When I chanced to read about our new 'foodie-in-chief', President-elect Obama's dislike of beets in the New York Times Diner's Journal, I couldn't help thinking what my Dad always said: "beets taste like mud."

I like the earthy tasting beets – especially dug fresh from our garden - whether steamed, roasted, pickled or juiced raw with apple juice and 'double' ginger from the Reading Terminal Market. (This is one of my favorite energy boosters when working our CobraHead booth at the Philadelphia Flower Show .) And I love a good beet salad topped with blue cheese and toasted walnuts. But as with anything they're not for everyone.

I would like to share my recipe for a simple garlic mustard vinaigrette. When the sliced cooked beets are lightly marinated in this the flavor is so enhanced it elevates them to star status. Just ask my daughter.

1 fresh clove garlic, pressed and mixed with ¼ tsp. salt
½ tsp. Dijon or brown seeded mustard
1 Tbl. Seasoned rice vinegar
1 Tbl. Extra virgin olive oil
Freshly ground pepper to taste

Using a small fork (or tiny wire whisk) stir the mustard into the garlic/salt mixture. Mix in the vinegar and beat in the olive oil. Add the pepper to taste. Fold gently into about 2 cups sliced cooked beets.

The past two weeks have been quite hectic for me and Geoff. We exhibited at Green Festivals two weekends in a row, and they were on opposite coasts. It's a tiring schedule, to be sure, but we like being busy like that. The Green Festivals are always interesting and a lot of fun. At each festival we end up making new friends, and we often see a lot of old friends, too.

Two weeks ago the Green Festival was in Washington DC. A number of folks from the gardening world were on hand to promote better gardening practices. Some very nice folks from Purple Mountain Organics were there selling books and gear to help with organic growing, Kathy Jentz had a booth with Washington Gardener Magazine, Susan Harris from Garden Rant stopped by (see her picture of Geoff at the booth here ), as did Viveka Neveln from The American Gardener Magazine. My friend Martha Stauss of Green and Sticky, Inc. also came to the festival with her son Forrest, and our friend Joe Lamp'l gave a talk on greener gardening practices. He was kind enough to give us each a "Growing a Greener World" wristband. I was happy to wear it for the rest of the festival, but I have to admit that I'm not much of wristband wearer. The wristband is now serving a far more useful and visible purpose as a travel mug grip band. It makes my stainless steel tea mug easier to grab, and it helps to keep the slippery container from sliding out of my backpack water bottle pouch. Joe seemed to like the idea, and he even posted a picture that I sent him on his blog. Maybe I've started a trend!

We were only home two days before we left again for the San Francisco Green Festival. There weren't as many gardening exhibits this time (with the exception of our friends at Rain Reserve), but there were still a lot of people interested in gardening and food growing. We were very fortunate to meet some really wonderful folks. Across the aisle from us was Anne Thibeau from The Old Fashioned Milk Paint Co.. They make no VOC paints using old fashioned methods. Next door was our new very cool friend Jenny. Jenny makes aromatherapy sprays for stress, relaxation and revitalization. I was also lucky enough to be visited by my friend Brad, who I know from back in my drum and bugle corps days. Brad and his girlfriend Jennifer are expecting their first child, and they were glad to learn about the dangers of Bisphenol-A and other potentially toxic compounds in baby bottles and other baby items. They were able to pick up a few safe baby items from a company called ZoLi while visiting the Green Festival.

Geoff and I are now decompressing back in our respective home states. Traveling can be fun, but it's always nice to come home. Starting in early 2009, we'll be back on the road again for garden show season. Watch for us at a garden show near you!

Well we harvested our leeks. I couldn't face the thought of mulching them heavily, covering them up and hoping they wouldn't be so frozen into the ground that I couldn't dig them out when I felt the need for a batch of leek and potato soup!

The leek section was about 3 feet by 4 feet on the end of the same raised bed on which we grew our onions.

I'd been harvesting a few here and there for the last couple of months taking only the biggest ones. The ones I wanted were not always on the edge of the patch so I used my trusty CobraHead to assist me as I picked and chose. Harvesting is just like weeding in this case except the plants go to the kitchen not the compost pile!

As you can see from the picture the root system is extremely bushy (unlike onions which pop out of the ground quite easily) so one leek's roots can be intertwined with its neighbor. When that happens I'll just push the 'neighboring leek' back into the ground if it looks like it has a good chance to survive. Otherwise it gets harvested too.

Harvesting the whole patch at once was a little different. We used our digging fork to loosen up clumps of leeks then used the CobraHead to separate them and beat the excess soil from the roots as much as possible.

A little prep time now washing and freezing my sliced leeks will save my sous chef (me) some kitchen time in the winter!

Last month the entire CobraHead family had the opportunity to visit several of the stunning gardens and nurseries of the Portland, Oregon region while attending the annual Garden Writers of America symposium. When I say family I don't mean it in the figurative sense. In case you don't know, we are a Mother-Father-Son-Daughter operation

My interests tend towards edible and medicinal plants, but the collection of Japanese maples and conifers at Iseli Nursery deeply impressed me. Iseli only wholesales their trees, but kindly provided all of us with a sampling of dwarf conifers that I potted up as soon as I got back to Austin.

Pictured above: Picea glauca "Jean's Dilly"-Dwarf Alberta Spruce, Chamaecyparis obtusa "Nana Gracilis"- Hinoki Falsecypress, Chamaecyparis pisifera "Cumulus"- Sawara Falsecypress, Picea glauca "Pixie Dust'-Dwarf Alberta Spruce, and Pinus mugo "Donna's Mini"- Mugo Pine. All of these varieties only grow one to three inches per year.

Another shot of the Pinus mugo:

My front porch has up to this point served as a holding area for plants destined for other parts of the yard. This container helps me slowly add to a more intentional design.

Except for the value of the labor you put into making it, compost can cost nothing. I detailed my composting method last December here.

Today I cleaned up the compost I had made last fall. I have a nice large pile shown in the picture. I'll definitely have enough to put more than a couple buckets into each of my beds.

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A view of the north beds shows an area untouched by human hands from last year until yesterday. The asparagus on the far left was tended and harvested in the spring, but the three beds to the right were probably not walked through until Anneliese started cleaning out a bed full of tansy and goldenrod. Next to the asparagus, the bed with the t-posts was last year a bed of tomatoes, carrots and greens, Anneliese's first attempt at growing her own vegetables. Now it's all weeds except for some volunteer Chadwick tomatoes that Anneliese found when she started cleaning up. There were some beautiful ripe edible fruits on a couple plants, but the rest of the bed was weeds. The tansy and goldenrod infested bed is next to that. The fourth bed over is mostly sunchokes - Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus).

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How's that for a mouthful of salad and my latest craze for fast food lunches? Being the cook book lover and foodie that I am reading recipes is at the top of my list. So I tried an intriguing black bean and sweet potato salad last week from one of the magazines I read. It had an olive oil, balsamic vinegar, garlic, cilantro dressing with chopped tomato in it. How can you lose with some of our favorite flavors?

What I realized after making the salad was that it tasted very much like a tomato bruschetta with added elements. So the next time I skipped the recipe and made my favorite bruschetta mixture with fresh chopped tomato (2 medium), 2 cloves chopped garlic, 2 T. extraordinary olive oil, 2 T. balsamic vinegar, 1/2 cup fresh basil, salt and fresh ground pepper. (Let it stand a while to let the many flavors blend with each other.) This time I tossed it with some leftover cooked quinoa and a can of navy beans and we had another winner.

As long as you have fresh tomatoes, fresh herbs and, of course, fresh garlic the possibilities are infinite.

This year's garden has been far from great. I've been on the road so many weekends that weeding maintenance has suffered. I didn't even get a lot of beds planted. The fallow beds were not mulched, so weeds are rampant. I'm playing catch up, but things are starting to look up. Geoff and Anneliese are doing most of the shows we have scheduled for the rest of this year, so I should be able to get the garden cleaned up and covered with leaves before the snow. I didn't get my leaves raked before the snow last year and I paid the price. But if all goes well, I'll be back to my normal planting schedule come spring.

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Back in the beginning of April I planted three small hyacinth bean plants Dolichos lablab in front of the makeshift cinderblock wall that I built off my front porch. Now when I sit on the front porch I see this:

The view from the front

Once the plants were established I gave them no additional water other than the little bit of runoff that they got when I watered the potted plants on the porch. The vines thrived during the 100 degrees for days on end drought that we experienced in Austin this summer.

However, unlike the hyacinth beans that I grew last year at the South Austin Community Garden, these have yet to produce any flowers or bean pods and so far show no purple coloration.

I will need to prune them back from the walkway as they are starting to take after their killer cousins from The Center of the Earth

That's Irene Bender, the event coordinator for the Minnesota Garlic Festival , held last Saturday at the Wright County Fairgrounds in Howard Lake, Minnesota. Nice Hat!

The garlic festival is a little show featuring about a dozen small farmers offering over 100 varieties of garlic. Garlic was for sale, but so were other homegrown foods and locally produced goods. Garlic flavored food was in abundance including garlic brats, garlic potatoes, pickled garlic, and more, with garlic flavoring many of the food items for sale. There was even garlic ice cream and garlic chocolate chip cookies for desert.

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In our ongoing quest to make the CobraHead Weeder famous, we occasionally try new trade show venues. Since I thought there had to be a connection between farming and gardening, we exhibited at a show in Minnesota this week called Farmfest.

The show organizers had invited us out as a "green" vendor and we were in a tent with others promoting such things as organic farming, sustainable agriculture, energy issues and land conservation.

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