My Veggie Garden :: Attempt Two

Photo: Raised Bed Veggie Garden © Biologie.

My raised bed vegetable garden is now a total of 36 square feet. That's still small but at least I have a little more room to work with than I did last Fall. I planted my new Spring vegetable garden on Monday and tied a soaker hose along the top of the beds. After I had it all hooked up I realized it would have made more sense to line the soaker hose along the inside of the beds so I might re-do all that before the plants really start taking off.

Last fall I planted a pesticide-free vegetable garden of mostly squash. My beautiful and healthy squash plants were devastated by squash vine borers. I even took a picture of one of the adult moths (pictured left) sitting on my squash leaf and wondered what kind of bug it was but I forgot to identify it, to my later chagrin.

The vines went from thriving and blooming big gorgeous flowers to withered and dying, practically overnight. The squash plants had been attacked from within by the larvae of the squash vine bugs and I couldn't see the damage until it was too late! The adult female lays her eggs at the base of the plant and when the larvae hatch they burrow inside the stem and begin eating the plant alive from the inside! After they are finished with the buffet, they exit the stems and work their way into the ground to pupate and emerge the next spring to start the cycle all over again.

To manage the menace of squash vine borers, the first step is to know what the adults look like and keep an eye out for them. Organic controls are outlined at the National Sustainable Agricultural Information Service: Squash Bug and Squash Vine Borer.

I'm spraying the new transplants with a home-made organic pepper spray recipe my dad uses on his garden. I'm not sure if it will keep the borers at bay but it does help keep off the bugs that like to chomp the leaves.

Organic Pepper and Garlic Spray

Ingredients:

• dishsoap
• several cloves of garlic
• 6-10 hot peppers (hotter the better!)
• 1 gallon water

Directions:

Place garlic, peppers and a small amount of your water in a blender/food processor and puree. NOTE: Avert your face when you take the lid off because the fumes are very strong. Strain the mixture and add the liquid to your gallon of water.

When you are ready to use the solution on your garden, fill up a spray bottle, add 2 tsp dish soap, shake and spray every few days on the tops and undersides of plants and leaves until the pests are under control.

Shake well before each use.

Here's my newly planted Spring 2010 Veggie Garden!

Wish me luck and Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

My Home-made Kim Chi

Kim to the Chi!

If you've been following my blog you know how much I've been craving homemade Korean kimchee.

I developed a taste for kim chi in high school while living in Japan. All of my close friends from that time in my life are of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent so I experienced a lot of delicious, authentic oriental dishes and I miss them (and my friends).

Now that I'm in Texas I can't find kim chi anywhere so I learned how to make it from scratch at Koreancuisine (Anna Kim) on YouTube! I've been eating it plain on top of steamed Kokuho Rose rice, spooning it into my Roo Hoo Rook Korean noodles, and making kim chi potato salad. I still have quite a bit left to use up so I'm constantly searching for more recipes to incorporate the kim chi!

Okay, back to my homemade recipe, the first thing you have to do after you've chopped all your veggies is soak the cabbage in salt water (brine) to pickle it, the process not only leaves a tasty amount of salt within the leaves but causes them to remain crunchy. I bought a big beverage party-bucket to soak my Napa cabbage in and it worked great! The chopped cabbage soaks for two hours then you rinse it in fresh water. It is imperative that you remember to rinse your cabbage three or four times in fresh water after it has soaked in the salt solution or it will be entirely too salty to eat. While it's soaking you get to make the "good stuff" which is a mixture of chopped green onion, daikon (Korean radish), and a sauce of apple, apple pear, garlic, ginger, and salty fish sauce (or anchovy sauce). Sounds pretty crazy, huh? It's so good!

I used my food processor to puree the sauce. It looks like applesauce when it's done but it sure doesn't smell like applesauce! I didn't have any daikon so I substituted red radishes (not the same but they will do in a pinch). Next time I make kim chi I'll be sure to have the correct type of radish, although Anna Kim did mention in her video that you can use any type of radish in the recipe. The puree, the chopped green onions, and the radish are mixed together by hand (wear rubber gloves) to complete the sauce for the kim chi.

If you suffer from heartburn while eating spicy foods you better take your antacid medicine before eating kim chi! Anna's recipe calls for 1 1/4 C of red pepper flakes! Oooo, yeah, you better believe that's hot stuff. I love it but I'm one of the lucky people who can eat spicy without detriment. Keep in mind it's a side dish and served in small portions with rice or a meal so a little goes a long way. After I rinsed my Napa cabbage and mixed the sauce into it, I spread it out in a 9x13 inch dish, covered it over with cling wrap and then put the lid on my casserole dish to sit overnight at room temperature. This allows the fermentation process to occur. Think of it as "ripening". Store the kim chi in the refrigerator for three days before eating. You can eat it right away but it will not achieve full flavor until it's allowed to chill.

Here's the recipe by Anna Kim:

Kim Chi Cravings

I recently bought Kim Chi Ramyun noodles from my local oriental market because I was craving Korean kimchi. The noodles are good because the seasoning packet has the flavor of kim chi but haven't sated my craving for cabbage kimchi!

I can't find fresh kimchee in the grocery stores or markets so I've decided to make my own.

Searching the web, I found two great videos with different recipes:

How To Make Kimchi on YouTube.com
How to make kimchi using western cabbage on YouKu.com

I'm amazed at all the different recipes out there and these are two that sounded yummy to me. There are so many variations, it's impossible to try them all. The kind of kimchi I know and love is red-orange, spicy, flavorful, and gloriously odoriferous!

If you have a favorite home-made recipe for kimchi, please share it with me!

This craving was sparked by the blog post of Kat @ Our Adventures In Japan:
kim chee potato salad

Veggie Garden

In August I planted a vegetable garden. It was my first attempt at something like this and I've been meaning to blog about how things are going!

My husband built me a raised bed which I sectioned off like a square foot garden. I planted seeds of bunching onions, long thin cayenne peppers, bok choy, golden hubbard squash, bush beans, spaghetti squash, zucchini, and yellow squash. I used organic soil mixed with organic compost. The only things I transplanted were the pepper plants which I grew by seed indoors some months beforehand.

The bok choy were the first to show their cute faces to the world! They are very slow growers so I didn't expect to see them sprout first. The seed packet was a good one, practically every seed I sewed sprouted. A few days later the squash started sprouting as well as the bush beans (but I never did see a single bunching onion, the seed packet was old).

It didn't take long before the white-flies found my little garden plot. Here is an excerpt from my garden journal:

August 27, 2009
Whiteflies EVERYWHERE! It's awful. I spent pretty much an entire afternoon researching ways to kill them. I sprayed them with my soap solution recipe (it's for aphids but I read it will kill the whiteflies too). They are all over the leaves of my squashes and bush beans, plus the larvae on the underside. I hate them! I just read that the solution might be harmful to my squash plants so I may have killed them along with the flies. :(

I researched a few organic garden pest recipes. My dad used a pepper spray to protect his Tabasco and habenero peppers from being eaten alive by garden chompers. This is the recipe he used as he remembers it:

Ingredients:

• dishsoap
• several cloves of garlic
• 6-10 hot peppers (hotter the better!)
• 1 gallon water

Directions:
Place garlic, peppers and a small amount of your water in a blender/food processor and puree. NOTE: Avert your face when you take the lid off because the fumes are very strong. Strain the mixture and add the liquid to your gallon of water.

When you are ready to use the solution on your garden, fill up a spray bottle, add 2 tsp dishsoap, shake and spray every few days until the pests are under control.

Shake well before each use.

We had to leave for a few days in September. I left a soaker-hose attached to a timer so the seedlings would stay moist while we were gone. When we came home the garden was not only growing and alive, it was wild and the squash plants were huge! They pretty much took over the garden.

Next season I'm going to make a new bed where I can plant just squash separate from everything else! The bush beans and the peppers were still getting enough sun so I just let everything grow so I can see how things turn out. This is definitely an experiment in progress and I will have more pictures and info as the garden saga continues.

Additional photos of my Veggie Garden are found on my Flickr page.

If you are interested in building a square foot garden box like mine, check out Emily's instructions for making the garden box on her My Square Foot Garden blog: Build It!