I was in New Jersey last week and stopped by my friend Mike’s house. Mike is an East Coast Surfer, and we talked about his surfing world on this episode of GardenFork Radio
GardenFork Radio is brought to you buy Brushy Mountain Bee Farm and Allison House.
I’m not a great baker, so this easy cake recipe appeals to me. This is called a Dump Cake Recipe.
Watch here as we make this peach dump cake that tastes good and is quick to make.
This all came about as I had a can of peaches and wanted to make a dessert with them. So I asked on Twitter for a peach dessert recipe, and @writersinthesky answered with this peach cake recipe.
What I like about this cake recipe and dump cakes in general is that they’re a great emergency dessert. If you forgot to plan a dessert or you just decide that you want to add a simple dessert to your dinner, you can make it happen. Because you, like me, always plan ahead, you can keep a can of peaches or a can of pears or other fruit (ideally in a light syrup not the heavy syrup) in the kitchen. Pull it out, add flour, and boom you’ve got a cake.
This easy cake recipe comes together in minutes. All you really have do is remember to preheat the oven. I like to use a glass cake pan, I think the crust is more crunchy, but you can use a metal pan as well. Use what you got is what I say. You can do this, it’s easy, it’s quite good and it’s wicked simple. So go ahead make this and tell me your thoughts.
Peach Cake Recipe
1 cup self rising flour
OR 1 cup all purpose flour + 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt
1 stick of butter
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar – you can use less sugar, this cake is pretty sweet
1 can of peaches, drained, light syrup preferred, 20-24 oz
Preheat the oven to 375F
Put the stick of butter in a 9×9 baking dish, preferably a glass dish, and place in the oven to melt the butter.
Mix together the dry ingredients, then add the milk and mix.
Pour the batter into the heated baking dish with the melted butter, then add the can of peaches.
Bake at 375 for 30-40 minutes. The cake is done when a knife comes out clean.
recipe ©2014 Eric Rochow all rights reserved
Mike and Eric talk about Jamie Oliver’s reality show about how he tries to change the eating habits of one of the heaviest towns in America, this year’s Maple Syrup season, Farmers Market shopping theories, salt pork and how to find recipes based on what you have in your fridge and of course, Viewer Mail!
Yes, dandelion is edible. There you go. Below the video here are a bunch of photos and info, scroll down after watching!
Dandelion can fall under the subject heading of urban foraging. It is ubiquitous in yards in America. Just make sure it hasn’t been sprayed with anything if you are pulling it up out of someone’s yard.
I was weeding the mesclun salad greens bed, which i have covered with our Hoop House Cold Frame ( you can get plans for our hoop house and video here )
A lot of dandelion has already come up, and I was surprised at how large the tap root was for such small plants. wow. look at the picture below:
Dandelion is edible. It tastes a bit like arugula, it has a tang to it, if the leaves are mature, it can be a bit bitter.
But bitter can be good in a salad! It offsets raspberry vinegar really well, and it goes well with blue cheese. So stop pulling those weeds and instead harvest them for your dinner plate.
The younger plants are better, I think, after dandelion has flowered the leaves get tougher, but you can still eat them. Best way for tougher leaves is to saute them in some olive oil with garlic.
Dandelion is super healthy, according to the USDA, Dandelion is high in Vitamin K, Carotene, Vitamin A, and Lutein. neat. And this grows in your yard.
When weeding a garden bed of dandelion, I try my best to pull out the tap root along with the top of the plant using one of my weeder tools. If you snap the plant off at the top of the taproot, the plant will send up new leaves. This is a good way to harvest if you have an area of dandelion which is a designated growing area for the plant.
You can buy dandelion seed. I buy a kind called Italian Dandelion, which I believe is not a true dandelion, but it grows really well in my garden, and we like it.
After I harvest the dandelion, I snap off the taproot, and shake as much dirt off as I can. I then put the greens in a salad spinner and fill up the bowl of the spinner with water. I slosh the greens around, pull up the basket and dump the water. I do this twice usually, then spin the greens. Then I eat them.
Do you eat dandelion? How? Tell us below:
As part of my family visit, I am always repairing my sister’s house. First was the motion sensor light repair, and now on to the rain gutter repair.
Her rain gutters were starting to pull away from the house, so I climbed up to find the gutter hangers had been nailed in instead of screwed in, and the nails were now pulling out of the wood behind the gutters.
I picked up some rain gutter screws ( more like lag bolts, actually ) that I used on my own house. Once you put these in, the gutter doesn’t come off, unless the wood behind it does. The plastic sleeve keeps the screw from compressing the rain gutter.
With these gutter screws, I’ve found it best to drill a pilot hole in the front lip of the rain gutter. Then I use a powerful cordless drill or a corded drill to sink in the screws. You have to put some weight behind this, so make sure the ladder is secure, and don’t over-reach, you’ll fall off the ladder – a bad thing.
Have you done gutter repairs? Tell us your solutions in the comments section below:
Whenever I go to my sister’s house, there is a quid pro quo. She makes choc chip cookies, I fix her house. This trip we removed a TV antenna, fixed the rain gutter, and swapped out a broken motion sensor light.
I like motion sensor lights. I’ve installed many. But I’ve found that the ones I buy at the large home improvement stores tend to stop working after a few months to a year.
My sister had a motion sensor light at her back door, and she was using its dusk to dawn setting. The sensor had broken, and one of the lamp assemblies just fell apart.
I suggested a simpler light assembly with just a dusk to dawn sensor. I made sure the one we bought allowed us to replace just the sensor if need be.
I switched out the lights. To test the light sensor, you need to turn on the power to the light and wait a few minutes for the sensor to adjust to the sun. Then put some electrical tape over the sensor and wait a few minutes. If the lamp does not go on, something is not working correctly. First to to check is your wiring, many times the wire nuts supplied are not great, I always use better ones from the hardware store.
We wanted to use compact fluorescent bulbs in the outdoor light, but all the outdoor rated lights, most of them flood lights, were too bright for just lighting up the back door. We didn’t want to light up the whole back yard.
We bought some lower wattage CFLs that were similar to the floods, but not rated for outdoor. We’re using those for now, and we’ll have to figure out if they can stay outside. The lamp housings protect the bulbs from the elements, but I’m thinking the ballasts may not be rated for cold temperatures.
What has your experience been with motion sensor lights? Do yours break? Let us know in the comments below:
Its a mobile GardenFork Radio with my sister. We talk about all the home repairs I did while visiting the parents and her. And we welcome our new sponsor, BrushyMountainbeefarm.com
I came across this video on the Jim’s Natures Nectar blog. This is done by Terry and shows her cleaning out a dead hive. I learned that you can take the honey and pollen stores from a dead hive and add it to another hive to help it get thru the rest of the winter. This video also shows really well how to place a pollen patty on top of a cluster. Thanks to Terry for doing it.
You can watch more of her videos on YouTube here
A neighbor lost a hive, and as we took it apart, I saw for the first time what honeybee starvation looks like.
Bee Starvation can happen for a different reasons, here are a few:
• There just isn’t enough food to get them thru the winter. This can happen if the beekeeper has taken too much honey off a hive, especially a young hive, and/or has not fed the bees enough 2:1 sugar syrup in the fall, it can also happen for no discernible reason at all. Bee Starvation can happen to the best beekeepers.
• Brood Rearing can start in the late winter, and if the weather has a cold snap, the bees will not leave the brood, even though there may be food in comb a short distance away. Read more on Jim’s blog
• Nosema, a bee disease that impairs the bee’s digestive tract, can cause winter starvation.
I didn’t see any brood on these frames, and there was no honey in the frames, so I’m guessing it was a lack of food stores, but I am not the expert here. What do you know about bee starvation, have you lost bees over the winter?
Here are some hoop house plans and photos of the small hoop house we use for cold weather greens. We had a really warm weekend last week, so i pulled out the cold frame hoop house that we built in the How to make a hoop house cold frame video here. I put in a mix of salad greens and mesclun mix, place a wireless thermometer in, and left it to grow.
I’ve gotten many requests for plans for the cold frame hoop house, you can get more info on all our hoop house cold frame plans here. Below i’ll post a few key photos to guide you along. This Cold Frame Hoop House plan is perfect for our raised garden beds.
These hoop houses work really well with our raised vegetable beds. You can watch our How to Make Raised Garden Beds video on our site here.
If you want to learn more about growing vegetables year round read Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest book and Nikki Jabour’s Year Round Vegetable Gardener.
We’ve had a cold winter here, and we’ve had few opportunities to open up our hives to check on the bees.
It depends on which expert you are asking, but you should only open up a hive if its above about 45F. The rule I’ve read is if you have to wear a heavy jacket, you should not be opening up a hive.
Why open up a hive? Many hives perish in late winter or early spring when they may have run out of food. You want to get a quick peek to if there is food in the comb and if they bees are alive.
After reading and talking to our bee mentors, we decided to slip some fondant into our hives, as well as new grease patties. Fondant can be bought at a bakery supply or some craft stores, or you can make it yourself. There is a good discussion of making fondant on the Bee Source forum here. Pressed for time, we picked up some fondant at a craft store.
We finally had a day where the weather was in the 50s F, we opened up our hive at Maple Knoll Farm. We found a lot of dead bees on the bottom board, and we cleaned these out. The bees were out, already bringing in pollen ( we think from maple trees ), and they were entering the hive through the small gap in the inner cover.
To put the fondant on top of the frames, I built a simple spacer to allow the fondant to sit on top of the top super. We did a quick check of the frames in this top super – do not pull out the frames, just look down into them – and we found ample food in the comb. We decided to add the fondant and a grease patty just to be safe.
We watched the bees, and despite us cleaning out the dead bees from the bottom board, they continued to use the inner cover entrance.
A few days later we decided, since it had been so warm, to put a sugar feeder on top of the hive, with a 1:1 sugar syrup ( 1 lb of sugar to each 1 pint of water ). We pulled off the polystyrene and inner covers to find they bees had barely touched the fondant. They had been using the grease patty.
We left the fondant and spacer on, then put on the sugar feeder. We saw the feeder had warped, and there were gaps along the edge that mates with the hive body. The honeybees were trying to get into the hive between the feeder and the spacer. ( When adding a sugar feeder to the top of the hive, you do not use the inner cover, as it would allow bees to get into the syrup reservoir and drown. )
Remembering in some of my beekeeping books, people do drill entrances into upper hive bodies, i opted to drill a hole in the spacer to allow the bees to enter the top of the hive. I also screwed the warped edges of the feeder into the spacer.
All the time we were at the hive, the bees were bringing in pollen, which i was suprised by. I’m thinking it was probably maple tree pollen and some other early flowering plant that was a nice yellow color, perhaps pussy willows.
Each hive got a gallon of sugar syrup, as well as leaving the fondant on the hive. This week I will probably remove the fondant and top up the sugar syrup.
What have your experiences been with late winter beekeeping? Please let us know below:
A while back on GardenFork Radio I was saying how much I’d like one of those weather stations that sit on your roof and you can hook up to the internet.
Then Allison House, a weather data company, sent us one. ( I like how this works )
We assembled the weather station, which is an Oregon Scientific WMR968. It has an anenometer, wind direction, rainfall, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, which are all solar powered and connected via wireless to the central display in our house.
This display is then connected via USB to our internet router, and bang – our super microclimate weather data in our yard is on the web and on my iPhone. We use WeatherUnderground to post the weather data, this site aggregates weather info from a ton of personal weather stations. You can search by zip code to see if there is a weather station near your. You can use the smartphone version of their site for remote check-ins.
AND the best part is the graphs and historical data is collects. I can go to the site, and see graphs for the past 24 hours, past week, past month, etc. This has been good to have with our bees, as I can tell when the bees have probably been leaving the hive during the late winter, early spring. Its also great for gardening, when we have a few years of data, we can see the average frost date for our yard. One of our neighbors down the hill has a weather station as well, and I can check his now for frost dates , though his date will be earlier than mine, as he is lower in a valley.
Hooking up the weather station to the net took a bit of work, it was not plug and play, but not too hard either. The enclosed instructions are good, and there is an active community of users online.
A big thank you again to Allison House for providing the weather station. You can follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/allisonhouse
Do you have a weather station? Let us know, be cool to compare equipment and uses.
The Labradors and us people all love sugar snap peas. Thankfully they are pretty easy to grow. Someone has trained the pups to eat them right off the vine.
My method of planting peas is simple:
As soon as I can get a trowel in the raised bed, I plant peas. They will grow. They love cool weather.
I also throw in some legume inoculant. Some people suggest wetting the seeds and dusting them with the inoculant, but I think spreading a bit on top of the seeds in their hole is just fine.
In the picture below I am planting them where our tomatoes will be, they’ll both use the same trellis-cage. Peas grow, produce pods, and then burn out pretty quickly, so they will be done before the tomatoes need the wire cage.
That’s about it for peas, growing them does not require any rocket science. You can plant them as soon as you can dig the soil. An advantage of using raised beds is the raised beds warm up quicker than the surrounding ground. So go plant peas.
Another week with Mike and Eric, as we talk about Mike’s new pinball mission, and how he photographs the process ( his pinball blog: ShoppedMachine.blogspot.com ) AND we talk to Theresa and Aidan about their new bed and breakfast in Northern Ireland, The River Mill ( http://www.river-mill.com ) Plus we ponder why Eric is burning his bread. Please write a review if you are listening on iTunes. thx.
Its was real warm this weekend, and the bees broke cluster a while ago, and this weekend they were out collecting pollen. i think its from Maple Trees.
Garbage Disposals as composters, Grey Water for toilets and car washes, the new Food Blog Forum from Jaden, Buddy Club Gardening, Alexandra Cooks, and Mike’s pinball machine blog are all part of this week’s eclectic GardenFork Radio show. GardenFork Radio is all about just about everything: Cooking, Gardening, DIY and How-To, Green Living and recycling, and whatever else pops into our heads. As you probably already know…
Links:
mike’s new blog: http://shoppedmachine.blogspot.com
NY Times Article on too much soap in your washer and dishwasher
Not sure if I told you this, but I tore the rear end of my 82 Ford F150 off towing Bill’s car out of a ditch, and after that my favorite truck was no longer the same. The shackle brackets were broken, the rear half of the exhaust system was gone… you get the picture.
So I picked up a 93 Ford F150, in black of course. I drove it to work in the city, and already got a parking ticket. Thank You New York City.
This week Mike and Eric talk about dishwashers : leaks and greening them. Plus feeding the bees, garden growing favorites, food you order in a restaurant, pinball machines, and more. And help us name our new listener call in phone: what to call it?