S2E6: The Culinary Rewards of Lasagna Gardening

"Dirty Homecoming©" - Written, performed, and recorded by Mattie J. Bamman

Finally! The payoff after all the hard work. It's August, and our kitchen is overflowing with homegrown organic produce. We make corn chowder, basil-eggplant curry, tomato-eggplant-basil panini, and other dishes from scratch. The video features notes so you can recreate the dishes at home, as well as instructions for when to harvest and how to cure onions.

Despite the delicious recipes, nothing beats eating corn on the cob just seconds after harvesting with butter and salt. Or popping a sun-warmed strawberry in your mouth fresh off the vine. Few things are so purely delicious. Throughout the video, I include harvest dates by produce type to give you a sense of our growing environment in Midcoast Maine. After all of the drama starting our tomatoes from scratch this spring, the tomato harvest came in about a month earlier than in 2019, proving that pruning can work magic in a zone 5b environment. Next year, I plan to get rid of all our tomato cages, which can’t handle the size of our tomato plants, and make trellises using livestock fencing/panels. I’ll also space the tomatoes farther apart to allow more sunlight to reach them. Every year, we always learn something new in the garden. In the next episode of the Ravenous Farmer Project, I tackle some serious electric fence issues to fend of some pesky beasts.