More than 20 youths were present at the final Linn County Master Gardener’s class at Southeast Linn Community Center Thursday, Aug. 11.
The Garden classes have been offered at SELCC over the course of the summer, with lessons on subjects including “Planting seeds and watching them grow,” garden rock painting, garden snacks, stepping stones, fairy gardens and salsa making.
Beula Dvorak with Linn County Master Gardener’s talked about how to make salsa with garden fresh ingredients.
The most important portion of salsa are tomatoes, and Dvorak outlined different varieties of tomatoes, including Roma and othes.
She specified that she doesn’t like all the tomato or pepper seeds in her salsa, so she removed those items when cutting her tomatoes and peppers, but youths could make their own decisions when making their salsa.
“That’s the great thing about salsa, is you can adjust the amounts in the recipe to make sure it tastes the way you want it to taste,” Dvorak said.
Because she was making this salsa to appeal to as many tastebuds as possible, she also only used green peppers as her pepper of choice.
“If you want a spicier salsa, you can replace one of the green peppers with a jalapeno or spicier pepper to give it more of a spicy kick,” Dvorak said.
Other ingredients in the garden fresh salsa Dvorak was making were onions, garlic, lime juice and cilantro. She noted that cilantro, just like spicier peppers, is something people may choose to leave out.
The items were diced via a food processor, which Dvorak noted quickens the process of making salsa, but if they did not have access to that, they could use a knife to finely dice all the vegetables and elements that went into their salsa.
The youths were then able to taste the salsa that was mixed up with chips.
“I really like spicy salsas, but this one is just sweet,” said Lizzy.
After the salsa tasting, the class participated in garden bingo, where the names of vegetables, fruits and flowers were read aloud and they checked off their BINGO cards for a chance at some prizes.
Participants were able to take home a small batch of salsa as well as a recipe to make their own from the items in their garden.

Gallery • 2 Photos

Nathan Countryman

Salsa class 3