Gary is a self made guy who shares. That sums him up. He’s a great guy with an infectious zeal that can seem crazy, but he’s great. Watch as Gary and I talk about wine for the average guy.
You can see a lot more of Gary at WineLibraryTV.com. He has written a great book full of his energy, Crush It , a big thank you to him for making some time for me.
Garlic Scape Pesto is quite a recipe. Watch how eric makes it in this 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
Wondering how to plant and grow carrots? Watch and see us try our hand at carrot growing
My neighbors gave me an electric smoker, so I thought I’d try to smoke salmon with the smoker.
You can buy an electric smoker like the one I use here
Before smoking salmon, I suggest you brine it with this recipe here, and follow the instructions on how to dry the salmon after the brining it.
Another thing I learned is these electric smokers use wood chips, not wood chunks, and you shouldn’t put the wood so it is touching the electric heater element of the electric smoker. I keep the side vents closed for the most part, and use a oven thermometer probe to check the internal temperature of the smoking salmon.
Too high an internal temperature and the salmon is toast, literally, as you see in our how to smoke salmon video above! Using a smoker in cold weather can be challenge, as the cold air surrounding the smoker tends to drop the internal temp of the smoker. Do not use this smoker indoors or in a garage or basement!
Line caught wild salmon is best, but farmed salmon works too, so use what you got. Check the salmon for bones, called pin bones, and remove them with a needle nose pliers.
Here is the smoker I use, it works well, not too fancy:
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.
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.
Want know how to repair power tools? Watch Gardenfork.tv and see how Eric repairs a reciprocating saw ( aka a Sawzall style saw )
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.
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:
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:
A number of our neighbors tap maple trees to make maple syrup, here is a video about using sap buckets and taps.
Learn how to identify Sugar Maples trees, make sure you are tapping the right kind of maple trees with this neat tree identification book, Bark. The great thing about this book is that its based on bark identification, not leaf identification, because when you think about tapping trees, there aren’t any leaves on the trees, you know..
Here is the tree identification book we like to use:
Buy From An Indie Bookstore Here
Buy From Amazon Here
Watch all our maple syrup videos here on the site!
Transplanting raspberries can be tricky. They don’t like to be transplanted. So watch Gardenfork.tv and see how Eric does it.
Caroline from Holland sent me an email with questions about the Sullivan Bread recipe, and my sister Tracy had some suggestions. Caroline then sent me these great picts of bread success. Its very cool that people in Holland watch Gardenfork.
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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
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I’ve been making the No Knead Bread, invented by Jim Lahey and made famous by Mark Bittman, and this time I used 1 cup of all purpose flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup bread flour. All King Arthur brand flours. Worked well. Not a lot of rise, but it was cold in the house this weekend.
Sullivan Bakery Bread, The No Knead Bread Recipe, the Gardenfork version
I’ve made this bread about 20 times now, and it comes out great every time. I’ve learned a few things doing this. It really helps that the dough be in a warm place during the long rise time. I let it sit overnight, so I bring it up to the bedroom, as the rest of the house cools down at night ( thanks to our programmed thermostats ).
A viewer emailed me to say that you can also put the dough in the oven and leave the oven light bulb turned on, this will keep it warm enough as well. You don’t have to turn on the oven itself, just the oven light.
3 cups all purpose flour. I use King Arthur brand flour.
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon salt
Cornmeal, preferably coarse ground.
Mix together flour, yeast, and salt in a large bowl. Add 1 1/2 cups of warm water ( about 100 degrees ).
Mix with a spatula. The dough will look like it needs more water. It doesn’t. Mark Bittman has the best word to describe it, the dough will look “shaggy”
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot for about 12 hours. You can let it rise longer if you want. The dough will have a good amount of bubbles in it.
Get out two large cutting boards.
Flour a large cutting board and turn the dough out onto the board with the spatula.
Put a clean towel on the other board and dust the towel with cornmeal.
Take the dough, dust it with a bit of flour and fold it over on itself front to back and side to side.
Then turn the ball of dough so the folds are on the bottom and place in the center of the towel dusted with cornmeal.
Fold the towel ends over the dough and let rise for about 2 hours. The dough should roughly double in size. The dough will not rise up a lot, but will grow outward on the board.
30 minutes before its time to bake the bread, put your dutch oven in the oven with the cover on, preheat the oven to 450 F.
When the dough has risen and the oven is preheated, remove the dutch oven, put it on a wire rack next to the dough on the towel which is on the cutting board.
Slide your hand under the towel and dough, lift up the dough and flip it over into the dutch oven. What you want is the folds of the dough, -what was on the bottom of the dough during the rise – to be on top when it sits in the dutch oven.
Be careful doing this as the dutch oven is very hot.
The dough never lands perfectly in the middle of the dutch oven. I use a wooden spatula to gently nudge it toward the center, pushing down any part of the dough that may be sticking to the side of the dutch oven.
Cover the dutch oven and place in oven for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, remove cover, the dough should look like bread and be starting to brown. Remove the cover and bake for another 15 minutes.
The bread should now look like great bread. The crust should be golden brown. You can bake it longer if need be.
When done, remove bread from dutch oven and cool on a wire rack.
You can double this recipe, but be careful with the water, add not quite twice the amount of water, you can always add more.
NEW INFO
my house is quite cool in the winter, and i remember someone suggesting putting the dough in the oven with the oven turned off, but the oven light turned on. so first I had to finally fix the oven light in our 50’s era propane stove salvaged from a Vagabond camper trailer. I fixed the light, and left the dough in the oven overnight with the light on.
Being the gadget geek, I put in my temperature probe to see at what temperature the dough would maintain. It stays at about 78 F. Great.
I woke up and decided to make pancakes, so I woke up our guest, Charlie, to run the camera, and …
Here’s our version of simple home made pancakes:
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tbsp sugar
pinch salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup yogurt [ you can vary the ratio of yogurt to milk ]
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1 cup +/- blueberries [add more if you like more]
oil or butter for pan
Heat up the griddle
mix the sugar, flour, and baking soda in a bowl.
Put the yogurt and milk into another bowl, beat in 2 eggs.
[ you can vary the amount of milk and yogurt to your liking, you may need to add more milk if the batter is too thick]
Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, don’t overstir. add milk if the batter is too thick.
Add in blueberries, give a quick stir.
Grease the griddle and pour your pancakes. turn them then the pancakes bottoms are to your liking.
© 2007 eric rochow
My way of making pesto is by taste. I’ll give you the general outlines here, and you should experiment.
approx 2 cups of basil leaves, stems removed, washed and dried
approx 1/2 cup – 1 cup virgin olive oil
1/2 cup pine nuts or walnuts
1 cup + coarsely grated Parmesan or Roman cheese, the higher the quality, the better.
1-3 cloves of garlic
In a food processor, pour in enough oil to coat the bottom to 1/4 inch deep.
Add in some of the basil leaves and process until roughly chopped
add more leaves, and drizzle some oil on top, process.
repeat until all the leaves are chopped.
toast nuts on the stovetop until fragrant, not burnt
add nuts, cheese, and 1 garlic clove, ( minced or crushed ) and process to desired consistency. You may have to add more olive oil.
Taste and adjust. You may want to add salt.
Pesto will keep a few days in the fridge, its best if the top has a covering of olive oil to keep it fresh. It tastes great on bread, even on corn.
©2007 all rights reserved
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
