I have found a new commitment to growing and eating Brussels sprouts. From 3 or 4 plants last year I ate several hearty meals including a socially distanced Christmas (not because of any sprout side effects).
21.07.2023 - 22:19 / awaytogarden.com
A NEW COOKBOOK got me thinking in a whole new way about bread, which actually involved my thinking about bread in a whole old way: more like my grandmother did, when not a crumb was wasted, and bread crumbs didn’t come prefab in cardboard canisters.The book, appropriately called “Bread Toast Crumbs,” by Alexandra Stafford, got me thinking about not just bread for, say, a sandwich, but about bread as an ingredient in the simple, delicious recipes I can concoct with my upcoming garden produce. Examples: a thick, roasted tomato and bread soup, or orecchietti pasta with brown butter, Brussels sprouts leaves and homemade bread crumbs, or a salad that becomes a meal when it’s a version of panzanella–reviving even stale bread in the best, delicious Tuscan fashion.
Alexandra Stafford is the creator of the popular food website Alexandra’s Kitchen at alexandracooks dot com. Though “Bread Toast Crumbs: Recipes for No-Knead Loaves and Meals to Savor Every Slice” is Ali’s debut cookbook, it has earned raves from some of the baking world’s bestselling authors, including Dorie Greenspan and David Lebovitz.
I am also glad to say Ali will be doing an event near me, at HGS Home Chef in Hillsdale, New York on April 8 so those of us lucky enough to be nearby can see “Bread Toast Crumbs” in action, and meet (and taste) the no-knead, so-simple peasant loaf that is the basis of her bread adventure. (For event information, click here.)
Read along as you listen to the March 20, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
no-knead bread (and using every crumb), with alexandra staffordQ. Congratulations on the new book.
I have found a new commitment to growing and eating Brussels sprouts. From 3 or 4 plants last year I ate several hearty meals including a socially distanced Christmas (not because of any sprout side effects).
BESIDES OUR SOMEWHAT OFFKILTER HUMOR, Andre Jordan and I have another thing in common: We not so long ago each headed for the hills. (Wait, are there even hills in Nebraska?)
M AY IS MADNESS. I have already said that in the monthly chores column. But it’s madness otherwise, too: garden tours to prep for; workshops I’m giving with friends; a garden contest I’m judging (as in, free prizes!); a sister in the news to brag about…and oh, I need your help with the Urgent Garden Question Forums here, too.
UH-OH. WHAT IF WE GET THE GARDEN ALL DRESSED UP, and then nobody shows? Tours of (disclaimer) The Garden After the Flood are next scheduled for Saturday, August 22, 10 AM to 4 PM, during Copake Falls Day (that would be my town’s second annual shindig).
I PROMISED I WOULDN’T ADD EVEN AN EXTRA TRIP TO THE CURB WITH THE TRASH to my schedule, with all the mowing I have to do, but (big surprise) I layered on a couple of events, and I want to make sure you know about them, in case you are in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires vicinity this summer. Another container-gardening class, a 365-day garden lecture with an extra focus on water gardening and the frogboys, and a tour here in August (that last one you already might know about). Details, details:Sunday July 12, Containing Exuberance, container-gardening workshop, with Bob Hyland at Loomis Creek Nursery, near Hudson, New York, 11 AM to 1 PM, $5.
I spoke about some notable natives with my friend Andy Brand of Broken Arrow Nursery, with whom I often hosting half-day workshops in my Hudson Valley, New York, garden, when we focus on upping the beneficial wildlife quotient in your own backyard with better plants and better practices. Andy has been one of the experts I’ve pestered for ideas as I’ve been doing that in my own garden in recent years to good effect.Andy is manager of Connecticut-based Broken Arrow, and he’s a serious amateur naturalist, and founder of the Connecticut state butterfly association. (That’s a photo by Andy of a red-banded hairstreak on a Clethra blossom, top of page.) Learn where many familia
You may recall my previous conversations with Thomas, the co-author with Claudia West of the provocative 2015 book “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes.” Even though we both have worked around plants for many years, it’s as if Thomas sees them differently from the way I do, in a sort of super-savvy botanical 3-D. He doesn’t see them as mere decorative objects, but astutely reads their body language for clues to who they want to grow with (or not) and how to put them all together successfully.I love how he sees, and thinks, as you can glean from our lively Q&A, where he says things like this:And this:Though not intentionally so, the Times article turns out to be especially timely—and not just because it’s early spring, and we gardeners need to make smarter choices
‘THE SMALLEST NPR STATION in the nation,” Robin Hood Radio, just got bigger, which is good news for them and also for my garden podcast, which we began doing together each Monday morning around 8:30 in March 2010. The station, headquartered in nearby Sharon, Connecticut, has expanded to reach about 150,000 residents, up from 40,000 previously, by adding a signal from the frequency at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
This history of beelining, the other way to connect to honey bees besides keeping hives, is the subject of the book called “Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting,” by Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, just released in paperback edition. Tom, Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell, has been passionately interested in honey bees since high school, eventually doing his doctoral thesis on them, and his ongoing scientific work has primarily focused on understanding the phenomenon of swarm intelligence with the help of these incredible animals.Learn about how a hive works, with its female-dominated order, about how and why Tom beelines to locate wild hives. And maybe most astonishingly listen about what he calls our “shared uniqueness” with the honey bees–what characteristic we share with
QUICK, BEFORE THE FROST gets hold of the ground for good, do it: Take a soil test, to send off to the lab. Host Joe Lamp’l of the award-winning public television program “Growing a Greener World” says this simple practice is a foundational tactic of garden success, and shares other insights into building and maintaining healthy garden soil.
I’m feeling daring, so I specifically called Timothy Tilghman, a former colleague at Martha Stewart Living, who is now horticulturist at the much-heralded Untermyer Park and Gardens in Yonkers, New York, just minutes north of New York City. The property has quickly become a destination for gardeners, a getaway where visitors are wowed by bold, contemporary plantings—including ones in containers—in a dramatic, historic setting.A century ago, in 1915, Samuel Untermyer hired William Welles Bosworth, an Ecole des Beaux Arts-trained architect and landscape designer who designed Kykuit for the Rockefellers, to create the “greatest gardens in the world.” Soon after, they began exe
Andy Brand is longtime nursery manager of the famed mail-order and destination nursery Broken Arrow in Hamden, Connecticut, and each September he and I teach half-day workshops in my rural Hudson Valley, New York, garden–with one part of the workshop being about gardening for the birds. Our next one is Saturday 16, 2017 (details at the bottom of this story, or at this other page).But no matter where you are listening, we talked recently about strategies and plants that bring in the birds and more—particularly the top genera of powerhouse woody plants that fuel fruit production in summer and fall for hungry birds, preceded by spring or summer flowers that support pollinators and other beneficials. I’ve also inclu