Winter Composting

Don’t stop now, composting and the decomposition of garden and kitchen waste continues all year. It’s better for your soil and the environment to add vegetable trimmings to the garden than a landfill or your local wastewater. These amendments feed the friendly organisms in your garden soil and improve tilth and fertility.
What to compost: grass [...]

Back On Line

Greetings From The Garden,
I’m so pleased to be back online. Our home internet went down December 15th and was repaired today. We had a doozie of a storm with winds 60 to 80 mph. Two houses within a hundred yards of us had trees fall on the roof. Our business, Nichols Garden Nursery, in Albany, [...]

Chicken Vegetable Curry With Yacon

This Indian style curry includes Yacon. These Andean tubers cook to a tender/crisp translucence and absorb the curry flavors. For a vegetarian dish simply omit the chicken. Serve with rice and a side dish of yogurt and chopped cucumber seasoned with cumin, salt and pepper. Serves 4-6
Ingredients:
3 tablespoons cooking oil
1 tablespoon ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground [...]

Thai Chicken Curry with Yacon

Thai curries are fast and easy when you use a commercial curry paste. For this recipe I used Mae Ploy brand green curry paste. It comes in a 14 oz. plastic tub. Other ingredients like fresh basil and Kaffir lime leaves are optional but they do provide extra flavor and aroma. Yacon in this recipe [...]

Yacon Carrot Salad with Wasabi

Peeled and cut yacon discolors when exposed to the air. Acidity from citrus or vinegar maintains the white color. When making this salad, prepare the dressing first so you can quickly add the julienned yacon to it and preserve the color. Note my suggestion for using the food processor to speed preparation. As I keep [...]

Gardening is playing Hooky

Because I write our Nichols Garden Nursery catalog in the fall, I have a couple months when I’m mostly in front of my computer and my own garden is sorely neglected. It seems every year, I finish catalog and the rains begin. This year it was a deluge which I partially escaped by going to [...]

Yacon Waldorf Salad

My friend Joyce and I have been sharing birthday dinners for nearly twenty years. This year, it was my turn to prepare dinner for six, so I seized upon this as an opportunity to prepare not one but two yacon based dishes for for our meal. This salad really shines with the yacon and apple [...]