Ham Sandwich Indicted!

Want to learn a valuable life skill to survive when the zombies finally come?  Join me for a series of canning classes at Oakland Nursery this summer...I'll be teaching how to make jam in June, pickles in July, and salsa and tomato sauce in August.  Classes are $25 each, or all three for $65...it's a bargain! Plus, I'll be sharing some other tips on preserving your summer fruits and veggies. All the info can be found HERE .  I can promise delicious treats, a quality educational experience, and prize giveaways courtesy of everyone's favorite garden center: Oakland Nursery!  See you there!   

"The Heart of Darkness." aka, my tomato plants. All that rain we had seems to have treated them well, as it's just now July and they're as tall as the fence. The Romas are fruiting nicely, as are the Early Girls, but the heirloom Willis Plum I picked up in Clintonville is the slow kid of the bunch. Maybe he's just a late bloomer... The cukes produced their first batch of veggies, allowing me to make a batch of sweet & spicy pickles: I used this recipe, and since I didn't have 24 dried Cayenne peppers on hand, I used some of the peppers from the jungle: We'll give them a couple of weeks to marinate and see how they turn out. Finally, the onion and garlic seem to be lying down on the job: My garlics never produced any scapes (oh, the horror!), got about a foot tall and not all that thick, then decided to give up the ghost. I dug up a test garlic the other day, the bulb was about the size of bounce-ball--definitely not the nice, plump head I was h...