Chive Blossom Vinegar

Oh my goodness. The aroma, that of a delicately sweet, oniony, slightly vinegary scent released as heated liquid pours over jars filled with fresh-from-the-garden chive blossoms. Absolutely wonderful! The first harvest of the season from the Happy Valley Community Gardens, Garden Nbr. 01, chive blossoms, one of those early bursts of spring color in the garden. While these lavendar colored, fluffy pompom-shaped flowers are great tossed into a salad or a bowl of soup, they make one of my favorite herb infused vinegars. A great way to preserve some of those herbs that seem to grow wild and crazy in the garden, herbal vinegars are extremely easy to make. About all there is to making some is to cut and wash the herbs.
Then simply stuff a bunch of the herbs into sterilized jars and fill the jars the rest of the way up with a good quality vinegar. When I make Chive Blossom Vinegar, I like to heat the vinegar before I pour it into the jars because the chive flavor is released almost instantly into the vinegar that way. Immediately after filling the jars with the hot vinegar, the color of the chive blossoms change from light lavendar to a very pretty deep, deep pink, purple.
If you want to skip the step of heating the vinegar, your herbal vinegars will turn out just fine though, because, either way, the jars of herbs and vinegar need to sit and steep for two or three weeks before their flavor has totally enfused. Maybe the reason I heat the vinegar is simply because I so enjoy that sense of instant satisfaction when that chivey aroma fills the air once the hot liquid hits the herbs.
The chive blossom stems are quite tasty too and I save them after cutting off the chive blossoms, chop them up and package them for the freezer. Used directly from the freezer, they are a great addition to almost any cooked sauce, soup, stew, rice or potato dish.
Chive Blossom Vinegar can be used almost anytime wine, plain vinegar, lemon or lime juice is called for in a recipe. When added to a bottled barbecue sauce, it turns a possibly boring sauce into a fresh-tasting addition to the grill. My favorite use for Chive Blossom Vinegar though is as the base for a vinaigrette dressing. I use one part chive blossom vinegar to two parts olive oil, sometimes toss in a few other fresh herbs from the garden, shake it up and drizzle it over a bowl of garden-fresh salad fixings. Even better, try this Chive Blossom Vinegar dressing as a dipping sauce for homemade artisan bread fresh from the oven. Wonderful!

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Step-by-step, making Chive Blossom Vinegar and preserving the stems.

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Now, we count the days until a jar of this season's Chive Blossom Vinegar is ready to be opened.

Tulips and Irises

Pretty flowers make even a sunny day more bright. Thanks to daughter Jeni!

Garden Number 02 - First Planting

The soil throughout the Happy Valley neighborhood is clay, and located near a creek, the Community Gardens are not lacking in this heavy, slow-draining dirt. Without amendments, it's not uncommon to see an entire garden turned into a mucky, muddy bog after one of our Pacific Northwest rain showers. Thanks to the use of a truck, most of a beautiful sunny day was spent shoveling two loads (aka, two scoops - aka, two yards) of a garden-ready 5-way mix soil from the bulk materials section of Bakerview Nursery into the raised bed frames in my Garden Number 02. Last year, the beds in Garden Nbr. 01 were amended with this same soil and I was so pleased with the quality of that soil and success of that garden.
Thank you so very much for all that help. I never could have done it all in one day without you!

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Because the base layer in the gardens is clay, I like to use straw in the walkways. Straw does a great job of keeping my feet out of the mud after a rain, and even though I have to add more straw every year or so, I like that it decomposes and eventually works itself into the clay. Picking up a bale of straw at the local Country Store on the way to my garden, in no time I had that straw spread throughout the walkways and was ready to begin planting.

At first, I thought it was a drum roll that I heard as I prepared to plant, but looking up, I saw it was actually the awesome performance of a pair of red tailed hawks soaring and diving overhead in their annual mating ritual.

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Reserving the very center raised bed for flowers, my first "official" planting was giant sweet peas in the middle, then more flowers all around. As this bed will be the first one we see when entering the garden once the deer/rabbit-proof fishnet fencing is in place, how delightful it will be to watch it grow throughout the summer as it overflows with beautiful, sweet-smelling flowers.

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Meanwhile, I really like how Garden Number 01 is growing and taking on a style of its very own.

Garden Number 2 - More Boards

Having built barely half of the raised beds needed for new Garden Number 02 at the Happy Valley Community Gardens, another day was spent digging through the construction scrap pile rescuing boards.I conside these boards to be a real "bargain" as having saved them from the construction dumpster, their price was zero dollars. They did come with nails though - lots of nails. Fortunately I had brought along my hammer and set to work. I had created quite a pile of old bent nails by the time those boards were cleaned and ready to be cut down to size.
So kind of that wonderful contractor to cut the boards for me, and of his helper to load them into my car. What a very lucky girl I was that day! Thank you both so very much.
Then I headed to my newly cleared and tilled garden spot with that load of lumber and started assembling more raised beds.
How cool it was when my puny drill started making hard work of screwing those boards together that a much better drill was made available to me.
In no time, I had the rest of the raised beds built and set in place in the garden.

Thank you so very, very much.

Spitfires in the Garden

You would think that my Spitfire nasturtiums for the Seed Grow Project would have been planted by now, and you'd think that my Happy Valley Garden Nbr. 01 would have been the obvious place in which to plant them. After all, I have certainly been busy adding plants to this garden - perennials and annuals, fruits and flowers, vegetables and herbs. The chives, blueberries and strawberries are in full bloom and the garden is looking real good. Sweet peas, one of my favorite cut flowers, fill two different areas in Garden Nbr. 01. They are the "giant" kind, promising to grow over six feet tall and be covered with long stems of colorful, fragrant flowers. It's exciting to watch them stretch as they almost reach the trellises on which they will soon be climbing so high.

Nope, I'm not going to plant these Spitfire nasturtiums in Garden Nbr. 01. You see, there's hardly any room left in Garden Nbr. 01, and what space is left is already reserved for a few sunflowers, several kinds of pole beans, some pole peas, two or three tomato plants, a couple of eggplants and some patty pan squash. There's just no room for any Spitfire nasturtiums in Garden Nbr. 01 - so I'm going to plant them here, in my Garden Nbr. 02.

It's rather obvious that Garden Nbr. 02 is not quite ready for those Spitfire Nasturtiums, but progress is being made. The sod and weeds have been removed, and the soil turned with the shovel.

A friendly, fellow community gardener guy tilled the soil between, in, under and around the heavy rain showers this weekend.

The wire fencing that was originally around Garden Nbr. 02 has been removed, rolled up and stowed way until it's time to cut it up into sections and twine them together with bamboo poles in order to make the trellises needed later for the pole beans, peas and a couple of the vining squashes. A destination this week will be the harbor, where Bellingham's commercial fishing fleet discards their old fishing net. We'll get enough to make a new fence to keep this garden safe from all those hungry neighborhood deer and bunnies.

With more used lumber available, enough raised beds will be built to fill this entire 10' by 40' garden space. The truck is ready to haul in a couple of yards of 5-way garden soil to top-off these new beds, and straw will be placed down between the beds to help keep the weeds under control and to make a nice, mud-free walkway.

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Then, then I'll be planting my Spitfire nasturtiums. I'll be filling one of these new raised beds with Renee's Gardens colorful Spitfire nasturtiums. Meanwhile, I'll try to remain patient as I daydream about those lovely nasturtiums growing totally out of control this summer in my Garden Nbr. 02.

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"I'm growing Nasturtium "Spitfire" for the GROW project. Thanks, to Renee's Garden for the seeds."

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