Karen's Garden Delights Journal
3rd week of July 2011

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Our family enjoyed our annual summer vacation day at the Family Farm Field Day. This year it was held on an Amish farm near Sugarcreek and it is always a day full of learning and reuniting with many farm friends. I was one of the panel members for the Desserts without Sugar session in the homemakers tent and took along a potted stevia plant and 3 gallons of chocolate mint/stevia tea for sampling. Another session that I attended was on lacto-fermentation. The presenter was from Vermont and has 8 tons of veggies fermenting in his basement in large blue barrels. I was again inspired to attempt more fermenting for our family and a couple days later harvested about a dozen cabbages plus carrots, onions, garlic and a few hot peppers to make a kim-chi. I spent the afternoon slicing cabbage and chopping veggies on the porch and it is now fermenting in a 5 gallon crock in the basement. I had been contemplating doing a "Preserving for Maximum Nutrition" class at Local Roots including lacto-fermentation, dehydrating and root cellaring and this gave me the push to give it a try even if I am not a complete expert. If you are curious to learn more, join me August 3 from 6:30-8pm, cost is $5/Local Roots member, $8/non-member. Meanwhile, I have a list of reading to do to prepare and some more fermenting projects to attempt.

Another class that I did recently was Edible Flowers at Today's Kitchen Store. I did the first one and then received a request to do a second class for a group celebrating their mother's 74th birthday. We had a grand time sampling edible flowers, eating them in salad, creating beautiful appetizers and then decorating elegant cupcakes. Here are our nasturtium appetizers stuffed with herb cream cheese and served on a cucumber slice. You can see more photos at (TKS facebook). In reading and preparing for this class, I was brave and tried eating a few more flowers growing in our flowerbed. Holly hocks are edible but the flavor/texture wasn't great and I decided they are better used as holly hock dolls. The scented geraniums weren't bad though and I'm waiting for more to bloom to try them in other things. We also learned to crystallize flowers by brushing them with egg white and dusting them with fine sugar. A very fun project with violas, borage and mint leaves though it was time-consuming and they struggled to dry when it was humid. My daughter planned to make some for a cousin's birthday cake but the humidity made her give up and use fresh violas instead.

This weekend we welcomed my brother and sister and families for the Gerber farm weekend. A dozen cousins enjoyed running around the farm, sitting in the shade during the heat, playing with kittens and games of multi-age whiffle ball. We had twenty people to feed over the weekend and it is a great time of year to eat from the garden. We have lots of beans, cucumbers, potatoes and due to the heat, we made as many cold salads as possible. I served the last of the lettuce from the shade blanket area and we'll be lettuce-less for a few weeks. I also celebrated my birthday while everyone was here and we ate our traditional first meal of sweet corn. My sweet corn isn't far enough along so my Amish produce neighbor enjoys picking my birthday corn, it was so sweet and delicious. For dessert my daughter and her cousins baked a chocolate zucchini cake and we cranked ice-cream. July birthdays are nice!