The Welker Family » Vegetables

Seedlings take the trip outside

Glenn Welker — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:25:59 +0000

15 flats of assorted vegetables and flowers have been nestled under fluorescent lights in my basement for the past few weeks. I decided today was the day for them to move out and find a home of their own. I did suggest residence under a make shift hoop house in the backyard.

My hoop house is standard 1/2 inch PVC pipe and the cover is a sheet of thick plastic sheeting. I bought mine in the paint department of Home Depot and it has lasted about 5 years to date. The hoop house serves a couple of purposes. Firstly, it protects the seedlings from damaging storms and hail. I have lost numerous flats of plants due to heavy rains. Secondly, the plastic is opaque enough that it helps to shade the tender plants. I don’t technically, harden off my plants. I find it incredibly tedious to move plants in and out of the house over the period of a week or so to acclimatize the plants to the outdoor conditions. Instead I use the hoop house. I can take the sheet completely off during the day for a few hours, gradually increasing the time the are exposed to the light. This will help to prevent the plants becoming sunburned. I also can provide a warm environment on cooler evenings, by pulling the sheet all the way down to the ground.

On a being frugal note, I keep the plastic sheeting tied back by using large binder clips. The 1 inch size, works quite nicely for 1/2 inch pvc and is much cheaper than the “snap clamps” being sold for this purpose. I also make use of heavy rocks and logs to hold the ends down. Quite high tech.

Some photos are included below. I also included a picture of an Iris that is currently blooming along with Horseradish in bloom. Strange enough, the Horseradish blooms are both beautiful as well as pleasantly fragrant. Lastly, the sad looking plants in the 4 inch containers are sunflowers that were dug up from volunteers growing all over the garden. My dad over the past couple of years, has shown me how durable these plants are. They will look horrible for a day or so, but recover very quickly.

Make the Reynolds Vacuum sealer more useful

Glenn Welker — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:57:26 +0000

My dad and I were discussing how this little product is actually quite expensive. The vacuum itself isn’t really that expensive, I paid $7.00 for mine. They have been running $2.00 coupons in the paper and our local grocery store had the product on sale for $9.00. The problem isn’t the vacuum but the cost of the bags. I bought a box of gallon bags, 9 bags to be exact. This cost me an additional $3.29 or roughly $.37 per bag. Ouch! You better have some really great things to freeze.

I was attracted to the idea because I freeze a lot of the vegetables out of our garden. Unfortunately, I might as well just buy the vegetables from the grocery for that price. Well, I did have another idea.

I bought the gallon size because I felt that I could place an ordinary quart freezer bag inside of the gallon sized vacuum bags and it would take the air out of both of them. If you want to play, you can do just that.

Here are some caveats.

The vacuum sealer is slow. It takes about 10 to 15 seconds to take the air out of my test bags.
The seal on the quart bag will indeed seal up before the air is drawn out if you don’t follow my technique

To successfully take the air out of the bag inside of the vacuum bag you need to offset the top edges of the bag so that they don’t seal. It is easier to seal the bag after the air is removed if the gap is at the edge. However, I found that it really doesn’t matter that much. During my tests, I realized that the bags seal tight enough that most times the bag will still keep its vacuum outside of the vaccum bag without the edges being sealed. This makes it easy to seal the edge with your fingers rather than trying to do this inside of the vaccum bag. But once again, pressing down the seal through the vacuum bag was never difficult.

So, if you want a diversion you can give yourself a new toy for the kitchen. Just don’t expect it to be a professional tool even with the bags that are supposed to be used with the vacuum sealer.

Veggie Burgers

Glenn Welker — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:06:33 +0000

We have been trying to eat a little better lately. To that end we have tried quite a few new recipes. Some of them have been quite nice and others not so much. Deb tends to be much more excited about a few well cooked veggies then meat any day of the week. I bought a book last year, The Culinary Institute of America, Vegetables. To date we haven’t had anything out of the cook book that we didn’t like. One of our favorites was their version of Vegetable Burgers. Unfortunately, as is my thing, I have changed it a little here and there. It is very close to the original recipe but I think my version is a little “meatier”. Enough with this, here it is. Enjoy.

Ingredients

2 carrots
1 stalk of celery
1 red onion
8oz of button mushrooms
2 eggs
1 clove of garlic
approx. 1 cup matzo meal
Olive Oil
buns (optional)
sliced cheese (optional)

Steps

Use a food processor to make your life easy. Just mulch the veggies up into nice small pieces.
Mix the eggs in a small bowl
Combine all vegetables and the eggs in a large bowl
Mix the matzo meal with the vegetable mixture using enough that the mix sticks together but isn’t dry.
Shape the mixture together in small patties and pan fry with Olive Oil over medium heat until golden brown on each side. It takes about 4 minutes per side.
Optionally melt your cheese slice on your patties before removing from the pan.
Serve.

I like the patties without a bun with a little hot sauce drizzled on top. Then again, I would eat breakfast cereal with hot sauce. Deb likes them served like a normal sandwich.