Fried Morel Mushrooms

Here in Ohio, these mushrooms are hard-to-find but so good to eat. I went out three times this year and didn't find any, but luckily someone found over 400 and was willing to share.


You can prepare these by soaking and then rolling them in a flour and corn meal mixture (with garlic salt of course) but this year I bought a beer batter mix and they turned out really, really good. All I did was add beer to the mix, roll them in it and fry. Season to taste with garlic salt and pepper.


You'll never eat better mushrooms than these, I promise!

What we did for earth day

Last Saturday, in celebration of Earth day, the street where Different Daisy is located held an Earth Day Festival. In store, we fed visitors
Loma Linda Big Franks and Tings and passed out literature outlining the environmental impact a meat based diet has on the planet.





Flyers we passed out (PDF, you need Adobe for these):
Page 1
Page 2
Feel Free to print these and hand them out at your next event.


For the kids we made "Rabbit Food" Gardens that they could take home. Each child got a reused flower pot with stickers and ribbons to decorate it and spinach & lettuce seeds. The child first places soil in the pot, the adds the seeds, covers lightly with more soil, waters and covers with plastic wrap. The seeds will germinate in about 10 days and in 40-60 they will have "Rabbit food" to eat.






For the adults, we made a body scrub they could take home. We used epson salt and sea salt, sunflower oil, and NOW foods essential oils. Each person got to pick their choice of scent for their personalized scrub.


Recipe for a small take-home container of scrub:
4 T Salt
1/2 to 1 T oil
Serval drops essential oil

Stir and enjoy!





People came up with all sorts of combinations but lavender was a top choice and an invigorating blend containing tangerine, orange and grapefruit was a close second.

New Favorite Flower & Salad Burnet

Salad Burnet is a cool herb that many people have never heard of before. It is pretty new to me as well. What's fun about this plant is that if you eat a whole leaf you suddenly, magically taste cucumber. I mean the exact taste of cucumber. Just one bite of a leaf and nothing, but the whole leaf and there it is.
You can add this herb to salads, dips and sandwiches. It is perennial in zones 4-9 so you can use it all spring and summer as a substitute for cucumber.
These are my salad burnet starts which I just got potted up and on the porch tonight. It's April 22nd and the last expected frost date for Southern Ohio is May 7th, lots to do outside before then!






Wow, I absolutely love these Rananculus plants! The flowers are so pretty and the blooms have been lasting over 2 weeks, they're amazing. This is the first year I've had these and it won't be the last...










I picked these 2 plants up at a local garden center but I also have some seeds for these so hopefully they will do well for me.

New USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map/Climate Change

For the first time in 20 years, The USDA is updating the Plant Hardiness Zone Map in response to climate change. The map shows where various types of plant species can thrive, and as warmer annual temperatures move northward, the more than 80 million U.S. gardeners and farmers will be looking to the map to see what new plants may be able to grow in their area.

View the Map:
http://www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/ushzmap.html