Look at that sweet corn grow! And check out all the rest of the random stuff that I’ve gotten from my farmer neighbor (leeks, fingerling seed potatoes), as well as from the local nursery (white and red onion sets, sage, basil, cilantro, rosemary.)
You can also see in photo #5 the free seeds (see here) that I got from my neighbor starting to germinate.
Here are a bunch of pics of the discarded seedlings in the white cups. I also started a whole flats worth of sweet corn just to test to out, and so far they seem to be doing very well. The sweet corn ended up germinating a lot quicker than I thought it would (about 3 days to sprout.)
All I can say is: BORING. I will give Frito Lay the benefit of the doubt, in that they didn’t recycle one of their other flavors to make these chips. But their really wasn’t anything exciting about this flavor. More or less it tasted like tomato soup with a hint of basil, with the ironic part being that on the back of the bag is a recipe for making tomato basil soup.
For some reason I thought that these chips were going to taste more like a caprese salad, which is usually what I think of when I see tomatoes and basil put together. But instead I got a mouthful of crunchy tomato basil soup. Overall I’m indifferent to this favor. Would I get them again, maybe. But I can tell you that I won’t be going out of my way to get a bag of these chips.
Alright I ended up only transplanting 18 of 27 cells of the cucumbers and the zucchini tonight, so you’ll see a couple of before and after pictures below. Also you can see that I’m going to give growing potatoes another shot this year (more details to come on the pallet growing bins) hence why those potatoes are under the grow lights.
The pics for this set came out pretty bad, since I didn’t have the camera flash turned on. So the only light, is the light coming off of the florescent grow lights. From now on for the seedling posts, I’m going to stick with just the calendar date instead of the number of days that the flat has been growing. Things are just starting to get a little bit too confusing for me trying to remember the numbers of days instead of the date.
So here is a quick breakdown of when the two flats were started:
Flat #1: 04/13/2010
Flat #2: 04/21/2010
Amazing what another five days of growing will do, but it looks like I have a mixed bag of results as far as seeds that ended up germinating.
Success:
Aji Limo
El Jefe
1/2 the Bell Peppers
1/3 the Banana style peppers
1/2 the Sage
1/2 the Basil
Failed:
The other 1/2 or 1/3 of all those listed above
all the parsley
all the cilantro
all the oregeno
all the rosemary
I have to say that I’m not 100% sure that the parsley, cilantro, oregeno, and rosemary have failed. Since all those herbs take anywhere from 14 to 21 days to germinate. So before I toss out all the dirt in those flats, I’ll give them another week or so to do their thing.
It’s been a little bit tricky, figuring out how to get the temperature just right on the heating pad. Since when I wrapped the whole flat in a movers blanket, the temperature inside the flat shot up to 95F. So I’m going to test out simulating the heat and light cycle of the sun in the growing area. So last night I set up a make shift growing station with a grow light on a couple of copier boxes, with the heating pad and the grow light both plugged into a timer.
The basil ended up sprouting this past weekend, which was a lot quicker than expected. And when I checked the flat this morning, I started to see some activity on the El Jefe jalapenos and the sage. As it currently stands, it seems like the heating mat is cutting down the germination time almost in half, which is pretty amazing. That is of course, with me assuming that the seeds that I saved from last year are still viable. Which is the big question mark for the garden this year.
OK, the first flat of seed were sown last night. And here is the breakdown of what is going into the first flat of 72 cells:
9 cells – Aji Limo
9 cells – El Jefe Jalapeno
6 cells – Bell Peppers
3 cells – Jalapeno “M”
3 cells – Banana pepper – green color
3 cells – Banana pepper – yellow color
3 cells – Banana pepper – orange color
6 cells – Sage
6 cells – Basil
6 cells – Parsley
6 cells – Cilantro
6 cells – Oregano
6 cells – Rosemary
This is kind of a late post, since I made this caprese salad in October. But I guess better late then never.
If you don’t know how to make a salad, then you should have no problem in making a caprese salad since it only has seven ingredients. And those ingredients are fresh mozzarella, a tomato, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil, kosher salt and pepper.
And putting it all together is just as simple as the ingredient list. Slice the tomato and mozzarella into ~1/4″ slices, and arrange on a plate or platter alternating between the tomato and mozzarella. Finally top with the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil, kosher salt and pepper. And that’s it! How much more simple can you get? (Other then getting a bag of mixed salad greens and topping it with bottled salad dressing.)
Side note:
1) Since I didn’t want to get fresh basil from the grocery store. I just used some of the basil that I dried from my garden.
2) If you have some nice salt (black salt, red salt, etc) by all means use it. I just happened to use kosher salt, even though I had some red salt on hand but forgot to use it.
3) For the olive oil, I used some extra virgin olive oil that JRR got for me a while back.
Now that I have the box fan dehydrator built, its time to dry something. And I just got a bucket full of basil from my farmer neighbor, at first I thought about making it into pesto and freezing it into ice cube trays. But why not put the box fan through its maiden voyage, to work out any kinks.
Well it turns out that the type of filter you use can be a major kink in using a box fan dehydrator. The filter that I started with was a cotton style filter with a MERV 8 rating. The problem with using a filter with that high of a rating was that the box fan wasn’t strong enough to blow its air capacity through the filter. So a majority of the air ended up bouncing off the filter back though the box fan. So what was supposed to take a day to dry out ended up taking five days. So for next time I’m going to use one of those blue furnace filters that has a MERV 2 rating, since a MERV 8 is just overkill in this application. That is unless you are a dust freak/germ-a-phobe, then maybe a MERV 8 is the way to go.
