simple ways to make vegetables special, with alana chernila

A happy and pleasant surprise has just arrived through the post at home.

Get sowing for some winter greens and veg like Beetroot, Spring Cabbages, Lettuces, Spring Onions, Chicory, Fennel and Rocket.

Gardening in the winter is somewhat challenging but doable. Many of the greens, some of the root vegetables, and herbs can be planted in the fall and will grow through the winter months. The saying is that greens are better after a frost.

Besides leaning how, enter to win the new book plus a chef’s knife and tote bag Alana shared with me to celebrate her book launch, the followup to her previous hit, “The Homemade Pantry” in 2012.One recent weekend, when we were teaching back-to-back, daylong cheesemaking classes at my place, I was explaining to the students how Alana Chernila and I ended up in my kitchen together this way, surrounded by all this milk and cream. After all, I’m a gardener, right, not a dairy farmer?Trying to explain Alana’s and my connection, I asked the class:“You know how my A Way to Ga

“If you know the basic science and a few techniques with home dairy,” says Alana, author of “The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making” (Amazon affiliate link), “the whole world opens up and you can make a zillion different things.”That first book has been lavished with praise from food stars including Mollie Katzen, and Alana just delivered the manuscript for “The Homemade Kitchen,” due out in fall 2015. She’s a keen gardener whose grow-your-own passion and cookbook writing both began in 2008 with a job selling vegetables in our local farmer’s m

Yes, of course I make vegetable soups: onion soup, split pea, lentil, sweet potato-greens, carrot-ginger, and so on. But a less-specific catch-all “vegetable soup” wasn’t in my repertory. Irene (who co-wrote “Beard on Pasta” with James Beard, and until recently taught food writing at NYU) fixed that.irene’s vegetable soup, my way(I say “my way” because the “recipe” on that napkin didn’t actually give proportions of anything, just, “diced onions, celery, carrots…” and because Irene says, “zucchini doesn’t add much to the mix” so she skips it. Me? I’m looking for ways to use up my summer-squash harvest at the moment. When I showed her the photo, Irene said, “Mine is redder,” meaning more tomatoes, and that’s the point: Balance the “recipe” according to your taste, and the garden’s offerings.)

Last year, Alana and I began teaching a series of workshops at my place on cheesemaking, and also on other subjects around food and gardening. She has a new book, “The Homemade Kitchen,” coming this fall, a followup to her popular 2012 debut with “The Homemade Pantry” (Amazon affiliate link). Alana joined me on the public-radio show and podcast to talk thick, creamy, easy yogurt; what vegetables she’s growing for her special hot sauce, kimchee and sauerkraut, and more. Read along as you listen to the March 23, 2015 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).read/listen:crockpot yogurt and more, with alana chernilaQ. So what’s simm

Read along as you listen to the June 26, 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).evaluating monarda with george coombs of mt. cubaQ. We’ve talked before on the show about your past trials of other native plants like Baptisia and Heuchera—and native plants are the mission of Mt. Cuba, which is both a garden for visiting and a research center, right?A. Mt. Cuba Center is actually a former du Pont family estate, the Copeland family estate, and they left their estate to become a public garden. What kind of sets us apart from others in the area is that we focus on native plants. We broadly define our nativity region as the Eastern United States.We do a lot of work promoting plants in a display capacity in the gardens itself, and then we also do research like what I do, trying to help

I hope you visit Joe’s latest inspiration-filled home base, and listen in to our chat that ranged from key landscape-design principles for real gardeners to how much I weigh (did I really say that out loud on the show?).the “Joe Gardener” podcast episode we just recorded Joe’s new website If you’ve never seen the TV episodes we filmed here—his first visit to my garden, and later a show about my obsession with gardening for the birds—those are recommended, too. (That’s us at one such meetup, above, with my trusty Kubota.)And Joe has been a guest on my

That’s Lee with his trusty scythe, above, which doesn’t figure into composting, but into how he cuts his meadow-like fields. Impressive, and mesmerizing! I’ve included a couple of his great how-to videos on composting and no-till soil preparation, along with links to the audio of our entire conversation.I was especially excited to visit Lee Reich’s New Paltz, New York, “farmden”–that’s half garden, half farm–since it’s fruit harvest time. Lee is a longtime friend and author of many exceptional garden books, including “Grow Fruit Naturally” and “Weedless Gardening,” and “The Pruning Book,” among others.Read the show notes from our discussion on the October 21,

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.

We should be doing “successions,” or new sowings, all along during the growing season in our edible gardens, but it’s never more important than right now, especially up North where Katie and I garden. As summer comes on strong, we need to focus on continued vegetable and herb harvests through fall frost or even beyond. But what, and when?Katie Spring and her husband, Edge Fuentes, make their living eking out every possible week of deliciousness and productivity–even in Zone 4 Northern Vermont. Katie also works part of the year with my friends at High Mowing Organic Seeds, as if she is not busy enough with CSA and wholesale clients, farm animals, and family at the couple’s GoodHeartFarmstead, 9 miles north of Montpelier (photo above of their seed house an