New Garden Additions

At the organic gardeners meeting last Wednesday we became the proud owners of a Sweet Potato slip and a Seminole Pumpkin plant. If you are not familiar, Sweet Potatoes are just awesome. The Seminole Pumpkin is a butternut squash-like veggie that is supposed to grow well here. As of now, I still have the sweet potato on the porch until I can determine what to do with it. And the Seminole Pumpkin has been transplanted to a larger pot and put under a bottle brush on the side of the house ( so it can climb it).

Publish Post

Home made pizza

I am a pizza freak. If unrestrained, I could eat pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I have been talking about making home-made dough for a while now. I decided to try making pizza from scratch about a week ago. My goal is to come up with a dough recipe that uses alternative grains such as buckwheat and to possibly eliminate the use of yeast in the recipe. However for this pizza, I used the tried and true whole wheat pizza dough recipe that is in the The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso. It was not a difficult recipe to follow. We love to make our own tomato sauces so the pizza sauce is a variation of the spaghetti sauce we normally make.

The following ingredients were used in sauce:

  • Muir Glens Fire Roasted Tomatoes
  • Veggies sauteed in olive oil (eggplant, zucchini, green pepper, onion, garlic)
  • Medley of fresh and dry herbs (bay leaf, oregano, basil, thyme)

Finally, I shredded Organic Valley mozzarella cheese for the cheese topping.

Final Notes
The pizza was quite good but the dough was a little thick and crunchy. The dough recipe allows to make two pizzas. The extra dough can be stored for a day or two in the refrigerator as long as it is covered. For the first attempt, I had preheated the pizza stone. I did not do this on the second pizza. Additionally in the second attempt, I used a rolling pin to flatten the dough to make it look more pizza like and to even the dough throughout. Finally, in addition to the mozzarella cheese, I added some grated cows milk cheese that I purchased from whole foods. The cheese had a similar taste to a parmesan. While I enjoyed both pizzas, the second was definitely better. Sorry I did not take pictures of the latter because we were rushed to eat it before a Broadway show.

Preparing square Foot Garden


After a late start, I finally finished the square foot garden. I used the book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew for advice on how to prepare a garden. Carlos assisted me in clearing a spot in the garden. After the area was cleared and leveled off, a weed sheet was put down and the garden frame was assembled. The garden frame was purchased as a pre-configured set to save time.
The potting mix used is a combination of peat moss, vermiculite, and compost in 1/3 amounts. Large quanties of vermiculite was hard to find, I was only able to obtain it in an old school feed store (that sold baby chicks and live turkeys). The sq ft gardening book recommended that the compost be a mix of different brands and types of compost to ensure diversity of nutrients. I mixed the soil on a large tarp.

The last step in setting up the garden was setting up the grid system. A theme you might notice is lazy gardening. Instead of setting up the fancy wood grid as specified in the book, I made a grid from leftover garden string. I used old popsicle sticks to hold the strings.Finally, I prepared a diagram of what I plan to grow in my new garden. I was able to use Carlos’s old graphing paper for this one 🙂