• Swiss Chard and Ricotta Cheese Pasta

    A simple recipe for your garden grown Swiss Chard.

    it's sometimes hard to know what to do with a vegetable once you've grown it. Swiss Chard is like that. Swiss Chard like Radicchio, is bitter raw but provides depth and flavor when cooked. This recipe is a quick and colorful meal that takes only 30 minutes.

    Ingredients

    1 Bunch / 6 leaves
    Swiss Chard
    3 Ounces
    Ricotta Cheese
    1 Pound
    Rotini Pasta
    2
    Cloves of Garlic
    1
    Onion or equivalent Leaks
    1 Tbsp.
    Vegetable Oil
    1 Cup
    Liquid, reserved from pasta water
    16 Oz.
    Sausage (optional)

    Directions

    • 1. Cook pasta to package directions.
    • 2. In a dutch oven or large heavy saucepan, brown 16 oz. of sausage. Set aside.
    • 3. Add in vegetable oil, onions and garlic. Cook over medium heat till soft.
    • 4. Add chopped swiss chard. Continue cooking over medium heat until wilted.
    • 5. Combine all other ingredients, sausage, ricotta cheese and pasta.
    • 6. Add reserved pasta water as needed.
    Garnish with grated romano or parmesan cheese. A simple great tasting recipe with vegetables you grew yourself.

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  • Use leaf compost as mulch in your landscaping

    Turn your leaves into high quality compost mulch in just 2 months.

    All of those leaves and you don’t know what to do with them. If you want your bushes and shrubs to stand out and maybe get a bite to eat, you should consider putting your leaves where God intended, under the trees and shrubs that made them.

    Leaf compost will help maintain moisture during drought conditions and organisms in the soil can use the leaves for food and in turn provide nutrients to the plants. Leaf compost can also be combined with natural wood chips to create a denser mulch effect. The leaves and wood chips will decompose together.

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  • Welcome

    I love to garden and enjoy growing vegetables, flowers and whatever unusual plants I can find. You may know that adding organic material to the soil is a necessity. And since my soil is heavy clay I need to add quite a bit to maintain a healthy loom. I have been using leaves from the trees on my property to amend the soil for a few years. I realized I needed a better way to turn my leaves into a useful soil amendment. Over the years I have been using tarps to collect my leaves, store them and keep them from blowing away. Then one year I decided to not just cover but wrap the leaves up in the tarp to store them for the winter. I added the remnants of my kitchen scraps from the compost bucket and some grass clippings, then I watered the whole pile for good measure. I left the whole batch to decompose through the spring, in May I opened it up and started using the partially decomposed leaves as mulch and side dressing. The results were wonderful.

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  • Garden Peppers

    When it comes to summer vegetables, the red bell pepper is a winner. But what do you do with them when you have an abundance? A traditional method for making the red bell pepper even better is to roast them until the skin burns off and the flesh becomes tender. On a hot bed of charcoal place your bell peppers with a long set of tongs. They will take up to 10 minutes to completely roast on each side so have some patience and maybe a beer.

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  • Caramelized Carrots

    A delicious recipe for your garden grown carrots.

    Growing carrots is easy. Well it's easy when you use the Compost Hero Leaf Compost method. Here is a recipe for the loads of carrots you will have in the late winter after a season growing carrots using leaf compost. This recipe is a favorite as a side dish to any festive meal.

    Ingredients

    8 - 10
    Carrots pulled from your garden.
    2
    Cloves garlic, hopefully pulled from your garden.
    1
    Small piece of ginger, hopefully pulled from your garden.
    2
    Dried cayenne peppers, hopefully pulled from your garden.
    1
    Juice of whole lemon
    1
    Tbsp vegetable oil
    1
    Tbsp apple cider vinegar
    2
    Tbsp sugar

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