Souper Sunday has passed but it's still soup weather here. Actually soup weather lasts a long, long time in Wisconsin! Following is a recipe that I think came from 'Sundays at Moosewood' cookbook. I don't have a copy of the book so I can't be sure and as a well-worn family favorite the soup formula is mostly in my head.

Tomato, Lime, and Tortilla Soup (Sopa de Lima)

1-2 cups chopped onions 4 large garlic cloves, minced or pressed 3 T. vegetable oil 1-2 minced chiles (1 inch long) (or to taste) 2 teaspoons ground cumin seeds ½ tsp. dried oregano 3 ½ cups chopped fresh tomatoes* 3 cups vegetable stock 1/3 cup fresh lime juice** or to taste Salt to taste

Grated Monterrey Jack or Pepper Jack cheese Tortilla chips, crumbled Chopped fresh cilantro Chopped avocados

In a medium soup pot, sauté the onions and garlic in the oil until the onions are translucent. Add the chiles (I keep a bag of frozen Serrano peppers in the freezer), cumin, and oregano, and sauté for a few more minutes. Add the chopped tomatoes and sprinkle with a little salt. Cover the pot and cook gently until the tomatoes begin to release their juices. Stir occasionally. This will take longer with winter tomatoes than with summer ones. Add the stock and simmer, covered, for about 15 minutes. Add the lime juice and salt to taste.

Serve topped with grated cheese, avocados and crumbled tortilla chips. Garnish with finely chopped cilantro, if desired.

Notes: *Freezer tomatoes are fine. The only time I use fresh tomatoes is in the summer. I've even used leftover marinara sauce. **Go easy or by taste on the lime juice, depending upon the acidity of the tomatoes you may not need quite that much lime. You can also serve lime wedges and let everyone squeeze their own.

Garden Preserving Note: If I have time during the tomato harvest I will cook up the soup broth and freeze in one quart containers. Then it's winter fast food time – just thaw, heat and decorate!

It helps to have a plan. For business, for life in general, and certainly for growing plants to eat, planning gives you some control of the future. January is planning month for lots of northern gardeners. My planning includes going though several favorite seed catalogs and ordering seeds to replenish any in short supply in my seed inventory.

I also start looking at what is going to be planted where. In January, I print out two new charts for my south and north garden beds and start to pencil in the plan of crops and their locations. The charts go back to 1986, but it's really the last seven years I care about. I use previous years' charts to help maintain a rotation that I took from Eliot Coleman's book, The New Organic Grower.

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Border         Digging        Spading          Manure
 Fork             Fork             Fork               Fork

I'm surprised at how few people in the general population of gardeners truly know how useful a good fork can be. Doing all your digging using a spade or shovel is often not the best way to approach the task.

For most garden and landscape tasks that require breaking or cutting earth, a fork is the better tool to choose. In actuality, for many gardening and landscaping jobs you really need both a fork and a spade or shovel. In tandem they make the work a lot easier.

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Brighten your holiday table with the 'other' green vegetable – greens of all colors. The greens I've enjoyed the most recently are the seared collard greens at the Eldorado Grill in Madison, Wisconsin. Admittedly I haven't eaten collards too many times, they just weren't on the menu when growing up in Minnesota. If you want to try the exact recipe check it out in the 'Eldorado Grill Southwestern Cuisine Cookbook' by Kevin Tubb, owner of this superb restaurant.

For a simplified way to get your seared greens to the table get out your favorite vinaigrette dressing, whether bottled or homemade. Try one made with seasoned rice vinegar or oil and tamari. Heat up your heavy duty cast iron frying pan or wok, chop your favorite greens or combination thereof and toss them with the dressing as if you were going to serve a big salad. Include a hot pepper if you like a little extra bite – a whole one, dried or not, with holes poked in it works well. When the pan is hot add the dressed greens and sear the flavor right into them. Stir frequently and cook for 5-10 minutes or until softened the way you like them. Try not to overcook or the pleasing bright green will turn to olive drab and so goes the fresh flavor.

Red Russian Kale

We happen to frequently use Red Russian kale since Noel has it growing like a weed in the garden. (Note in the pictures that the garden beds have already been blanketed with leaves for the winter.)

Lacinato Kale

This year we planted lacinato kale (received from a friend) for the first time though with its bumpy leaves we at first thought it was savoy cabbage. (Thanks, Geoff, for helping us figure it out before it was too late!) Sometimes it pays to label your plants but then we like nice surprises in the garden.

Two years ago I threw the remains of a horseradish thinning into the compost pile. It rooted, as horseradish likes to do, and I let most of it grow. I've always grown horseradish in my regular garden beds, keeping it at one end of the herbs. After this weekend's harvest, I'm pretty sure the horseradish will stay in the compost area.

Digging horseradish out of my clayey beds is always a back breaker and I leave so much behind that I have horseradish sprouting for the next several years. Digging it out of the compost and the soft compost-rich soil in that area is a lot easier. The roots are cleaner, fatter, smoother, and straighter than they would be coming out of my beds.

In northern climates horseradish is amazingly easy to grow. The most difficult problem is keeping it under control. It will spread vigorously and almost any piece of it will root and sprout. It is not pest and disease free, however. Insect damage from wire worms and rotten spots that form in the folds of the convoluted roots are two of the major problems that I've had.

Roots Ready for Peeling and Processing

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I love it when the larder is full of sweet potatoes! We harvested 76 pounds this year. Not bad for 20 home started plants in a Wisconsin garden.

There is nothing like a plain baked or roasted sweet potato slathered in butter. The other night I roasted small chunks of sweet potato mixed with Rose Finn Apple fingerling potatoes and cabbage wedges all tossed with olive oil mixed with crushed garlic, salt and pepper. After 45 minutes in a 400 degree oven the sweet potatoes were caramelized, the potatoes crispy on the outside & the cabbage starting to brown. It needed nothing else.

One of our favorite ways to fix these nutrition-packed gems is in a savory dish – Mexican style sweet potato quesadillas. We were served these by a friend about twelve or so years ago and they have been a family favorite ever since. There are lots of recipes for these but the one we like came from 'Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home – Fast and Easy Recipes for any Day' by Moosewood Collective.

Usually after making the same meal several times over the recipe evolves into your own with changes here and there. While we have changed the type of cheese (pepper jack comes to mind) and changed the type of tortillas (corn, whole wheat or ???) or baked instead of fried them, we have determined that the original version is the one we like best. We have found an excellent organic white flour tortilla with no hydrogenated fat at Whole Foods. When fried in the hot oil the baking powder in these tortillas causes them to puff up. The secret here is to make sure the oil is hot before you start, otherwise the tortillas just soak up the oil. If you're intrigued give the following recipe a try. Don't be afraid to experiment, you may come up with your own winner!

• 1 1/2 cups finely chopped onions

• 2 garlic cloves, minced

• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil

• 4 cups grated peeled sweet potatoes

• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

• 1 teaspoon chili powder

• 2 teaspoons ground cumin

• 1-2 pinch cayenne

• salt and pepper

• 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese

• 8 (8 inch) flour tortillas

• Salsa

• Sour cream

Directions:

In a large skillet, heat vegetable oil. Sauté onions and garlic until the onions are transparent. Add in the sweet potatoes, oregano, chili powder, cumin, and cayenne. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking.

When the sweet potatoes are tender, remove the filling from the heat and add salt and pepper; stirring to mix.

Evenly spread the sweet potato mixture onto the tortillas; sprinkle 2 tablespoons of cheese onto each tortilla. Fold tortilla in half over filling.

Using a clean skillet add a little oil; heat on medium high heat. Place the quesadillas in the hot oil and cook on each side for 2 minutes, until cheese is melted and the filling is hot. Add more oil to skillet as needed and cook in batches.

Serve with salsa and sour cream.

I've explained my composting process previously, but I wanted to show a picture of an army of red worms working the sludge mass in a 55 gallon drum that we use to collect kitchen scraps.

Boss Cat supervised as I tipped over and emptied the drum. The worms were thick throughout the mostly digested material.

I'm building a new compost pile. I do this once a year, as I clean out the garden and get the beds ready for winter. I'll alternate layers of cornstalks and other harder materials, earth, compost from the barrel, and the softer weeds, grasses, and plants that I've been piling up here and there for the past season.

The stuff in the barrel was so well worked up by the worms that it had almost none of the normal compost barrel stink. I've got another full barrel that is not old as this one. It will have a lot less worms, and when I tip it over, raunchy, unpleasant orders will escape, but I'll work that stuff into the pile and the stench will quickly dissipate.

Most of the worms won't survive after having their world turned upside down and then being spread out over the new pile. Some will escape, but many will become part of the excellent compost that helps us grow our own food.

It was a perfect night for burning the brush pile. Thursday's heavy rains had diminished to a very light drizzle. The pile is a collection of trimmings and fallen branches. This year we had two huge sections of trunk from an old apple tree that I took down in the spring. We had to use some dry cardboard and dry wood from the shed to get the fire started, but there was no danger of starting the woods on fire, which is always on my mind when burning anything in the yard.

After a while we had a roaring blaze. As the fire died down we cooked a collection of fall vegetables in the hot coals, just like we were camping. We baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, sweet peppers, and butternut squash. Judy coated the veggies with olive oil and wrapped them with cooking foil. We placed them on the hot coals, and in less than an hour, we had a delicious meal. The peppers were a little less than exciting and probably could have used some seasoning, but everything else was scrumptious.

The next morning the fire was still smoking. Anneliese and I have been working the remnants of the logs to try to get most of them burned up. We now have a pile of ashes, which are a good source of potassium. When the ashes are totally cold, I'll carry them to the compost pile and work them in.

We began developing a long-handled CobraHead soon after we introduced our original CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator. It quite honestly was a reaction to older gardeners who at trade shows kept telling us, "that looks great, but I need it on a long handle." When we got serious about making a long tool, we realized that just sticking the CobraHead blade on a hoe handle was not going to produce a very effective tool. We tested many blade shape configurations before we determined that positioning the blade so it was perpendicular to the handle gave us a totally new tool that was a useful device for gardeners of all ages and a vast improvement over similar narrow bladed tools that were previously marketed.

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The cold weather that was delivered with five inches of rain last week dealt me this beautiful flush. The shiitake in my hand is neither the largest nor the smallest. It is one of twenty close to perfect mushrooms I sliced off the plugged logs this afternoon.

I have a chance to win even bigger in the next few days. There are at least 27 more on the logs. They're smaller, and I'm not sure if they are going to fill out as nicely as these. But I will bet on this: The twenty in the bowl are going to taste great!

We attended the Garden Writers Association 61st Annual Symposium in Raleigh , North Carolina, last week. It was CobraHead's 6th GWA, and our fifth as an exhibitor.

Here's Anneliese putting the final touches on our booth. The symposium includes a trade show, seminars, speakers, tours, dinners, and awards. It is held in a different city every year, and tours of both public and private local gardens are a big part of the trip

Pictures from the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University. A truly outstanding public garden and arboretum.

These are from Montrose , a former estate of a governor of North Carolina, William Alexander Graham, now a foundation maintained by Nancy and Craufurd Goodwin.

S.E.E.D.S. , is a community garden project in inner city Durham that teaches people to grow food and care for the earth. The young people are paid interns and the food grown is sold at the facility. They were harvesting sweet potatoes while we were there. The second shot is of a green roof project constructed on the site.

On Sunday our tour had a mis-adventure as our bus slid off a driveway and got hung up.

Touring the Wal-Mart garden center in Mt. Olive was not on the agenda, but here's the group at the big box waiting for a replacement bus. The bus mishap put a damper on the last day's fun as we missed several of the scheduled stops, but overall, the trip and trade show were excellent.

Next year the symposium is in Dallas and the organizers promise another excellent show. GWA is as close to a vacation as Judy and I get since we started CobraHead. So we are looking forward to the gardens of the big D.