This is a mayonnaise-based caesar salad dressing that works great with thinly sliced black kale to make a Black Kale Caesar Salad but works equally as well with romaine. The taste reminds me of Renée’s salad dressing. If you prefer an olive oil & egg-based dressing, try this traditional caesar salad dressing. Ingredients: 1/2 cup… Read more »
Turkey Tetrazzini
This is a traditional tetrazzini recipe I made with leftover Christmas turkey. It made a great boxing day dinner served with cranberry sauce, creamy caesar salad, stuffed mushrooms, and celery bread. We paired it with an amarone which went well with the savoury flavour. Ingredients: 5 tablespoons butter (1 for pan, 1 for mushrooms, 3… Read more »
Raw Beet Salad
I love beets. Boiled, roasted, Harvard beets – anything except pickled beets (sorry pickle lovers). However, all the rain we’ve had this year has meant an abundance of big beets. So, I decided to branch out our beet repertoire and experiment by making a raw beet salad. We enjoyed it, although my younger son likes… Read more »
Getting an Early Start to the Vegetable Garden
Living around the Kitchener-Waterloo area in southern Ontario we have a decent gardening season, but most years you can’t reliably plant vegetables outside until late May and most produce is finished by late September. I’ve read a lot about year-round gardening and have, with limited success, been able to extend our harvest with row covers… Read more »
My Daffodils are Backwards!
Last fall, with the help of my mom and dad who were up for a visit, I planted a couple hundred daffodils along the edge of my back gardens. Some were the traditional single yellow daffodils, others were white, some multi-coloured. Finally this past week the last started to bloom and they look lovely. There’s… Read more »
Weather Confusion – What Happened To Spring?
If it wasn’t April 4 I’d think this was someone’s idea of an April fool’s joke. After a very mild winter, with little snow, old man winter dressed up as a Polar Vortex and decided he’d show up just as spring arrived. He’s not just late to the party but he’s the guest no-one wants… Read more »
Practical Crop Rotation – A Second Look
Gardening evolves with knowledge and experience. I have been formally planning my vegetable garden layout on paper for several years now and each year I think I get a little bit better. In addition to learning about plant families, I have come to realize how you effectively rotate your crops depends upon what exactly you… Read more »
Crop Rotation, Plant Families And The Vegetable Garden
When planning your vegetable garden, consider the benefits of crop rotation. Good crop rotation prevents the build up of pests and diseases in the soil and preserves micro-nutrients. For example, legumes (beans and peas) will actually add nitrogen to the soil. While crop rotation will not guarantee that diseases will not occur, it greatly reduces… Read more »
My Pruning Schedule
I’ve often found it hard to know what shrubs needed pruning when, and with all the new shrubs I have planted or plan to put in this year, this task will get even harder. To help me this year, I’ve made up a pruning schedule by major time of season. If you are reading this… Read more »
Draw Your Own Garden Plan Without Expensive Garden Design Software
I experimented with quite a few different garden design software packages. Many of them were very cumbersome or too limited for what I wanted. I eventually found that it was easier to use an Excel spreadsheet by treating it like graph paper and combining this with the many autoshape tools in Excel. The end result… Read more »