Happy June!

I'm alive! And I'm dutifully following my mama's orders to "update your blog" so everyone in the family can see what I'm up to.

Lots of good stuff has been going on around here...

The 2011 garden is doing wonderfully! I am trying out a new biodegradable paper weed barrier and it is really keeping the weeds at bay. Now I have more time to play with and stare at the plants.


Here's what I planted this year:
2 types of heirloom tomato plants (cherry and large size)
4 cucumber (1 climbing and 3 picklebushes)
8 pepper plants (red, purple, orange, banana, green...)
8 basil plants (yay for pesto)
4 parsley plants
lots of lettuce, swiss chard, and kale
8 squash (acorn, butternut, crookneck, zucchini, spaghetti)
6 snap pea plants (which I will never grow again because they just don't do well here) replaced by
6 climbing bean plants
2 Rhubarb plants
7 Asparagus crowns (I will be so happy if these actually grow correctly!)

 I have finally decided that I will no longer be growing seeds inside in the winter months. It has been too much hassle for me and a big waste of money because the plants just don't grow well. It's nice to finally free myself from that obligation. And it fits my instant gratification personality well, too!


I am also trying out black plastic in our squash bed. It's supposed to warm the ground and keep weeds away, so it should work out really well with these heat loving plants.


I've been aided by these  3 books that I would highly recommend:


Week-By-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook - This workbook will tell you what to do in your garden each week based on your calculated frost date. It's great help for getting second and third cycles of plants in the garden.
Grow Great Grub - Lots of great tips for growing food in small spaces.
The Kitchen Garden Cookbook - Answers the perennial question of "what do I do with all of this X." It's got lots great preserving tips and techniques and wonderful recipes (mostly vegetarian/vegan friendly)

2010 Garden: Week 10

It's come to the point in the summer where I start my neglecting the garden. It happens every year around this time. I've finally realized that it's not because I'm sick of gardening. It's actually because my job is sucking up all of my energy. My big catalog deadline is looming (next week, Thursday!) and I'm working myself to the bone every day. By the time I get home at night it's all I can do to find something to eat and crash in front of the tv before falling asleep for the night. You'll notice that there was no update for Week 9. That's actually because I didn't go in our back yard at all last week (lame, I know!). Thank goodness Jon keeps it watered for me!


Needless to say, next Friday I will be reclaiming the garden (or what's left of it that the weeds haven't taken over!)

For now, I'm dreaming of fresh pesto made from my 6 thriving basil plants and lots of butternut and spaghetti squash this fall and winter (can you spot the tiny squash growing at the top of the trellis in the first photo?).

2010 Garden: Week 8

The garden is finally starting to fill out! We're getting lots of cucumbers, zucchini, beans and peppers these days. It's always nice to go outside to pick dinner for the evening. Jon made a delicious green pepper and onion stir fry the other night and I'm dreaming about it again for dinner tonight.


I've been a bit lazy about training the squash plants, but I was able to tie them up on Sunday and now the butternut and spaghetti squash have almost reached the top of the trellis. Next year, I will be on the lookout for vining zucchini and summer squash.

2010 Garden: Week 7

The garden is in full production this week!


We've had lots of:

lettuce


beans (thanks for the tips, I did pick them right away last week)


and cucumbers! Here's how they looked 5 days ago. I think I shrieked when I first spotted this little vegetable on the vine.


Here's how they look today post-picking.

Now I need to do a bit of weeding, train some of the squash up the wooden trellis, and pull out some of the spent plants (mesclun, bok choy).

2010 Garden: Week 6

This post is a bit late, but here is the garden update from last week...


The good:
- The weeding is getting much easier these days (probably due to our summer drought right now)

- The pole beans took off. We put in taller bamboo stakes last week and the beans have grown higher than the stakes already. I am definitely growing pole beans next year! They take up so little space and yield lots of beans.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but on the left side the beans were halfway up the 4 ft trellis and on the right they are off the 6 ft poles.


- Our peppers are growing, slowly but surely! Jon and I are pepper-holics, so we planted 14 plants this year. We could eat these forever and never get tired of them (raw with hummus, on sandwiches, in salads, in stir fry, roasted, and so many other ways)


- We got our first banana pepper. I love the color of these.


- Our kale is looking so big and leafy. We made kale chips last week and they were surprisingly almost like regular potato chips. If you do make them, make sure to cook them long enough. The longer you cook them, the crispier they get.

- I finally got around to planting more seeds: 3 rows of radishes, 1 row of spring onions, 3 Swiss chard, 4 bush beans, and 1 row of mesclun. I'm trying to fill up some of the empty space in the garden.

The bad:
we lost a few plants (spinach, mustard greens, mesclun, bok choy) due to bolting. This happens every year and I never seem to find the "perfect" time to pick plants that can bolt. I'm afraid to pick them too soon because they might be too small so I end up waiting for them to grow fully and miss out on them completely.

The unknown:
Are these beans too small to pick? They are long already but super skinny.
 

The misc:
- We added two new plants to the garden last week, a nasturtium (for a spicy salad kick) and an heirloom chocolate cherry tomato. It's a little late for the tomato plant, but we had a spot open up in the garden (thank you, bolted bok choy) and added it to the mix. The tomatoes will be small, so hopefully we'll get a few by the middle of August.

The links:

- We tried roasted radishes last week (instructions seen in the NY Times here). They were so delicious! I'm hoping our new crop of radishes grows soon so we can have these again.

- Check out this gorgeous kitchen garden. I'm drooling!
- Martha Stewart has a free printable label for frozen fruits and veggies.
- have you heard about Basil Blight? I'm checking on my plants every day now.

- preserving herbs. I'm going to miss having lots of fresh herbs to choose from throughout the winter.
- a gorgeously photographed local foods recipe blog, Straight from the Farm

Garden 2010: Week 5

We are slowly getting to that time of the summer where all of our hard work in the garden is paying off.

(I decided to weed the garden again on Sunday and now it's blog presentable once again).

Exhibit 1: Radishes!


Exhibit 2: French Breakfast Radishes!

You haven't lived until you've tasted radishes fresh from the garden. They are nothing like bland, store-bought radishes. They're super crispy and extra spicy and so delicious. I like to eat them like potato chips.

Our plants are starting to properly trellis...

pole beans (may need to bring out taller trellis poles for these)


cucumbers (on an upside-down tomato cage secured at the top with twine)


butternut squash


Zucchini (I'm afraid that we planted the non-trailing zucchini and squash varieties, so perhaps the right side of the squash trellis won't be used this summer).

All of the plants that we started by seed are popping up, too. We did
lose some leeks and green onions, but for the most part, everything is
doing well.

beets, parsnips, turnips, onions, carrots and purple carrots


The swiss chard, kale and okra are coming along nicely as well (I accidentally weeded 2 swiss chard plants that I need to replace soon). I've never eaten okra before...I'm accepting any great suggestions for okra dishes if you care to share!

And I finally cut into my row of precious basil...

...and turned it into fresh pesto for this delicious pizza we grilled:


topped with pesto, pine nuts, tomatoes, red onions, broccoli, mushrooms and roasted garlic. (Next time we'll make sure that the bottom doesn't char! oops!)

As you can probably tell, it's been a great week in the garden! The garden and I are back on good terms after last week's depressing post. :)

Garden 2010: Week 4

Not much to report this week. We planted marigolds and ignored the weeds. For this week, I want to tie some of the squash branches to the trellis, weed and plant more radishes and mesclun.

Garden 2010: Week 3

The bad news: I am starting to regret that I publicly stated on this blog that my goal this year is to keep up with the weeding in the veggie garden! Weeds are popping up left and right and it seems like 2 new weeds grow for every one that I pull.


The good news: We have beans! The bush bean plant has two full-sized beans. Now, what can I make with 2 beans?


Lots of the seedlings are popping up. The radishes seem to be doing best so far, but there are little glimpses of onions, carrots, and turnips popping up.


I waited too long to plant the lettuce seeds, so they are still tiny tiny and this heat is not helping at all. Even though I missed the boat on an early spring lettuce planting, I definitely want to start another batch of lettuce seeds at the end of August.


The row of mesclun I planted is coming along nicely, though. The seed pack says to plant 5 feet of seeds every week to ensure a full summer of mesclun. I just planted row number two today, so we might stick to the one row every 3 weeks plan and see how that work.

I'm going to plant a few more rows of turnips and radishes this week (between the struggling lettuce plants) to get some more use out of the extra soil space.

Some of our plants are getting eaten up and these tiny holes are appearing on the mustard greens and turnip greens. Rosamaria posted a great natural remedy for bugs that Jon is going to set up this weekend to hopefully give the bugs something else to eat. One tip that I read was to add all soil amendments in the late fall and rototil the garden in the fall to break up bug larvae and reduce the bug population over the winter. Since we didn't know to do this last fall, our garden has bugs everywhere this year. We will definitely be preparing our garden better this fall.

Garden 2010: Week 2

Here's my belated garden post this week...

In an effort to keep up on the weeding (one of my goals for this year), I had to do a quick run through of the veggie garden before taking these pictures. Those weeds popped up fast this year! Now I can see how weeding once a week is a lot more fun than a long 2 hour session once a month (ahem, yes we are lazy weeders!)

We lost one turnip green already and I accidentally weeded a pepper plant, so we've had two casualties so far.

The direct sow seeds are popping up already and their little blooms are so cute! I'm so excited for the radishes to grow. Home grown radishes are so much tastier (and spicier) than store bought radishes.

Last weekend Jon and I went flower shopping together (big mistake as we are both enablers!)

We did two part sun pots for our front porch,


two full shade pots for our back patio, and some more herb pots.


After reading a bit more about edible herbs and fun drinks that you can make with them in Grow Great Grub, I got some more herbs to plant in my neglected strawberry pot (Apple Mint, Orange Thyme, Peppermint, Spearmint, and Lemon Verbena).


I also got a few more varieties of basil (Thai, Spicy Globe, Purple), and a dark purple shiso plant (shown with a dill, oregano, and parsley pot, too).


Our big purchase of the day was this specimen, Korean Fir Horstman's Silberlocke. We're trying to add more evergreens to the front of our house so that the landscaping looks nice year round. This tree is about 3 feet tall right now and is a slower growing fir with a crazy shape. Once we move some of the perennials in the front garden around to make more space, I'll take a picture of the whole tree. This is a slower growing evergreen and it looks more like a giant bonsai tree than a landscaping tree, so Jon and I were both excited to add this to our garden!

I'll leave you with shots of some perennials that are in bloom in the garden right now.

peony


bachelor button