Blog Archives
Those Old Onions
It happens to the best of us, you reach into the bag of onions and you find greens. Sometimes you can still use these onions but other times, well, they’re gross. Instead of tossing them in the garbage or compost heap, watch my video on how to plant them so you get more onions!
Chive Blossom Vinegar
Every year I have a bumper crop of chives, regardless of the weather. I’ve started using the blossoms as I can’t possibly eat all the chives themselves, especially if I let them spread their seeds everywhere. My favorite way of using the flowers is making flavored vinegar.
Here’s a quick video we made:
Simply fill a mason jar with the fresh beautiful flowers and top off the jar with white vinegar. (If you want to get fancy, white wine vinegar is amazing in this.) Let the jar sit in a dark place for a couple weeks. When the vinegar is a pretty pink color, it is ready to use. Strain out the blossoms and use the vinegar on everything! Its got an awesome light onion flavor, it tastes so good on salads, raw veggies or anything potato.
Let me know if you try it!
Supplies:
Jars (https://amzn.to/2UrfDTh )
Chive seeds ( https://amzn.to/2yWd3hq )
Vinegar
My New Greenhouse
Guys, I’m so excited about my greenhouse. It was a birthday gift from a friend but I’ve finally got the chance to set it up and start using it. If you follow my Instagram, you’ve seen it but here’s a quick pic and the promised review:
Greenhouse!
It recommended two people to set up but it really was only a one person job, the trickiest part was getting the tarps on. It’s 6x6x8’.
It has stood up to strong wind and rain in the Canadian spring season. My plants inside are super happy. It has two built in shelves with lots of space for more shelves of your own.
Here’s a quick amazon link if you want to check it out for yourself (https://amzn.to/2ZfFMIR)
Chive Seeds
Tis the season for gardening and any prepper can tell you that the more food you can grow on your own, the better.
I have a huge clump of chives in my back yard. They come back every year and spread from their roots so I had no idea they had seeds or that I could harvest the seeds to share.
To start, you need to find a clump of chives that has flowered. Select flowers that have mostly dried out.
The tips of the flowers should be white and thin like tissue paper. The next thing I do is separate the flower blooms from the stem, to make them easier to sort.
The dry flowers I set aside for processing and the not so dry flowers I either let air dry for a few days or compost if they are not even close to being ready.
When you pull apart the flower, inside you will find a dark green to black ball, this is where you will find the seeds. Cut this apart, it should divide into three parts, leaving you with some sacks covered in a thin green film.
In each of these sacks is two chive seeds, gently remove the green film to reveal two small black seeds. Set the seeds aside to dry (I put mine on a paper plate away from any breeze) and then store. Chive seeds can be finicky and may only last a year even under optimal storage, so be sure to share with your friends.
Here is a link for some chive seeds if there are none local to you : https://amzn.to/2UcXfyR
Newsprint and the Prepper
I use newsprint for a lot of projects around the house. We get two sets of advertisements and local news once a week and it adds up to a lot of paper. Over the summer I use this paper to start fires but here are three things I do with it in the other seasons.
1.) Shred: I save my flyers for about a month and then spend an hour shredding them (by hand). I keep my shreds in a tupper bin until the summer time when I make them into paper bricks for the fire. I got my paper brick maker from Lehmans (www.lehmans.com) This is an easy and free way to have heat and cooking material.
2.) Spread: Once spring comes and I re-dig my garden beds, I spread newsprint on the bottom. This keeps the weeds to a minimum by suffocating them. By the time the papers disintegrate, the weeds have been killed. I usually do a layer about 3 sheets of newsprint thick.
3.) Seed: I use newsprint to make little pots for starting my seeds. There are little gadgets you can get to help you do this (check here). They stand up fairly easy in my mini greenhouse and the roots have no trouble pushing their way through the wet paper. You can take the whole pot and put it in the ground as is.
Starting Seeds
Starting seeds doesn’t have to be rocket science. You don’t need green houses and heat lamps. Kindergarten children plant beans in their classrooms to learn about spring time.
All you need is a cup, some paper towels or napkins, some water and a window sill.
I use clear plastic party cups to start my seeds. I stuff a little bit of brown paper towel in the bottom and then add water. I let the paper towel absorb as much water as it can, then pour any extra out. I put two or three seeds in each cup then set the cup in a warm, sunny window sill. After a couple days to a week, the seeds should start showing some signs of life. If they haven’t, don’t give up, recently my cantaloupes took almost three weeks to start sprouting. Keep your paper towels moist (but don’t drown your little roots) and wait. Once your plant has developed a good size tap root (the biggest root in the middle that the other roots sprout from), carefully pull the plants out of the cups and put into some good quality potting soil until it’s warm enough to plant outside.
This is how we start the majority of our seeds. Currently we’ve got every window sill full of beans, peas, carrots, peppers, chilies, butternut squash, sunflowers, radishes, cucumbers and countless herbs. This is also great for any little helpers you might have hanging around (children, grandkids?), they usually get very excited to see their little projects grow.
I’ve personally used these seeds in the past and was very pleased with quality.
BurroakBurrow 