The cool season is one of our favorite times to grow food! Most people are not aware that you can grow food during cool seasons and sometimes some may even survive over winter! We extend our growing season and protect our plants by adding plastic row covers on pvc domes to our raised beds. Check out the video here! Kale gets such a bad rep, but I was pleasantly surprised at how great it tasted when I […]
Squash bugs are one of our biggests pests in the summer. A minor infestation can get out of hand in a hurry if you don’t stay on top of it. The adults are a dark, triangular insect with a flat back. You can find their tiny copper-colored eggs in clusters on the undersides of leaves. You want to make sure to get them under control as soon as you spot them, or else they can cause mass destruction!
Basil is one of our favorite herbs to cook with in the kitchen. It flourishes in warm weather and is one of the best things to plant alongside your tomatoes. Many people mix various types of basil in their gardens. It is also great for container gardening. Some of our favorite varieties are sweet, thai, lemon, cinnamon, and lettuce leaf.
We had a lot of fun at the OKC Home & Garden show last weekend! We went there to help spread the word about the app, to get kids interested in gardening, and to help inspire people to start growing food. I had A LOT of conversations about growing food and began to notice a common theme among the topics. I have this huge list of features I want to add to our mobile app but I’ve struggled to decide what to work on first. Last weekend clarified the biggest challenges facing new gardeners and helped me focus my attention on the most important problems. Here’s what I learned from talking to people for 30 hours straight this weekend about growing food and the challenges they face.
Beans are a staple in our house. It’s something that we always have on-hand in our fridge to eat on with our meals. Dried beans are so much more cost efficient for us than canned and we don’t have to worry about all the preservatives! I used to cook these beans on the stove after soaking them overnight and then boiling them on the stove for several hours. It was so time consuming and I am not one to plan ahead that well! The Instant Pot changed my life in this area! I can now take completely dried beans and cook them in the Instant Pot and they are ready within the hour. These black beans not only taste great, but are just so simple to make!
When we make a whole chicken we always save all the bones and use them to create our own chicken bone broth!
Cook a whole chicken from raw to ready to eat in 40 minutes!
Homemade pizza dough tastes incredible! You can adjust the thickness of the crust to your liking by adjusting ingredients slightly or by how large you roll out the dough.
It’s getting close to the end of the season but there are still plenty of things to plant including one of our favorites, spinach. This is a list of what we’re planting in September in our zone 7 urban Oklahoma backyard food farm.
We’ve had an unexpected cool-down in August and it’s been wonderful. We’ve started planting our fall season crops and the kids planted carrots, beets, and lettuce this weekend. We also let Junior play out in the garden for the first time and caught his first time standing on camera!
We’ll be planting more of this as well as other fall crops like cabbage, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, spinach, kale, garlic, peas, and beans over the coming weeks.
