Pagan Village News

Welcome to the Debut of Natures Kitchen. In this short column, we are going to include recipes, tips of growing your own food, tips on finding wild foods, natural foods, natural products for use around the garden or home and basically anything having to do with what n Nature can provide for your kitchen.

Most articles will include things that you can make for little or no cost. I will also be including some tips on storing your home grown foods, as well as, canning, freezing, and those sort of things.

To start off our debut column, I would like to express to everyone out there that "If you can grow your own vegetables in a garden then all means DO IT." Home grown vegetables which aren't laden with heavy chemicals and pesticides taste so much better, are better for you and keep longer. Tomatoes for instance, have a richer flavor, are more savory and juicy compared to store bought flavorless ones. Hothouse tomatoes taste even worse when compared to home grown tomatoes. Tomatoes are easily grown in many types of soil and can also be grown indoors in large pots and can produce fruit long into the winter season.

Another tip with that are homegrown is "Do not pull the fruit off the vine when picking them but take a small piece of the vine with the tomato, they will keep twice as long on your counter." If the frost is coming early, you can take your green tomatoes, put them in a brown paper bag with a ripe tomato and viola, the ripe tomato will help the green ones ripen.

How to Save Your Tomato Seeds instead of buying them every year.

Tomatoes are self-pollinated vegetables, meaning that the male and female parts are in the same flower. Tomatoes usually pollinate their own flowers, requiring no aid from insects.

Harvest your tomatoes when they are very ripe for the best seed. Cut the tomatoes in half and squeeze the pulp into a bucket. Place the bucket in a warm spot and let the seeds and pulp ferment for 3 - 4 days. After this amount of time, the pulp will come to the top and the seeds will sink to the bottom. Fermenting the seeds is necessary to produce quality seeds as the fermentation process kills many diseases and disintegrates the anti-germination gel that encases the raw seed.

After 3 - 4 days, add more water and stir vigorously, then pour off the pulp and drain the seeds in a sieve. Wash the seeds thoroughly with water to remove the excess pulp and any debris. Place the seeds onto a dinner plate to dry, stirring them every day to insure that they dry thoroughly. Be sure to label the plates!

After 10 - 15 days your seeds should be dry. When they are dry, put them in a air-tight polythene zip-lock bag and store in a cool dry place. Remember to label your bags! Tomato seeds should keep for 5 - 10 years, if not longer, when stored in the right conditions.

Our other tip for this month is a Natural Organic Rhubarb Pest Spray for your Garden.

Rhubarb leaves, even although they ARE poisonous, can be used to make an effective organic spray that will kill leaf eating insects in your garden. This spray is harmless to bees and breaks down in the soil quickly.

To make the rhubarb spray, boil a few pounds of fresh rhubarb leaves in a few pints of water for 20 minutes. Allow the liquid to cool and strain off the liquid into a container.

NOTE: BE SURE TO USE OLD UTENSILS AS THIS WILL STAIN AND POISON THE POT AND THE STRAINER AND THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO BE USED FOR ANYTHING ELSE AGAIN EXCEPT FOR MAKING THIS SPRAY. AN OLD POT PURCHASED AT A THRIFT STORE WILL WORK FINE AND WON'T COST A LOT.

Dissolve some soap flakes (approximately 4 ounces) into the mixture while stirring it vigorously. Pour into a spray bottle and apply to infested plants.

REMEMBER! - DON'T USE THIS SPRAY BOTTLE FOR ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN YOUR RHUBARB SPRAY! IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN, KEEP IT AWAY FROM THEM.

I hope you enjoyed the tips and recipes I brought you this month and hope you look forward to more articles on this subject.

Dave Clark (Pryderi)

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782