Conifer Garden Tour Part 2...the Dragon Eye

In this conifer garden tour we go eye-to-eye with the dragon eye pine. For those wondering what I'm talking about check out the clip.

The Price of Rice

What's with the price of rice? Even these little grains of goodness have not been immune to the rate of inflation. I've seen rice priced as high as $4 per pound for some organic varieties and don't get me started on the price of arborrio rice for risotto.

So here's the tip, I prefer jasmine rice as my long grain rice of choice. If you seek out an international market in your area, which typically also sell wholesale, you can find large bags of jasmine rice for less then $1 per pound. In these economic times creativity and resourcefulness reign supreme.

How Many Peppers did Peter Pick?

Recently I was asked what was my favorite hot pepper to grow? To answer that question I have to decide what is my favorite hot pepper to eat?

There are thousands of pepper varieties to choose from with flavors from citrus to smokey. My favorite combines both heat, sweet, and citrus all in a nice little package called limon chile.

Limon chile has a medium heat and is accented even further by a citrus tone and a smokey finish. This is another great example of taking advantage of a fresh grown product that adds culinary depths of flavor by simply adding it to a dish.

If you have a favorite pepper leave a comment below.

Garden Expansion Project - Post 100

It's fitting that this is post number 100. One of the reasons I started this blog was to document my new garden expansion project. I'm updating the project's progress in this clip.

List of plants to be added to the garden.

Happy 100.

Spring Frost

Hopefully we won't have to deal with a spring frost that threatens the new growths on plants, but if it does here's some tips on how to best prepare and deal with that kind of problem.

This Week on the Garden Years

New Gardening Videos this Week

- How to start an herb garden

- Part two of the conifer garden tour

- The large expansion garden project

- Will the fruit trees make it?

New Cooking Videos this Week

- How to make the $4 pizza

- The $15 steak dinner

Also New this Week

- the third garden years podast

- random garden thoughts

- lots of food and cooking pix

- and random goodness

The Culinary Herb Garden

The very first thing that made me want to start gardening were herbs. I had been reading through some recipe books and came across a reference to lemon basil and the thought of a

lemon flavored basil sounded fantastic. Now, I'm very aware of what's available food wise in my area and knew of no place that would have had lemon basil. The only option was simple, I'd have to grow it myself.

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Three years later I've grown dozens of basil varieties and each has a different flavor. That makes looking at herb catalogs like going through a recipe book. Each different flavored herb can provide such complex flavors and they come ready to use. No combining lemon zest and fresh basil, just fresh lemon basil. The options are endless when you combine cooking and gardening.

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Next week I'll be doing an entire video series on culinary herbs.

Conifer Garden Tour Part 1

I've been wanting to conduct some guided video tours of my gardens and this is the time. If you're new to conifers hopefully these tours will get you to think about adding some to your garden. Also, this first tour will preview some upcoming events.

There will be several of the guided tours and I'll eventually cover every plant on my property in these tours. This tour covers some larger specimens that I feel reflect some of the diversity of conifers and some interesting gardening points.

For all of you conifer fans notice how I combined Pinus koraiensis, which was next to the camera, and Pinus virginiana.

For more info on some of the conifers covered in this tour check out these link from the American Conifer Society.

Pinus virginiana 'Wate's Golden'

Pinus bungeana 'Silver Ghost'

Pinus parviflora 'Tempelhof'

When the Beans Go Dry

I love beans, but recently I've been considering which are better dry or canned beans?

In the past I've always felt dry beans were better because you can flavor them more directly. The advantage to canned beans is of course convenience. I'm beginning to turn more to canned beans and here's why.

How long have those dry beans been on the shelf? The whole point to dry beans is they're picked fresh and cured till dry and stored for latter use. The problem being when were they dried? There are some examples out there that these dry beans were dried decades ago and that's a bit of a disturbing fact. I'm sure the world dry bean association will tell me that it's fine for beans to sit for that length but I'm not buying.

Until I can investigate this issue further I will be using canned beans. More importantly though, I'll be growing my own fresh beans this year in the garden.

Click Here for the Garden Years Podcast

Spring is around the corner and so are the gorgeous colors of Japanese maples. For this podcast I wanted to make sure we spoke with an expert who could help us get a handle on all kinds of issues with maples.

Lucile Whtiman from Whitman Farms joins me to discuss maples in detail. From what to do when you receive a new tree in the mail to what a root control bag is, we cover a variety of issues in this extensive interview.

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