NotHannah's Green Space

Pulling Up Stakes

2009-06-03T11:57:00.002-04:00

Get it? GET IT?

Actually, I put IN stakes today, but what I'm trying to get around to is that I'm going to put all of my gardenly, craftly, housely stuff over at I'm Not Hannah. I actually am going to move the whole shebang at some point in time over to Wordpress and get a new domain. Because I'm nuts. It'll be fun. Really.

Promise.

There are already a few garden/yard posts up at I'm Not Hannah, and I'd love to see y'all there. So...yeah.

See ya.

Compartmentalizing

2009-05-29T09:32:00.002-04:00

(For those of you who don't go to I'm Not Hannah, this is a verbatim post from over there. I'm thinking about moving everything here over there somehow. Or keeping this as a holder blog. Or something. If you ARE an I'm Not Hannah reader, there is nothing new here for you to see. Bless your sweet heart.)

I think I've written about this before. The main fault with my labeling system is that it has a lot of vague, cute designations that offer very little in the way of search-aid. This particular post needs a label like, "contemplating the fate of my blogging universe" or "is having more than one blog a sign of schizophrenia?"

I have, over the course of my blogging life, had three blogs. The first is this one. I like this one. I'm bored with the template and know that I need some linkage overhaul, but I like it. I've made friends through it and it is a great way for me to keep track of my momentous occasions. I still love to go back and read about River's birth, because it was such a profound experience and it's hard for me to remember every moment of it when she's doing what she's doing right now, which is being curled up in a ball on the other side of the baby gate moaning because she can't get through, but won't ask for help, preferring instead to be as dramatic as possible. (For real, she's saying, "Oooh, nooooo. Oh, nooooooo. I will nebbuh see my mommy agiiiiiiiiin." As she stares at me.)

The second is NotHannah's Greenspace. I started it because I realized that not everybody gets all crazy-excited about the fact that my muscadine vines have overcome the idiocy of me dragging them out of my azaleas. Also, I often write with an eye to the funny and it's sometimes hard to write "and then I made the week's worth of pancakes" in a humorous way. I mean, it's pancakes, yo. They just kinda...sit there. I like having NHGS because it's a good way for me to (River is now accusing Frodo of being whiny. She is gonna make a hell of a psychological study one day.) chart weather and planting and what not. I could put it down on paper, I guess, and be one of those people whose kids have to deal with stacks and stacks of journals with entries like "March 22, 2010. Planted onions. It rained. I had a pimento cheese sandwich" when I die. Blogging seems easier and less likely to make my children break the Southern commandment to not speak ill of the dead.

The third was a now-defunct, never mentioned in the world of Not Hannah blog in which I discussed my spirituality. It's not that I'm ashamed of my spirituality, but the simple truth is that as I try to hammer out my own personal dogma, it's a lot easier to not talk about it with most folks. The personal religious freedom I value all Americans having is awesome, but I don't always need folks exercising it all up in my face, know what I mean? HOWEVER, it was nice for the few weeks that I wrote in it to be able to get some feedback from other folks walking the same(ish) path that I was and nice to have my musings down on...er...paper.

Here's the problem, then. I have somehow convinced myself that it is stressful having more than one blog. It probably ISN'T stressful, but the two of them feel like one (two more?) more thing (things?) that I can't get to in the course of a busy day, and I think the pressure I have (idiotically) put on myself is feeding into the dangerous and ridiculous "there's so much to do ACK I can't do it all ACK maybe I should just play eighteen games of Bejeweled Blitz instead" procrastination cycle of doom and despair that I like to plunge myself into.

I am in an organizational phase right now, brought on by the fact that Will will be on vacation soon and will want to transfer his managerial skills from school to home and thus make me feel oppressed and anxious. (Bless his sweet heart for living with me. He deserves a medal and a Xanax.) So I'm all like, "Gotta plant the garden. Gotta wash the clothes. Gotta get rid of stuff. Gotta scrub and put away and FOR THE LOVE OF THE FILING CABINET PUT IT TO ORDER!!!!"

The blog is just a tee-ninecy, often neglected bit of my life and so restructuring it should probably be last on my list of priorities, behind "scrubbing the baseboards" and "finally cleaning out the flatware drawer." But I can't help but think that if I started streamlined, it would be better. After all, planting limas is just as much a part of me as battling snot monsters. Deciding whether making instant oatmeal from regular oatmeal is worth it from a time/cost perspective is as immediately concerning to me as the idiocy of people like Tom Tancredo (Note to his idiotic self: Hey, buddy. If it doesn't have hoods and nooses, it isn't the KKK, you massive, ignorant wanker.)

So. Would anybody here (all, like, 17 or so of you) be mortally offended if I mixed the gardening/thrifty/crafty part of me with the mommy/political/writery part? I mean, I don't want to bore anybody silly with posts about hills versus ditches for corn-planting. Additionally, I don't want to freak out anybody coming here looking for a discussion on biscuits and finding, instead, a discussion about nether regions. Personal nether regions. Or maybe spiritual nether regions. I mean, Hell is a fascinating concept and I'm pretty sure that my mailbox area is a Hellmouth, so it might come up.

I'm just saying.

Yet Another Smorgasbord of Blogicity

2009-05-06T12:49:00.009-04:00

PEASSSSSS!!!! Actual, live, eat 'em right off the vine sweet peas. I eat the smaller pods, I open the older ones and lick out the peas in an ecstasy of gardening goodness. The ones above will be eaten for dinner tonight. (The ones left after River got to them, that is.)

So much has been going on in our "inside lives" that we haven't spent a lot of time doing anything outside. The garden is woefully underplanted, and I'm going to have to go ahead and get some plants from the store, as much as I hate it. You do what you can, right?

A couple of weekends ago, we took a trip to a local strawberry farm to pick our own berries. I've done berries here, and they'd be fine for a novelty for the kids, but I don't have enough space for a big patch. We wound up with an enormous mass of the lovely red fruits (including Jeffrey's "magic"--i.e. "unripe" ones)

and so later that afternoon, I set to preserving them. I made one big wad of them into strawberry jam. This was my third attempt at jam--the first resulted in a thick brownish sludge, the second resulted in a thin, goopy mess and the third:

I kinda wish I had a "TA DAAAAHHHH!" sound bite right now. Or, like, angel trumpets. The jam set beautifully and I made eight half pints of it! Huzzah!!

The rest of the berries I culled and sliced for freezing. They were so pretty on the tray that I took a picture of them. After they froze on the trays, I popped them off and slipped them into some Ziploc Vacuum Freezer bags. I'd been thinking about one of those vacuum storage systems for a while, because I make ahead and freeze pancakes, muffins, cookies, biscuits, etc. and wanted to be able to preserve them for a bit longer if possible. And I hate it when my blocks of cheese go bad fast. But the price of the systems kept me from buying them, along with the fact that reusing the bags for anything is impossible. I had heard about a Reynolds product that worked on a battery and the last time I went to HellMart, I headed to the freezer bag aisle, where I found the Ziploc system. Four bucks got me some bags and a little handpump. At face, this is pretty low-tech: a handpump goes over a hole in the bag and you, um, pump the air out. But the storage potential made me go nuts. I would prefer to can our produce, but Jeffrey hates what he calls "olive green" green beans and peas that are canned. And the kids LOVE frozen berries. So the idea that I can freeze stuff without the frantic "suck-with-a-straw-hurry-to-seal-curse-the-invention-of-air" deal is awesome. The pump removes every bit of air in the bag and you can reseal them after cutting off a wodge of cheese or grabbing a few berries.

The package and website cautions against reusing the bags, although to be honest, I'll probably reuse the ones I keep fruit and breads in--at the very least, these would make great "keepers" for wet socks and clothes that the kids mess up while on the road. No more icky soured clothes!!! You can check them out here: http://www.ziploc.com/?p=b10 Oh, by the way, I got five quart bags of frozen berries. I'd like to have more, but I'm going to fill out our fruit stash for the winter with blueberries (maybe even a few from our new rabbit eye bushes below),

peaches, and blackberries from the farm in Cowtown.

Let's see...I've given up hilling the potatoes...they grew all the way up to the top of the potato bin and I couldn't see using any more soil or straw. I'm hoping all the growth will mean lots of potatoes, but you know my skepticism with this concept. I was pretty surprised to see how close the blossoms of the potato are to eggplant blossoms and interested to find out after some research that they belong to the same family: edible Nightshade. Cool.

I decided to dig a corn trough this year instead of put them in a raised bed. Corn requires a lot of water and gets so tall that a raised bed made it difficult to deal with. The trough is roughly six feet by six feet, and I was able to get thirty-six kernals planted. I put mini pumpkins in each corner. The corn is starting to come up now, so tomorrow I'll put in some Henderson limas. YUM!! The corn trough picture is bad, I know. I think I'm going to call it: Large Lopsided Square of Dirt. You might be able to pick out the corn if you squint and say an incantation.

I dug out a BUNCH of the chocolate mint when I discovered it was started to invade the raised beds. Um. No. I transplanted some of it to a different spot, but was going to dry the rest until I decided to try doing some mint jelly with it. It has such a nice flavor that I thought it might do. The only pectin I have is powdered, though, so I have to make a HellMart run for some liquid stuff. Hope I can find it...

In other, horribly disgusting news, I have stinkwort mushrooms in one of my beds. I'm not sure what sin I committed to deserve the variety I have. They're nicknamed "Dead Man's Fingers" (charming) and emit an odor that is so gross and profound that you can smell it when you walk out the back door. Topping off the nastiness is a brown slimy wad of ook that apparently draws flies, which adds to the general grodiness. (Click on the pic to get a gander at the mushroom loogy. Shudder.) A Googling of the mushroom revealed that you can actually cook with these, which makes me want to yark. I just...no. I'll have to dig them out soon, once I gather the courage to do so.

Tomorrow is a planting day! Woohoo!

I Pea'd Myself!

2009-04-22T18:44:00.004-04:00

Oh, garden humor. I am a laugh riot.

For real, I have finally managed to plant sweet peas in such a way that I get, you know, actual peas on the vine! Woohoo!!!! The trick wound up being: plant early, plant in the shadiest spot in the garden, and sing to the vines encouragingly every day. They prefer Bob Marley. I'm sure that this won't necessarily work for everybody, depending on your region. If you live in the Northwest, for example, you might do better with full sun and, say, Lyle Lovett. The point is: I HAVE SWEET PEAS!! To be sure, there aren't a lot of vines, probably because the seeds I planted were old. Next year, I'll put trellises on the back of every bed in the shade and try to get a bigger harvest.

In other garden news, the potatoes got a second layer of hilling, this time with mucked out straw from the school farm. Forking it into barrels made me so happy that I'm pretty sure the Ag teacher thought I was insane. I doubt any farm I have will have cows, but the smell of straw + cow + manure is lovely to me. The taties already need another hilling. I'm considering going to the Ag Center, which is a huge complex where the state fair and various animal contests and RV gatherings are held. They have a pile of shavings and manure that anybody can go and get for free. I don't know about hilling potatoes with it, though. Maybe I should just try to find some more grass clippings? I remain skeptical about the potatoes, although they look beautiful and healthy in their golden bed (I'd take a picture, but we've been under a weird little streak of thunderstorms since around five, so I think I'll stay in here so as not to get zapped...maybe later after the weather clears.) I wonder what type of music they'd like? Garth Brooks springs weirdly to mind.

The first batch of compost is officially ready. There are still some bigger strands of grass left over from last year before I realized you really need to shred your stuff before chunking it into the bin, but I'm not too worried about them. I'll use the compost on my seedlings, which will go in this weekend. Poor babies. Winter sowing, it turns out, is a science for at least one person living in the South. Again, it might be easier somewhere else with more predictable seasons. This spring has been fairly consistently coolish, but our winter was a wee schizophrenic, especially at the end. The plants sprang up fast and then have been hunched down in their pots for at least a month. Transplanting them seemed to have little to no effect on their growth, although most of them really seem puny now, like they want to stretch their legs. I'll be trying to find fish emulsion this weekend to perk up the squash. I've read that too much nitrogen makes for not a lot of fruit. And I want a LOT of fruit!! (Oooooh, the thought of fried squash is ALMOST enough to make me long for the heavy heat of summer.) The others will get some compost--and maybe some Andrew Lloyd Webber show tunes.

On the homefront, we've been doing good on the eating-in department. We took Jeffrey out to eat yesterday after a doctor's visit, but otherwise, we've eaten at home for the entire week. The rest of the month hasn't gone as well--we've done a terrible job of eating-in AND of keeping our budget. Sometimes I feel a bit like, "Dang, I'm growing a garden. How much do I have to pare down?" but this mainly comes on days when the kids are fractious or we have a packed schedule or when (to be honest) I'm just being lazy. Budgeting simply must be part of the homesteading effort, as well as doing a better job of using what we have here instead of buying something new. Baby steps.

I've settled officially on a biscuit recipe for the family. It yields yummy, tender, buttery, soft, crunchy on the bottom bread that everybody loves. It's a variation of Mama's recipe, one I read in "Better Homes and Gardens" by Scott Peacock, and one from Alton Brown, my culinary boyfriend (and fellow UGA grad.)

Not Hannah's Biscuits O' Joy

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Combine 2 cups all-purpose flour, three teaspoons baking powder, and one teaspoon salt. I use a whisk, other folks use a food processor. Eh.
Pour one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar into a measuring cup. Add milk to make one cup. I use 1 percent milk, for what it's worth. This is a replacement for buttermilk. I don't know that I make biscuits enough to buy buttermilk since I don't know how long it lasts in the fridge, nor how much it costs. I'm perfectly happy with this substitution.
Cut a half stick of cold, unsalted butter longways and then shortways. You're aiming for little butter cubes. Plop those into the flour mixture.
Squoosh the butter cubes around in the flour mixture to break them up. "The experts" say aim for pea-sized pieces combined with smaller bits, which always makes me go, "Ack! Are we talking sweet peas? English peas? Crowder? PURPLE-HULLED PINKEYES????" Dude, you just want some bigger bits (field peas) and some smaller bits (graham cracker crumbs) and some flour. Don't have big hunks of butter in there.
Stir up the milk and cider mixture. The acid in the vinegar will combine with the baking powder and make a nice fizzy dough that rises in the oven.
Pour about 3/4 of the milk mixture into the flour and butter mixture. Some folks say make a well in the middle. Eh. I just pour slowly and hope for the best.
Stir gently with a fork. This is the "Do this part carefully or you'll wind up with tough, dry, disks o'sadness" part. I mix until it's all just combined. Depending on weather, I sometimes have a bit of milky stuff in the bottom of the bowl. This is okay--I can always add a bit of flour during the kneading part.
Plonk the dough out onto a floured surface. I use a wooden cutting board and I sprinkle maybe an eighth of a cup of flour onto the board. I have no idea if this is the "lightly floured" surface the experts go on about. This is what works for me.
Now the kneading part. I flatten the dough out to about an inch and a half, fold it in half, flatten it to an inch and a half, fold it in half, repeat and repeat and repeat maybe six or seven times. I've heard you should knead eleven times, that you shouldn't knead, that you knead only enough to coat the back and front of your dough with flour. Whatever works, y'all. This works for me.
Roll the dough out to about half an inch. I use a fairly large biscuit cutter and with a bit of smooshing the cut out parts together, I can get eight big biscuits and a little wonky one that I call the "sample." Don't spin the cutter; just push it down (I love the poofy little sound it makes) and lift it up. Put the biscuits on a parchment sheet lined pan so that they're almost touching, like maybe a centimeter between them. Poke holes in the biscuits all the way down to the pan with a fork, twice. Top each biscuit with a tiny piece of butter.
Bake for, oh, eleven or so minutes. I never time it...I always go by sight.
Eat and experience bliss.

Still working on the Cracker O' Joy. Will report when I've figured it out.

Homesteady

2009-04-08T00:01:00.011-04:00

I actually wrote this...um...a few days ago. Wednesday? I don't know. Will's been on break and it screwed my sense of time all up. I did another homestead-y thing today and I'll document it tomorrow maybe, after a trip to our favorite herb farm.

Guess what I just did? No, really. Guess.

I ate a homemade graham cracker slathered with peanut butter. And it was AWESOME.

Or at least very, very good.

The recipe from Baking Bites proved to be spot-on and even when I totally mixed two steps up and wound up with largish blobs of butter in my rolled-out dough, they still taste good. Jeffrey is kind of squicky on the texture (he doesn't like crunchy at all and still speaks with longing of the thick, chewy slabs o' dough that were my second batch of crackers) and River refused to eat hers at all (it was sweet, you see, and I have decided this child might actually be a foundling--she eats neither chocolate nor peanut butter and...) BUT--Will and I liked them. Next time, I'll do a few things differently, starting with, you know, combining ingredients in the correct order. I also think I'll to process the graham flour a bit and try to break it down. The biggest difference between these and storebought was one of texture--storebought are smoother and...flakier, maybe? I also will substitute one of the tablespoons of molasses for honey. It won't change anything but the taste and I feel like, especially for the little ones, molasses makes for a more complicated taste. All in all, this was a successful test. I'm really stoked to think that in a few weeks I'll be able to mark one more item off my shopping list. Woohoo!

Now guess what I just did? It's about six hours later and I'm finishing up the post that work kept me from. I'm not snuggled down in bed because I had my very own Laura Ingalls Wilder moment and got up to water down the plants because of the expected frost. To my relief, it doesn't appear that it got down to freezing. NOAA has the temp at 35 degrees and while that's cold as poo poo, there's no frost on the car or the plants. I'll check again as it gets closer to twilight, but I think we were spared. (I have my fingers crossed for the peach farmers.)

The anxiety the forecast frost caused me was considerable; I'm not really sure why. Certainly, I don't depend on my garden for sustenance. And with our warm climate and long growing season, there's plenty of time to plant seedlings or even grow some crops straight from seed. I suppose it's that a lot of work went into my little seedlings--physical work, but also planning and hoping and dreaming. I'm starting to consider this venture to be less something fun to do because my Daddy gardened and more an actual lifestyle change, and the threat of frost threatened that lifestyle. Just checked the veggie garden again...no frost! Yay!

So now I have a slew of newspaper-potted tomatoes and cukes and peppers sitting in my kitchen for no good reason. Ah, well. Better safe than sorry.

I dug out most of the seedlings from their winter-sown homes yesterday. (I had to leave some because the kids were clamoring for supper and my fingers were numb from making newspaper pots.) First, I needed to bring them in from the cold and second, they were getting a bit root bound and nitrogen-starved in the containers. It was odd to look at my garden sans containers. This has been an interesting experiment. I'm not sure what I'll do differently next year. I expected the peppers to go great guns, as I've frequently had volunteer peppers come up from missed fruit, but I only got two California Wonders and no banana peppers at all. I expected no eggplant, but yesterday I lifted two healthy seedlings and two "trying hard" seedlings from the container. (More than enough in our house, as I'm the only one who eats it.) The tomatoes got a mixed review, although I had to restart the seeds after a hard freeze. The Jelly Beans went pffff (I think I have three?), the Romas and Better Boys did okay, and the Cherokee Purples surprised me by going CRAZY and springing up all six. So...I'm set for tomatoes. (Will doesn't know this yet, but I'm thinking I'm going to be stuffing some of these jokers into a flower bed or two. Or, you know, seven.) I'd like to experiment a bit more...starting the seedlings earlier, bringing them in for frosty nights, etc. But I'm also going to look at a small grow-light set up for my herbs and peppers next year.

On Monday (again, ahead of the expected freeze), I hilled my potatoes. I had been meaning to do it, but I didn't get around to it and I had a good foot or so of plant sticking out of the soil.

Good old Ed and Daddy both recommend mounding soil or (in Ed's case) marsh grass around the plants as they grow to increase production. My soil being less than satisfactory in the organic matter department and lacking any marsh grass (or marshes, for that matter), I elected to do a hodgepodge and make my own marsh grass. I mixed soil from the big pile left from last year with grass clippings I got from friends and piled it all up around the plants. There was something so pleasing about the process: the rhythm of of shoveling the soil, stirring the clippings and soil together, forking it out of the wagon. Hilling potatoes is hard when you're using a box bed. The potatoes are crammed in as it is and mine are close to the edge. The answer was using a vinyl-wrapped chicken wire to create a sort of cage around the outside. I have no freakin' clue if this will work, but if it does, I figure I will have roughly eighty blue million pounds of potatoes. This means figuring out how to build a small root cellar, finding out if potatoes dry well, and unloading mounds of taties on all friemily who'll take them.

I think I'll head back to bed for a few more moments of snuggling with the hubs before the day gets going. It'll be warm today and there's still so much to do to get the garden ready. (Not least of which is figuring out what to do with a laundry room full of misplaced seedlings.)

Bonus shot of my precious little farmer boy:

Um, About the Rain

2009-04-05T09:52:00.007-04:00

Sheesh. I really got what I asked for. A pretty much whole week of blinding, stay in the house rain. Right now, I'm chilling out in the library waiting for the first of the severe storms expected today to arrive. More rain. Ahem. The rain in question will usher in a blast of frigid air--we're expecting cooler temps all next week, with two nights dropping to or below freezing. Argh.

With the coming cold (and rain), I elected yesterday not to set any of my winter sown babies out. The cukes and squashes are getting pissy in their containers, though, so I may try to get some slightly larger pots (or make some out of newspaper) to transplant them into next week. I've just realized that there's supposed to be an intermediate step between the place you first sow your seeds and the place they'll stay. Oh. Huh. It makes sense, I suppose. I have plenty of used newspapers after the weekend, so I think I'll roll some pots tonight after the kiddies are in bed while Will is watching the Braves. There are a few different ways to do it, so I'll hopefully have a veritable armada of pots come Monday. (BTW, omalawsy at the last link, I have found another urban gardener and she rocks my socks off. I think I'll be spending all of today poring over her site and pretty being lazy as she talks about all the work she does.)

I don't feel all too upset about the laziness today, as I worked a good bit outside yesterday. Having abandoned my setting out plans, I elected instead to do some transplanting of various plants around the yard and beds. First up were the lavenders I've been growing for about a year in the transplant bed. I dug them all up and used them to line the walkway of the cottage garden. Darryl from Olive Forge told me last year that he thought they might be Spanish, and a quick Google proved this to be so. Spanish lavenders aren't typically as fragrant as French lavenders, but these particular lovelies have a wonderful, honey-tinged scent as they leaf and bud out in the spring. The two (rather straggly) plants that I had in the front flower garden greeted me every day with that scent and it made me smile, so I decided to haul them all out front. I was able to get eight plants from the original four or five. I hope they'll grow into a nice little hedge for me. Research shows that they just might, providing the very moist soil in the bed allows them to. (Research also shows me that the name comes from the Latin word "to wash," which makes me long for a bathtub deep enough to steep myself with a few sprigs of lavender...sigh...) Hopefully, removing a few of the bordering blocks to allow a path through the bed will help with drainage. I'll be trimming them back hard after the rain to give them a break from making flowers and to encourage root growth.

I've decided to turn the front bed from herbs (with the exception of the lavender) to straight flowers. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that I have yet to find an organic solution to blackspot and the Joseph's Coat is prone to it and I need to go ahead and treat the bed. I want anything I use in my cooking or home solutions to be organically grown, so I need to move the herbs back to the main garden. After the lavender, I took out a sweet grass I got last year from Olive Forge and a tiny itty bitty jewel weed that self-seeded (oh, I hope I find some more later in the season.) I rearranged the stokesia into an orderly cluster (stumbling upon a truly gigantic dark brown spider scurrying around with her egg sac tucked under her...yay, Mama!--also, *shudder*) and moved an aster from the path's edge.

Then back to the back to put in two rabbit-eye blueberry bushes. They're covered already with blooms and berries, so I have much hope for at least a handful of berries for a snack come early summer. (The raspberries also have a few buds on them, which makes me SMILE as we edge closer to the kind of self-sufficiency I crave. I'm hoping to get a couple more blueberry bushes, some blackberry brambles and maybe some self-pollinating kiwis next week--unless the nurseries say it's too late to plant. FRUIT! Woohoo!) Anyway, I put them in the transplant bed after removing the last small lavender and mulched them with the grass clippings Will swept out of the yard.

What few clippings were left were added to the Phase One composter (the aluminum trash can). I'm trying to be very good about chopping everything into smaller bits, because I've realized that has been the primary problem in my composting history. I also am more careful to layer dry and wet stuff. I checked on the contents of the Phase Two composter (actual tumbler-style bin that Will got me for my birthday) and was THRILLED to realize that (drummmmmrooolllll) I'm getting some compost!! I finally did it right and I'm so excited because that means that if all goes well, I'll be able to use it when I put my transplanted seeds in.

I was reading over some of my blogs from last year and taking into account the things I've learned. The biggest success so far this year is the sweet peas. The vines are so healthy and tall (worried about them come Tuesday and Wednesday night), I know I did the right thing by planting them so early. Next year, I'll do the same for the Swiss chard. The winter sowing/heat fiasco this year and the lack of seedlings last year taught me that they need to go in the ground at the same time as I do my lettuce and peas. Live and garden and learn!

Plans for the upcoming week (despite the fact that it's supposed to be really chilly):

Figure out what to do with all this chocolate mint. (It's the darker green stuff bordering the beds.)I don't mind having a bunch of it around (it's my favorite mint to use in charms and cooking) and in fact was afraid I had killed it dead, but this is ridiculous!! I might try to encourage it to grow around the little flower bed/not very much used spot under the bigger crepe myrtle. We're thinking about putting a little zen fountain out there, so it might work nicely.
Decide on the zen fountain. :)
Finish trellising the Joseph's Coat.
Fix the front bed gate.
Repot the seedlings.
Start working on the sidewalk bed--the foundation will be transplanted rosemaries. I'll fill in with a few trellises of mini-pumpkins and some inexpensive annuals for right now.

Off to do laundry and attempt some homemade graham crackers from the recipe over at Baking Bites.

Rain, Rain, Please Don't Go Away (Random Garden News)

2009-03-27T11:47:00.004-04:00

The weatherpeople keep teasing us with promises of heavy rain, but so far we've just had light showers. My garden NEEDS some heavy rain.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the winter sowing. I think that the concept of throwing seeds in a pot and waiting til Spring probably works best for colder climates--ones not prone to freak warm spells followed by freak cold spells followed by freak warm spells followed by...On the other hand, one can't deny the head start I've gotten on my squash and cukes. However, by the time the second round of seeds went in, it was already too warm for much more than sizzling death inside the containers. The tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant are up, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get enough growth to justify a transplant. Does that make sense?

So. I think I'll do this next year BUT I'm going to add a wheeled cart into the mix so that if it DOES look like we'll get a heavy freeze after freak-warm-spell-induced-seedlings come up, I can just push the babies inside for the overnight hours and return them outside during the day. I also am thinking about expanding the container sizes so that I literally have little mini-greenhouses. Am thinking about green ways to try to finagle this.

I'm feeling a bit slumpish about the garden right now. I feel as if my soil isn't "alive." Things are green at first when they come up, but then seem sort of tired and spent soon after, which just depresses me. (I am perhaps a wee too emotionally attached to my garden. :)) I plan to use the next few weeks adding as much organic material as I can to the soil and hooking up my watering system again. I also might work a little "live it up" charm with this girly. Isn't she precious? I got her at a yard sale last week from an African woman who does wire work. I luff praying mantises (manti?) and think she'd make a good guardian spirit for the garden.

Decisions, Decisions

2009-03-19T13:29:00.004-04:00

I've got a couple of gardening quandaries that I'm working on right now. Maybe some of y'all can hook me up with some advice?

My winter composting consists pretty much of me chucking bits of kitchen waste out the backdoor. (A method that Will simply ADORES.) Sometime in January, I realized this was not very efficient, so I went outside and hacked some of the larger bits of kitchen waste into smaller bits to ensure better breaking down. A few of the bits were actually whole mini-pumpkins given to the kids by my mother-in-law at Halloween. They hadn't broken down at all, probably because of the coating of waxy stuff used to preserve the painted on faces that decorated them. I chopped them into pieces, noting in passing that they sure were full of seeds to be so small. Can you see where this is going? The fruit of the pumpkins broke down beautifully, but I am now the proud owner of at least ten mini-pumpkin seedlings, with more popping up every day. Some research shows them to be edible and full of uses, from the aforementioned painted on pumpkin doohickeys to autumnal candle holders. BUT--I can't use ten vines...I'm not even sure if I could find room for two or three. I have considered potting them individually and trying to sell them at the Farmer's Market. Or maybe using them as a vine in the as-yet-to-be-decided front flower bed. I love the IDEA of mini-pumpkins and think that they could be a good cash crop, but I'm not up for an entire garden of them. What do y'all think?
My winter-sown heirloom white scalloped squash is rapidly outgrowing it's container. I've got EIGHT (because I'm a nut) plants that are growing like gang-busters and which really need to be transplanted soon. However, squash is notorious for being difficult to transplant and I really want to baby these guys. Tomorrow is the last date for average spring frosts in my area, but the temperatures are expected to fall to the upper thirties on Saturday night. I really want to get my watering system in soon, which would be best done if the plants are in. Ackk!!
Also in the self-seeding category are a whole menagerie of tomatoes: Romas and Better Boys. Below is a wad of Roma seedlings.Daddy has asked for a few of them, but I might be able to get as many as twenty out of all the little seedlings. I've winter-sown both varieties--as well as Cherokee Purple and Jelly Bean, so I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to need any more tomatoes. Should I just chunk them in the compost? Try to sell them at the Farmer's Market?

The biggest issue here is that I HATE to waste plants and money, so when I lose a plant or can't use one, it makes me nuts. What would YOU do?

Catching Up...Again

2009-03-15T18:23:00.008-04:00

Seriously, early spring is a BAD time for my blog.

How about a list to catch y'all up? I think yes. (Also with a bit of stream of consciousness thrown in. Woohoo!!)

The garden is coming along swimmingly. I have learned sooo much from the winter sowing experiment. Like, cucumbers sprout so quickly. Why in the world would anybody ever start them as seedlings? I probably won't do this again with cukes. I also learned that Swiss chard grows in little clumps from one seed and is pissy about being transplanted or thinned. It will transplant, but it isn't all that thrilled about the whole thing and the primary leaves will turn a sickly yellow before agreeing to green up. Not sure I'll winter sow them again, either, maybe just start them earlier. Last weekend, I planted a vast assortment of stuff; everything from three different kinds of basils to four different kinds of tomatoes. I'm not exactly sure where I'm going to stuff all of these seedlings along with the beans and peas and carrots and onions that will come along with them, but I guess I'll figure something out. I also put out some more lettuce and spinach seeds, which have sprouted and been dug up (by me AND Frodo) and sprouted again. Still actively growing are the lettuce, spinach, and arugula I set out as plants. I doubt I'll do plants again when it comes to greens. It seems redundant and expensive now that I'm on this side of the winter. Still, we've had several salads off of the greens, so the investment was worth it. The broccoli is also growing well, but hasn't gotten any heads yet. On Thursday, I "rearranged the furniture" in the garden in order to take advantage of the light better. I realized when I saw this picture that the bird netting I use to grow cukes and peas shadows the plants behind it more than I previously supposed. (Note how much smaller the broccoli in the back is.)So I'm moving all of the trellises to the back of the various beds. Anything tall will be on the north and east side of the garden, mainly in the back beds where there's more shade. I know from last year that peppers and cukes will do okay in partial shade and I think some of my beans will, as well. Here's a shot of the garden complete, which isn't too different than it was a few weeks ago. What you can't see from here are the raspberries planted along the newly moved trellis and the transplanted sorrel and cutting celery. We love raspberries with a passion and Jeffrey would make himself sick on sorrel if I let him, so I'm trying to put a lot of "nibblies" in the two beds closest to the house. I'll be putting a "Jelly Bean" grape tomato in the bed on the left for River.You also can't see...Wait...is that a potato (and a random, unknown weed?)It is! (And, unfortunately, a highly identifiable bit of nut grass. Argh.) BUT!!! The potatoes are up! I am just THRILLED about this, as potatoes still seem like some sort of new and insane piece of craziness to grow--and I'm still worried about my soil. Further worries involve a disconcerting lack of earthworms. I seriously am earthworm deficient. My feeling is that the number of fireants in my garden is keeping the population low, and my soil is probably STILL organic material-deficient. So I have two plans of attack. The first is that I've found an organic fireant control that has good reviews. (I'll let you know if it works.) The second is that I need to get my compost cooking FAST and add it as a top dressing ASAP. Then, you know, I'll add worms. The leaves are doing a great job of controlling weeds in the paths so far, but I'm getting some in the beds. I'll have to do some weeding when it dries out. I also discovered (HORROR) that one of my beds has termites...the price to pay for untreated lumber, but not cool at all so close to the house. I read that some beneficial nematodes are used to control termites, and I found a seller who combines nematodes that work on ants, termites, fleas, thrips, loopers, and some beetles that were problematic for me last year. So...I think I'll do a double whammy on the beds and see what happens. I've also been cleaning out the front bed and readying it for spring. Still mulling over the idea of making it all medicinal and tea herbs. And then zinnias and other cut flowers for the strip next to the house? Not sure if I can convince Will of this. He's pretty anti-flowerbeds, because they always seem to get weedy and produce well. He thinks bushes are always the way to go.
In non-gardening news, I have FINALLY figured out a biscuit recipe that makes me happy. The winner is: Mama's recipe. For years, I've fought against it, because I wanted to have MY recipe, the thing that I do. But it really is the most workable. I've made changes to it, the first being that I use all purpose flour versus self-rising like she does. I also use my fingers to sort of smoosh the butter into the flour--and I'm going to start using unsalted butter because I feel that they're a bit too salty. I knead the dough a bit and then I poke holes in the finished biscuits for extra rise. Mama doesn't do all of the above, so I feel like I have my OWN version of the recipe and it makes me happy to have reliable biscuits every time. I'm contemplating getting a cast iron biscuit pan just because it seems cool. I also might try to do my own buttermilk with lemon juice thing next time to see if a tangy taste is better for my family. The pictures below are a fairly flat batch--it was very humid that day and I added too much milk. They still tasted great!
Still working on the organizing thing. It might actually make me go crazy really, really soon. I've developed a new way of cleaning, one that works for me when I'm not sitting on the computer writing blogs all day. I just take my timer from room to room and force myself to only work five minutes at a time on each room. It takes forty minutes to do the whole house and then I vacuum each room. You would think that this would mean every room is just a little bit messy, but I'm actually finding that I'm starting to have time to get a deeper clean and do stuff like wipe down baseboards or scrub windows with the leftover time. Each room has a day when I give it an extra thirty minutes for a total dust and vacuum and scrub down. The kitchen is different, of course. I work on it during meal times and when I get a spare second. I seriously doubt that it will ever be clean enough. Sigh.

So, here I'll make the obligatory "I'll do better about posting" statement. And I WILL try. When I'm not going mad on sunshine. Or dusting. Whichever.

Springing (and Cleaning) Out All Over!

2009-02-19T09:47:00.006-05:00

The sweet peas and bunching onions are up! Yay!

Tiny lil sweet pea

Baby onions in a row

(Is it wrong that I kinda want to smooch on them?)

Clearly, the rain from the storms last night (which I apparently and uncharacteristically slept through, which is scary because Will never checks the Weather Channel and we'd be halfway to Oz before he realized we were having a tornado) helped them out. I really need to get my garden planned out so I can get my watering system set up. Last year I tailored it to each bed, which meant a lot of sweating in the pathways after everything came up. I'll still use the soaker method this year, but I'm going to try to configure it in such a way that I can set the lines up without having to plant around them OR move them around the plants. Hopefully I'll be able to salvage the lines and all of the drippers as I start dismantling the system in the next few days. Having them will keep me ahead of the game.

The winter sown seedlings all got a good soaking last night and are looking good--even the blown-over Swiss chard. Another Lemon Cucumber is coming up. I'm actually worried about all of the seedlings, winter sown and otherwise, since we're expecting a hard freeze (or several of them) over the next few days. I can always rake some leaves over the peas and onions and maybe "bank" some around the containers. The theory is that nothing will come up that isn't ready to, but our weather is so temperamental in the late winter/early spring that it makes me wonder.

In other (and far more boring and unpleasant, in my opinion) news, I'm still working on my Imbolc-inspired inside overhaul. The office is awash in discarded CDs and papers. I feel guilty throwing so much JUNK out, but at the same time, paring this down will help me be more efficient in running the house and garden. I'm planning on making binders for home projects and our schedule and budget, much like the one I've already made for my recipes. (One project will be using bills and envelopes and other junk mail to make paper, as I recently came across my old paper-making frames. Viva la organization!)

Another thing we're working on as a family right now is an itemized budget. We've always had a budget--but I use that term loosely, as we never followed or tracked it at all. I suggested we itemize our budget for February so we could see where the money's going. No big shocks so far--we're already over our monthly grocery limit AND we've eaten out A LOT. This is my fault. I need to do better on planning and cooking our meals. We over-budgeted for gas, though, and had a big "miscellaneous" chunk, so we can adjust as needed. Still, I'd like to do better on groceries next month. Cleaning out the pantry today will help me plan better for next month--I won't buy extra of those things we don't use.

Fascinating stuff, no? Sigh. I'm going to have to roll up my sleeves and take to the office again before I put myself to sleep.

Ugh and Woohoo!

2009-02-17T19:28:00.005-05:00

Friday morning I went to get the recycling bins from the curb and did my standard "check under the rims of things for evil, scary, monster spider evidence." Lo and behold, I found this:

Why, NotHannah, you might be saying, that looks a lot like a cluster of brown widow egg sacs. YES, I KNOW THAT, THANKS.

After losing my mind all over the driveway, I used a stick to pull the sacs loose and then proceeded to grind them to less than a smear on the asphalt. After girding my loins and swallowing my tonsils, I then poked around at the little shmoodge of web looking thingy at the bottom right part of the picture because I was pretty sure that's where Mama Brown Widow was hanging out waiting to bite me. But, no. A pretty pissed off grass spider popped out and scurried away, leaving me with no Mama Brown Widow, which isn't as awesome as you would think it is. Sigh. Shudder.

Opting not to attack the recycling/trash can area with a flame thrower, I instead packed for our weekend trip to Chattanooga with the kiddies. (I'll try to post something about that over at I'm Not Hannah soon.) Much fun was had by all, in addition to a few hives and a case of bad belly.

When we returned, I took my standard return home-walk around the garden to see what miracles have happened in my absence and discovered to my frabjous joy that WOOHOO! Some of my winter sown sweeties are up!

These are Boston Pickling cucumbers. Loved these last year. I have nine of these up. My Lemon cukes are up, too...well, one is up. I realized when I tried to put a picture of it on the blog, though, that it might require superhero vision to see it yet.

No superhero vision needed for these guys. These are Swiss Chard, and the seedlings you see are far and away more than I got last year in my Swiss Chard patch.

I am a gardening goddess.

So far, the winter sowing is working bee-yootifully. I don't see a difference in the containers--I used soda bottles and milk bottles and both seem to be germinating the seeds equally well. I'm intrigued that the cukes have come up first...this seems to support my idea that I should have set them out earlier last year. I'll put out a few more "greenhouses" next week when the signs are right again for bedding crops; probably more peppers and tomatoes...maybe my Cherokee Purples will be here!

I also planted a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes today. I'm skeptical about taties. It seems so difficult to grow them. I'm not sure why--maybe because I can't see the "magic happening" under the soil? I meant to put out onions, but I'm still waffling about where I want them. I'll wait until the 21st.

Picked a mess of lettuce, spinach, what sorrel Jeffrey hasn't munched to the ground (I'm pretty sure I'm the only mom in America who actively worries about her child getting oxalic acid poisoning), and a few sprigs of cutting celery for a salad tonight. We wound up not eating it yet--we went with waffles and eggs--but I'll eat it for lunch tomorrow, maybe with a tuna salad sandwich (made with leeks from the herb bed.)

The broccoli continues to grow and look lovely. Neither the sweet peas nor the onions are up, but I am keeping my fingers crossed. We'll get rain tomorrow, so maybe that will get the seedlings going.

Taking Advantage of the Loveliness

2009-02-09T12:51:00.010-05:00

This weekend was one of those perfect clusters of days of warm sunshine and fresh breeze at the end of winter. You know it will get cold again, but you can revel in the loveliness while it lasts and get some prep work done in the meantime for actual Spring. (As I've been moping around about the bizarre weather, I wonder if Mother Nature is reading my blog!)

Saturday I puttered around the garden, cleaning up bits and pieces of miscellaneous trash that collects in a yard with children. I planted some lettuce and spinach and broccoli seedlings in late January and all are fine, having come through the bitter cold spell with ease. While I was picking some of the greens for a salad (with leftover salmon--yummy AND frugal AND green!), I noticed a yick smell--like a dead animal. But Frodo has occasionally ventured unwelcomed into the garden for a potty break, so I just sort of shrugged it off as puppy poo.

Here's a shot of the broccoli bed:

After a few more hours spent futzing around the garden and planning out the beds with the help of my trusty Vegetable Gardener's Bible, the whole family headed off to the park to do some exploring with Jeffrey's metal detector. This is the park we cleaned last year in preparation for the Earth Day that didn't quite get off the ground. They recently got the paths refurbished and it was so nice. This would be a great place to run. We only found one treasure--a rusted Pepsi can.

Alas. We had a great time anyway, running on the path and spotting Canada geese, a Great Egret, and one confused white duck.

I also thought I saw an alligator:

Sunday was spent much like Saturday was. We were outside almost the whole time. After a lot of messing around, Will brought his iPod outside and we listened to Jupiter Coyote and Jimmy Buffett as I started Winter Sowing Project 2009. Farmer Cathy gave me the idea, and I'm so excited to see if it works. I planted three kinds of tomatoes (Better Boys, Romas, and a grape variety--which I'm pretty sure will be a bust as River "helped" today by shaking the bottle up), some California Wonder peppers, eggplant, summer squash, Boston Pickling and Lemon cucumbers, some cantelope and some Swiss Chard. You will note that a lot of these names sound familiar--I'm using some seeds from last year. Ed Smith from VLB says that most seeds will last a few years, so I'm going to believe him. It seems as if I'm combining two unknowns and hoping for the best, but isn't all gardening like that? After filling up my WS containers, I set them in a nice sunny bed and pulled some of the leaves around the bases. The strip in between I planted with bunching onion seeds, yesterday being the last day the signs were right for planting above ground crops for a few weeks. I think it looked nice and tidy when I was finished, although I will say that I felt a lot like my daddy when I surveyed the reused bits. Daddy is a FAMOUS reuser.

While I was at it, I decided to put in a row of Sugar Snap peas in the broccoli bed. I have terrible luck with sweet peas. Last year, I managed to get the vines going for the first time, but it was too hot for any flowers by that time and so I was pea-less yet again. Starting earlier must be the key, I figured. While I was planting, I noticed, yet again, the dead animal smell. No poo was in sight. Hmmm...As I poked holes for the peas, I also discovered that some creature has been tunneling in my bed. And... as I bent forward to put in a pea, I realized that the dead animal smell was coming from the tunnel. Urk. I figure one of several things is happening. Either I've got a mole or mouse or something which died in there (barf) or I have a snake in there who took over a mouse or mole tunnel (not as barfy, but still not pleasant to consider.) I don't want moles or mice in my garden, although I wouldn't mind a king- or rat snake. They keep away mice and bad snakes, such as the copperheads I REALLY don't want to be tangling with. I'm not sure what to do about this...should I dig the bed up and risk running up on a snake or yicky dead things? This doesn't seem good for gardening...won't it pose a risk to our health? Blah. Maybe I should call the extension agency. Ideas?

Jeffrey got into the spirit of reusing while we were outside and went through the recycling bin until he found an old soda can. He got Will to help him cut out a piece of it and filled it with birdseed for a bird feeder. Will it work? No clue, but it was sweet that he came up with the idea all by himself!

Later that evening, Will and I were discussing the smell. Referring to my habit of tossing kitchen scraps directly into my beds in the wintertime, he said, "Yeah, all that rotting fruit and food seems like the ideal habitat for a snake."

My eyes didn't QUITE roll out of my head at this--um, YEAH, snakes are just MAD for some soggy carrot peelings--, but it was a near thing. I let it go, but I did go out this morning to take shots of our two respective areas of the yard.

Which looks more "snakey?"

My orderly, tidily-leafed garden

or his brush-cluttered, Christmas tree-piled, stacks o' wood-laden man camp?

That's what I thought.

A new kink has come into my plan to turn our yard into a semi-viable homestead--a piece of property at a crazy-low price. I'll be wigging out about it over at I'm Not Hannah later on.

Girl Gourmet Cupcake Maker OR Satan's Cupcake Maker From The Hot Stinky Place

2009-01-10T23:47:00.014-05:00

I am planning, some year, to do green reviews here. Or reviews of catalogs. Or fun household products. Something. What follows is a kind of review of something that's neither green nor a catalog and which didn't even work correctly. However, we learned some stuff and wound up having a good time.

Jeffrey asked for one of those cupcake baker thingies for Christmas. Then he saw a commercial for them and realized it was called Girl Gourmet and lost his mind. (Pause for a mini-rant about why in the heck with folks like Emeril and Bobby Flay and that dude in orange plastic clogs do we still have baking toys marketed only to girls? Why?) Will and I explained that it was perfectly fine for him to ask for the cupcake baker thingy and he would have a grand old time with it. Well, Nana hooked him up and a few days ago, I broke it out.

And by "broke it out," I mean actually got out my pocket knife and jimmied that sucker out of all of the plastic twist ties and flat holdy pieces and tape and...is all that mess necessary? I washed all the silly little bowls and spoons (pink and teal as the 80s, y'all) and waited with bated breath for the Bug to get home.

He was excited to try and pour out the packets of mixes by himself and measure out the water. I bit my lip practically through, but I kept my hand still by some miracle and let him do his thing:

River was clearly as skeptical as I.

We got the cupcake in the cupcake cooker mahoojy and then waited the requisite minute and a half until it was cooked. Jeffrey sneaked a lick of batter out of the bowl and immediately gagged. I reasoned that uncooked batter isn't always yummy, although...honestly, have you ever tasted bad cupcake batter? Yeah, me neither.

The cupcake cooked and Jeffrey was impressed by the whole thing. I personally thought the cupcake looked like a piece of poo. And smelled odd. Jeffrey was very proud.

While we waited for Jeffrey's cupcake to cool, we mixed up one for River. Her's, while not looking like poo, gave off the distinct odor of sweetened Play-Doh. More concerning, it sort of tasted like that, too.

*Can I pause here to comment on the loveliness of my bebes' hands?*

When the cupcake was cool, Jeffrey and I started mixing the frosting per the instructions. It must be said that it smelled like artificial strawberry death. Also, the amount of water recommended by the instructions rendered a bowlful of small pink pellets but not anything even remotely resembling frosting. More water had no effect at all until suddenly, I was stirring a puddle of pink ooze. It was like a magic potion gone terribly, strawberrily wrong. The only thing to do was to add a bit of the vanilla frosting powder.

Now, I've been baking for a month and a half straight, using good vanilla and pure chocolate and freshly shelled pecans. That must be the reason why that frosting smelled (and tasted...holy egg beaters, the taste) so...wrong. As in, "This frosting is not of this world and must be sent back to whatever alien factory produced it." Still, I was going to do this thing. So I stirred and mashed unholy vanilla lumps and finally produced a frosting-ish substance that we spooned into the cupcake frosting mechanism.

Here's where the fun began. The purpose of the frosting mechanism is to produce puffy swirls of frosting atop the cupcakes. Our frosting wasn't puffy to begin with, but even if it had been the right consistency, it never would have swirled while riding along on the cupcake holding tray doojywhopper. Our cupcake looked sad, my friends. And then Jeffrey discovered that if you pumped the mechanism with any kind of enthusiasm whatsoever, it splattered frosting EVERYWHERE in swirling arcs of fake pink sweetness.

For a moment, Jeffrey and I sat in silence as frosting dripped off River's ears.

Then we burst out laughing. I laughed so hard with my boy that the entire thing became worth it, especially when River joined in with a few artificial "hahaha"s of her own. We sputtered over the definition of "gourmet" and generally acted like fools all over my kitchen.

The cupcake, when "frosted", was hideous.

Jeffrey ate it anyway.

Rivers was only marginally prettier, probably because I used less water and the frosting looked like fat white caterpillars versus oozing pink death-ooze. But it smelled like vanilla-flavored Play-Doh and tasted the same. In fact, it sort had the same texture, too. Shudder.

To sum up: the Girl Gourmet Cupcake Maker does not produce gourmet cupcakes, although Jeffrey and I have now taken to calling any disgusting sort of food gourmet. It doesn't produce gourmet frosting, either. I'm thinking, though, that if one used a homemade butter cream in the mechanism, it might work as long as you didn't get too excited while pumping the mechanism.

Or, hey, get a can of ready-made. Cupcakes are pretty easy to whip up from scratch or from a box and really, that was the whole purpose of the cupcake maker in the first place: to spend some fun learning time together.

And we DID have fun.

Speaking of, must go...I need to to scrape some more frosting from the walls.

Owls at Dusk

2009-01-03T20:45:00.004-05:00

Late this afternoon, I spent some time winterizing my garden beds. I'm a bit late, I know, but better late than never, right? In any case, I gathered up the piles of fallen leaves, chopped up the pieces of fruit I chunk out whenever they go bad in my fruit bowl, crumbled the thrown egg shells, spread all of it out and then covered it up with the leaves. It looks all nice and tidy and I am proud of my little garden, but the best part of everything about today was this:

http://fsc.fernbank.edu/birding/bird_sounds/great_horned%20_owl.mp3

The entire time I was serenaded by Great Horned Owls searching for love. Being out in the warmish air, feeling the cool earth under my hands and knees, hearing the ethereal, plaintive calls was...magical.

Toast Cups and Fireworks

2009-01-02T12:51:00.004-05:00

Does anybody else feel like it's the weekend? Whew, I am ALL confused about which day it is.

Anywho, this weekend...I mean...over the past few days (sheesh), we rang in the new year with our friemily, per tradition. What a riot it was to have eight kiddies running (or creeping or wiggling) around the house as we prepared our feast for the evening. Will and I went BONKERS at the Fresh Market in Nearest Large Town and my lovely ladies (and Vince) helped me create quite a spread.

First on the list were toast cups filled with chicken salad. I know. Foo to the fy. The recipe I was following for both was from The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American Cooks by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock (read a bit about them here). The toast cups were simple: roll out bread, cut out circles, butter the circles, smoosh into mini-muffin cups, and bake. Easy, peasy, and very pretty, too:

The chicken salad was a bit more problematic. First, I was going to make homemade mayonnaise to go in it, but couldn't find pasteurized egg yolks, and with kiddies and a dude who battled C-Diff potentially munching on the stuff, I was loathe to try it. So I went with store-bought. Then, the proportions were all odd to me. Either Miss Lewis and Mr. Peacock were using truly gargantuan chicken breasts (or my chickens were puny) OR there was a typo, but if I'd added the amount of mayonnaise specified in the recipe, it would have been a very unappetizing mayonnaise and chicken soup. The seasoning was great, though. I loved the licorice-y twist that tarragon added. I substituted apples for the Jerusalem artichokes (I wouldn't know a JA if it came up and bit me on the butt) and enjoyed the sweet touch, but I think next time, I'll either amp up the amount of apples or use some really firm grapes instead (or track down some JA). The finished cups were nice-looking and delicious. I feel a bit guilty about the left-over bread from cutting out the circles and am contemplating some kind of bread-puddingy thing composed of layers of the smished bread pieces and apples and cream. Throw some nutmeg in...lawsy, that sounds good, doesn't it? Um. Toast cups:

I also made venison sausage balls:

and Vince created some of his famous chicken satays and peanut sauce. Seriously, I kind of wanted to cuddle up with my new stand mixer and the satays and peanut sauce and make the world go away. That is some GOOD eatin':

We also had a cheese tray, some taco dip, mango salsa with blue corn chips, cream cheese with a spicy muscadine jelly made by my Aunt Nunu, a pickle and olive tray featuring almond-stuffed olives (which we deemed the "adult olives" while making supper for the kids), and Hello Dollies:

Um, we also had a lot of alcohol. Here are Vince and I being artistic. Or, you know, drunk:

It was too windy on New Year's Eve for our traditional (and, hi, illegal) fireworks, but we made up for it the next night. Fireworks are hard to capture with a little point and click, so check out some kiddies instead:

OH--and I got two garden catalogs over the weekend (week? whatever...): Baker Creek and Seeds of Change. I'm sooooo excited! I also got some of those annoying ad packets filled with gardening stuff, one of which featured a catalog for gardens for cooks, which I am all over like white on rice.

Off to go eat lunch--a makeshift stew of leftover black-eyed peas, collards, and pork tenderloin with a topping of crumbled cornbread washed down with cold milk. Yay, 2009!!!

Bad Biscuits and Fairy Houses

2008-12-31T00:38:00.006-05:00

I have a problem making biscuits. As a Southern woman, this shames me. My potato salad is impeccable, I can whip up a cobbler in no time flat, I take pride in a perfectly seasoned pot of lima beans.

But...I cannot make biscuits.

My mother makes insanely good biscuits. Her recipe is simple: butter, flour, milk. And, like, magic fairy dust or something, because they are that good. But I can't make them. When I make them, they wind up sad little flat discs.

I have searched high and low for a good recipe. I've gone to the back of flour packages, baking powder tins, Allrecipes, craft forums, the list goes on and STILL I haven't found anything that comes close to Mama's biscuits. It drives me batty.

On Christmas day, I was in charge of the bread and I found this recipe. I followed it dutifully, although I was dubious about the insane wetness of the dough. I'm talking CRAZY wetness. The one diversion I made from the recipe was that I cut the biscuits a bit smaller than it called for. I wound up with these:I mean, seriously. Ar to the gh. They were peaked AND split in the middle. And while they tasted good, still...I don't think this is the recipe. Sigh.

The day after Christmas we went up to Cowtown and spent a lot of time out on the farm. I went out several times with my little digital camera and pretended to be a real photographer. (It's a pity that all of my favorite hobbies require pricey equipment.) I got a few shots that I really liked, including lots of fairy houses, as Will and I spent a great deal of time convincing Jeffrey that fairies were real. His pragmatism can be exhausting, but it inspires groovy pictures!

Christmas Cookie Bake

2008-12-22T13:20:00.004-05:00

Last night, we had several friemily members over for a big Christmas cookie bake. We made Oatmeal/Apple/Cranberry, White Chocolate/Orange/Walnut, Chocolate Chip (which did that thing that chocolate chip cookies do half the time and for no discernable reason in which they spread out and taste fine but look like lumpy discs), and sugar cut-outs. I used a recipe I've been doing for cut-outs lately which is slightly cakier than the recipe from my childhood and which I think takes a frosting better as it is less sweet. However, we wound up not frosting them at all and using the sprinkles and sugars that my sil and I had accumulated over the last year or so. We let the kids do all of the cutting out and decorating, which meant that there were a looooot of cookies for Santa at the end (and also that I am going to be doing another batch of cut outs for myself and the grownups later.) Seriously. It's cold season, y'all.

A few things made this potentially life-threateningly messy situation less messy and stressful for the adults.

I rolled the dough out between two sheets of wax paper to 1/4 inch thick before chilling. When I came up with this idea a few weeks ago, I thought it was BRILLIANT. Turns out that bakers have been doing it for years. Oh, well. In any case, doing this made it really easy to give each child half of a sheet and save the scraps for a quick roll and toss into the freezer.
I lined half of our kitchen table with floured wax paper and set the cookie trays up on the other side. The kids cut out the cookies on one side and decorated them on the other. This worked pretty well, although I think that next time I'll do an assembly line from one end of the table to the other. Less walking around and therefore smoodging of dough all over my kitchen. I wish I'd thought to take a picture, but I was totally in the moment and forgot. My sil got some, I think.
I let go of my anxiety about the whole thing. I tend to be crazy meticulous when I'm deep in the zone of a new obsession and cooking has become IT lately. But I realized that this was not about me and my fantasies of silver-iced perfect stars. It was about a bunch of friemily hanging out and the littles having a high old time making messes and memories. They were all flour-covered, sugar-wired, and HAPPY at the end of it all. And so were the adults.

Oh, while I'm at it, I'd like to share with you my new recipe collecting dealio. I'm sure this is another one of those "Uh, yeah, NotHannah. Pretty much EVERYBODY does that." things, but I'm a little slow coming into this cookery stuff.

While I love cookbooks and use recipes from them frequently, I find myself more and more using the internet (and friends) as a source--mainly because many of these recipes are rated and/or have been tested by folks whose opinions and tastes I trust. I had collected quite a wodge of printed out pages and scraps of crumpled paper and it was getting to be a mess. The solution was rewriting or reprinting anything stained and crinkled past recognition and slipping the pages into clear plastic page protectors tucked inside a three ring binder. The plastic keeps the pages from getting wet and icky and the binder stands up on its own on the counter.

I've started dating when I use each recipe and adding a little note about the event or the reaction folks had to the dish. I could probably even add pictures to some of the recipes. I think it'll be a cool thing for my kids to look back on--and a great way for me to record good times with friemily. And family illnesses. Whatever.

Oh, one last thing--this didn't work:

I was all excited about my cookie scoop with the press-the-dough-out back, but it wound up being a flop and a half. It couldn't cope with my very wet chocolate chip dough and while it was better with the oatmeal and turned out some nicely shaped cookies, it was a pain in the butt and took much longer than just eyeballing a table spoon and smooshing the dough out with my finger. Save your $3.99.

Brownies and Bookmarks

2008-12-19T16:18:00.008-05:00

Jeffrey's best friend, D, requested I bring brownies to the class Christmas party and because he's such a good kiddie and I'm thrilled that Jeffrey HAS a best friend, I was happy to oblige. Upon asking, I found out that he didn't want frosting, nuts, or chips anywhere near those puppies (he's an Aspie, too, so I'm pretty sure it was a texture thing), so I went looking for a kick-ass recipe that didn't have any extras. After many stops and starts, I found this one at Home-ec101.com (which is an AWESOME site, btw), and decided to give it a whirl.

I pressured my mother several months ago into making homemade brownies and the results were pretty dismal--through no fault of her own, I'm sure, as she's quite the whiz at baking. So I was a tad nervous about the whole thing, particularly with the bit that called on me to heat the butter and sugar together. I'd never heard tale of such a thing in a baking recipe.

However, these guys wound up being lovely, lucious chunks o' chocolate heaven: rich and dense and gooey and yummy. My mind is reeling with all the possibilities of this recipe: adding chips of all kinds and nuts and marshmallows and caramel and peppermint bits and...Sigh.

The only difficulty I experienced was cutting them. I think they weren't cool enough yet, so I had some stickage on my knife. Wiping it off and giving it a spritz of Pam after every few strokes kept this to a minimum, but my brownies didn't have nice, clean edges. (Not that the six-year-olds cared.)

(As a side note, for some reason, getting a picture of these brownies was way harder than it should have been. I don't know if it was the weird light today or if they were just so dark with chocolate heavenliness, but I never could figure out how to capture their fudgy perfection. Not even when I crawled on the floor or stood outside in the middle of my yard. The picture below comes closest.)

Having finished the brownies, I moved on to the teachers' presents. Jeffrey's teachers have gone above and beyond the call of duty this year and I wanted to do something nice for them. The scented coffee rests didn't pan out because I ran out of time, so I whipped up some bookmarks based on something I've seen all over the internet, most recently here. (Anna Maria Horner is like a fairy godmother of groovy design stuff.)

I didn't do it exactly like AMH (and others) suggested, mainly because my Hell-Mart doesn't carry double-sided heavy fusible and also because I wanted to fiddle with the idea of a string of beads attached to each bookmark.

First, I gathered my fabrics. I chose the tropical rayon print (leftover from our shower curtain, which is starting to make me insane) for Jeffrey's parapro, since she said on Monday that she hated cold weather. The red fan print (sturdy, well-made cotton) was for his classroom teacher, since she's kinda funky and eclectic. The green calico was for the special ed teacher. I have tons and tons of this left over from my teaching days when it covered a bulletin board showcasing British Romantic poets. I'm thinking matching skirts for River and I in the spring for the rest of it (and possibly skirts for my sil and mother and all of the women in my neighborhood. There is a LOT of fabric left.) Anyway, it's a pretty print, and I don't know the spec ed teacher as well as the others, so I went with it.

I like a big bookmark, so I used a business sized envelope for my template:

Then, using a neutral cream thread, I sewed the suckers together. The rayon was, as rayon often is, a pain in the butt as it slipped and slid and wallowed all over the place. The cottons were lovely, although I did press all of them before adding the fusible just because I didn't like them looking crinkly after the turning right-side-out part.

Slipping the fusible in was easy with all of them except the fan print, which required lots of cursing and poking with various poky objects until it lay flat. *Quick aside here to say I did this whole project--and soothed River when she woke up with a bad dream at nap time--in about an hour, so I was flying trying to get them done. I would be much less curse-y and sweaty if I did this project again.*

Tucked the ends in, ironed each bookmark, sewed the ends shut while doing a topstitch all the way round, catching a coordinating hemp string just above the knot tied in the end. In retropect, I wish I'd used thread that matched the string to do the topstitching, but, again, I was in a curse-y, sweating hurry. Next time I do this project, I think I'll use a buttonhole or maybe even an eyelet hole to slip my string through. And I'll topstitch much closer to the outer edge.

Threaded matching beads onto the string, knotted the beads in place, and I was done. They aren't perfect, but I'm pleased with the way they turned out. I slipped them into envelopes with a gift certificate to a local new and used bookstore and a package of chai tea. The teachers seemed pleased with them, and it made me feel good to give them something personalized. Goodness knows they deserve it after being so patient and hard-working with the bug for four months.

I'll take a break from the crafting tomorrow (Santa shopping!), but will be back to it on Sunday when we have our huge cookie bake with Will's family. I've decided to spend the Christmas moolah from my grandparents on cookie cutters and decorating tips.

Ooh, and maybe some of that stuff that makes frosting shiny.

Is it normal to get this excited about baking?

Craft-o-frickin-rama

2008-12-17T16:24:00.007-05:00

In the spring and summer, I'm pretty much all about the garden and outside. In the fall and winter, all of my other crafty multiple personalities come out and my brain explodes with the craftiness of it all.

To wit, in the past two weeks I have:

Made marshmallows! Who knew you could MAKE marshmallows?? Thankfully, cool chick over at Artisan Sweets did and she hooked the world up with the recipe, which made me lose my mind and absolutely NEED a stand mixer. How in the world have I made it this far without a stand mixer? HOW? Anyway, these puppies are soft and lucious and wonderful. I doubt you save any money on them, but the art of it (ART!! With MARSHMALLOWS!!) is totally worth any time and/or cash you spend. (BTW, I came across a recipe for cardemom marshmallows and am now dreaming of some kind of chai/cocoa mixture with a thick blanket of sweet goodness floating on it. Heavens.)
Converted a cute (but space-sucking) table runner into two cute (and space-saving) pillows. Apparently, as a Southern woman, I'm supposed to have a bunch of tables lying around to put doilies and runners on. Um. I don't. But my mil got this one on sale and I hated to keep NOT doing anything with it at Christmastime. Clearly, pillows were the answer. The runner was made of felt and at first I had lots of lofty ideas about keeping the trim intact. This wound up being nigh unto impossible due to all kinds of odd design flaws (both in the runner and in my expertise level) and so I wound up making smaller pillows with no trim. Still, very cute. (But I now have NO idea what to do with the leftover red felt. Suggestions?)
Made four kinds of cookies (FOUR) for gifts for the front office of Jeffrey's school and Will's co-workers. I have made oatmeal with spiced dried apples and cranberries, white chocolate chip/orange/walnut, gingersnaps (with chunks of candied ginger), and chocolate chip. Tonight I'll do sugar cookie cut-outs and I'm trying some benne seed wafers. One thing I've realized as I do more baking is that following directions is key. Chilling and letting sit at room temperature and kneading or stirring or whatever is not just for show: it's all about texture and flavor. I mean, check out these cookies. Are they gorgeous or what? (And they tasted like little bits of perfect yumminess.
Tomorrow while River naps, I'll sew up some scented coffee rests for Jeffrey's teachers and maybe mix up some spiced nuts to go in the gift bags. What else would go well with scented coffee rests?
Then I'll make up a batch of batter of each of the cookie kinds for our family cookie bake on Sunday.
Because I'm crazy.

Um...hi.

2008-12-01T14:13:00.002-05:00

So, when I last wrote, the garden was growing great guns and I was reveling in it. The garden is now damp and cold and withered and I'm reveling in my warm and cozy house, up to my neck in craft and holiday shmussing.

The garden was a success. In particular, my herbs and tomatoes did really well. Too well, in fact, in the case of the tomatoes. If you'll recall, I grew my Better Boys in wire cages and the Romas on a rope system. I'll reverse this next year. In the deep, soft soil of my beds, the BB's vined out like crazy while the Romas stayed put and produced like mad. So those will be swapped.

A few things must be done before next growing season:

I'm transplanting some raspberry bushes to one of the shadier beds. They need less sunlight and more trellising than the plants I grew there last year and I can always grow lettuces and spinaches alongside it.
I MUST treat early for aphids and fire ants. The two thrived off each other and decimated my peas. Bastards.
The soil still needs to be amended with more organic material. I'm currently flinging kitchen scraps into the beds and will be applying some leaves when the wind stops blowing so frickin' much.
The paths need to be weed free. Will saw a snake in an overgrown patch over the summer and nearly lost his mind. So I'll be laying newspapers and maybe pine straw, again when the wind chills out.
I'm digging up the strawberry plants. They didn't do as well as I'd like, although I was fairly pleased with production. I might put them in the herb bed, but the bed they're in now is in prime sun location, so I feel like I need to put it to better use, maybe for lima or green beans.

There's more to do for next year, like culling through seeds and deciding if trying to start some would be worth it, but for now, I think I'll do some more reveling--I made bread today AND I've got a little pot of orange peels, cinnamon sticks, and cloves simmering on the stove. My house smells like heaven.

It Was The Worms On My Green Beans That Did It...

2008-06-11T18:38:00.005-04:00

Induced me to go out and get some insecticidal soap, that is. For a few days, I've been duking it out with the aphids on the peas. The little suckers are so thick and the fire ants farming them are so protective that I spend several minutes every morning with my bottle of Dr. Bronner's solution.

But yesterday, I discovered a worm's hind end poking out of one of my almost ready, beautifully succulent Blue Lake green beans. That is not going to work, my friends.

So I went out and bought some Safer Insecticidal Soap. It's certified organic, and won't kill any of my good guys--it gets only the leaf munchers. The package also says it leaves behind a pleasant scent. Ooookay. I'll let you know.

3/5...

2008-06-09T21:43:00.002-04:00

..of dinner came from the garden tonight! Woohoo!

We had pork chops and couscous PLUS:

Fried eggplant--I'd never eaten Ichiban eggplant before. It tasted exactly like "regular" eggplant and was much easier to deal with, actually. To prepare it, I peeled it and sliced it into thin slices, maybe two quarters thick. After giving it a good soak in salt to get the excess water out, I tossed the slices very lightly with cornmeal. I think next time, I'll try for an oven-fried dealio, but tonight I went old school and deep fried them. Oh, the heavenly, lightly salty yumminess of deep-fried eggplant. It's my theory that if you get the oil hot enough, it acts like an oven instead of an artery clogging monster. I'm going to keep telling myself that.
River had a piece of squash that I steamed in the microwave. She was not impressed. Sampling a bit of it, I have to say I agreed with her. The outside was sort of rubbery and the inside oddly mushy. The flavor was fine, but the texture was revolting. I hope it's just that I shouldn't have nuked it instead of the plant producing yucky squash.
Refrigerator pickles--These are a favorite of my family. You mix up white vinegar, sugar, salt, and pepper. Slice up a cucumber (two Boston Picklings...which were FANTASTIC) and an onion. I used a handful of red onions which clearly weren't going to "make." They weren't particularly hot, but they still had a good onion flavor. Dump the onions and cucumbers into the vinegar mixture and let the whole yummy concoction soak in the fridge for a while. This will keep pretty much indefinitely; we used to slice up a cuke every few days when I was growing up and add it to the jar. So good. (Jeffrey ate too many and said he was getting a "vomiting feeling." So...go easy on the refrigerator pickles.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to get some green beans out of there!

I spent a good part of the morning laying the rest of the tubing for the irrigation system. I didn't melt, but it was close. Hopefully I will be able to get the system finished up tomorrow. I am so ready to have the bones of the garden done--it feels weird to have the muscles already up and flexing. (Bad metaphor? Probably.)

On the pest front: the aphids staged a comeback, so out came the lavender spray again. Mwahahahahaha. I also spotted some stink bugs on the green beans and cucumbers. Argh. I don't think the lavender spray will get rid of those jokers. Argh part deux.

Also, I haven't gotten the composter going yet.

Focus.

Irrigation. Harvest green beans. Deal with bugs.

Check.

Whatever It Is That I'm Doing--Is Working

2008-06-07T13:40:00.011-04:00

Here's a shot of the garden yesterday:

It's taken from a different angle because, quite frankly, I am overwhelmed by the success of the garden and all of the green stuff therein. I'm not trying to brag; I'm just kummerfloxed by the whole thing. I've had gardens my entire life: little patches of dirt which Will tilled for me and into which I plopped seeds and plants and occasionally watered or fertilized. These gardens have been, with the exception of the herbs I've been harvesting for years, collosal wastes of time and money. Turns out, my friends, that actually putting work and thought and preparation into a garden actually means that you get, um, a crop.

My father poked at me today, asking how much I've paid for my cucumbers. I think his point is that I've spent a good deal of money to get the results I'm getting. I've had to haul in dirt and build beds and trellises and install an irrigation system, never mind the actual plants. It's a good point, but will only go so far, particularly in light of the thirty years he's spent turning his soil into fluffy beds for plants. (Never mind the gazillions of dollars he's spent on tillers and wheel barrows.) My money is well spent, the dozens of cucumbers on the trellis tell me.

That said, in so many ways, I have no idea what I'm doing. I've never grown in raised beds, I've never used intensive methods, I've never installed an irrigation system more involved than dragging the soaker hose around. I'm doing things I've only read about or heard about...or completely invented.

Case in point:

This is what one of my corn patches looked like after a heavy thunderstorm the other day. Actually, all of my corn patches looked like this, although the others were languishing on pepper plants and tomatoes instead of eggplants. I remember Daddy's corn doing this before and that he always let it pull itself upright or just chalked it up to a loss. In my tiny garden, each plant is valuable, so when mine only managed to get up to a sixty-eight or so degree angle, I staked it. I don't think you're supposed to stake corn, but I didn't want it to just wallow there. I also staked my peppers and I'm going to stake my eggplants. I don't know if I'm supposed to stake them either, but they're bending with the weight of their fruits and I don't want them to die.

I've put the volunteer AND Lemon cucumbers on tomato cages, because I don't know what else to do with them and can't figure out how to adequately support them. I guess I could let them run on the ground, but with my "stuff it all in" approach, I don't think that would work. (And actually, I'm not sure that the volunteer cucumber is actually cucumber. The fruit looks more like cantelope to me, although I didn't plant cantelopes last year. I suppose it could have come from a cantelope we ate. What do you think?)

I know. It's not the best picture, but...it doesn't look prickly enough for a cucumber to me.

I suppose I could use a "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" excuse for the tomato cage/cucumber trellis dealy, but I have no such excuse for my Pinkeye Purple Hulls (Purple-Hulled Pinkeyes?) I originally wanted to use bamboo poles, but couldn't find anybody selling real bamboo that was longer than four feet around here. Then I thought I'd use (wait for it) tomato cages turned upside down

*Hang on...while I'm on tomato cages, what are you supposed to do when the tomatoes outgrow the cages? My Better Boys are now a foot taller than their cages and LOADED down with babies. Ideas? Please?*

and attach string from the cages through a hole drilled in the trellis frame I'd built over them. This wound up not working so well. Instead, I tied string to one plant, looped the string around a cup holder screwed into the trellis (one day, I will write a book about the millions of uses for cup holders) and tied it to the plant next to it. I repeated this around each circle of peas, creating a sort of self-service teepee for them. I was afraid that the string might pull the plants out, but this seems not to be the case. I wrapped each growing pea vine aroung the strings and waited to see what happened. (In the interim, I mixed up a mild Dr. Bronner's lavendar castile soap/water solution and sprayed the heck out of the aphids and fire ants that were having a party in the peas. I didn't want to run the risk of killing any lady bugs with my organic insecticide. I also sprayed some horrible looking white bugs that I think might be mealy bugs, although I'm calling them Satan's Little Fuzzies. The spray took away the fuzz and killed them dead. Woohoo!) What happened, you might be asking? This:

They're thriving--in fact, I spotted the first blooms today.

In the same bed with the peas (and with a couple of basil plants that I need to snip because they're going to bloom soon if I don't) are my Roma tomatoes (except the volunteer who is in a cage next to the eggplants). I'm trellising them using a combo of techniques I read about in The Vegetable Gardener's Bible and in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I haven't written about this book yet, but I think that everybody who...eats needs to read it. Seriously. It's that wonderful and important. Anyway, the deal is that I tied sisal rope to the bottom of each plant and sort of wrapped them in order to stake them up. Holding the rope tight, I passed it through a hole in the trellis and wound the remainder around a stick. The rope can be wound tighter or let out as the plant needs. I have no idea if this is going to work. It seems to be: the plants are pretty well covered with fruit and seem sturdy. I worry what will happen in the storm, and getting the spool of sisal to not unwind is a pain in the butt, but...it's working, so far.

This is actually not the best photo of a trellised tomato, but whatever. Look how green it is.

My Boston Pickling cucumbers are growing insanely. I'm actually afraid they're going to tear the trellis down, they're so lush and crazy. The trellis itself is a bit taller than five feet two inches...and the plants are now a few inches taller than that. I guess I'll have to start whacking the tops of them off. I'm not sure what else to do with these lovely monsters.

Now, ask me if I've gone crazy with the watering of these guys. Nope. I spray them in the evenings if needed and have used the soaker hose a few times while the other system gets in place. Fertilizer? Not unless you count tossing the peels of our bananas on the beds. (I actually am going to start a load of compost tomorrow in the used composter Will bought off of the guy who sharpens our tools. Now THAT was an awesome Mother's Day present.) The only thing I've done is kept the soil fluffy and planted with the signs. (More or less.)

I'm actually a little SCARED to start composting. I'm afraid I'll wake up one morning to find that the cucumbers have grown over the house!

Taming the Wild Cucumber

2008-05-28T11:27:00.013-04:00

First, a shot of the whole garden:

As you can see, it is kicking butt and taking names. The black snake looking thing is the soaker hose I have been using to water it, although that will be coming out and going to take care of the (still neglected) roses in the backyard as soon as I can manage. I believe that will be tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon. I have all the stuff for a drip system and I REALLY need to get it going because the hot, dry summer is upon us. Up until now, things have been fairly cool and wet, but that trend is changing. It had to happen and I've been spoiled, but I need to get cracking. I'll write more about that tomorrow, but it seems to be a theme of the garden this year.

Anywho, today I tackled trellising the Boston Pickling cukes. I've had the material for the trellis for a while, but have been swamped or lazy or not here at varying intervals, so it's been put off. But the cukes are growing like mad and taking over the Blue Lake bush beans, so it had to be done.

I first assembled a (sorta wobbly) frame from some 1x4s that I had had cut to size. I fastened the trellis frame to the frame of the cucumber/bean bed (previously known as Bed Five) and pondered how to attach the bird netting I was going to use as the actual trellis to the frame. I have been a bit hesitant to use the bird netting, owing to a horrible incident a couple of years ago during which a king snake got itself enmeshed in a net I had haphazardly thrown over the long-suffering blueberry bush. (I'll tell you that story some day.) But it's cheap, it's durable, and it seemed like a good material upon which to trellis the cukes. Eventually, I looped the netting over woodscrews place every six or so inches around the frame and screwed in until only the head was visible. This seems to be holding the netting tightly, although it might need shoring up as the season progresses and the cukes get bigger. Here's a pic of the finished trellis:

Once the trellis was finished, I spent a goodly amount of time painstakingly untangling the cukes from the beans and then tying the cuke vines to the trellis with cobalt blue embroidery thread given to me by my Aunt Nunu when she cleaned out her craft room. I don't know why I chose cobalt blue; green would have been a more obvious (or rather, less obvious and therefore better) choice, but the blue called to me so I went with it. After the vines were tied up (and the teeninesy little baby cukes counted), I very gently twined as many of the runners as I could around the netting in the hopes that they would catch on and the vines would start training themselves.

The cukes seem a little angry with me right now: lots of downturned, droopy leaves, but the beans are thrilled. I discovered, unfortunately, that the beans also have attracted some sort of bug or pestamathingy which nibbles the edges of leaves and turns them over to form an envelope kind of dealy. Er. Not sure what is up with that, but plan on consulting my Ortho garden puzzle-solving book ASAP. ALSO discovered that the bean germination rate was lower than I thought. I'll fill in the empty spaces in the rows with more beans when the irrigation system is in.

I fiddled around a bit more, deciding to pull the plug on the sweet peas. They were lovely vines and probably would have lived a few more weeks before succumbing to the heat without producing a single blossom. But they were also aphid magnets (and therefore fireant magnets) and were taking nutrients from the little Hero of Lockinge melons which are hanging in there, although not growing as I thing they should. So out they came. I also did away with the broccoli after one last harvest of side shoots. Again, I could have left them. They were still producing, although the heat would get them soon, too. But they were drawing moths and shading the melons and I felt I could use their space to put in a few more bush beans. I have to say that I felt a little sad tugging them up. They were great little plants and produced really well for me. I'll chop them up and put them in the composter and hopefully they can give me some good fertilizer for everybody else in a couple of weeks.

Finally, I did a mini harvest. I got a couple of banana peppers and eggplants, the broccoli, and a couple of volunteer squashes. I also dug up two volunteer catnips. I sort of hated to do it, but I have catnip in the herb garden already and I'm trying to keep the volunteers to a minimum. (I just discovered that two of the volunteers in the Roma tomatoes are actually cucumbers. Where the heck are these guys coming from?)

Anyway, the harvest:

Note the slice I took out of the squash to see if it was edible still. Oddly, although it's almost orange and bizarrely bumpy, the seeds inside were nice and small and the flesh was firm and sweet. I wonder if it's a result of the volunteer part? Maybe this generation of plant has regressed?

In any case, it's always nice to bring stuff out of the garden. We'll eat the veggies for supper and I'm going to hang the catnip up to dry in the kitchen to make some playtoys for the kitties in our life. Once the irrigation system gets going. And the trellising for the tomatoes and purple hull pinkeyes. And...

And the Garden Goes Wild!!!

2008-05-27T10:14:00.012-04:00

So, I go away for the weekend and I come back and the garden is nuts. Seriously, you would think that I was fertilizing with unicorn poo (thank yooouuu, Robin McKinley) or something. I went away from a blooming but non-fruited garden and came back to:

Ichiban eggplants that make me blush a little. (Also, Blogger, what the heck is up with your picture loading? It's driving me crazy!!!)

Almost overripe squash on the volunteer crookneck that sprang up next to the compost pile.
The plant is seen below because...Blogger? Seriously? This photo stuff is making me insane!!

The leaves are bigger than my head. Or my torso, which is saying more. A lot more.

Banana peppers of such yellowness that they really look a little like bananas. Gorgeous.

So many Roma tomatoes amid such lush foliage that I'm afraid I'm going to come up on a snake. Or, you know, a tiger.

Really, it's all very verdant and staggering, especially given that I haven't staked the Romas or the cukes and that my broccoli is still producing and I really probably need to do away with the snap peas which are growing but not blooming and then there's the irrigation system.

I am embarrassed by the success of the raised bed system. I'm not sure I'm a good enough (or prompt enough) gardener for the bounty that is coming.

Oh, and here's a shot of the Boston Pickling cukes. They need to be trellised before they take over the world. (Wonder if it's the banana peel seen in the behind the blossoms?)

More Work on the Cottage Garden.

2008-05-01T13:51:00.008-04:00

Non-germinating Lemon Cucumbers pushed firmly from my mind, I went to work on the Cottage Garden again today. I figured that I can't do anything to make them come up and if they haven't come up by the time the moon starts waxing, I'll replant. I have to put in the Cherokee Trail of Tears beans then anyway, and fill in a few gaps in my Blue Lakes.

I focused on clearing the evil death grass from the second half of the Cottage Garden today. It is insidious stuff, showing a certain amount of sentience in twining itself evilly amongst the roots of my (struggling) daisies and beloved stokesias. Ugh. I hate that stuff.

It also managed to creep under and against (and possibly melded with) the fence that forms the back border of the Cottage Garden. The Joseph's Coat rose bush is braced against the fence and the soaker hose runs alongside it, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find this:

That's right, y'all. A spider condo. Now, I know that as a gardener, I'm supposed to be all "Ooooh, I luuuurrrrvvv spiders." Theoretically, I do. However, in practice, they give me the creeps. I can't help it. I just imagine them crawling on my fingers as I weed close to the condo and it WIGS ME OUT. Needless to say, there might be a bit more evil death grass next to this part of the fence than in other places.

I was able to get as much of the evil death grass out of the CG this morning as possible. I have a big pile o' leaves and weeds and other mess left ver, but the bed itself is ready to be planted. I also staked up some gladioli that I planted a couple of years ago which seem to serve no other purpose than to be chow for thrips. They drive me nuts, but I told them firmly that I was NOT going to allow them to just lay their lives down for the thrips. They might not bloom, but they will not wallow.

I then spent about thirty minutes being mesmerized by a bloom on the Joseph's Coat. It just looks...exultant. I think I'm going to load it onto my digital keychain camera thingy so I can always carry it with me. Pretty fitting pictures for May Day, I think.

Then I wandered around the yard looking for stuff to take pictures of. I found this magnolia blossom--the only one from the tree I gave Will for his birthday. Magnolias are so special to us, and this little blossom is important.

Tomorrow, it'll be back to the veggie garden. (If I can talk myself into NOT going to the local library's used book sale. So....hard....) I've got to get in my potatoes, garlic, and green onions in the next few days. I want to have everything in the ground and ready for the watering system to be put in the first few days the moon waxes.

Then I'll be able to sit back and relax. Snort.

Cottage Garden in the Morning

2008-04-30T12:23:00.013-04:00

Today I took a break from ~~obsessively dithering with~~ working on the vegetable garden and went instead to the front flower bed. I'm going to be putting some medicinal and cosmetic herbs in that bed at some point in time, so I've decided to start calling it the cottage garden. It sounds pretentious, but I'm hoping it will grow on me.

In any case, it's been covered over with leaves and such all winter long and it is past time to get to work on it. The cool snap that is visiting us right now is actually welcome, as it will give me time to get the ground ready for the zinnia seeds. Zinnias like to have warm tootsies, so to speak, so I'll wait until the moon starts waxing to get them in the ground.

In the meantime, I need to clear off the leaves and root out the evil death grass that is taking over. The leaves can't be helped, but the evil death grass is my fault. The patch of ground on which the Cottage Garden sits was once a bizarre little half-oval of ground bordered on one side by the backyard's privacy fence. I thought, since there was a small gate and all, that it would be the perfect place for a flower garden/entrance into the backyard. The only issue was breaking up the dirt, because it was home to a thick growth of some kind of sod. It isn't Bermuda grass, but it's a close relative. In any case, I thought it would look really cool to leave a strip of the sod and set some round pavers in there. Quel Better Homes and Gardens, you know?

In theory, it will look really cool. In practice, there is much cursing and groaning as the evil death grass weaves its way underground and through your daisies and gaura. Argh. Curses.

I spent an hour tugging out the sharp-tipped strands of evil death grass, a chore made even more pleasant by the fear of coming up on the new spider in town, the Brown Widow. (Yeah. Um, thanks, Louisiana. But we got it. You have some fearsome pests. Now, do us a favor and try not to export any more of them, mkay? Mkay.) No brown widows were encountered, and I was able to clear out one half of the bed. I'll try to get back to it tomorrow or this afternoon, children willing.

In the meantime, how about some random flower shots? Good stuff.

First, a couple of the "Joseph's Coat" rose bush. You may remember that I spent a day pruning and tying it back and it has rewarded me by being stunningly beautiful this season. I actually stole this rose from my mother-in-law after giving it to her for Mother's Day one year. She never let it climb and it was killing me to watch her hack it down, so I took it from her. Ruthlessly. These babies start out with butter-yellow, red-tipped buds and open up into creamy yellow, blushing flowers. They grow into a pale pink as they fade. Amazing roses.

I have no idea what this next flower is as I have lost the tag for it. It's an evergreen, sprawling plant that looks almost like a succulent. The tag said (I think) that it would form mounds, but it actually is sort of leggy and sparse. I keep thinking I'll dig it up, but then it blooms out with this blue, and I stop myself. This is a truly bad-quality photo, but it shows the color well.

Gaura is a great plant in a flower garden because it blooms early, takes up a good bit of space, and is absolutely gorgeous along the way. You have to be careful of self-seeding, but I've found the seedlings to be easy to deal with (despite dire warnings of insanely strong taproots) and good to give to friends and neighbors. I think they look a little like orchids.

This shot of my amaryllis is not strictly, I know, good photography. The pale green/white fuzzy thing is actually several leaves from a horse mint and I suppose I should have scrapped it, but I love how the stamens show up, like a little group of worshippers. It's shots like these that make me long for a "real" camera with lenses and filters and things. Because I need another hobby to take up more time.

Another "not quite perfect shot," this time from a bunch of lavendar in the transplant bed. I got this picture with a good deal of cropping. What I wanted to do was get a nice, tight shot of a mature flower bract, but I didn't manage it. This is an immature bract. I think it's pretty, but again, it makes me long for a lens.

Despite my moaning and groaning, I'm really jazzed to see how well everything it coming along this year. I hope I can keep it going when the hot weather settles in.

Rain, Rain...Woohoo!

2008-04-28T13:29:00.012-04:00

It's been raining all day long...a nice, gentle, soaking rain. It looks like everything has cleared out now, and I'm looking forward to seeing what a little bit of sunshine will do to the garden. How about some gardening news?

Bed One: The peas are stretching up to the twine beautifully--a few are curling their tendrils around the strands and climbing toward the trellis. I feel so tender about my peas. I've planted them before from seed and from seedling, but never with any success. I am really hoping to get some good stuff out of this year. The melons are doing fine. They're growing very slowly, but I'm not too worried about them. The carrots are also good. I still haven't planted more, nor have I replaced the Swiss chard that didn't grow. Maybe this week, now that Earth Day and Jeffrey's birthday party are out of the way.

Bed Two (henceforth known as the herb bed): All is well here. I have a feeling that my red leaf lettuce is about played out. It came up as a volunteer and the two plants have contributed mightily to several salads, but they seem to have stalled as far as new growth is concerned. I'm oddly saddened by this, but am trying to console myself with the mesclun patch, which is a thing of beauty and light:
Bed Three: Trucking along. The strawberries are tee-ninecy, which stinks a bit, but the birds are getting the bulk of them, anyway. Bastard birds. I'm considering sticking some cheap little windcatchers in there in hopes of keeping them out. Onions are doing fine, although I worry that they don't seem to be bulbing very well and a few of them look like they have given up the ghost. (I'm a nervous gardener.) Below is one of the bulbing onions. Keep your fingers crossed.

Bed Four: The pink-eyed peas are up! They sprouted beautifully, with almost all of them coming up in the circles in which I planted them. I like to imagine little overall-clad fairies having a hoedown in them while I'm sleeping. (Do you like the sparkly circle? I'm learning to use Gimp.)

In the upper righthand corner, you can see one of the basils also in this bed. I've got four Roma tomatoes in here, too, which are doing quite well.

Bed Five: The Boston Pickling cucumbers have been up for a week in a tidy, orderly line, but I was worried about the Blue Lake bush beans. Imagine my utter delight when I came out to the garden on Saturday and found this:
Today's rain brought out a straggling line of these babies. Can't wait for some fresh green beans this summer!

Bed Six: The eldest of the Three Sisters is up! I have four little corn plants in this bed, two in Bed Seven, and four in Bed Eight. I'm still hoping to get a few more sprouts, but I'm pleased with what I have so far.
Isn't she lovely? Someday, I'll figure out how to focus on the flowers and plants I want to focus on instead of the individual grains of sand behind them. Sigh.

Also in Bed Six are some eggplants and peppers. I was worried about all of them, as they seemed to be going through quite a bit of transplant shock. But the rain seems to have rejuvenated them and I was happy to see a little cluster of blooms on the eggplant tomorrow. Tell me these gorgeous things wouldn't look beautiful in any flower garden. (Also allow me to be a huge photo nerd and tell you that this shot is actually upside down and that I contorted myself into an alarming shape to get it.)

Bed Seven is notable only in that it is the bed in which I have the least corn and in which the Lemon cucumber seeds have yet to sprout. I delicately scraped off a bit of soil from the row and discovered two that had yet to germinate in any way at all. Hmmm. Will give them a few more days. Odd.

Bed Eight is home to three Better Boys who are awesomely beautiful. Check it out:

I know. I'm blown away by how hard my garden is working for me right now. I hope that it will come to a glorious, steamy, juice-drenched conclusion in the fall!

Shots From Bed One, April 22

2008-04-23T10:18:00.011-04:00

I'm breaking this into different bed shots, because there are too many for just one post.

Here's Bed One, early April. What you can't really see is the insanity of the trellis for this puppy.

Lettuce. Prrreetttyyyy!

I am obsessed with the gorgeousness of my broccoli. I might need therapy.

Peas and Twine. Lovely, no?

Bring On The Next Moon Phase

2008-04-21T13:06:00.002-04:00

This weekend was a flurry of gardening goodness. I could give you a detailed run-down, but lists are so much more fun!

Bed One: The carrot, pea, and "Hero of Lockinge" seedlings are all up. Hopefully, the melon and peas will cohabitate beautifully the admittedly jerry-rigged trellis I set up for them with two plastic stakes, chicken wire we inherited with the house, a huge old dowel I found under the shed, and some 18-gauge wire. Oh, and some hemp twine tied to the bottom of the chicken wire to give the peas something to crawl up. It is lovely, let me tell you. The Swiss Chard has, unfortunately, not come up yet. I'm a little bummed and wondering if I should try again. It's definitely been longer than a week. I've gotten a few heads of broccoli from the plants. They are outrageously healthy, but I'm a bit disappointed with the size of the heads. Next year, I'll definitely try to start some from seed and look for BIG heads. I'll plant some more carrots in that bed this week, and also give the seedlings some side-dressing, as they seem a bit anemic to me.
Bed Two: The mesclun bed is kicking ass and taking names. I have a nice little patch that will need to be thinned very soon. I'll probably put the thinnings into a salad tonight. All herbs are doing well. I need to plant my Thai dill seeds and the two basils I got yesterday in there. Hopefully later in the week, I'll be able to take a visit to my favorite herb farm and get some sage, orange mint, and Vietnamese coriander. I might try throwing some stevia in there as well.
Bed Three: This bed received the bulk of a load of truly horrible topsoil. We got our first two loads from a landscaping business and while the first was fine, the second was mainly sand and clay. Mix these together, add water, and...PRESTO! Adobe. Not good for onions. The strawberries seem to be doing okay, but the onions were gasping desperately for breath. Spent Friday adding soil from topsoil load number three, purchased at a much lower price from a different dealer. The soil is much more...dirty, but will still need a great deal of organic material forked in throughout the season. Anyway, I loosened the earth around the onions and added the new dirt--and sure enough, I've already got some "bulbing-out" onions. Woohoo! I'll get some globe carrots in there this week.
Bed Four: This bed will hold Roma tomatoes (six plants) and some purple-hulled pink-eyed peas. (Plus whatever else I can stick in there as time goes by.) The peas will be trellised on bamboo teepees if I can find some frickin' bamboo around here that is natural and not painted green and/or three feet tall. What do you DO with dyed-green, three feet tall bamboo anyway? The Romas will be trellised using a cord system that I'm adapting from an explanation in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and from The Vegetable Gardener's Bible. I'll need Will to cut some landscape timbers for me for it to work. The peas were planted yesterday and I found four Romas today...they seem to be in short supply thus far.
Bed Five: Planted all in "Blue Lake" bush beans and "Boston Pickling" cucumbers. Haven't decided what I'll trellis the cucumbers on yet. Suggestions? Of course, I'm sure I'll try to stuff something else in soon.
Bed Six: The "Silver Queen" corn for the first of the Three Sisters bed, basil, bell peppers, and eggplant. The eggplant looks droopy today, but I find that it usually does right after transplanting.
Bed Seven: More SQ and peppers and some "Lemon" cucumbers. This was one of the crops that gave me the itchies. I didn't want to put the cucumber varieties too close together, but the spacing and size of the garden stymied me a bit. This bed might be a bit more of an experiment than anything else.
Bed Eight: More SQ, three "Better Boy" tomatoes and two peppers. I don't particularly like tomatoes and am growing probably more than I need, but I love marinara sauce, stewed tomatoes, ketchup, etc. The BBs will make good stewed tomatoes, juice, and chunks to freeze.

Still left to do: plant the shriveled, out of season white potatoes; the already growing and looking kind of odd scallions; and perhaps the garlic. Every bit of literature I've come across says to plant it in the fall, but my father claims it's a two season plant and I need to get it in the ground. Suggestions?

Also, I have to put the tarragon in, as well as my bug-diffusing marigolds.

On the non-veggie front, I'll be putting some chamomile, fever few, and a citronella (actually, I think it's a mis-labeled rose) geranium in the medicinal/cosmetic herb and flower bed. I have seed for zinnias, as well, but I think it's too cool yet. (They like to snuggle in warm dirt.) I have some soapwort seed as well, but keep hearing horror stories about it. Any ideas, soapwort fans?

Plus, I need to pay attention to my poor rosebushes, who, with the exception of the "Joseph's Coat" up front are WOEFULLY neglected.

Huh. In the past, I've always hated Daylight Saving's Time. Looking over this post, I actually might start lobbying for another hour.

Last Day of March, First Seeds Sown (GTS Sunday 4)

2008-03-30T19:01:00.007-04:00

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It wasn't the best day for it: chilly and windy and cloudy. BUT--I got some stuff planted! Woohoo! I'm going to keep track of moon signs--it totally wasn't the right time to plant anything I planted. But it's just going to have to be okay. Hopefully Mother Moon and Father Sun will hook me up.

Anyway, today I...

Sowed a mesclun patch in the herb bed. The herb bed will be permanent--the sorrel, chives, marjoram, thyme, bay, catnip and lemon balm already there will stay there. I believe I'll keep the leeks there as well. I'll fill in with mesclun (check!) and other annual herbs. Oh, and I need to get sage.
Sowed three rows of "Amarillo Yellow" carrots between the lettuce. Tomorrow I'll add two more short rows between the broccoli. I'll also put some Swiss chard in that bed and sow some sweet peas. Jeffrey helped me sow the seeds (he was meticulous in his seed placement) and wrote out the markers for the rows. Growing up, helping Daddy in the garden was a requirement and a pleasure and I have no doubt that that's why I love veggies and gardening so much today. I hope my kiddies will be the same way.

Set out the Quinalt strawberries I finally found. Quinalts do fine here, Divine Ms. K, but they need to be kept nice and healthy. They aren't particularly big; I'll use them for fresh fruit and to keep Jeffrey's attention. (I'll get most of the strawberries for putting up--freezing and jam and drying--at the farm down the road.) Between the strawberries, I set out four rows of red onions. This, clearly, is about a bajillion onions, and if they all make, then I'll have far more onions than I'll use fresh. More drying and freezing in store for those babies. I'll put in some Swiss chard and some "Little Finger" carrots in that bed tomorrow.

Also on tap for tomorrow: see about potatoes. It might be too late to plant and I'm not sure where to get them. I might put out some Blue Lake bush beans as well, although I'm going to wait on the Trail of Tear pole beans because I want to get the corn in first for my Three Sisters bed and the soil needs to be a bit warmer. Besides, I sort of feel like I need to go all the way native with that, and as the dogwood leaves aren't the size of squirrel ears yet, I think I'll wait a while.

Realized that the container/companion plant method I'm using is forcing me to make wise gardening decisions. Before this year, I've just sort of put things in randomly. Some plants did well, some didn't, some sort of chilled in the garden reading the newspapers I spread out to stop the weeds. Few things started from seeds thrived, the weeds were horrendous, and my fennel managed to kill as many plants around it as possible. But now, I'm thinking so carefully about where to place each seed and seedling and cutting. I'm worrying about fitting things in and making sure they can support their neighbors. I still don't know where I'm going to put the French melon or how to avoid crossing the two varieties of cucumbers. I'm careful with seeds and I follow recomendations for depths and watering that I never have before.

I couldn't decide which of the below to use as my GTS pic, so I'm using one. The first is Jeffrey's handiwork in the carrot row. The second is a bedewed (okay, behosed) broccoli plant. The clouds and shivering made for weird pictures. Better pics next week, I hope.

Whew!

2008-03-26T11:18:00.002-04:00

I'm actually so glad that I didn't get my garden planted as planned, as we had a freeze on Monday night and a frost last night. It's not the right time according to the signs, but I'm going to be a planting fiend today and finish out another bed. I hope. I'll post pictures when I do and probably update this post.

In non-garden news, I am in the midst of a huge digging out and reorganization process in the office. I'm setting up day planners on both computers and reconfiguring my email to be more efficient. And I am tossing out a whole bunch of mess. Lots and lots and lots of mess.

Also, we're in the middle of having our house painted and reroofed. Ugh at the fumes and the sploshes and pools of paint all over my gardens. But it looks good. I'll post pictures of that, as well.

ALSO, I've added a review section to the blog for "green" products--if you have something handmade, organic, or otherwise earth-friendly that you'd like me to review, let me know.

Anything else? Um...my "bug guy" told me yesterday that getting brown widows around our house this year was probably "inevitable." Awesome. Blech.

OH YEAH! It's SPRING--run out and frolic, my loves.

Green Thumb Sunday 3

2008-03-09T19:59:00.006-04:00

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Things have been slow in the garden this week; the moon has been waning and the weather has been rainy and/or cold. But we're waxing next week and I'm going to start getting my cool weather veggies in. I'm a bit behind, but wanted to wait on the moon (plus, we had a hard freeze this week.)

In the meantime, here's a pic from last week's visit to Cowtown. This is a field thistle that found its home nestled in the lea of a hay bale. Not to sound like a photo nerd, but I really like the contrast of textures in this photo.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Green Thumb Sunday Two

2008-03-02T23:15:00.004-05:00

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The first picture owes absolutely nothing to my personal green thumb, unless you count "not hacking the bush into bits" as gardening. It's a blossom from one of the gajillion azaleas in our yard. We figure they must be as old as our house--which was built in the early 1970s. The bushes themselves are around ten feet tall and they form veritable thickets of pink and fushia and white blossoms in the spring. It's all very lovely and every spring, I think to say "thank you" to the folks who had the good sense to plant so many of them.

The second picture owes even less to my intervention. These daffodils were planted well before my birth by the wife of the caretaker of the farm where my father (and I) grew up. Big Jim and his wife (whose name I'm not sure I ever knew) are long gone from the farm and might, for all I know, be gone from the earth, as well. But their daffodils still bloom in a rectangular drift along the fence line and have the sweetest scent of any daffodil I've ever sniffed. They bloom earlier, too: these have been blooming since Valentine's Day. If you look close, you might see the brown stippling caused by a frost that caught them unaware.

I'm labeling this post "Spring," even though the weatherman says the temperature will dip back below freezing by the end of the week and the solstice is still days away. I'm doing it honor of those folks from the past who seemed to know that I needed a bit of hopeful color after the past week.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

In Search of Strawberries

2008-02-29T10:41:00.006-05:00

First, the weather? Is crazy here. Saturday and Sunday were lovely and blissfully warm. Monday was nice.

Tuesday, we had severe storms. In addition to this picture, I have video which is amusing mainly because of my "I'm so cool" commentary, but I hate my camera's restrictive software (and Blogger, which can't deal with it, and also You Tube, although it might just be my slow desktop...ARGH!) Anyway, here's the picture:

What you can't see here is how hard the wind was blowing or the slightly reddish tinge to the clouds over the horizon. You know there's going to be a doozy of a storm when the clouds are reddish here. I think the wind picks up all the red dirt south of us and mixes it up above us. Anyway, suffice to say that River and I ate our lunch in the closet.

After the storms, it got very cold and windy and then a stomach virus visited our house, but between all of that, I've been checking out various vendors in our area for strawberries. I'm looking for a good ever-bearing berry like Quinalt, but I'm finding myself struggling against the megolith that is Bonnie Plants. Apparently, they're shipping strawberries right now to all of the Big Box stores. I checked by Lowe's the other day while I was dishwasher shopping and found myself looking at a truly gorgeous crop of "Tennessee Beauty"s. The only problem is that they aren't everbearing. Huh. A peek at the garden section of Hell-Mart revealed more BP TBs. Huh squared. Things got really frustrating when I went by a locally owned farm supply store and found..."Tennessee Beauty" inscribed on each lucious plant.

Awash in green rage and muttering things about biodiversity, I went online to dig up everything I could about Bonnie Plants, but all I could find was positive stuff about scholarships and biodegradable pots. Dang it.

The problem is that I hate that even small mom and pop places are falling prey to the "Big Guys," who can sell them good stock on the cheap because it means that lots of smaller mom and pop nurseries can't get their stuff sold. And I HATE that every single place I go in town is going to have the same strawberries, tomatoes, lettuces, etc.

Sigh. I know that there are online options and I am aquiver with the idea that my heirloom, organic seeds are winging their way to me right now, but there's something so exciting to me about the trips to the nursery, touching and tasting and smelling all the leaves.

Am I the only one who gets a sinking feeling when she sees that "Big Guy" label?

Green Thumb Sunday

2008-02-24T21:45:00.005-05:00

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Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Can't you almost FEEL the sap rising?

Pruning the Joseph's Coat

2008-02-24T14:31:00.010-05:00

In lieu of messing with the soggy and soil-deficient food garden (I'm not just calling it a veggie garden, as it will have fruit and herbs in it, too), I elected to prune and tie back the "Joseph's Coat" climbing rose in the front flower bed. Once in it, I also decided to dig up the myriad of daylilies and do some general tidying, as I've decided to make this my medicinal and cosmetic herb garden (as well as repository for things like zinnias and daisies and other pretties.)

Before getting started, I snapped a "before" shot, which immediately made me get all arty.

Photography just slays me. I am perfectly capable of seeing the poetry in things, but when I try to capture it on film, it seems so flat to me. For example, seen in person, this dead weed looked like black lace in negative. But here, not so much. It's pretty, I think, but doesn't do as much for me on screen as when I saw it with my eyes.

And then there's the whole lighting thing. It's amazing the difference it can make. Here is basically the same shot of some gorgeous nandina berries; the first was taken in the early morning rainy/mist dealio, the second was taken after the sun had come up and burned off the clouds.

Maybe I need to take a photography class and thereby add yet another hobby to my already full hobby plate. I love the idea of telling a story with words. Anyway, here are more pics from the day:

"Anticipation"

"Inner Beauty"

"Runneth Over"

"Enlightenment"

"Star Below"

"In a Line"

"Traveler"

After all the art, I set to work and dug up all the daylilies. I love me some daylilies, but they line the path through my garden and love to leave smears of rusty red all over your pants when they bloom. And as they are pretty much crotch-level...I'm moving them to a bare patch of yard near the driveway. I'm hoping they'll thrive there even though it is lower light. The great thing about daylilies is that they'll grow no matter where you plop them down, although they are more finicky when it comes to blooming. If they don't bloom well, I can always move them next year.

River decided to scare us blind after the daylily digging, so any more work on the front bed was put off until today, when I tackled the rose bush. "Joseph's Coat" is a climber and technically, you aren't supposed to do a lot of pruning with those. However, this one was neglected last year and I want it to be as beautiful as it can be, so I pruned. First I bound the long stems to the fence with wire. I used 20-gauge for all but the two largest stems--those bad boys were as big around as my wrist. I have no idea the gauge of wire I used for the big ones; it was about as big around as a pipe cleaner. When the big guys were pinned to the wall, I pruned any side shoots that were smaller in diameter to a pen. Most roses send shoots off of old growth, so if you don't prune the little stems, you're going to wind up with small blossoms on spindly stems.

After getting rid of the skinny ones, I bent the tops of the largest stems sideways so that they could be placed on or through the little flower arbor dealy that Will fastened to the top of our fence last year. The idea is that we fasten another one to the other side this year and the large stems will grow between the two to form an arch. That's the theory, anyway.

When that was all settled, I took a few stems with potential and bent them sideways the other way. These stems were lower to the ground, so they were fastened to the actual fence. Climbers send out new stems for blossoms from horizontally-lying stems. If you want strong growth from a climber, you have to make sure that some stems are horizontal; otherwise, you're going to get sort of a viney thing going. I felt kind of sorry for these stems as I had to bend them fiercely and prune them pretty severely because I wanted to limit their growth to new vertical growth which I'll weave into the stems already lying near the top of the fence. I felt less sorry when I spotted this puppy. It's hard to tell, but this is a TRIPLE-HEADED thorn. Crazy.

When all was said and done, the front bed looked pretty much like this:

Pretty tame and definitely easier to walk through (less chance of getting whacked by thorns upside the head.) I need to get rid of some turf grass that I decided would make a lovely walk way (because I'm an idiot), and then I'll be ready to plant once the soil warms up. The great thing about this location is that while it gets less sun than the food garden, it's sheltered from the west winds by the fence and the north winds by the house and the soil tends to retain water much better.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go put peroxide on my scratches!

Rain. Lots and Lots of Rain.

2008-02-22T13:37:00.001-05:00

I am CRAVING sinking my fingers into some dirt, cutting up some potatoes, separating some onions, gently squooshing the roots of broccoli and lettuce sets.

BUT.

It keeps raining. And while we need the rain and I know the earth is just soaking it in and loving every minute of it, it's bringing me down. I think I'll head over to Baker Creek and snag some seeds for the warmer weather.

Then I might do some sewing to try to whittle down my massive piles of fabric.

Tomorrow, I'm planning on shoring up the out of control rosebush on our front gate (it's a Joseph's Coat and it blooms really early and beautifully, but it clearly plans to take over the world.) and transplant the daylilies in the front flower bed. I love my daylilies, but they smear purple and red pollen all over you when you brush past them and as they line my walkway...poor planning. I'm going to take out the yarrow, as well and plant the whole space with zinnias and daisies for cutting. I think. We'll see as it warms up and the flowers start popping up at local nurseries.

Rain. Lots and lots of rain...

Finishing the Frames!

2008-02-20T09:37:00.009-05:00

Saturday, the whole family got up early to clean up a local park in preparation for Earth Day. I'm spearheading our community's first celebration and this was our first event. I was so proud of how hard Jeffrey worked--and how patient River was with hanging out in the Moby as I crashed through bushes and briars. Anyway, after a quick nap, we got back to work on the garden in order to finish up before the storms of the approaching cold front reached us.

River really wanted to be out in the yard (she's already an outside kind of gal), but I needed to help Jeffrey haul off some pine straw and brush from the yard. So...looks like we're having a bumper crop of toddlers this year!

I told Will it might be a good idea to leave one of the frames empty so I could get some gardening done outside of naptime!

One of the areas Jeffrey and I cleared up was what I am optimistically calling my "transplant bed." Basically, it's a triangle of dirt where I stuck a bunch of rosemary and lavendar that had layered and formed roots. To my surprise, a lot of the rosemary looks like this:

(In case you can't tell, it's green with some new growth.)

Unfortunately, a good bit of the lavender looks like this:

(In case you can't tell, um...it's sticks.)

I'm hoping that come spring, the lavender will surprise me and green up.

In any case, by mid-afternoon Sunday, we had this:

Woohoo! Alright! Break it down! I can't wait to fill up all these beauties. I'm actually surprised that the garden "feels" bigger when it's laid out like this. Maybe this is the gardening equivalent of the lists and timers it takes for me to keep my home straight!

I have run into one problem so far with the beds: settling. I knew my nice fluffy topsoil/water saver compost mix would settle a bit and I thought I had prepared for it by mounding the dirt an inch or two above the container's rim before I planted it with my herbs. Not enough. When I went to check on it after the thunderstorms on Sunday, I found that it had settled at least five inches, bringing the level of the dirt down three inches below the rim of the frame. Like this:

Bummer. I'll probably have to add more soil to this bed, although I think I'll wait til it warms up a bit before traumatizing the poor babies again.

In a perfect world, I would have been able to wait a few weeks before planting, but I needed to get the herbs in ASAP as the garden was being reworked. I'm hoping to get a load of topsoil today before the rain and storms tomorrow and Friday. (Hi. The spring rains are super early this year and it makes me freaked out about the rest of the spring and storms to come. Argh.) This will give it some time to get settled--I need to get my greens and peas and broccoli in the ground.

Speaking of putting things in the ground, here's a bit of garden oddity that I don't know what to do with.

This year, we got a Carolina Sapphire for a Christmas tree. It's a type of cypress and it is just beautiful: blue-green and fragrant. Anyway, I make our wreaths from the cuttings of our tree and we had to lop more off than usual this year. I stuck the cuttings in a bucket of water and used a bunch of them, but the rest stayed in the bucket. With the flurry of the holidays and bowl season and back to school, I sort of forgot about the cuttings until the reworking, when I realized that the cuttings were still green and supple. Huh. I lifted one out and was surprised to find little bumps on it that might actually be the beginnings of roots. Now I'm stuck. I don't want to disrupt these guys if they are trying to become trees. BUT-it's getting close to mosquito season around here and I don't need buckets of water sitting around my yard. Should I dip them in rooting compound and stick them in the transplant bed? Toss them on the compost pile? Leave them in the bucket a little longer? Decisions, decisions...advice needed, please!

Yesterday was the first day it was warm and dry enough for us to work outside again, and it was still a bit too blustery. Will pulled up the stump of an ornamental plum and planted a magnolia in its stead. (His combo birthday/Valentine's Day present.) We also let the kids wander in the yard a bit.

Wouldn't it be nice if all of us could receive and give help on the Walk of Life with such joy?

The First Bed

2008-02-15T07:48:00.001-05:00

On the fourth day, we got a big ol' truckload full of topsoil from a local garden center. I didn't take a lot of pictures, because it was on a Monday and Will picked the soil up on the way home from work, so we were boogying to get the frame filled before dark.

First, we placed two of the frames parallel to the house to form the entryway of the garden. We had planned to run the frames perpendicular to the house to take advantage of the path of the sun through our yard. (Our front door faces almost directly east.) However, our miscalculations (say it with me: math is hard!) meant that a perpendicular presentation would put us climbing over the rosemary bush (which we elected not to move) to get the rest of the garden. And while I basically climbed in it to get the full shot of Herb Bed One, it wasn't too happy with me about the whole thing. Also, we'd have to put some of the frames into the yard which would mean more tilling and Will giving up a precious strip of his grass. (Sigh.) I'm a bit worried about what this means for corn planting and shadows, but I'll try to put my corn on the north end of the farthest north beds and see what happens.

About the frames: we (again, I mean Will) built them from untreated two by tens. We chose untreated wood because even if they don't last as long, we won't run the risk of seasoning our peas with arsenic and other unsavory chemicals. The jury is out about this: there are some who say that the chemicals that leach from treated wood used in garden beds bind with the soil and therefore are less apt to be absorbed into the plants. I opted not to take a chance. It's true that my frames won't last as long, but if this experiment works, I'll probably replace them with stone or cement blocks, anyway. The Vegetable Gardener's Bible suggests using two by twelves, but I couldn't justify the almost three dollar difference in price for another two inches. We (Will) built and/or is building four eight feet by three feet frames and three six feet by three feet frames.

After laying the frames on the tilled soil, I used a spading fork (which looks a lot like an eating fork--don't use a regular pitchfork to do this) to further loosen the subsoil, which around here is basically hard red clay. I went about 8 inches down past the four or so inches of tilled soil and I was careful not to step on the soil inside the frame. I just rocked the tines back and forth to loosen the clay...I did not turn it over. Then I handed over the spading fork to Will and went to go get the topsoil.

Will's fullsized pickup was able to carry enough topsoil to fill one and a half eight by three frames. It cost about $16 for this load. We're actually going to get a bigger load delivered on Saturday or Monday. More fuel and cost efficient. We elected not to use a mix of potting soil and topsoil. I didn't want anything non-organic (in the carbon-based sense, not chemical-laden sense) in my dirt, and some planting soil has styrofoam balls in it. Plus, it was ten dollars more expensive. I filled the frame with topsoil all the way to the top. Then I added an entire bag of some water saver chips. This is basically coarse compost. I'm going to be adding my own compost to the beds as the weather gets warmer...the composting is going slowly now. I mounded the whole messy wodge of dirt an inch or so higher than the top edge of the bed. The soil will settle and I'd be displacing some of it with plants.

Now came the fun part: planting!

I filled the first bed with all of my culinary herbs: marjoram (oregano's wild cousin), sorrel (Jeffrey eats the sour stuff like lettuce, although I'm still searching for a recipe I can use it to cook with), thyme, bay (moving a plant from a pot in my front flower bed), chives, and bronze fennel. I actually might take the fennel out. I've never used it, although I think it is gorgeous and every year the swallowtail zebra caterpillars come out and munch on it, giving us lots of entertainment. I also transplanted my poor leeks again. Bless their hearts. Daddy gave them to me, thinking they were garlic. I let them get killed down to nothing in one drought after basically just sticking them in the ground in a very clay-y section of the garden. I moved them last year in the middle of the season to a different spot, at which point in time they died back to nothing. They came up again a few weeks ago, so I'm hoping they'll revive themselves for the summer. I think they make a pretty divider between the cooking herbs and the tea herbs, which are right now limited to a lemon balm that was basically forced into submission by my insane lavender last year and the catnip that refuses to die. It's the fifth or sixth generation of catnip I brought to The Manor from The Lovenest, our tiny little first house. I also plopped the volunteer lettuces in.

To the culinaries, I'll add basil, dill, cumin, parsley, garlic, horseradish, and cutting celery. I also might throw in some Greek or Cuban oregano (although I'm put off by the fatness of the leaf--anybody use this stuff for cooking?) and some lovage. I'd like to put in some orange mint, but it's sometimes hard to find. I like this mint in spaghetti sauce and it's not as invasive as some of the other mints. I'm going to get some Vietnamese coriander, as well, but it's crazy-invasive, so I'm going to stick it in the ground next to our garden hose, as it also likes damp soil. This is a great plant for warm climates--it has the taste of coriander (cilantro, whatever) with a peppery aftertaste AND it's a perennial. It goes wonderfully in all of the recipes that call for cilantro. Any other suggestions? (And keep in mind that although the raised-bed method allows for a good deal of stuffing in of plants, I'll be using the bed opposite this one for more herbs as well as lettuces, so I'm open to a LOT of suggestions.)

For the teas, I'm putting in chamomile and anise hyssop. I might sink a pot or two of apple or chocolate mint, but I'm wary of the invasiveness of it. I welcome any suggestions for good tea plants. I have lemon balm, as I said, but I really don't care for the taste of it--it seems sort of soapy to me. I do like to grind the leaves in the disposal to freshen it up, though, and I think it's a pretty plant.

I left the lavender in the wheelbarrow for now. I'm planning a medicinal/cosmetic herb bed for another section of the yard which will contain the lavender AND soapwort, meadowsweet, calendula, echinacea, feverfew, and maybe some elacampane.

Today I'll be buying some seeds online (it's too late to start seeds indoors here, probably, but I'm hoping that with my new and improved kickass soil, I'll have better luck with direct sowing than in the past) and checking out the lettuces available at our local nurseries. I'm feeling very excited about the garden this year.

Isn't it pretty so far?

Reworking the Garden, Day Three

2008-02-15T07:24:00.000-05:00

After a break for geocaching, we got back to work on the garden. Jeffrey and I raked pinestraw out of the entire thing to be put on the burn pile. It's true that pine straw will compost and a LOT of it gets put in the bin. However, pine straw has a tough outer "shell" that causes it to break down more slowly. Also, it is an "acid" and can get your pH all wonky if you have too much in your garden. Tomatoes love it...sweet peas, not so much. So I have to be careful with it. Mountain mint loves pine straw, too. Although, actually, mountain mint would probably love the cold, hard floor of a troll dungeon. This stuff grows ANYWHERE. (And is lovely with its purple stems and leaf-undersides. I like to pull it up just to sniff it for a little pick me up--it's powerful stuff.)

After removing my herb garden to Jeffrey's wagon and one of the wheel barrows

(and finding and taking a ridiculously long time getting a good shot of some volunteer leaf lettuces)

we set about tilling. (And by "we," I mean Will.) We're tilling the garden despite using raised beds for a few reasons. First, it will smooth out the lumps caused by my raised herb patch and lettuce bed. Second, it will give us a clean slate to work with and plan for. Third, it will break up the topsoil to make placing our frames easier AND to allow us to scoop dirt from the paths between the frames to place in the frames. Yay, tilling! Hey, know what gets caught in tillers besides pine straw? Rocks.

Boo, rocks!

In any case, by the end of day three, we had tilled most of the garden and Will had built three more frames. We were almost ready to start filling and planting! Woohoo!

In celebration, I tried to get arty with the catnip and lavendar in the wheel barrow. Our cat loves catnip and I was tickled to realize as I dug up the billions of volunteers that it really does smell like CK1. Also, it's hard to be arty with it. Which didn't tickle me that much, really. Note the everpresent pine straw.

Reworking the Garden, Day Two

2008-02-14T13:22:00.001-05:00

After a day of rain,

we got back to the garden. Will continued to work on the frames with Jeffrey helping. I pulled up tomato stakes and old pepper and eggplant vines and transplanted the poor blueberries again. It will be a miracle if they produce. I plan on trimming them back hard next year (they've already got buds for this year) and seeing what happens.

This picture has nothing to do with the garden, but I like the joy and trepidation that are mixed in his little body.

By the end of the second day, I had cleared all the trash and plants from the garden and was ready for tilling. We put a couple of the frames in the garden to judge size and placement. This was followed by much cursing on my part as I realized that...uh...math is hard!

I also snagged this photo of blooms on my rosemary. I love my new camera even if I hate the software it comes with. My rosemary bush is almost ten years old and is a monster if I don't keep it ruthlessly pruned. I use rosemary quite a bit in cooking (it's also, incidentally, a nice all-purpose herb for rituals.) Legend has it that while on the way to Bethlehem, Mary laid her cloak on a rosemary bush when she and Joseph stopped for a rest, turning the flowers blue.

Reworking the Garden, Day One

2008-02-14T10:42:00.000-05:00

This is how my garden looked a couple of weeks ago as the year dragged itself toward spring.

In other words, like crap. The old compost heap container was a rotten, fireant-infested spider's paradise. The new compost bin was fine, but also ant-infested. The gardenia bush, which I adore, was overgrown and disease- and bug-ridden. The blueberry bush which I had rescued from the shady dog pen (former owners of this house? C-R-A-Z-Y.) was spindly and sad. I had yet to pull up the old tomato, pepper, or eggplant vines. The ground was littered with various oranges, banana peels, and other bits of stuff I had thrown out because I was too lazy or cold to go to the compost bin. And...there was lots of various trash abounding. Only the herb patch looked as an herb patch should.

Here's a shot of the gardenia bush. It is patentedly unfair for me to post this picture of my husband on the internet, because it might be the most unflattering picture of him ever taken in the history of pictures. But I wanted to show how big the bush was and he's 5'9" or so and there was NO way I was getting in front of the camera so...yeah.

About a month ago, I stumbled on The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith. I ordered it online and realized upon reading it that it could CHANGE MY LIFE. Or at least my gardening habits.

Basically, the idea is that raised beds and organic techniques equal higher yields for your garden. And given that I want to actually, you know, eat stuff from my garden this year, I was all about his method. The soil in my garden is wonderful in a small section and horrible in the rest of it with a few smatterings of good throughout. Not optimal for gardening, so we decided to build some frames and bring in topsoil to add to the beds we made. It would be an investment (around $300 so far), but it would also be a permanent solution to the unsightly and poorly yielding garden that made Will want to kill me every summer. With Imbolc showing us all kinds of possibilities, we got started.

After fetching the lumber (and, come to find out, vastly miscalculating the amount we would need, basically because we vastly mismeasured the garden--math is hard!), we set to work.

Will built the frames in his "workshop" while Jeffrey helped.

Meanwhile, I hacked at the gardenia bush. I felt a bit like an axe murderer (clipper murderer?) as I did so, but the truth is that without any intervention, my beautiful shrub is going to die. I was literally stuck in a whitefly carcass snowfall as I pruned. So gross. I hope that I haven't killed it and that in the spring it will come forth beautifully again. When I say hacked at, I mean it:

I also took down the old compost container and a rickety chicken wire fence that at no point in time supported the peas or cucumbers like I wanted it to. It did, however, serve as an excellent way for me to worry about my children poking their eyes out.

I also found the time to take this picture of a bird's nest I removed from the gardenia bush. The birds had long since departed--the thing was starting to fall apart. What smooshes me is the care with which Mama Bird built it...how she tenderly wound the soft thready things around the center to make a cozy spot for her babies. Nature has so much to teach us.

At the end of Day One, the garden looked like this:

I was well-satisfied and felt like we had done a lot of good work. It was a lovely way to spend a day with the family: we all got a bunch of exercise and fresh air. Day Two would have to wait out a cold front...