This is one of my favorite garden tips.

When cooking, especially in the cold winter months when you make lots of stews and such, save those stubby bits cut off of the bottom of the garlic cloves. Really, those teensy little things! Go outside and poke them into your vegetable bed, maybe an inch under the ground. If you can, put it with the cut side up. It will grow, I swear, into a plant, and in July after the green tops wither you will have a whole head of garlic! No need to buy special “seed” garlic and waste it by putting the cloves into the ground without using them first.

I learned this after observing that the sliced off root ends of onions sometimes sprouted in the compost pile. I moved that first plant into my garden, and I’ve been planting onion bottoms and watching them turn into big plants ever since. But this is the first time I thought to try it with garlic. Look what I dug up a week or so ago! And these two dozen plants grew in maybe a square foot and a half of space, the plants just a few inches apart.

Think Green Thursday is a site about living more “greenly.” To me, growing your own food is one of the greenest things you can do.

This is a variety of Swiss Chard called Bright Lights. It’s pretty as a bouquet, with some pink stems, white stems, and here you can see the yellow and the red. Chard is so easy to grow from seeds or starts, and in climates like Seattle, actually winters over sometimes.

Chard and garlic are made for each other. Lightly steam the cut-up chard (I cut up the stems separately and start them first so they cook just a bit longer), then dump all into plenty of hot olive oil that has a whole lot of lightly browned sliced garlic in it. Cook a little more and then serve. A Sicilian way is to mix in steamed potatoes. Yum!

For more ruby visions of all kinds, visit Ruby Tuesday.

You can’t really call them green beans when they look like this. The yellow ones are called wax beans and the package on the purple ones says they will be green when cooked. We’ll see. They sure taste great just like this.

Here’s a tip: When storing, make sure they are in a plastic bag but DRY (wash just before eating or cooking). Peas like it moist in storage but beans, surprisingly, do not. That avoids the disappointing rust yuckiness. Also, you think you will remember which you picked when, but you won’t. Mark the bag with the date!

Home gardens are the ultimate in local, fresh, and hopefully organic food. And a package of seeds is so cheap, plus the seeds last many years if stored in a dry place. So grow your own! And for more GREEN ideas, visit Think Green Thursday.

UPDATE: I cooked them tonight, steamed the way I always do, and sure enough, the purple ones became green. Check it out! Top one is after cooking a bit and stirring, bottom one a bit firm but tender. No purple! They were yummy.

Seattle has an International Festival in the International District which really seems to be Chinatown, mostly. We went last year, had a great time, and were glad to see it was bigger this year, but I could do without the amplified karaoke. There was wonderful dancing on the Dragon Stage by several Punjabi groups, and the vendors included a food carver, below. Red is the color of good fortune in China, you know, so there was lots everywhere.

For even more red, visit Ruby Tuesday. And for more seriously bright colors, visit Color Carnival.

Everyone loves to grow tomatoes but not everyone knows how to make sure there are lots of tomatoes on the vines. With bees experiencing serious decline for unknown reasons (although I seem to see more this year than last year in my own garden), pollination can be a problem.

The solution? You! Assisted flower sex is the answer, and you get tomatoes for your trouble. Unless you are a farmer with acres of tomatoes, for a few backyard plants you can make a big difference in yield by going around your plants with a child’s little paintbrush, or even a cotton swab, and brushing each little yellow flower in turn. Do this every few days to catch as many flowers as possible, and you will be amazed at the results. And it’s fun!

Visit Think Green Thursday for more takes on the meaning of green.

These chive flowers are so pretty and the plants so easy to grow. I read they make a nice little hedge in front of bigger plants, but I have room only for one nice one. It’s near the kitchen door, and when I’m cooking, I just go outside and snip, snip, there you are.

I think that growing herbs and other food crops are a great way to garden, and good for the planet also. If you’d like other ideas about being green, visit Think Green Thursday.

My recent trip to New York included a truly wonderful trip downtown to Chinatown and Little Italy, which is right there alongside of it, although smaller than it used to be. There are sidewalk cafes everywhere and the best place to go for pastry and sweets is Ferrara’s. Here is a street scene, and the outside of Ferrara’s where they serve yummy gelato (Italian ice cream) and my favorite, the pastry display. This is only a small section of what they have! If you go, try the Baba au Rhum. A plain looking but completely fabulous experience, but not for teetotalers.

This is not my garden; again it’s from the Bronx Botanical Garden in New York City. This section was to inspire and inform the home gardener. While I have planted vegetable beds with flowers in them, I have never seen the plants planted in diagonal rows. So simple, but such a great idea. If you are going to have neat rows, might as well be at an angle, for pretty.

I like this photo for Think Green Thursday because to me the idea of growing your own food is about as green as you can get, especially if you do it the simple, cheap way with kitchen compost to enrich the soil, seeds, and there you go. No expensive supplies needed, just a bit of know how. Just ask a gardener and you’ll learn enough to get you going.

Just for the heck of it, here is a photo of the raised beds from October of 2007 in my last house. The string trellis at the right is for the flat peas which were already done by then. It was a nice garden, but the current one will be even nicer, eventually.

We went to Chinatown when I was in New York and it was so fun. I had never seen fresh lichees in their shells, only canned (looking like eyeballs but tasting heavenly) and dried, in rough, thin brown shells. I had no idea in the world they looked like this! Well, actually I thought they were lichees, but no, readers tell me they are rambutans! Here’s a link with the difference.

I’m participating in a new photo meme, Color Carnival. If you like color, and I sure do, check it out!

Food is like dance, in a way. So beautiful, and so fleeting. This beautiful brunch spread was created to celebrate my visit to the East coast. The smoked fish (you can just see the lox plate in the upper left), the fruit salad, and the veggie plate were joined by scrambled eggs and mimosas. And bagels, of course. A perfect meal, as far as I am concerned.

For more red visions, or to post your own (do! it’s fun), click HERE.