Garlic Scape Pesto is quite a recipe. Watch how eric makes it in this video:
Category: Gardening TV
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Tomato cage how to video : GF Video
This DIY home-made tomato cage works and last for years. Learn how to make tomato cages by watching our DIY video on how to build tomato cages. The tomato cages sold in garden stores don’t work for me. The cages are too short and flimsy, and don’t hold up your tomato plants. stop buying the cheap tomato cages in the store and start making your own tomato cages here.
There are two main kinds of tomato plants: determinate and indeterminate.
Determinate plants are compact.Indeterminate tomato plants are wild and all over the place.
I think the two words can be applied to plants and people’s personalities. Determinate people know where they are going in life, indeterminate people go all over the place. I think indeterminate plants produce more tomatoes, your opinion on that.
Tomato cages like these work for both kinds of tomatoes, but are especially good for indeterminate plants. The cages help contain their crazy nature of wanting to grow all over the place. The large squares of the kind of cage material use, concrete reinforcing wire, allow you to get your hands into the cage to harvest tomatoes. I’ve seen people build cages with other kinds of wire mesh, and you can’t get your hands inside the tomato cage to grab the fruit.
We have a number of how to grow tomatoes and how to cook tomato videos on our site here. I especially like our cherry tomato recipes, one of them is a raw cherry tomato pasta dish that is brilliantly simple.
Roast Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe Video
Fresh Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe Video
Get Rid of Tomato Hornworms Video
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Planting Carrots, How Eric did it.
Wondering how to plant and grow carrots? Watch and see us try our hand at carrot growing
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Grow Tomatoes How To & Extend The Tomato Season : GF Video
Learn how to grow and plant tomatoes and extend the tomato season. Want to plant your tomatoes early? Learn here how to start tomatoes early.
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Drip Irrigation System with Soaker Hose – GF Video
I use this homemade DIY drip irrigation system with soaker hose for my raised vegetable beds. Its easy to build and works great. Watch the video to see our first take on a soaker hose system. If you want to build a simpler version see my video for PVC connected soaker hose system.
The drip irrigation system I built uses copper pipe, which can be expensive, you can also use PVC pipe to build the manifolds that feed the soaker hoses.
I dug a slot into the ground and pushed the garden hose into it to hide the hose feeding each raised bed. This makes lawnmower much easier too, no chance of running over a garden hose that way.
Key to watering your garden with drip irrigation is to not water it too much, i know its fun to watch the water ooze out of the soaker hoses, but you want the beds to dry out a bit between waterings. I water my vegetable beds every 4-5 days. Tomatoes, especially, grow best when the soil dries out between waterings. Too much water is just as bad as not enough water, it makes it easy for fungus and disease to grow.
How long do soaker hoses last? I’ve had these in the ground year round for about 10 years. Some hoses have leaked, but not a lot. And its obvious when they are leaking, and easy to fix. All you do is cut out the leak, and connect the two pieces back together with a piece of pipe.
If the water pressure going into the hoses is fairly low, or if you use an inline pressure reducer attached to the garden hose, you can use cable ties instead of clamps to put the lines together.
Water timers for garden hoses have improved a bit lately, below is one i recommend. Some of these timers are awful to try to program.
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How to build a raised bed for vegetables or flowers GF TV Video
Build a simple raised bed with this DIY video. With this raised bed plan we show you how to make raised vegetable or flower beds without using pressure treated lumber The current raised beds in the garden have been there about 8 years now. So we must have done something right. how unusual… If you want to build raised beds, the ones we have are good for vegetables and flowers, check it out, let us know your thoughts.
Our raised beds are 4 feet wide and 12 feet long, make sure the raised beds are 4 feet ( 48″ ) wide on the outside dimension. This will make it easy to use floating row fabrics or plastic sheeting that comes in 48″ wide rolls. I learned this the hard way.
DIY raised bed plan complete You may want to consider putting 1/2″ galvanized wire screening across the bottom of the raised bed frame before siting it and loading in all the dirt, this will keep out moles and voles. We haven’t had a huge problem with that, but I see how it could for some people.
For our garden soil, we had a delivery from a local nursery that sells a garden soil mix. It can be hard to find a company nearby that sells what you want, you may end up mixing it all up yourself. Let me know how you have built your raised beds below:
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How to start seeds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Learn here how to start seeds in pots or trays with the experts. In the city we live near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and they showed us some great seed starting tips. By starting your own seeds, you can get a lot more plants for less money, and you get to grow plants that are not available at your local nursery. neat.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden uses bark as a seed starting medium. I can’t seem to find that stuff, so i use coir, which is compressed coconut fiber, and mix in vermiculite or perlite to add some air to the mix.
One of the keys i think, is to not have the seeds too wet, over-watering your seed starting trays can cause a bunch of problems and kill the seedlings. Its also important to have the seed trays in direct sun, I use a grow light, you can watch our how to build a grow light video here. Having the seeds in a window will cause the seedlings to get leggy – spindly.
Other GardenFork DIY seed starting videos you may enjoy:
How to Start Seeds and Make Seed Starting Pots
How to Start Seeds the GardenFork Way
Here is a book on seed starting basics you might like to check out:
Buy From An Independent Bookstore
Buy From Amazon -
How to transplant raspberry and blackberry bushes
Transplanting raspberries can be tricky. They don’t like to be transplanted. So watch Gardenfork.tv and see how Eric does it.
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Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe : GF Video
This is a great recipe for all those cherry tomatoes you have at the end of the season. This dish is sort of a cherry tomato salad over pasta. I don’t think this dish needs cheese, but if you do, go ahead.
Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe
3 pints of cherry tomatoes ( about 4 good handfuls )
Red Wine Vinegar
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 handful of Fresh Garden Herbs: oregano, chives, thyme, rosemary
1 lb spaghetti or other pasta shape you like. I use the thin spaghetti
Put the water on the stove to boil, go out to the garden and pick tomatoes.
Add pasta to pot and cook to taste.
While pasta is cooking, slice all the tomatoes in half, place in a bowl.
Chop the fresh herbs, add to tomatoes.
Add about 3 tablespoons of olive oil to the bowl
Add about 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
with your hand, mix the dressing into the tomatoes, and squish some of the tomatoes at the same time, so their juices come out and mingle with the oil and vinegar. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Put colander into a serving bowl, place in sink. When pasta is cooked, pour pasta into colander. [ the hot water will warm the serving bowl as it drains ]
Remove colander and drain hot water from serving bowl. Put pasta in the serving bowl and pour tomatoes over pasta.
©2007 eric rochow all rights reserved
Due to spam, comments have been turned off, please visit The Greenhouse to share your thoughts.
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Eric’s Rhubarb Jam Recipe with Canning How-to GF Video
Here’s is my rhubarb jam recipe:
Part 2:
Wow. what fun it was to make and can our own rhubarb jam.Rhubarb Jam Recipe
5 cups of chopped rhubarb
2 cups of sugar
1 cup of water
2 to 4 packets of unflavored gelatin
optional:
1 carton of strawberries, chopped
1 20 oz can of crushed pineapple
zest of one orange, or whole orange slices
Place all ingredients except gelatin in a large pot, and cook for 15-20 minutes, until rhubarb has broken down to your liking . Turn off heat, and add gelatin. How much gelatin depends on how thich you like your jam. More gelatin means a thicker jam.
Can jam according to canning instructions that come with your canning jars.
recipe ©2007 eric rochow
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Video: Cold Frame Plans from Brooklyn Botanic Garden
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.
Greens growing in a cold frame at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden -
Transplanting Plants, How to transplant Hosta plants
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.
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Tomato Hornworms – how to get rid of them – GF Video
Tomato Hornworms can ruin your tomato plants overnight. Here’s how to get rid of tomato hornworms. If you notice the leaves of your tomato plant have been chewed to the stalk, and it looks like the plant has been stripped of it’s leaves, you have a tomato hornworm infestation.
Nothing like coming up to the house to find large portions of your tomato plants stripped of their leaves. This is what happened to us, so we made a video about the tomato hornworms who took over our tomato patch.
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 roto-till the garden, as this will destroy hornworm pupae in the soil.
If you see a wild sounding moth-bug think flying chaotically around your garden, it could be the adult moth of the tomato hornworm. I have only seen the moth a few times, but its huge and looks like a crazy bug thing.
We have a number of how to grow tomatoes and how to cook tomato videos on our site here. I especially like our cherry tomato recipes, one of them is a raw cherry tomato pasta dish that is brilliantly simple.
Roast Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe Video
Fresh Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe Video
Get Rid of Tomato Hornworms Video
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Is Dandelion edible? Dandelion Salad Recipe : GF Video
You can eat what most people call a weed. Dandelion.
Here is another foraging video we did on how to harvest and cook 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. Dandelion starts growing early in the spring, flowers and quickly goes to seed. Dandelion then pops up again in the fall, so keep an eye out for it all through the growing season. You can even grow it in a cold frame or hoop house. Click these to see our how to build a hoop house and cold frame videos
Don’t harvest it from roadside areas or where your dogs like to hang out. 10-4?
if you want to learn more about foraging, here is a how-to book to get you started. I like this book, and learned a bunch about acorns, which you can make a flour with. who knew?
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Grow Lettuce Mesclun, Salad Greens GF Video
Watch this video on how to grow lettuce, mesclun and salad greens and learn how to harvest salad and lettuce.
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
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How To Cook Garlic Scapes – GF Video
You can cook garlic scapes, who knew? Here is a video I made about how to. Scapes taste great, and are easy to cook.
Why Cook Garlic Scapes?
To me, garlic scapes are free food. You are growing the plant for the bulb, but up come these curled stems with immature flowers on them. You can cook garlic scapes as you would scallions, but they also make a great pesto. Be aware, its a powerful pesto, maybe you want to add in some parsley too.
When growing garlic, you want all the energy the plant creates to go in to growing the bulb, so the scape is something farmers want to get rid of. Thankfully, scapes taste great. If you are harvesting scapes in your own garden, keep a few on the plant, they serve as a sign that the plant is ready for harvest. Scapes uncurl and point up when its time to harvest the garlic bulb. (Bet you didn’t know that)
If you want to order seed garlic to plant this fall, I suggest Filaree Farm. I’ve listed a few suggested garlic growing books below as well. Watch our garlic growing videos here.
Scapes are like most alliums, they will keep for a while in the fridge, but they get kinda soft. The flip side of that is when you snap off the scape, you don’t want to cut it off to far down the stem, or it is too stiff. Kinda like asparagus that way. The most common way of cooking scapes is a simple saute, but the get along well with other foods.Like we show in the video, I think grilling the scapes is the way to go. Especially if you want to show off the neat taste scapes have by themselves. Salt them after cooking, it works nicely.
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Hilling Potatoes
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.
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
