Herbs for days.....

amazing how fast our garden has come to life!!! after what seemed like days and days of rain we were back at it this weekend! it always makes us happy to dig in the dirt. after a visit to our gurus - The Herb Pharmacy - we added to our herb box - curry, licorice, sweet annie,(natch ), lime basil, standard issue basil, chocolate mint to go with our orange and spearmint. our mint is planted in their own clay pits, to avoid spreading. I am thrilled with the beauty of my herbs this year - Annie and I are working on the perfect garden markers! Hello Pinterest?!! We lost one of our cucumber plants so that got replaced. Bil planted an array of beautiful carrots - eggplant and some more marigolds to keep the bugs at bay. We picked chard and kale and a beautiful bounty of strawberries which may or may not have found themselves on top of an angel food cake. I'll never tell wink wink. the oregano got a much needed haircut which I happily shared with a friend. the garden days are happy ones - I can almost taste the tomato sandwiches. 

it's a new year

when I look at the investment of time and money that went into last years garden vs. the quantity and quality of the return on that investment I am at first mostly disappointed. But ultimately feel compelled to try again and to attempt to do it better. True failure would have been to give up or to have never tried in the first place.

Mistakes made last year include:

• spending too much money on fancy brand name fertilizer
• over crowding the garden
• planting from seeds instead of seedlings
• pulling half my plants when they first sprouted because they looked like weeds
• thinning too late

it's possible too that I may have over watered last year... but I'm not sure... that's a mistake I might make again. The thing is there are more "experts" at the garden than there are variety of things being grown in the garden.... and every "expert" has their own thoughts on right and wrong... too much vs too little... when to add this product or when to add that one.

Being newbies we try to take the myriad advice we get and choose the options that best feel right to us. Sometimes we get it right... we had cucumbers out the ears for two weeks last year... and some times we get it wrong... our beets and carrots were woody and small. But its our land... our time... our satisfaction... and it sure beats sitting on the couch watching television.

Welcome back to year two of our garden blog.

waking up the garden.

A long winters nap is over and it's time to wake up our garden. The lessons we learned from our maiden voyage into gardening last year, we hope will be a useful tool this year. A visit to the fabulous Herb Pharmacy has sparked our planting list. Annie and I will spend some time this week raking up leaves, cleaning out our herb bed and veggie beds in anticipation of our planting. We can't wait!! Here are a few iPhone snaps which by the way I hope will make the photo journaling portion of my duties this year a lot faster + easier! Won't Bil be happy! Here's to a great spring + summer and tomato sandwiches!! xo

grow.

how does your garden grow?!!

so it's been awhile since i have contributed to this blog and i'm sure bil has shaken his fists at me more than a few times. here i am. i can honestly say that i have enjoyed our garden tremendously. the feeling i get the minute i climb over the fence into our little piece of the world is that of pure bliss. watching our little plants thrive in the soil that has been lovingly tended (mostly by bil) is a very gratifying feeling. i enjoy our watering time together. each of us manned with a watering can we dutifully water our "assigned" veggies. annie owns those carrots i must say! perhaps our venture hasn't been 100% successful in produce it is most definitely successful in application. nothing is more satisfying than popping a tom into your mouth that you grew from seed, or slicing into a just picked cucumber still warm from the sun. i know we will be manned with more knowledge and information for our garden next year and i look forward to that. but for now.....i will just enjoy it for what it is. in the meantime, we are on the sidelines encouraging our tomatoes to turn red, coaxing our eggplants to get bigger and quietly cheering our brussell sprouts (which will be brilliant soon) - tomato sandwiches soon!!

i found this quick + easy cucumber/lemon/mint infused water recipe on pinterest. this one is minus the grated ginger which i think would add a much needed kick. but it's so very delicious. guess i need to grow a lemon tree next to really make it my own. 

When Life Gives You Cucumbers...

Make Pickles.

In our garden the plants seem to grow well, but the volume of fruits & veggies is low. Our four zucchini plants have produced a grand total of 2 zucchinis. Not 2 each. Just two. We have seven pepper plants and to date we've seen a grand total of 6 peppers. Our tomato plants are producing a reasonable number of tomatoes, but very few have turned red relative to the total volume. The tomatoes in the gardens on either side of ours have not only been turning red, but due to very little involvement on the part of those gardeners half have fallen off to the ground half rotten.

Our cucumbers for some reason seem to be doing quite well on the other hand. I mean we're not growing cucumbers out the ears or anything but I've had a cucumber a day pretty much for the last two weeks. Meg made some cucumber water with lemon and mint out of one. I made pickles yesterday from a half dozen that came out of the garden yesterday morning. And they're still coming albeit a bit slower now than the last two weeks.

The pickles I made are a simple refrigerator recipe. Now we wait ten days for whatever happens during the wait to happen. But even as I filled the two jars we made I could smell the wonderful smell of good deli pickles. I just hope the wait is worth it. I'll be so disappointed if I screwed this up.

Speaking of pickles reminds me of one of my favorite Annie stories. When Annie was a baby, just old enough to start eating real food, I wanted to play a mean little "evil daddy" trick. We were out at a restaurant and Meg always order's pickles on the side of any meal she orders. We had been sharing our food with Annie throughout the meal. Annie was funny about food.. she always made the "mmmmm!" sound whenever food was around. If a pizza delivery guy showed up at the door and she saw the box... she'd make the mad dash towards whoever had the box making the "mmmmm!" sound. She loved food and ate anything we gave her. 

So we're eating at this restaurant and I decide to do this trick and hand her a two inch length of pickle, knowing she'll put it right in her mouth and expecting her face to go sour and for her to spit it out. But not Annie. She started eating that pickle like it was the finest thing she'd ever eaten. She loved it so much that it was kinda scary how quickly she was devouring it. Afraid that it would be too harsh on her little system I attempted to take it away and it was like trying to take a bone from a dog.. she growled and hissed and cat scratched at me. Okay she didn't do any of those things but she may as well have because the cry she let out  was one of the very few she ever made. She was not a crying baby, she was generally happy and gave us very little trouble as a baby and this behavior was foreign to us. She was not giving in until I gave her that "Effing Pickle" back.

I gave in and let her eat the rest of the pickle and then she wanted another. To get through the meal we had to let her have that second pickle. So Annie played the trick on me. But she wasn't done with the trick just yet. When we eventually got home and settled in for the night Annie projectile vomited green pickle juice all over us. No crying... no fussing... just a little green pickle vomit as a sorta thank you gift for that wonderful treat.

To this day Annie loves pickles and almost always orders them on the side of her dinners just like her mom. Sometimes she'll take just a few bites of the meal she ordered, but there's never a pickle to be found on our table at the end of a meal. 

Exit the control freak

It's 8:45 on the Friday morning of my vacation week and I should be at the garden right now watering, but instead I'm sitting here in front of my computer... somewhat lazily playing on my computer and drinking a cup of coffee. The plants can wait a bit.

Water, sun and some nutrients... that's all it takes to grow some plants. We pretend that it takes more than that. Carefully spacing out our plantings, trying to read the condition of our plant's leaves to determine if we should add that or if we're watering too little or too much, but nature doesn't think about these things and yet these plants have been here for a very long time.

Sure we try to maximize the produce and we try to force things to grow where they really didn't want to be in the first place, so care is taken to try to invent an appropriate environment to allow everything we want to grow exactly where we want it. We drive steaks into the ground to support our plants. We add certain flowers to attract bees and butterflies. We add other plants to deter critters that might otherwise eat our goods. We are control freaks trying to make it happen in such a way as to provide us with the most delicious salad, or ratatouille, or pasta sauce, or pizza topping, or accompaniment to our grilled steaks.

On the other hand we can't just add nutrients, water and sun to the soil at the edge of our driveway and hope some random edible goods grow. So there is a certain requirement on our part to make some conscious decisions to plant something that might purposely grow into these edible goods. But how much effort is too much effort? Is it enough to get these seeds started and then just sorta hope nature does her part? How much money too, must be spent buying treatments for our soil because our radishes & beets look pathetic and our zucchini's flower but never create squash? We hunt for beetles that are specifically destroying this plant or that plant. We look up treatments on line. We make mild soaps to try to wash away the black sticky goo these beetles left behind. We buy lady bugs and apply them onto the leaves of struggling plants, hoping the ladybugs will eat the stuff that's killing them. WTF?

• Step 1. Dig in the dirt.
• Step 2. Add some nutrients
• Step 3. Add some seeds
• Step 4. Water

I think I need to let the garden tell me what it wants to do. I can't be the control freak. If it grows... great! If not... try something else. 

Garden School For Disappointing Farmers

So we're coming up on four months since we started this blog to follow our efforts to become organic gardeners. We haven't had much success in our garden. The fruits of our labor to date include:

• Small windy rooty radishes (that we never ate)
• About 15 tiny beets (we ate about 5)
• Half a dozen heads of lettuce (no other salady items to eat with them)
• Approx 36 pea pods (all of which were eaten)

But this week our first cucumber has reached maturity and was ready to be picked and four more are fast approaching with a half dozen mini's trying to become serious contenders as well. Where are those heads of lettuce now?

Our tomatoes too have started to produce millions of green tomatoes but only two are starting to turn reddish orange. I already see signs of the blight coming and I'm not sure how many of these tomatoes will ever make it to our table.

We haven't lost faith yet. Our garden is quite flush with green growing things strewn about. We have four (or five) brussel sprouts that are starting to form little nodules at the stems of each leaf. what a funny system for growing eatable items. Our second round of carrots are growing tall stems, but these will stay in the ground till early fall... or maybe till after the first frost as I hear it sweetens them up. We accidentally weeded out most of our first round of carrots before we understood that carrot sprouts look like the grass we keep weeding. Our herbs are doing quite well and I'm especially happy about Meg's cilantro as they're the only herbs we (she) planted from seed... somehow planting seedlings always feels like cheating to me. On the other hand all those who planted seedlings and partially matured plants are having more success than we are, but so are those with better located plots. Our plots is shaded by trees until 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning and again by 4:00 in the afternoon. Most gardens have sun from 7:00 to 7:00.  Our zucchinis have flowered at least 70 times but only two pathetic zucchinis have started growing. Our peppers are starting to produce baby peppers and we're hopeful that we'll soon be enjoying some of those. Our butternut squash and cantaloupe are kreeping longer daily with signs of flowering but no fruits yet. We planted eggplant and corn rather late (June 30th) and they're both growing but I fear not fast enough to give us much if anything at all. The watermelons never germinated.

We're calling this year "garden school" where we are learning through trial and error and through conversations with more experienced gardeners. I'm already thinking more about next year than I am about what I'll get this year. I have plans... ideas... experiments that I want to try. Today I'm a fairly disappointing farmer, but my day will come. Give me a couple more years to play with my food and I'll be making this work far more efficiently.