loose some leaves. And perhaps I should sow some more purslane - and some more carrot tops would be nice too. Ice plant will be interesting to taste as soon as the plants are grown. Add some strawberry sticks to that...

If you ever read an article about a flat where the windows were burst by a galopping djungle, then you'll know it's about mine.

Sowing, April

I finally did it. I've sown a new round of seeds. The nasturtiums and tiger nuts needed soaking, so the round stretched over three days.

The first day I put seeds in water and made sowing boxes for all my plants to be. I've found out that cardboardboxes for eggs, when split into four parts, fits into a plastic take away box - and since those boxes have transparent lids they make out perfect (?) mini greenhouses. In an attac of being minute I portioned the other seeds into their egg boxes, put them into their respective take away box and labeled them carefully. The iceplant seeds were ittybittytiny.

The second day I sowed everything except for the tigernuts - they needed some extra soaking time. Preportioning iceplant seeds turned out to be a mistake. The cardboad boxes needed some soaking too, since they would suck up moist from the soil otherwise. In other words I needed to empty the boxes in order to put them in water - and how do you do that without loosing the minute seeds among the grains on the table? I poured them onto the lid and with some extra detective work I only lost one of them.

With a plastic spoon from Max (swedish hamburger chain) I distributed soil into the egg compartments and put seeds on top. Those where then cosied with a thin blanket of extra soil and then I put on the lid upside down to ensure some ventilation. Since I have a twoyearold in the house I secured the lids loosely with some tape. I removed the lableling from the box and put it on the box instead.

The third day I sowed the tigernut, using the same method as described above, although I had very few nuts to use and had to be economical.

What I sowed this time was

• broccoli
  
• ice plant
  
• nasturtium
  
  
  
  • Garden cress
    
  • St. Clements
    
  • Alaska Scarlet
    
  
  
• strawberry
  
• tiger nut
  

Now I only have to sit and wait....