Burgundy Spice Sweetshrub

Whether you like to use your homegrown green beans in a good old-fashioned green bean casserole or in modern stir-fries, learning how to freeze green beans for later use is important, especially when the garden is producing them like crazy. Thankfully, freezing green beans from the garden is an easy process, but there are some essential steps to follow for success. In this article, I offer simple step-by-step instructions so you can enjoy the fruits of your garden for many months to come.

Chives are one of those perennials herbs that you can enjoy in several ways—you can infuse the blossoms in spring to make chive blossom vinegar, chop the tender stalks to use fresh in salads or as garnishes in place of green onions, and dry the leaves to grab from the spice rack and enjoy later. In this article, I’m going to focus on how to dry chives.

Most people can benefit from drinking more water. Here’s how to make it more exciting!

The apple cider and spices pair well with pork in this great fall recipe! Enjoy!

Summer heat and humidity cause folks to think about escaping to swimming pools, lakes, mountain retreats, and beaches. If your home is your sanctuary, then find refuge in your garden with our native summersweet (Clethra alnifolia). This month, summersweet produces spikes of spicy, fragrant flowers atop a 4 to 8 ft. high multistemmed shrub with attractive lustrous green leaves. The flowers mature into clusters of woody capsules that look like dried peppercorns. In the fall, summersweet leaves turn pale yellow to rich golden yellow.

12 lbs firm tart apples (maximum diameter 2½ inches) 12 cups sugar 6 cups water 1¼ cups white vinegar (5 percent) 3 tbsp whole cloves ¾ cup red hot cinnamon candies or 8 cinnamon sticks 1 tsp red food coloring (optional)

But first, that key reminder: For best flavor and texture, harvest both zucchinis (Cucurbita pepo) and cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) before the skin gets hard and dull, when they still look like the beauties up top. Bitterness from an increase in the chemicals called cucurbitacins that these crops (and melons, pumpkins and gourds) contain may increase with overripeness, though it can also result from environmental stressors such as uneven soil moisture, low soil fertility, low soil pH, high heat or wide swings in temperatures. Once you’ve got such tender subjects in hand, head directly to the kitchen.IAM KNOWN FOR MY PICKLES, and more all the time thanks to search engines and other such decidedly non-culinary efforts. The second-most-popular post I’ve ever published (just an inch behind my slideshow of gorgeous vintage “green” WPA posters from 1936-43, like the one below): the easy refrigerat

IN CASE I FAILED TO CONVINCE YOU in earliest spring that you didn’t want a Forsythia, but a Lindera benzoin or spicebush instead, more evidence just presented itself. Now try to resist this native Eastern shrub, and tell me that your Forsythia measures up to its gold standard.

WHEN WOODY PLANT EXPERT MICHAEL DIRR writes in his book “Viburnums” that the fragrance of the Koreanspice viburnum, Viburnum carlesii, “actually reaches out and engulfs passersby,” he is not exaggerating. This is a smell-it-a-mile-away shrub that I would not garden without, and it’s currently doing its engulfing thing here. Delicious.

“What do you use for pickling spice?” I asked–because I can see on my blog stats that my page with the headline, “What’s in pickling spice?” is getting lots of hits as it does each year at this time.What’s in pickling spice? Well, it’s a less obvious answer than you might think. Gayla grows a lot of her own ingredients, and pickles things you might not have thought of, too—like radish seedpods (top photo), garlic scapes, purslane, cherry tomatoes and more. That’s what we talk

I confess, I’d become somewhat herb-complacent, always stocked up year-round on garden-grown parsley and garlic and sage and chives, but not very herb-adventurous any longer otherwise.  I have various other herbs in the garden, but mostly ornamental varieties—like gold-leaf creeping oregano (also called marjoram, and a great groundcover), or garlic chives (which I rarely eat, but whose late-summer white flowers the pollinators and I both enjoy very much).After saying goodbye much too soon that Sunday to Gayla, her husband, Davin Risk, and their dog, Molly, all I wanted to do was pulse aromatic things in my food-processor, and I made basil pesto to freeze in cubes, froze whose rosemary twigs, made a parsley log and more of my usual fare–the ways I always freeze herbs. But every time I looked over at the goodies I’d made in class the day before, I thought: more, more, more!Gayla re-awakened the herbalist in me, with “recipes” like these:homemade herb-infused vinegarsWE WARMED a stainless

The charmingly fat little book, humbly bound in cloth, was just released by its American publisher this fall, about a year after it was issued in the U.K. (Enter at the bottom of the page to win a copy.)Don’t let its smaller trim size fool you: There are 600 ideas inside.Forget arranging the recipes and variations in predictable chapters like “Entrees” or “Chicken,” though. “Eat” organizes the way we cook and eat, such as “In a Bowl” or “In the Hand,” or “In the Frying Pan” or my favorite section: “Under a Crust.”Yes, Slater admits, making