I adore my four hens, Inky, Clyde, Bumble and Boo. I can’t help it, even though they occasionally rampage my garden, escape from the yard, and wake me up very, very early in the morning. They are just so cute and lovable. Especially Inky. She follows me around the yard and coos contentedly when I pet her.

So I was super excited when Bay Area-artist and gardener Rigel Stuhmiller emailed me to say she has a new line of rooster and hen prints in the works. She will be creating a hand-pulled, hand-carved chicken block print each week until she “runs out of chickens or out of steam”! She’s playing around with the texture and tone of the prints—so each one will be unique. Most amazing of all, she’s selling these prints for only forty-five dollars in her Etsy store, making them a special and affordable gift for all those chicken lovers out there.

These wee apples are so incredibly cute in real life. All three fit right into the palm of my hand. I picked them up at a harvest party this weekend in Yakima, which is pretty much the epicenter of all things apple in the state of Washington. This particular variety, whose name I could unfortunately not track down, is used to make cider.

I have apples on my mind because 6 apple trees, 1 cherry, 8 maples, 7 elms, and 3 dogwoods are sitting outside on my parking strip right now waiting to be planted. We participated in a free City of Seattle program that gives neighborhood groups trees to plant in their parking strips, plus one fruit tree per family. Seattle only has 23% tree cover, which is down from 40% in the 1970s. My block is getting together this Saturday to plant our new trees and do our small part to help the city meet its goal of reaching 30% tree cover by 2037.

If you live in Seattle, you can apply to participate in the Community Tree Program next year (the deadline is in August). If your city doesn’t have a tree giveaway, I still encourage you to get together with your neighbors and buy some trees in bulk. Nurseries often give discounts for large orders and many conservation districts offer discounted bareroot trees (you can search for your local conservation district right here). This weekend I plan on taking step-by-step pictures of how to plant a tree and will post directions next week!

When Jon and I first moved to Seattle we couldn’t afford cable. We ended up sticking our television in the closet, and then eventually selling it at a garage sale because we never used it. I don’t really miss having a TV set because we can still get DVDs of most of our favorite shows (Mad Men, 6 Feet Under, Sopranos) from Netflicks and watch them on our computer, but sometimes on a rainy afternoon all I really want to do is sit down, flick on the TV and watch a cooking show (or three).

So I’ve taken to watching online cooking shows and wanted to share two of my favorites with you: Plant. Grow. Eat and Cookus Interruptus.

Plant. Grow. Eat stars my Organic Gardening magazine colleague Abby Poulette and Tim Crowe, a culinary student and the host of his own online cooking show Eating Crowe. I love Plant. Grow. Eat. because it fits the mission of DigginFood (which incidentally is Grow. Cook. Eat) so well! Tim and Abby demonstrate how to make a simple dish using garden fresh ingredients, like pickled green tomatoes and stuffed squash blossoms. Tim has an easy going style and he is not exacting, which is so refreshing, because in my kitchen, cooking is not an exact science!

Cookus Interruptus is one part cooking show, one part sitcom, and wholly awesome. It stars Seattle nutritionist, author and actress, Cynthia Lair, and her fictional family, played by Matt Smith, Bhama Roget, and Frank Buxton. The show has the very serious mission of “educating viewers about how to prepare high-quality wholesome food in the context of busy family life” but they do so in a highly entertaining, super funny, addictive kind of way. It really is must watch TV, except it is on your computer.

I’ve embedded one episode of each of these shows below—Pumpkin Pecan Muffins from Cookus Interruptus and Compound Butter from Plant. Grow.Eat.—but you can put together your own cooking show marathon by watching back episodes at the Cookus Interruptus and Organic Gardening websites.

I love feta cheese. But not the kind that comes crumbled in a little plastic tub. No, I prefer the tangy sheep’s milk feta that is sold unadorned, floating in its own pool of brine. I nearly always have a bit of this cheese in the fridge because it pairs up so well with salad greens, but I also often use it as the base in a very simple, but seriously delicious, appetizer. This dish comes together a little different every time, but it is always very, very good.

Feta Marinated in Olive Oil and Herbs

* Pop out into the garden and snip a big handful of your favorite herbs. I like to mix and match thyme, rosemary, sage, marjoram, oregano, and savory. Basil is delicious, too, but I think it tastes best all by itself. Roll the herbs back and forth between your palms to crush their leaves and release their essential oils. Sometimes I then strip the leaves off of their stems, sometimes I don’t.

* Slice a hunk of sheep’s milk feta into ½ inch cubes.

* Select a cute container that is deeper than it is wide. Place a layer of feta in the bottom of the container. Sprinkle the cheese with red pepper flakes and a good grind of black pepper and then cover it up with a light layer of herbs. Repeat until the container is full.

* Pour a good extra virgin olive oil over the cheese, until all but the top layer is completely submerged. Set the container aside and let the cheese marinate at room temperature for at least two hours (though 6 or 8 is better). Stir the cheese occasionally during that time. Serve with bread and crackers and be sure to include a spoon so you can drizzle extra olive oil over the cheese.

I made this dish for the dinner party I posted about yesterday, and by the end of the evening there was nothing left. A good sign, I always think. If you decide to bring this dish to one of the many holiday parties that lay ahead, don’t let any leftover olive oil go to waste. During the party, Julie (from La Medusa) used the herb infused olive oil to dress the zucchini cruda, but it also tastes divine drizzled over roasted vegetables!

Thanks to Jim Henkens for sharing photos of my marinated feta. To see more photos from the dinner party, click here and be sure to check out Jim’s website www.jimhenkens.com.

Twinkly lights under a wisteria arbor.  A bunch of velvety sage. Footsteps crunching on gravel. Laughter rising up into the starlit night.

My memories of this summer’s solstice are as bright as snapshots. Luckily, if they ever begin to fade, I’ll have photographer Jim Henkens’ photos of the evening to bring them back into focus. Jim and I met when he visited my garden last summer. He was on assignment from Sunset and I was so pleased that the magazine sent him. He took great care photographing my garden and all the food growing in it, and I was thrilled with how the photos came out.

Afterwards, I asked him if he’d like share some photos for DigginFood, but he had a better idea—to throw a little party. The theme: fresh picked herbs, from his garden and mine. The setting: a long rustic table set out in his exquisite backyard.

I invited my dear friends from college, my beekeeping mentor, and his girlfriend. Jim, God bless him, asked of Seattle’s best chefs to join us—Justin Niedermeyer, the founder of Spinasse, Julie Andres, who owns La Medusa and her husband Evan Andres, the owner of Columbia City Bakery, plus Gordon Wishard, who is the new chef at La Medusa. I love to cook, but Justin, Julie, and Gordon are chefs. They surveyed the ingredients Jim and I presented them with and without much discussion made a truly memorable dinner.

The menu included a leg of lamb rubbed with garlic, anchovies, and rosemary. Little potatoes roasted with thyme. Fava beans braised in vinegar. Homemade prosciutto. Soft boiled eggs drizzled with harissa. Zucchini cruda with pea vines, mint, fennel, fresh goat cheese, and olive oil. And the most exquisite bread baked by Evan.

It was so fun and inspiring to watch the cooking unfold, because, like these chefs, I often make up a meal on the fly with whatever is fresh from my garden. It doesn’t always work out as deliciously as our solstice meal, but I now certainly having something to aspire towards.

To see more really lovely photos of food, I highly encourage you to spend a few moments exploring Jim’s portfolios on his website www.jimhenkens.com. I’m partial to the bakery shots. You’ll know why when you see them.

Justin has moved on from Spinasse, but you can sample Julie and Gordon’s cooking at La Medusa in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle. Evan bakes up the best bread in town at Columbia City Bakery—where he also sells homemade puff pastry. Swoon.

I garden smack in the middle of Seattle, but sometimes I seriously consider moving to the country and planting a huge vegetable garden. Luckily, I can keep my city garden and live out my country dreams by reading Red Dirt Ramblings—Dee Nash’s wonderful blog that chronicles her ever-changing one-acre garden in Oklahoma. Dee just ordered 37 chicks (!) and she grows a really astonishing variety of vegetables in her classic potager-style garden. I asked if she’d be willing to give us a tour of her and she most graciously obliged.

[Above: My youngest daughter, Bear (what I call her on the blog), holding her first crop of radishes for the year.  She likes plants which can be pulled from the ground best: potatoes, carrots, radishes and turnips.  No interest at all in lettuce or kale.  In fact, all of my children have liked this "buried gold" best.]

This an overview of the back garden.  The four long beds at the end of the garden were for vegetables, although more and more flowers try to creep in.  I’m thinking of making a brand new garden up on the hill.  I have a plan in mind, and the sun would be better.  My trees have grown over time, so that they cast more shade on the garden than they once did.

Spring was best in my garden this year.  The heat didn’t arrive until June, and then the temp hovered around 107 degrees F for two weeks straight.  All the blossoms on the tomatoes dropped, but because they were indeterminate, they produced later in the season.  Lucky for us, we have a long growing season.  My climbing beans failed to produce, and with my mother in the hospital for two months, nothing was normal for the garden.  However, we ended up with carrots, a few beans, lots of late tomatoes, eggplants, some squash (I had rot problems due to too much rain, too fast), but no potatoes because I tried something new, and it didn’t work.  I planted them in the compost pile, but it dried out in summer, and wasn’t near enough to a water source.

This is just a pretty sugar snap pea blossom photo.  We have a difficult time with true sweet peas in the spring, but this little blossom gives me almost as much cheer. Plus, the peas which came later were very, very sweet.

‘Giant Belgium’ (above) was my best producing tomato.  The plant was huge by season’s end, and it just pumped out the fruit.  Sadly, the taste was bland.  I still ate them.  I really liked ‘Royal Hillbilly’, ‘Cherokee Purple’, ‘Carbon’, ‘True Black’ ‘Brandywine’, ‘Sungold’ and a hybrid, ‘Super Fantastic.’  I plant this hybrid every year.  As for cherry tomatoes, I can’t beat ‘Sungold.’  Usually, they don’t even come indoors.  I eat them as I work.

This is a ‘Carbon’ tomato (I think!), which is an offshoot of ‘Cherokee Purple’.

My vegetable garden is completely organic, so it has lots of insects, both good and bad.

All photos in this post are copyright of Dee Nash. To see more pictures of her garden, visit Red Dirt Ramblings!

I’ve decided to follow the advice of these cute little munchkins and pledge to Eat Local this Thanksgiving! The Eat Local campaign is sponsored by the Cascade Harvest Coalition and Puget Sound Fresh and it is designed to raise awareness of the foods available from local farms. We will certainly be buying bread, cheese, and meat at our farmers market, but I want to make sure that we have homegrown food on our table, too. Here are a few ideas for eating uber local this Thanksgiving:

* Reserve some homegrown potatoes, winter squash, and apples for your Thanksgiving meal. Store them in a cool (about 50 degrees F), dark, dry place until you’re ready to use them.

* Use fresh herbs from the garden, including sage for stuffing, rosemary for the turkey, and thyme for roasted vegetables. Or, cut herbs now and dry them.

* Keep root vegetables, including carrots, beets, turnips, and rutabegas, in the garden and harvest them for the meal. In cold climates you can protect the crops from freezing by mulching around them with four- to six-inches of straw.

* Don’t pull out hardy greens like kale, Swiss chard, and collards yet. Wait to harvest them for Thanksgiving

* Harvest the peppers now, roast, and then freeze them. Add the thawed peppers into a roasted root vegetable medley, or blend them with feta cheese and serve with crackers as an appetizer.

Do you have other ideas for eating from the garden—or from local markets—this holiday season? If so, please share. And don’t forget to take the pledge!

My friend Mary Ann’s garden is a little slice of heaven that just happened to drop to earth on a bluff overlooking Boise, Idaho. Mary Ann approaches gardening-and well, pretty much everything-with gusto and it shows. Feathery ornamental grasses line a plunge pool, espaliered apples disguise a regular old wall, and edibles and ornamentals intermingle in the wide garden beds that encircle her gorgeous mid-century home.

It’s a garden that is easy to admire and envy, mainly because it doesn’t always follow the rules. There is no segregation here, where edibles are confined to the back and ornamentals put on a show up front.

In a bed besides the driveway, Mary Ann enclosed ‘Fall Gold’ raspberries within a gorgeous steel frame and then planted a big and bold Joe Pye Weed behind them. Nearby ‘Sun Gold’ and ‘Pink Thai’ tomatoes rub shoulders with Clematis tangutica and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus’. Out in the back, newly planted espaliered pear trees (six varieties on each tree!) are trained along a rustic steel fence.

Mary Ann looks at her garden as a work in progress. This year she ripped out a mature ornamental bed because the grasses growing in it blocked her view. Rather than look at this as a design failure, Mary Ann saw it as an opportunity to try something new. She recognizes that gardens constantly evolve and are never truly finished. A lesson that I’m still learning. I often procrastinate about putting in new beds, designing our patio, or installing a trellis because I suffer from design phobia–I’m terrified that I’ll plant or build something and it will look bad. But what Mary Ann has taught me is that you might not always get it right, and that is totally okay. I’m also learning that by mixing up plants that scare me (ornamentals) with ones I love (edibles) I can create a changing palette that will only get better with time.

To see more of Mary Ann’s garden and read about her gardening exploits, check out her blog Idaho Gardener. It is always a fun read!

Tomato season is coming to its end. In my garden a few orange-ish red tomatoes hang from their scraggly vines, but at the farmer’s market it is another story. On Sunday nearly every stall had crates of tomatoes priced to sell at $2.00 a pound.

I know that it’s a different situation out on the East Coast, where blight swept up the seaboard, leaving hardly any tomato plants in its wake. But here in Seattle, a record hot summer and a dry, warm fall resulted in bumper crops of tomatoes just waiting to be canned.

So, I called up the Shannon and Jason of The Lazy Locavores for some tomato canning hints. These guys know tomatoes. They have 60 plants growing in pots on the patio of their townhouse and have roughly 150 more plants in 5 different sites around Seattle. They can at least 80 quarts of tomatoes every year (plus “lots and lots of salsa”), share food with their gardening clients, and donate produce to the food bank.

I was lucky enough to attend a tomato canning class taught by Shannon and Jason at the home of Canning Across America’s founder Kim O’Donnel in August.  The class was so much fun—everyone pitched in to skin, core, and crush (i.e. smoosh tomatoes with your hands!) tomatoes. We canned whole tomatoes, crushed tomatoes and made salsa. It was such a good time.  And so easy! Seriously, anyone can do this.

Since I don’t have a memory for details, Shannon kindly sent me their list of top 5 tomato canning tips and agreed to share their directions for canning crushed tomatoes. For detailed instructions on canning whole and halved tomatoes and tomato sauce, or to schedule a canning class of your own, please check out The Lazy Locavore website and tell them I sent you!

Top 5 Tomato Canning Hints

1. Can crushed or chopped tomatoes instead of whole ones. Whole tomatoes look pretty in the jar but you can pack almost twice as much if you “mush” them up a bit. Remember, if you are going to cook them in sauces or stews, they are going to end up that way anyway.

2. Put up quarts of tomatoes. It’s very rare to see a recipe that calls for a pint of tomatoes.

3. Forget about canning spaghetti sauce. Instead of making 5 quarts of spaghetti sauce, why not have 5 quarts of tomato sauce that you can use for spaghetti or chili or any other dish.  Add the herbs, spices, and salt later.

4. Put up a few more jars than you think you need. You don’t want to run out early if something happens to the seal on one or two jars.

5. Use a crock pot or slow cooker to start batches of sauce.  Just toss the tomatoes into a slow cooker, turn it on, and go away. Come back hours later and you are almost ready to process the sauce.  If you like your sauce smooth, run the pulpy goodness through a food mill to remove the skins and seeds, or take the lazy way out and use a hand blender to pulverize the entire batch.

Crushed or Chopped Tomatoes

Equipment Needed:

Bottled Lemon Juice

Salt – Optional

Jars, rings, and lids

Water Bath Canner and assorted saucepans/bowls

Tomatoes* –  Approximate Yields:
21 pounds crushed for canner load of 6 quarts.
13 pounds crushed for canner load of 8 pints.

* You can use whatever type of tomato you like here.  Look for large round tomatoes with deep color and firm flesh.  We prefer to use Roma style (paste) tomatoes for making chopped tomatoes because the thick flesh remains tight after processing.

1. Prepare Jars and Lids

Place the jar lids in a small sauce pan filled with water.  Bring to a light boil then turn down to low heat for about 10 minutes before using. The idea is to keep them hot, not cook them. Leave in hot water and remove as needed. For preparing jars, wash them in hot soapy water and rinse well, or if you are lazy like the Locavores run through a hot cycle in your dishwasher. Place jars in a rack in your water bath canner, and boil gently for 10 minutes. Leave in hot water and emove a few jars at a time as you need them.

2. Skin Tomatoes

To remove skins, wash tomatoes and dip in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds or until the skins begin to split. Then dip in cold water, slips off the skins, core ,and remove any blemished or discolored parts.

3. Heat and Pack Tomatoes

Chop tomatoes into bite sized pieces or crush them with your hands or a potato masher.  Place is a saucepan. Heat to a boil and cook gently for 5 minutes. For quart jars: add 2 tablespoons lemon juice to each canning jar (along with 1/2 teaspoon salt if desired). Pack hot jars with hot prepared tomatoes leaving  ½-inch head space. Remove air bubbles. Wipe rim and screw threads. Place lid and screw ring until finger tight.

4. Process in water bath

45 minutes for quarts. 40 minutes for pints. (Times given are for sea level to 1000 ft elevation.  If you live at elevations over 1000ft please check your state Department of Health or Extension Office for correct processing time)

5. Turn off heat and wait 5 minutes

6. Remove jars

7. Wait 2 hours – check for seal

If seal did not take you can try to process again with a new jar and lid, but results will be poor.  The better choice is to refrigerate and use within 2 weeks or process for tomato sauce.  (yummmmm sauce!)

8. Label contents and date then store in cool, dark location.

I was so excited when I discovered these adorable canning label designed by LeAnn of the Portland-based blog, Lelo in Nopo. I have not labeled a single jar of my homemade chili sauce, raspberry or strawberry jam because I wanted the label to look cute and my handwriting is super messy. But now I don’t have to worry about it!

LeAnn is selling customizable versions of these super stylish labels in her Etsy shop. You can choose from Plum, Green, Orange or Red and send in your own title, description, and date for your canned goods. LeAnn will make up the label and send you a printable PDF of them. So cool! I’m hoping to make grape jelly with my neighbor’s Concord Grapes this weekend. If I do, I’m going to order labels in plum and have them read: Grape Jelly. Made with Handpicked Concord Grapes. Fall 2009.

Today is my 4^th wedding anniversary. So, I want to take a brief break from my regular programming and acknowledge that I am a very lucky girl. As my grandmother once observed, Jon is smart and handsome and on top of that he gamely indulges all my gardening whims.

He has become pro at removing grass, building raised beds, and identifying aphids. Once, last summer, he even followed me out into the garden at three in the morning to help secure a squash trellis that was endanger of toppling over during a windstorm. Seriously, that takes dedication. Luckily for me, he accepts payment in the form of butternut squash tacos made with squash grown on the still standing trellis!