Karen's Garden Delights Journal
4th week of September 2011

---

This is the last week for full veggie baskets for my weekly customers. They will be getting salad, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, peppers, turnips and herbs. I will continue doing salad bags through October but was ready to wind up the summer crops. With summer crops diminishing, there is still one crop in abundance - our weeds! Here are some of the edible and medicinal weeds we were able to share with our home-school co-op Nature Class this week. We took enough for the kids to sample chick weed, oxalis and red clover plus we made mint tea with stinging nettles and stevia. They were also amazed at some of the common weeds that can be used for medicine like plantain for bee stings and burdock leaves for burns. We still need to gather burdock leaves to dry for a supply of burn bandages for the winter. I hope we will never need to use them but it is an easy thing to gather while they are abundant now.

As you may have noticed in other journal entries, we have been experimenting lacto-fermenting all kinds of veggies and fruits in our air lock jars. The results are both tasty and extremely nutritious and can be considered "probiotics" in a jar. This week's ferments included beets, dilly carrots, radishes, more kim-chi and dilly beans. Enough people have asked if Olin would make jars for them that he bought a pile of supplies and I started working on a flyer with instructions and recipes. This week we were excited to get our Ferment-O jars on the shelf at both Local Roots Market in Wooster and Wholesome Valley Farm in Wilmot. This is just in time for prime sauerkraut season and I have another preserving seminar scheduled for October 11 at Wholesome Valley. See Events for details. If you want to learn more, I am available for a class in your home when you gather ten or more people to learn and taste together.

Zinnias and the summer flowers are starting to lose their glory and it's now time to enjoy fall garden decorations. This is the first year in a while that we didn't grow sorghum cane so we'll need to get sorghum seed heads from an Amish neighbor. We have plenty of pumpkins and gourds to add color and one of the favorite gourds are the tiny Tennesse spinning gourds. They are also called dancing gourds and make a delightful toy when you get them spinning like a top. For beginners, you can spin them on their belly but when you are ready for a challenge the right flick of the wrist will get them spinning on their heads. I had fun giving away over a hundred of them at Lehmans Fall Celebration and sharing them with both children and curious adults. I'm finding it's the adventuresome grandmas who are enjoying them the most!