Helping Leanne Ely Save Dinner

Wondering how to get your family back to the dinner table?

Perhaps Leanne Ely can help.

She’s the founder and creative force behind the popular Saving Dinner series and web resource savingdinner.com, and ‘The Expert on family cooking’, according to Woman’s Day Magazine. The NY Times bestselling author has also been has been featured in a long list of media outlets, including HGTV, The Wall St. Journal, and Redbook to name just a few.

She’s a seasoned veteran of multi-city book tours and national TV shows, Leanne also authors the Dinner Diva - a weekly column that’s syndicated in over 250 newspapers in the US and Canada.

Leanne’s core web presence – savingdinner.com – is a handy (and popular) resource that offers healthy lifestyle webinars, menus, e-books, weight loss help and more.

Like many chefs, she’s also a gardener, but with a schedule that reads like a Tokyo subway map, it isn’t easy to find time to work in her own kitchen garden, which is set on a hillside in the backyard, just a stones throw from the kitchen.

So she tapped Microfarm for a little help.

We started by filling the four 3’x12’ brick raised beds, which had been previously made by Leanne’s mason, with a blend of pine bark fines, mushroom compost, and PermaTill. We love this organic soilless mix for raised beds because it gives plants the right combination of soil drainage, root aeration and optimum nutrient uptake.

Once the beds were filled up, we worked our Microfarm Mix amendment blend into the soil. It’s a combination of dried blood meal, bone meal, kelp meal, rock phosphate, green sand, and dolomite lime, and gives organic garden soil the right combination of fast, medium and slow release sources of N-P-K, as well as trace minerals like calcium and magnesium.

Because Leanne’s recipes draw on a wide range of ingredients, we planted a variety of leafy green varieties like spinach, Swiss chard, mustard greens, and arugula, as well as root vegetables including carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips. And of course we made room for cool season classics from the Brassica family including collard greens, broccoli, cabbage, kale and cauliflower.

Since the garden is in a wooded area where deer sightings are as predictable as the mailman, the tall plastic deer fence is an essential step on the way to actually enjoying a harvest one day. Drip irrigation was also installed to ensure that the garden receives the right amount of water, regardless of Leanne’s busy schedule.

Is it exciting to think that our handiwork in Leanne’s garden might appear in front of so many people in so many media outlets in the form of her cooking? You bet.

But whether it’s a new kale smoothie promoted on national TV, or a fun beets recipe on savingdinner.com that brings a family together at the dinner table, or a simple mixed greens salad that Leanne harvests to enjoy at home with her own family, we’re just glad to help.