How do you know how to garden?

A lot of people ask me questions start with "how do you know how..." Especially after we started our vegetable garden, more and more people start to ask me how and where I learn to garden and grow stuffs. The truth is, this is the first house I ever live in with a garden that I can do anything with. I grow up in aparement building. The only thing I ever grew in my life are those house plants I could plant in the flower pots. I didn't start gardening until three years ago when we got the house. I never started serious about growing things until we own our house.
So how did I learn?
Well, when we first get here in Champaign, we found the community garden near Orchar Down. We started by going there to see what kind of vegetables people grow. When we went visit, we not only check on what they planted, we also pay attaintion on when they plant it, how they take care of the plants, whether the plants are doing well.
Then we start growing our own vegetable. A lot of them. We tried to grow everything we are interested in eating. Sometimes even things we never have before, like Swiss Chard. When you plant several things at once, even some of them fail, you don't feel so bad. You still get some other things to eat.
One of our first visit to Pontious farm, the U-pick blueberry farm, I found that they got one of the Asian herb, shi-so. I asked the owner of the farm where she got the seeds from, she introduced me to Johnny's seed catalog. This is the most useful catalog I have ever seen. Inside the catalog, you can find all the information you would ever need for germinating the seed, picking a good spot to plant, what kind of problem to expect, to when and how to pick the vegetable. Now when I have a question about some specific plant, normally I would check the catalog first, before I try the internet.
Another important thing about planting is to pay attention to how the plants are doing. You can see if the leaves are drying out, if there are some bugs on the vegetables, or the same kind of plants do better at one side of the garden than the other side. By paying attention, you can learn a lot about what the plants need, what they prefer. Sometimes trail and err is the best way to learn. Especially the possible lose is only a few seeds. So if you are not sure what's the best spot for a particular plant, put one each at different location, soon you will figure out what they like and dislike.
If you don't have much time to take care of the plants, can you garden? Of course you still can. There are a lot of plants that only require minimum cares. I recommend people start by growing herb. Most herbs are weeds at some point in the past. That means they would do quite well without much tending. Just make sure when you first plant it, give it regular water everyday for about two weeks. After the plants get established, they don't need watering unless it is extreme drought. Just make sure you put them in a sunny spot. Most herbs are sun lovers. Plants in the pot generally need more watering than the plants in the ground. So if you can put them in the ground, do so. That would make life easier.
Have I get you interested? If you are up for trying, here is a list of things that are easy to grow.

Herbs from seed: basil, cilantro(seeds are called coriander), dill, fennel,(both dill and fennel produce lots of seeds. Once they are growing in the garden, you can't get rid of them.), sweet marjoram
Herbs from cutting or transplant: thyme, oregano, wild marjoram, chive

Root vegetables: beets, radishes, potato(if you get some potato germinate before you can finish it, dig a big whole in the garden and plant them)
Leave vegetable: lettuce, Swiss chard, oriental amaranth
Other vegetable: tomato, pole beans, pea

Quiche

Quiche is one of the most adaptable dishes. I like it because, not only is it tasty, but you can put a large variety of ingredients from the garden into the quiche. Now, there are probably a thousand different ways to make quiche, but here is how I approach it:

1. The crust. Traditionally, this should involve lots of butter and/or lard. However, I've experimented over the years and have come up with the following recipe for the crust: a) place 1 cup of flour (take your pick, but don't use only whole wheat, otherwise it won't bind) in a bowl, b) add 1/2 tsp salt, c) slowly add olive oil and mix until you have something that looks like breadcrumbs. Take your time to break up lumps, and don't add too much oil. Better a little less than too much. d) Add water until the whole thing binds together into a wet dough (wetter than bread dough).
Once you have a dough, roll it with a rolling pin and line your pie dish appropriately. Some people pre-bake the crust, I don't, but I think it can be a useful idea on occasion.

2. The custard. Many recipes call for heavy cream. I dislike this idea intensely. I use milk and any liquid drained from the par-cooked vegetables (see below). Again, after much experimentation I've settled on the following easy formula. For one quiche, break three eggs into a measuring cup and note the volume. Add an EQUAL volume of liquid (milk + drained liquid from step 3) to the eggs and whisk it all together. I also add salt in to the mixture at this point, but you'll have to judge how much. For example, if you add olives into the filling, you'll use less salt than if you don't add olives into the filling. Since you can add just about anything into the filling, there is no formula for the salt.

3. The filling. Well, here is where you go to the garden and pick something. You can make a filling out of any of the following things: Broccoli, Swiss chard, bacon, ham, mushrooms, olives, beet leaves, spinach, sweet potato leaves, zucchini flowers, sun-dried tomatoes, onion, chives, just to name a few. Now, I do have an opinion about herbs. Hopefully you have a thriving herb garden... In my opinion, there are three, maybe four herbs that go exceedingly well with egg. They are: Tarragon, thyme, oregano, and maybe sweet marjoram. You might also try and experiment with different combinations of these four herbs. What I generally do at this point is a sort of a stir-fry/steam to par-cook the filling before adding it to the pie dish. I start with the pan really hot, caramelize the onions a touch (a technique I learned from Yuhfen), then add the leafy veg/mushrooms or whatever and finish with herbs after steaming for a minute or two. I drain any excess liquid (very important step) and add it to the egg mixture (step 2).

4. The cheese. Yes, I do need to get my dose of cholestrol and this is where I get it. There are many variants I like. Variant 1: Grate yourself some cheddar, gouda, gruyere, or whatever your favorite cheese is and sprinkle on top. Variant 2: Grate parmesan cheese on top (please, if you do one thing, get yourself a block of real parmesan and a micrograter). Variant 3: Use feta. Mmm so good, I feel hungry just writing this...

5. Bake at 180C (that's 350F for those stuck in the world of imperial units) for about 45 min. to 1 hour. (I set the timer for 45 and check for browning on top.)

It's raining!!

It's July 4th. Probably the worst day to rain for most Americans. Well, the rain goes on all day here. Ruin most people's plan on having a big BBQ party.

For us, it was good. The garden gets the very needed rain. And we have the party planned for tomorrow, July 5th. The weather will be perfect tomorrow. The only problem we need to worry is that the ground will be soaking wet. Well, a little mud on the shoes is unavoidable.

For the party, we are going to try to serve as much from the garden as possible. David is going to dig out more potato tomorrow morning. Those will go straight to the grill. I have already made some pickled radish and carrot, Taiwan style. The tomato are not quite ready yet. We have lots of them, but all of them are still green. Including the green variety that I don't know how to tell that they are ready. Well, grilled green tomato will be the solution for that. I will also make some rice paper spring roll with the last little bit of lettuce we have left. We will also cut off the first cabbage tomorrow and make some cabbage roll with it. We also going to make two quiche with Swiss chard.

Swiss chard is one of the best summer vegetable. You only need to plant it once per year. It last all summer without bolting. It grows fast. Just a few plants are enough to give us enough green whenever we want, plus extra to give away. They also look very pretty, at least the variety I planted, Bright Light, has a beautiful array of colors. The only problem is, most people don't know what to do with them. In order to give them away, I need to provide a list of possible way to cook them. Normally I would suggest to use the green part as any way you would cook spinach, and cook the stem like celery. Here is one of our favorite, make a quiche out of it.
David will post the recipe in the next post.

Another summer favorite we have this year is oriental amaranth. I grow up with this leafy vegetable. It is very tender if you boil it. It has very mild flavor, which make it good to cook with light flavor stuff like fish. From the oriental seed company, EverGreenSeeds, I was able to get three different varieties of them, red, white(pale green), and red strip. It only germinates in warm weather. As long as it comes out, it will be ready for harvest in 30 days. And they are also good for the entire summer. I planted all three of them together. The colors are so beautiful.

To cook the amaranth, the easy way would be simply stir fry with some garlic and oil. Or you can make a Chinese style vegetable soup (David says it is more like broth.) with tofu or fish. Chinese don't really use it raw. But I find it quite tasty by itself. So you can use it to substitute lettuce in summer. I just seeded some more amaranth in the failing soybean bed.(Due to baby rabbits in the vegetable patch.) This time I arranged them in a square pattern. We will see how it turns out.