Windowsill Garden: March Update

We started our windowsill garden back in January, and I last updated you about a month ago. 

Toward the end of February, we moved everything to a wire shelving unit with some grow bulbs we had set up for seed starting. I suppose this defeats the purpose of a windowsill garden, but I honestly didn’t see a huge difference between growth when we provided a UV bulb on the windowsill, and growth strictly under grow lights.  I've since moved most of the plants back to the windowsill, as the days get longer and the sun gets stronger.

I’m not sure our windowsill is sunny enough for starting plants in winter – with short days and weak sun. In the future, we’ll hopefully be working with some older plants, and we won’t be trying to start young, needy plants during the shortest, coldest days of the year.  If you’re planning to start a windowsill garden, I wouldn’t advise starting in January!

Our spider plant, for example, did great on the windowsill and put off a few more flowering stalks with baby spider plants on the end. So, I think a more mature plant would survive the shortest winter days, even if it didn’t do a ton of growing, but a young plant just can’t quite get moving in the weak sun. 

Here’s how the individual plants are doing:

The green onions are thriving.

The parsley is still thriving:

The cilantro and chives have started to germinate. We planted new cilantro seeds (from a new packet), and these ones are looking better than the last. I put a little soil over the chive seeds, and it seems to help germination (the packet said to sow them on top of the soil, which did not work). 

The tom thumb lettuce sprouted after I planted some new seeds, went wild, and I trimmed them back. They grew very scraggly, and I’m not sure what I need to do to get them to grow more compactly. It’s an issue I’ll be working on in our outdoor container garden. It also looks like something might be eating the lettuce leaves (although that might also be decay from sitting in the dirt).

The microgreens and other sprouts continued to do about the same – I harvested some of them, and the rest are doing fine. We’ll be eating the last of these soon; I don’t plan to include sprouts in the outdoor garden.

Our swiss chard is really starting to look good. Although still tiny, it has begun to produce more leaves on a regular basis. The plants are only a few inches tall, probably because of the small pot they are in (a 6 inch pot). I’m considering just transplanting it outside in a larger pot, rather than starting over, but I need to do a bit more research (it might just bolt more quickly).

So what did we learn from this experience? Next week, I’ll talk about our lessons from windowsill gardening. Most importantly, I learned that I don’t have a black thumb, as previously thought – I’m just not sure that I have a green thumb yet either!

Soon, I’m going to focus a lot on our garden plans for the spring and summer. With the super warm weather we’ve been having, I might be starting things outdoors a month sooner than anticipated! I’ll discuss our containers, space, seeds, soil, budget, and progress so far. Look for those posts the week of March 26^th! 

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Windowsill Garden: Green Onions

I wanted to give you a quick update on one of the most surprising and successful aspects of our windowsill gardening experiment. I'll be writing a more detailed update with an analysis of the whole experiment soon.

I found an idea on Pinterest that seemed almost too simple and easy to be true. By placing the white ends of green onions in a glass of water, we could grow new green onions. This meant that we would have a steady supply of fresh green onions for practically free, considering we usually just tossed those root ends. After only few days in the water, the onions showed some promising growth:

And now, a month or so later, we've got more green onions than we know what to do with!

I'm working on figuring out what the best technique for harvesting is. It seems that we need to cut as close to the white part of the plant as possible; each root piece sends up several stalks of onion. The root systems have grown to provide a stable base at the bottom of the glass - one of the initial challenges was keeping the pieces propped up (not just floating around in the water!).

These taste just as good as the ones we grew them from, and so far we've expended no more effort than changing the water every few days. I was worried they might taste somehow watered down thanks to being re-grown, but that hasn't been the case. We've been able to use the entire green stalk that we harvest (I usually discard part of the greens from the store because they are too wilted).

We used the onions in this orange wheatberry salad, and in a few other dishes so far. This is definitely something I would suggest trying - although green onions aren't expensive, you can grow your own for practically free!

Do you have any tricks like this? Are there other kitchen scraps that can actually be re-grown?

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Aztec Chocolate Syrup

First, today is Nick's birthday - HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICK!  And birthdays call for dessert, right?

I wrote about how easy it is to make your own chocolate syrup at home recently.  Once we had used up that first batch of syrup, I wanted to experiment a little, and try a new flavor twist. Spicy chocolate syrup, inspired by Mexican or Aztec style hot chocolate was at the top of my list. I like the grown-up twist of spicy flavors in ice cream - it is unexpected and delicious.  For this version, I reduced the amount of sugar, because it seemed the spicy flavor would be better if less sweet (and a bit more intensely chocolate-y).

The issue that arose after I made and cooled the syrup was this: it came out very thick - more like fudge sauce than chocolate syrup, and pretty difficult to work with. It didn't drizzle thinly like the regular syrup - it was too...goopy (yuck.). This problem was pretty easily solved by simply using a bit more water to thin out the sauce. If your sauce cools and is thicker than you would like, you can stir in an extra tablespoon or two of hot water to adjust the consistency.

Both this recipe and the original chocolate syrup recipes are vegan. Most store-bought chocolate syrups seem to include some milk products. However, the vegan-ness depends on the type of sugar used. A natural, unbleached sugar is vegan, but some vegans don't consume bleached white table sugar. If you're vegan, you probably have a favorite sugar product - if you're cooking for someone else who is vegan, ask them what sugars are okay with them. (Also: it is definitely not vegan if you eat it atop regular ice cream, like I do!)

This sauce, like the original, blends nicely into a hot chocolate drink; all the spices add a really fun, gourmet twist. It is also great on top of ice cream - the spiciness is largely masked by the sugars from the ice cream, but the flavor of the chilies shines through. If you want it to make your ice cream really spicy, use more cayenne.

Aztec Chocolate Syrup
This sauce is mild to medium spicy; increase the cayenne if you want spicier sauce, or omit it for mild sauce.
Yield: about 2 cups syrup

INGREDIENTS
1 cup sugar
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup plus 3 tbsp water
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp ancho chili powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

DIRECTIONS
1. In a medium sauce pan, combine sugar and cocoa powder. Stir together, breaking up any clumps of cocoa. Add the water and salt, and stir.
2. Place pan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, and boil for a minute until the mixture thickens slightly. At this point, it will coat the back of your spoon and look like you expect chocolate syrup to look.
3. Remove the pan from the heat. Let it cool about 5 minutes, then stir in the vanilla extract and spices. (If you add the vanilla before it cools, it will evaporate and not flavor your syrup!). Adjust the heat level to your preference.
4. Pour into an airtight container, let cool, then store in the fridge.

I'm loving our warm weather this week - although I had to photograph this ice cream fast so it didn't melt (too much) on me! I've been getting out for runs with Cooper and Nick, and I'm loving how late it stays light.

I've been doing a lot of planning work for our outdoor container garden, and I'll be telling you all about that soon! With this warm weather, it looks like we might start things off quite a bit earlier than I thought. 

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