House of Roses

Thankful

We’re thankful that yesterday we helped folks carve turkey and contributed to conversation and laughter.

At the House of Roses, we roasted (rose-ted?) turkey

made stuffing

made gravy (!!)

and ate.

Winter Veggie Storage

Something I always have questions about: an explanation of how to store different types of winter vegetables, via Gretta Anderson. Awesome.

We Labored

Bento, House of Roses style

I’m Not Gregor Mendel

but I planted seeds on Sunday (March 22) and I’ve got seedlings popping their heads above the divets in the nursery. Mostly spinach, chives, tatsoi, and lettuce, ’tis true, but there’s a watermelon or two in there as well.

Here’s the scoop on this round of babies:

Pictures of actual green things coming this weekend!

Couldn’t Wait for Spring

So I planted seedlings:

March Meat Haul: This and That

March brings a little bit of everything

• 1 lb Ground Lamb
• 0.6 lb Lamb Rack Rib Chops
• 0.6 lb Lamb Rack Rib Chops
• 1.25 lb Greek Lamb Sausage

• 1 lb Maple Cured Ham Steak
• 1.5 lb Pork Loin Chops
• 1 lb Pork Breakfast Sausage

• 1 lb Ground Beef

• 2 lb Chicken Legs

Lentil Bean card

As a Valentine’s gift for marymary, I designed a fake “Lentil Bean” card for the game Bohnanza.

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Buying Seed

You’d think, after that nice long entry I wrote a while back, that copying and pasting stuff into the appropriate websites and paying for things would be easy.

Er.

The Seeds of Change website could be better set-up. For example, when I click on an item, you really should default the number to purchase to 1 rather than 0. That way, at least some percentage of the time, your user won’t have to change a damned thing. This way, everyone has to change it everytime which is pretty frustrating, given the number of things I want to buy.

Second, once I’ve clicked the button that says “add to cart” add the damn item to the cart. Don’t show me a table that indicates you have and then have the item disappear when I enter another value in the search box because I didn’t click “continue shopping”. That’s frustrating.

A different level of frustration is the number of seeds they appear to be out of, which is entirely my fault. I should have realized that everyone else starts sowing about a month before I can so they’ll also be ordering a month earlier. Aie.

So, stuff on the waiting list: tomatillos, orange chard, nira chives, leeks. Argh.

Shumway’s, by contrast, had a nifty little shopping cart sidebar so I could see exactly what was in my cart at all times. Hmm.

Park, also by contrast, required me to click “continue shopping” but did not include the search box on the cart page so I was not tempted to try something that would result in me losing items. Hmm.

I still need to get parsnips. Where-o-where?

Weekly Specials

We’ve really been enjoying the winter produce share from Enterprise Farm (November-ish to March-ish).

Each week we get an onion or two, a handful of potatoes (but not enough sweets), maybe a pepper or two, a head of lettuce, root veggies if we’re lucky, a handful of apples, carrots or parsnips, and a good green like chard or kale.

Each week there’s also something a little unexpected. (Not the lettuce, though, that’s come to be expected. It’s come to be a joke. Who eats lettuce in January in the nothern hemisphere? Especially when it’s bitter?)

Around Thanksgiving there were 4 cups of local cranberries and 4 cups of pecans.

There was a jar of local (well, Massachusetts) sour dill pickles a few weeks ago.

For a while, we got oranges and tangerines each week (although that’s petered out).

We’ve gotten both yellow crookneck and zucchini (but on different weeks). Could we have some winter squash please?

Twice we’ve gotten Florida avocados; the guacamole has been good enough to silence all my concerns about freakish warm vegetables in the winter. (But not my comments about the lettuce.)

Twice we’ve gotten kolhrabi, which we found out is entirely perfect shredded in the food processor, sauteed on the stove, and mixed with butter and parmesan. Perfect.

I wonder what will come today?