Scratch Food with a Side of Geek Mom and Pop Culture.
My relationship with Pinterest would probably be best described as somewhere between a blind first and second date. You know, that awkward phase when you still hide things with Spanx and a pushup bra, and the guy is still pretending he would rather be listening to stories about your cat than drinking a beer and…
It started as an innocent enough question from an Eastern Sea-boarder on my Facebook page: Why does bad weather affect things when I make candy? I assumed she meant the humidity was changing things. After all, the boiling process of a sugar syrup reduces the amount of water. I knew that after it cools a…
Unlike some garden vegetables, cucumbers can be a bit of a puzzle. Cucumbers don’t give as many obvious cues to a novice gardener that they’re ready to pick, and a great many ailments of the cucumber plant present similar symptoms. If your cucumbers are turning yellow, but the fruit is large and it and the…
I was hoping I was wrong, but alas, I was not. My tomato plants are keeling over. It was a complicated set of circumstances that ultimately boiled down to one thing… too much water. Last week, we had our famous trademark Canadian “Holy Crap, It Really Gets That Hot?!” weather. I was absent for a…
I saw these flies around my garden about a month ago, but I paid them no real attention. I thought they were ordinary house flies. Boy was I wrong! Observe: the adult phase of the Spinach Leafminer (picture from Wikipedia.org), which began attacking my spinach a few weeks ago. Even then, I didn’t pay much attention…
My parsley is pouting. About a week after I transplanted parsley into a container, it began looking like this. Weedy, kind of limp, washed out. The first thing I did was attack my gardening books, but somehow I managed to get only books that don’t really help with troubleshooting beyond pest control and blossom rot. So…