Category: Kitchen Garden

Gardening, Farming, Cooking, Recipes, Local Food, Everything that goes into meal production.

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Kitchen Garden

Last of the Apples

Last six apples from 2025 season in the refrigerator.

Sunday I finished reading A Basket of Apples: Recipes and Paintings from a Country Orchard by Val Archer. I wrote a brief review: “The paintings are gorgeous. The recipes very British, heavy on dairy and animal flesh. If you cook like that, give it a go!”

Planting apple trees on our lot in 1996 was a defining moment in my life. I remember the family gathering at our house after my mother-in-law’s funeral, then leaving for Ames with my father-in-law while I stayed behind to plant the orchard before joining them. Over the years, some trees were lost to windstorms and a derecho, but three of the original six still produce. Today, the pantry is full of apple cider vinegar, dried apples, applesauce and apple butter… plus these six fresh apples.

At a political event on Saturday, a long-time friend arrived with a car emblazoned with promotions of veganism. It got me thinking about why I settled on being ovo-lacto vegetarian. Sunday night our household had a conversation about that and I reached some conclusions:

  • I won’t give up butter but can limit myself to one tablespoon per day, and some days have none.
  • There is no reason I can’t limit the amount of hard cheese I consume to one or two ounces per day, or seven ounces per week.
  • Cottage cheese is less offensive than hard cheese when it comes to encouraging LDL cholesterol production. I consume the regular product, so should limit myself to no more than one cup per day and try low-fat.
  • Fluid milk is basic in my diet, and I will measure how much I consume. Not sure of a limit, yet drinking 16 ounces per day seems like a start.
  • Peanuts and peanut butter are a daily menu item. Roasted, salted peanuts for snacks, and Jif-brand peanut butter for meals or evening dessert. Goal is quarter cup peanuts per day and no more than two tablespoons peanut butter in a day, leaning toward one. Natural peanut butter will be for some, but not all of my consumption.
  • Sodium intake is a constant overage in my diet. Need to continue to reduce how much I consume. That dang brain of mine rewards consumption of salt, so I need to be less “brainy” in that regard.
Promoting veganism.

Sadly this means I won’t be visiting Archer’s book for recipes. From time to time, though, I can remember her beautiful paintings.

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Kitchen Garden

Life Is Change — Fertilizer Edition

Tubs for potatoes.

It was the day for a drive to Monticello to pick up 150 pounds of composted chicken manure for the garden. I learned to use this fertilizer during eight years working on a friend’s farm where they used organic practices. Most farmers use it on a larger scale, yet 50-pound bags were available for gardeners like me. That is, they did sell them before private equity bought the company.

The first sign of trouble was the telephone number being disconnected. I found another number and asked my question, “Before I drive 40 minutes to Monticello, I want to make sure you have 50-pound bags of composted chicken manure.” In a gruff voice, a lady replied, “I can tell you for sure, they don’t have that in Monticello.” Undaunted, I looked for other options as first planting is approaching.

Life is change, Paul Kantner wrote. How it differs from the rocks.

Midwestern BioAg, the company where I sourced fertilizer for years, operates in the sustainable/biological agriculture sector, helping both conventional and organic farms reduce dependency on synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus, aligning with environmental goals, according to Google. That’s why we used them. The composted chicken manure product they made was perfect for a small gardener. It was uniform in texture, easy to apply, and enhanced yields.

When private equity bought a controlling interest in the firm in 2020, there was no noticeable change in company operations… until this week.

I had to do something. Potato planting is slated for Friday, and after that, Katy bar the door on garden work until Memorial Day. It turned out there are a number of “organic” composted manure products available, most selling for a lot less than the one I was using. A nearby hardware store advertised a 40-bag of “organic composted manure” for $2.79, so I drove to the nearby city and bought five.

On the pallet where I picked them up, one bag was open. I could see the mix was not as uniformly granulated as the other. Adaptation is a key part of home gardening. On Highway One I thought about how to address that. I have a screen with quarter-inch mesh mounted on a frame. I will push each bag through it to create a more uniform texture. I had a plan by the time I got home.

I started digging holes for six planting tubs. The soil was easy to dig and everything is falling into place. I don’t like change, yet the best policy in fertilizer is accept it and move on.

Tub with a layer of sticks in the bottom to keep the openings flowing when it rains.
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Kitchen Garden

Garden in Late Winter

Garden on March 15, 2026.

The best part of a garden is the produce harvested. A close second is the fresh meals made, followed by goods processed and put up in the kitchen, making the whole enterprise a kitchen garden.

I’ve written before, “The goal of having a kitchen garden is to produce food aligned with our culinary habits that helps meet a basic human need. We have to eat, no matter where, no matter how. It may as well be enjoyable. We’ve all eaten our share of food that doesn’t please our palate. A kitchen garden should address that.”

There is more than that.

A garden is a place where decisions accumulate over time. Where the house is positioned, where trees are planted, which ground is left open, where paths form — some by intention, some by use. Over years these choices create habitat where plants, animals, weather, and human routines overlap. The gardener participates in the process but does not control it completely. A deer path appears. Birds sow mulberry trees the gardener did not plant. Wind finds corridors between structures and foliage.

The result is not wilderness. It is something more ordinary and interesting: a lived landscape, worked for food but shared with whatever life finds its way there.

Some days I get up from the writing desk — an heirloom from my father-in-law’s estate — and simply walk to the garden. In late winter desiccated foliage is beaten down, showing the ground covered in plastic and mulch from last year’s growing season. Garlic is already up. Soon weeds will follow. I cleared a plot to bury the potato tubs for Good Friday planting. As soon as I can manage — between rain showers and late winter snowfall — digging begins.

A deer path emerged between the wooded acreage a few lots to the east and an apple orchard a quarter mile west of me. I walked those woods and saw deer beds in the thick undergrowth. I followed deer paths because they existed in a place infrequently visited by humans. There is no more direct path for them to the orchard than between my garden and the house. The frozen ground is scattered with hoof prints and deer pellets. I occasionally see them browsing for food near twilight, yet mostly they are unseen. The idea of growing an urban lawn isn’t viable here because of such traffic.

Our garden is a noisy place in late winter. Crows, red wing blackbirds, cardinals, sparrows, and finches welcome spring in loud musicality. The sound of rubber tires on pavement filters across the lake from the road to the commercial district. Neighbors walk dogs in small groups, their voices circulate the way strong winds move on their own path during a wind storm.

What lives here is habitat: a built environment made of decisions about garden plots, landscaping, and use. A permissive structure that allows fruit and vegetables to grow while not impeding local wildlife except to keep them from eating tender young plants. Part of me wants a nice lawn, yet the other part wouldn’t have it any other way than it is.

Spring begins on Friday, a form of rebirth, yet not new. As garlic planted last fall emerges, the world stirs with slow, obvious awakening from winter’s decay. I am ready for it.

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Kitchen Garden

AI Peanut Butter Cookies

Peanut butter cookies made with a recipe created by artificial intelligence.

Suddenly there were three open jars of peanut butter in the house. I had to do something with them, and had been fancying a peanut butter cookie the way Mother used to make them. It started simply enough. I typed “Recipe for vegan peanut butter cookies” in the artificial intelligence chat box. It returned this recipe in a couple of seconds:

Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients

1 cup creamy peanut butter
3/4 cup brown sugar (or coconut sugar)
1/4 cup plant milk (almond, soy, oat, etc.)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a bowl, mix peanut butter and brown sugar until smooth.
Stir in plant milk and vanilla.
Add flour, baking soda, and salt and mix until a dough forms.
Roll dough into 1-inch balls and place on the baking sheet.
Press each with a fork in a crisscross pattern.
Bake 10–12 minutes until edges are lightly golden.

Let cool on the pan for about 5 minutes before moving them.

Resisting a temptation to change the recipe, I made them and mentioned in my chat bot: “I tried. Cookies seemed heavy.”

In its “that can happen” way of hiding failure while attempting to placate me, it responded, “Vegan peanut butter cookies can easily turn out heavy or dense. A few small things usually cause it. Here are the most common fixes and a lighter recipe that tends to work better.” With all the large language modeling, couldn’t you have done something to deal with this before posting the recipe? No. AI can’t help itself.

Back and forth we went, refining the recipe I eventually wrote in the workbook with culinary experiments. I will bake them again before putting it in the permanent cookbook. Finally, I said what was on my mind:

To address texture issues, would I be better off to consult cookbooks that place this recipe in the context of a specific culinary culture, such as Regan Daley’s In the Sweet Kitchen: The Definitive Baker’s Companion?

The chat bot immediately searched the internet, presumably to read Daley’s book before answering. There was no indication the machine was stunned by the threat of my leaving its environment to consult actual food authors on the same problem.

In what can only be described as a smarty-pants response, AI came up with this:

Yes — consulting a cookbook like In the Sweet Kitchen: The Definitive Guide to the Baker’s Pantry & Craft by Regan Daley is a very good idea, and your instinct about culinary context is sound. But there are actually two different kinds of cookbooks that solve texture problems, and they help in different ways.

I can’t say how much more I detest the word “but.” It went on to say my whole premise of “vegan peanut butter cookie” was a problem. It responded, “Your specific case (vegan peanut butter cookies) adds another layer.” Didn’t you know that from jump street, I thought.

Artificial intelligence displays little idea how we humans cook. If it were paired with a robot chef, the results could be generic and unsatisfying to the simplest palate.

Next time I’ll know to contact my sister and ask her if there is a copy of Mother’s recipe.

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Kitchen Garden

Local Food Renewal

Three trays of seedlings on Feb. 28, 2026.

After five planting sessions, there are seven trays of seedlings between the heat pad, grow light and table in the dining area. This year, indoor planting is proceeding well.

My foundational experience in gardening improved dramatically during the period 2013-2020 when I worked on area farms. 2026 is the year I introduced artificial intelligence into the process.

The results of ai have been surprisingly good. Because the large language model has so much information in its database, without hesitation, it can give me planting schedule adjustments, ways to use two spots on the heating pad, and two more under LED grow lights. The rest of my process from seed to seedling to greenhouse to planting has fewer uncertainties this year compared to last. Optimizing use of the heating pad has been a boon to productivity.

On the second day of March, I am of to a good start.

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Kitchen Garden

Food Algorithms — Getting Started

Stack of garden seeds.
Seeds arrived for the 2026 garden.

It’s cold outside, the kind of cold that stings my cheeks while walking on the state park trail. I’m standing at my workbench sorting seeds for early planting. The heat pad is already plugged in. Grow lights hang overhead. In front of me is a cabinet with last year’s leftover seeds, sorted by variety. On the bench are two dozen packets with this year’s seeds. I’m still looking through seed catalogues. It’s time to decide what to plant first, what to wait on, what to try for the first time, and what to abandon. Each small seed packet represents a choice made long before anything reaches the kitchen.

Every decision reflects a value. Food is no exception. In this series of posts, I will discuss the idea of a “food algorithm” to see where it goes.

Simply put, an algorithm is a repeatable sequence of steps used to accomplish a task. With food, this could be a recipe, yet that’s not what I mean. The intent is to take food from the seed, seedling, or cutting as the first in a series of decisions about what goes on a table.

Agriculture is a large field to consider, but food algorithms are individual. An active agent — a person — decides whether to plant a bean seed, use raw beans from a farmer, rely on prepared, canned beans from a retailer, or use beans that have been prepared with other ingredients. This decision is elemental and part of a discussion most cooks have when preparing a dish. My focus is at this entry point, not to gather and analyze recipes, although one could.

An algorithm is simply a structured way of getting from here to there. We use them constantly in many aspects of our lives. Following food from seed to table is a more comprehensive look at a process we follow, yet do so largely unawares.

I see three interlocking layers:

Biological logic — the natural requirements and rhythms of the plant or animal.

Human practice — the gardener’s labor, the farmer’s tradeoffs, the cook’s improvisations.

System forces — markets, logistics, regulation, energy use, and scale.

By showing how these layers interact, the discussion could make visible the hidden structure beneath everyday meals.

Taking steps in the process from seed to table represents ordinary choices that shape resilience, community, and ecological health. It could create awareness and the quiet power of understanding the paths food has taken before it reaches us.

The adventurer in me wonders what will be next. I hope readers will too.

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Kitchen Garden

First Day in the Garden

Frost in the ground.

After struggling to get the fork into a pile of grass clippings, I gave up for the day. Everything was frozen solid, even after a few days with ambient temperatures well above freezing. Highs in the 40s and 50s are forecast the rest of the week. Maybe I will accomplish my goal of clearing one plot this week to use as temporary storage. Not that day, though.

I am in the garden way early this year, so there is time for preseason work. I seeded the first indoor trays last Saturday and by Tuesday some of the varieties already had leaves. I hope they all germinate by this Saturday when I prepare the next tray of seedlings. Warming pad space is at a premium the next eight weeks.

When we moved to Big Grove Township there were scrub grasses and a lone mulberry tree on the vacant lot we purchased. The tree appeared to have been planted by a bird’s droppings while it perched on a surveyor’s re-bar marker. The ground had a high clay content which suggested the farmer who made his farm into a subdivision had removed the topsoil before selling plats.

From that clay I built soil in a garden that now occupies one fourth of the 0.62 acres we own. When I started, the first plots were small with a large grass border around them. Today I can’t get the mower between the plots to cut foxtail grasses and other weeds that grow there. I got big after working on a vegetable farm for eight years, bringing home the skills and techniques I learned there. After years of expansion, it seems time to bring order to what I do. This is likely why I am outdoors in the garden the second week of February.

We did not set out to build habitat when we moved here. The decision to site the house closer to the north property line — as opposed to in the center — mattered more than I knew. Placement of the foundation determined what remained open, how wind would move, where trees should be planted. We were thinking of how to build additions when finances permitted. Now, a deer path runs the length of the lot on the south side of our home. When winds come from the west, there is a corridor on the north side where it sweeps through the fruit orchard, and into the back yard. Over the years wind has taken a toll on the many trees we planted here. We never built an addition, nor even a deck.

The abundance of wildlife remains mostly unseen. There have been birds of all kinds, opossums, foxes, and after many years of waiting for trees to grow, there are squirrels. There are too many deer, although by developing a path from their space in a nearby woods to an large apple orchard to the west, they mostly leave me alone.

As I contemplate today’s schedule I plan more time in the garden. Maybe the dead vegetation will have loosened enough to move it. Maybe not. In either case, there is plenty of time for preseason garden work.

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Kitchen Garden

Garden Beginnings

Markers for kale, collards and chard in a tray of soil blocks on Feb. 7, 2026.

The first day’s seeding session went quickly and well. I bought soil mix and garden seeds last fall, and cleared the table I use indoors — with a heating pad and grow light — last month. Experience pays as I was able to find and put together everything else in a couple of hours on Saturday morning, producing two trays of 50 soil blocks each. Mostly, I planted cruciferous vegetables.

We’ve been saving plastic yogurt tubs and today I drilled holes in a dozen of them for an indoor herb garden. It will be a new experiment. If successful, it will have been worth trying. Bread on the water.

I’ve been looking at photographs from previous gardens and was inspired by this one to grow leeks again. We returned to leek-potato soup in the kitchen and prefer our own leeks over store bought because we understand all the inputs. I ordered a bundle of leek starts from a new to me seed company.

Garden produce in 2008.

When it is cold outdoors, I put kitchen scraps in a 5-gallon bucket in the garage until it warms and I can dump them in the composter. Because of the cold, the composter is not doing much work and is two thirds full of kitchen waste. The other garden waste composter has hardly anything in it. When I make my indoor herb garden, I won’t use garden compost in the soil mix because it hasn’t decomposed enough and therefore might be stinky.

Part of apple sorting is putting low grade ones in a pile for wildlife. By spring they will be gone. (Update: when I took the compost out on Feb. 7, 2026, they were all gone.

This year seems different in that the pace of everything from the garden to finishing my book to politics is swift and deliberate. As long as I remember who I am, I’m okay with that.

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Kitchen Garden

Using Apple Butter

Apple Blossoms

Although 2025 was an “on year” for apples — all five trees bore fruit — I skipped making apple butter because there were more than three dozen pints in the pantry. I need more uses for the thick, sweet, and tasty condiment than spreading on toasted bread and muffins, dolloping on applesauce cake, and spooning it on pancakes. It turns out there are more preparations I hadn’t thought about.

As a vegetarian household, using apple butter in meat cooking, while popular elsewhere, is not viable. That isn’t the end of the discussion. One must change their way of thinking about apple butter. It is good as a spread, yet can be considered as a fruit-based sweetener, thick apple concentrate, or a spiced apple paste. These considerations open a whole new world. It could be used as a replacement for honey, molasses, or applesauce without much recipe variation. Following are some ideas to try.

The first thing I did was to dish up a serving of plain Greek yogurt and swirl two tablespoons of aronia berry apple butter into it. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before, yet after trying it, apple butter will be a recurring breakfast menu item to pair with yogurt.

We already use applesauce as an egg replacement in baking. Our corn muffins, or any other muffins serve as a useful home for it to replace an egg. The texture is always moist, firm and tasty. I will just substitue apple butter and use a bit less.

Using it on grilled cheese sandwiches hadn’t occurred to me. It might pair well with the sharp cheddar cheese I use to make them. I make about one grilled cheese sandwich per month, and next time I will spread some apple butter on it to discover the flavor.

We are not big cake eaters or bakers. We do have a recipe for a spice cake. Next time we make it, we will try substituting apple butter for the oil. Based on the experience with applesauce cake and muffins, I bet it will be moist and delicious, as well as change the spice profile.

I found a recipe for a barbecue sauce or ketchup that includes apple butter, tomato paste, vinegar, onion and garlic powder, and spices. There is nothing to lose by making a batch and trying it.

There was a recipe for a salad dressing made from one tablespoon each of apple butter, extra virgin olive oil, vinegar and mustard. Simple. The way we like our recipes.

Substituting apple butter for the sweetened, condensed oat milk I use when making steel cut oats is a possibility. The spices will add a variation in flavor. I make this dish about twice per month and will try it next time.

The next “on year” for apples is forecast for 2027. Hopefully I will use most of the apple butter in the pantry by then and make new.

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Kitchen Garden

Hot Sauce Redux

Hot Pepper Paste

I’ve written about hot sauce so many times. It is ironic that the two other main people in my family have an aversion to capsaicin. Here I am again, though, writing about my enamored state regarding all things hot peppers.

Slowly, over a matter of years, I developed hot pepper food products I use. When I make a lot of fluid pepper sauce, I typically water bath can it, mindful of how much acid goes into each batch. This year’s repeated food products are:

  • Ground cayenne pepper to fill an existing spice jar. I kept the extras whole for future use.
  • Red pepper flakes made from cayenne peppers.
  • Pickled whole or half serrano and jalapenos.
  • Pickled sliced jalapeno peppers for tacos.
  • A jar of hot sauce, like the kind here.
  • Hot pepper paste, like here.
  • Strained hot pepper sauce.
  • Legacy hot pepper seasoning. Dried peppers and other spices mixed together and stored in large canning jars after the stove-side receptacles are filled. This is made with everything hot and few that aren’t. Also includes a large batch of Emeril Lagasse’s Essence.

I still keep a bottle of Frank’s RedHot in the refrigerator. It has a distinctive taste which I seek from time-to-time.

By now, the fresh peppers are gone. I found freezing them whole or halved was not the best option. This year hot pepper paste is doing journeyman’s kitchen duty. Making it used all remaining hot peppers. Hot pepper paste is a gardener’s friend.

Growing and using hot peppers is a never-ending journey. One I hope continues as long as I live.