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. 

The Seeds We Sow (All About Annie)

Vegetables aren't the only thing that gets watered in the garden.

Occasionally on a hot day we'll hit Annie with a few sprays of the hose to cool her down and to make her time in the garden a bit more fun than just watching us dig in the dirt.


Sometimes I feel sad for Annie because she isn't growing up with a yard to play in like I had as a child. It wouldn't even need to be a big yard if there was just a patch of grass to call her own and maybe a tree to climb.

But Annie's a trooper. She pretty much accepts her world as it is without complaint. She can occasionally be a nudge like any child but she's well behaved most of the time and she makes it easy to be a parent. For those who subscribe to the idea that life only gives you what you can handle.. I guess life doesn't have much faith in me as all my kids are pretty easy to
deal with.

See those cute little chick-let teeth? They're all loose now and soon will be gone, replaced by the unsightly growth of adult teeth in her sweet little girl smile. And those freckles will eventually fade like mine did. And her button nose will someday have... shall we say, more character? Will it resemble my big honker or will she inherit Meg's smaller more feminine nose?

Such a happy little reader she is. Aside from her American Girl Dolls, which she treats like babies and even has fake conversations with an imaginary babysitter from her sleeping beauty cell phone to check in on said babies when we're away from home, reading is her favorite thing to do. Although these days inventing dance moves based on a style of dance she's created that's part ballet, part Irish step dance and part hip hop, is quickly rising on her list of things that she loves to do.

Her energy is amazing. Her sweetness brings tears to my eyes. Her ability to engage in wonderful conversations makes me proud to be the daddy of one of the sweetest creatures I have ever known.

MR. Thank U Verymuch

Do you recognize this guy? He's Mr. Gimme A Break, Mr. Throwme A Bone. He's the guy who has been waiting impatiently for the photographer for this blog to get him his damn pictures so there's something to see in his blog entries. He's also me looking a bit older than I believe I am in my head, but that's a story for a different blog. I wish I had a good picture to represent Mr. Thank U Verymuch, because I finally have access to some long awaited pictures and today I'm going to share a few of them with you.

We didn't get any photos of the garden as we had acquired it, but there were four of these boxes laid out in a  pattern to fill the space and divide it into four equal quadrants. We didn't like the way the boxes seemed to limit the growing space... so we pulled them out, dug up what was originally in the space and then removed as much of the weeds and roots as we could (or so we thought). At the end of day one in April this is what we had. Notice that we kept the chive in the corner of that box. Also notice the huge rock in the lower right corner. That was in the ground and we dug it up and knew right away that it needed to have a home in our garden as a sort of utilitarian step/seat. It was a good choice... that rock has served me well on many occasions even in the short two months that we've been gardening.

About a week or two later we had painted the box blue and set the garden up for planting. I had this idea that everything should be planted in raised mounds. Meg hated the idea and eventually I gave in and removed the mounds.

By the end of May we had planted all of our initial round of seeds and and planted our seedlings as well. The chive really took off and has a bunch of purple flowers on top in this shot. Just at the fence line are the peas at about a foot tall. Notice also that we added a slate walk way aligned to our favorite rock.

 This close up from a recent visit in June shows the bottom of Annie's crib, which we mounted above the fence to give the peas more room to climb. They're currently taller than the additional space we gave them. You can see much growth has happened at the ground as well.

Here's a look from the opposite side. In the box is where all of our herbs are growing. Between the box and the fence you can see our cucumbers just peeking over the edge of the box, then there's a row of beets, a row of peppers, a row of carrots with about six carrots in it because we accidentally weeded out all of our initial planting of carrots, then finally the peas. There's asparagus growing just outside the fence, I'll include some shots of that in an upcoming entry. On the other side of the box is a clear patch where our radishes used to live, but I've replanted three new rows of carrots here and they're doing quite well.

Now try to imagine my happy face here as I'm happy to finally have been able to show you some progress in our garden. I know this entry itself was a tad boring, but now that we got this out of the way perhaps I can get more creative and write a fun blog entry... although no promises here... Meg's the more creative blogger, she's just sparse with her entries. (nudge nudge... let's go Meg.... this was supposed to be a joint effort)

Twisty & Rooty

Two months of gardening and finally the results are starting to show. This week our radishes have started to reach the point where at least some needed to be pulled. In fact they should have come out a week ago or more but I thought leaving them in a little longer might let them grow bigger... plumper... rounder. Unfortunately that's not what they had in mind. They decided instead to stay long and narrow. Then they decide to get all twisty and rooty looking.

But more is happening than twisty radishes. Our peas have started to finally flower. This means we'll see some peas in the next week or two. We won't have as many as some of the sunnier gardens, which by the way have had peas for a few weeks. Our's are taller, their's are making peas.

Our original planting of lettuce had almost all been eaten by some critter, but for two of our original plantings. those two are doing well despite the loss of so many of their family members to the great beast. We replaced  much of that lettuce with cheater's lettuce. Cheater's lettuce because we bought them already half grown and then we planted them in place of the fallen soldiers. I almost feel guilty wanting to pluck leaves from any of the non original heads, but I'm going to need something to eat with those twisty radishes.

Last night I once again thinned the beets. It was pretty obvious that some were doing far better than others. So I made the command decision to pull about a half dozen to a dozen wimpy beets. I took them home, cleaned up the leaves and steamed them and served them up with a little butter and salt. Meg and I loved them. Annie, not so much.

Last night also included the addition of two locations of cantaloupe, but I'm not convinced we'll have any luck with those. In August at our local farmers market you can get locally grown musk melons. Have you ever had a musk melon? It looks a lot like a cantaloupe, but it's larger and has pronounced grooves, almost like a pumpkin. Anyway, these locally grown musk melons are a personal fave of mine. I have to buy two because I know I'll eat the first one when I get back to the house. The other is for later on when I wish I had another and lo and behold there's another right there.

We added a couple more herbs to our herb garden last night. We had basil already, but decided to get a second different variety to mix it up. Then I saw some lemon thyme and that sounded good to me... so in it went. I have to report that Meg's cilantro that she planted recently is starting to grow. I actually tore off a leaf the other day and ate it, just to make sure it was the cilantro and not a weed.

Speaking of weeds... if weeds were edible we would be amazing weed farmers. We grow more weeds than we do vegetables. I guess that's the reality of it all anyway, right? I mean the world is covered in things that grow and perhaps its edible to something but most of it isn't edible for us and we call them weeds. Weeds have played a part in our history for as long as we've maintained cultivated land. According to the book of genesis, after the serpent convinced Eve and then Eve convinced Adam to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God drops this little nugget on them:

"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground"

Oh, that crafty little serpent, tricksey he is.

A Mental Picture

It would be great to include some lovely photos of the progress our garden has seen. Unfortunately our photographer hasn't been doing her job to get us photos. Maybe I can get Meg to have a little talk with her and encourage her to get some updated shots of the space. I feel overdue on an entry into the blog and would really love to show you what the garden looks like, but instead I'm going to do my best to paint you a mental picture.

To start you off you need to envision our space, which is approximately 10'x15'. There is a light blue colored box sorta centered in our garden. It's approximately 3'x5' and 8 inches tall. In the corner of this box is a chive plant that we acquired with the space. It has grown quite tall and is dotted with purple flowers that are starting to die and fall off... possibly due to all the recent rain. The rest of the box is filled with single plantings of myriad herbs, including basil, oregano, rosemary, sage and thyme. There were some cilantro seeds planted but we haven't confirmed any growth there as of yet.

Out side the box towards the fence we have some recently planted cucumber sprouts, then some long ago planted beets which are in need of some thinning. Then there's a row of peppers looking like they need some nutrition. Our carrots come next and we have very few of these... most likely due to our overzealous weeding when the the carrots were first breaking ground. No one told us they would look so much like the grass we were pulling. Against the fence our peas are climbing and a few have even surpassed the top and will soon latch onto the bottom of Annie's crib, which we installed a few weeks ago in anticipation of these little climbers needing more vertical space to climb than that 18" fence.

Outside the fence is a row of asparagus playing volley ball with the peas. The asparagus once looked exactly like what you might purchase in the store, but have long since grown into ugly weedy looking shrubs in need of a good haircut, which is sorta the point when starting asparagus. You let it grow tall and weedy then cut it all back to the ground... or let it fall back to the earth. Next year the growth will be thicker and the following year thicker still. One needs patience while waiting to reap the rewards of growing asparagus. For about two feet beyond the asparagus is the flower bed with our bee attracting flowers just starting to pop up from the earth. In this same area I've transplanted from another garden a small raspberry shrub and a couple of strawberry plants that I found invading the walkway outside a neighboring garden. The raspberry has taken quite well, but the strawbs are struggling.

On the other side of the box you'll see two rows of radishes. Originally one row, we created a second row as we thinned the first row. I'm happy to say that our radishes are doing quite well and we even picked one yesterday and sliced it up and ate it. It was a bit small but delicious. I ate a second one later in the afternoon. Beyond the radishes is a hodgepodge of recently planted young lettuce and  brussell sprouts, a transplanted poor man's onion, and some seeds were planted for eggplant and butternut squash.

We've also recently added 6 tomato plants and 4 zucchini plants along the back side adjacent to the walkway. The tomatoes, like the peppers need some nutrition. But the zucchini's look quite happy in their new home.

A final note: Due to an abandoned garden we have recently acquired some more space. I started working the ground in that space yesterday. I really dig the earth... literally and figuratively.

A Crop of Characters

In a community garden its not just plants that grow. Friendships can flourish. Acquaintanceship blooms. Stories, advice & news is shared and knowledge grows out of conversations with the crop of characters you meet within the community.

In our community we know some of these characters better than others, but they all make time in the garden more interesting and they bring a wealth of knowledge of things both garden and non garden related.

Mary & Rob are more than garden neighbors they are literally neighbors in Newburyport's south end. Meg had met Mary online, then we discovered we were neighbors and now we see each other at the garden. Meg and Mary chat the minutes away while Rob toils in his garden dreaming about sailing on a beautiful day and pondering his weekly chore of mowing the lawn.

Then there's the former Newburyport city councilor who is also an avid gardener. I see him occasionally and he almost always shares some nugget of advice whether he realizes that's what he's doing or not.

We have a pair of Jane's, both friendly and clearly better gardeners than us. Their gardens are better organized and more productive than our own... makes us wonder what we are doing wrong.

Then there's Patty. She's like the mayor of our community. She keeps us all informed on the goings on around the garden by way of regular news letter. Her advice has helped us more times than I can recall. She advises us all of what we aren't allowed to grow due to certain natural problems that we are trying to avoid. This year it's no beans due to a certain beetle we're trying to be rid of.

The twin brother to the husband of another friend of ours has a garden just around the corner from our own. He and his twin look so much alike I never know if I'm talking to the husband of our friend or his brother. Of course now that I know better I'll be able to call him by name when I say hello.

Chuck, who I like to think of as the Roy Orbison of our garden, not only because he resembles a young Roy Orbison, but because like the legend who was himself a genius of his art, Chuck seems to know the answer to any question I have. His garden is full of things I've never heard of and he gladly shares his over grown plants with me. We have a raspberry shrub and something he calls a poor man's onion now growing in our garden that came directly from Chuck's garden.

Joe is another regular around the garden and I always enjoy chatting with him. He's recently added a couple of children's pin wheels to his garden to attempt to keep the critter's away from his broccoli and we intend to add a few as well as we believe our radishes and lettuce have been falling victim to some mammalian demon. Thanks for the idea Joe.

Annette is a member of the bee committee as is Meg. We see her and her husband, whose name I can't recall, not only in the garden but recently around town... in the grocery store etc. Lovely people... just nice to chat with. Always friendly.

We have some pirates in our garden... or at least they like to fly the jolly roger . They came late but their garden already looks great. Their little drawings on the wood frame that surrounds their garden depicts images of the plants that will grow in rows aligned with those images.

Deb is the Queen Bee of the bee committee and like Chuck she seems to know a lot about gardening. Not a shy woman, she seems fearless as she works around those bees. Reaching into an abandoned garden to pluck a sample leaf and eating it while offering one to me and explaining what it is, she has New England written all over her and yet we'll lose her this year to the west coast as she plans a move.

Meesh, whose name isn't short for something else, looks like she just left a 1970's commune and I mean that in the kindest and somewhat enviable way. She is nature woman embodied. I think her car was also a loaner from the commune.. it struggles to keep running but she knows how to treat it and she knows how to grow a garden. I'd like to be a fly on the wall of her life.. she is by far the most interesting yet mysterious person in the community.

Our immediate garden neighbor Eileen is a former regular of the tea house and I always see her and her husband with their children walking around town. Like us they are first timers here in the community. The garden they acquired is flush with strawberry plants as is our neighbor on our other side... who for some reason hasn't shown up since we started gardening in April. We wonder if the ants will eat all of their strawberries before they realize how many are already ripe. Perhaps we'll have to eat a few if they don't show up soon.

There are others we've yet to meet and some we know but but haven't really seen around the garden, but with the last frost behind us the real gardening is about to start happening and I look forward to our meet and greets throughout the coming weeks and months.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Two weeks ago our garden was starting to flourish. The peas, radishes, beets & lettuce all broke ground. Last weekend we decided to thin out the beets and radishes, as they were in clusters that would have probably choked off any successful growth. Then again... what do we know, we've never gardened before, perhaps all would have been fine. Following the thinning we had several days of colder rainier weather and i'm thinking we may have lost much of the crop. (crop... sounds like it's supposed to be fields of beets & radishes right... you can laugh at me... I'm laughing at me too.)

In a completely separate occurrence our lettuce has all disappeared.   Was it something we did? Was it a little critter? Was it all the rain? We're going to try again on the lettuce.

The good news is that our peas our doing great and our asparagus has actually started growing. We have about 4 thin spears ranging from 1" to 8" tall. Our asparagus will grow into 3-6 foot tall ugly weedy looking things that we'll ultimately let die into the same spot so that they will provide us with a more significant crop next year. We'll most likely do the same thing next year and then the following year we should start getting asparagus for eating.

Moving Mountains

When first moving mountains one will approach with gusto and determination to tackle the mountain with great strength and power. But mountains have their own pace at which they will allow you to move them. You can throw yourself into the task with all the strength you can muster and that mountain will not move any faster than it wants to. You on the other hand will tire long before the mountain gives in and accepts the new location you want it to be.

Granted, the mountain that taught me this lesson was nothing more than the remnant wood chips that once sat in a pile adjacent to the parking lot of our garden. But even that small spread of wood chips which had come to settle quite content, lay undaunted to all my sweat and might.

Tired from digging in with my strength, I stumbled to my water, removed my heavy shirt, took a few breaths and changed my approach. It was no longer my intention to move this mountain but to gently coax it to move just a little closer to our garden so that it might have a better view of all that the little valley below had to offer. Gentle relaxed sweeps of alternating rakes over an hour seemed to work much better than my original plan of knocking this task out in 10-15 minutes with brute strength. And I'm the wiser man as recompense.

the bee yard.

“I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't.

 Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.” 

{Sue Monk - The Secret Life of Bees}

One of the lovely things at New Eden Garden (among all the other lovely things) is the feeling of community. In this delightful community of earth and vegetables and dirt and worms we are a team. With many committees that need tending just like our plots, I have joined the Bee Committee. I've always been fascinated with bees, you know, being a queen bee myself. The bees have arrived and been "installed" along with the queen. While I wasn't able to be present for the actual install on Saturday, a few days passed and Monday evening,  the hives needed to be checked to see if the Queen had been released. She arrived as most queens do in her own little box, I have come to learn that at the open end of the box is sweetness, candy for all intents and purposes for her future subjects hopefully, to nibble on while getting used to her pheromones and vise versa. Basically they eat this candy wall until it no longer exists and the Queen is released from her box. Hopefully as I type this, this act has happened and she is busy being entertained by her subjects while requesting tea and cake and enjoying a mani/pedi. Oh the life of a Queen.

Well we couldn't see the Queen on Monday, too many bees about that box. We hope it's a good thing but one can never tell. We don't want anarchy. Sugar syrup - made by Annette, was placed in each box to feed the bees. Our fearless leader Deb donned in her bee armor - soon to be the latest fashion craze - opened those boxes without breaking a sweat. I was impressed. New frames of bees wax were installed so our bees can start doing what bees do. Amazing the jobs each bee has - male drones only role is to mate with the queen, worker bees (all female, no surprise there) tend to the queen, build the comb in which honey is stored and eggs laid by the queen, tend  young drones and defend the colony. Exhausting. The foragers scout out the pollen and nectar. Talk about busy bees.

This bee journey is so fascinating and I am so excited to be a part of it. There is much to learn. Our next visit to check on the Queen we will use smoke to keep this gang calm and sedated. Let's hope the Queen has arrived and is accepted by all. 

I wonder is she's wearing a fabulous hat?

Rainy Day Dreams

On a rainy day like today, if I can't work in the garden I can always transfer the garden related ideas I have onto paper (or into a CAD file). The above is a rain water collector that I've been thinking about.

In our garden we don't have the luxury of a convenient roof to collect water from. The idea of this rain water collector is that it can collect rain via the half barrel on top and the water gets passed into the two lower barrels. It's a reasonably sleek design that holds up to approx 130 gallons of water.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to actually build one of these.. but in my mind it's a reasonably low budget, fairly simple to build rain water system.

------------

Slept on this design and discovered three flaws overnight in my dreams:

1. The relatively open top design is a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Need to look into that.
2. The structure may be attractive to kids wanting something to climb on. I should add stabilizing features or plan on permanently fixing in place via cement.
3. The pipes between barrels currently force this design to require building  around the barrels while assembling them (or after) and once assembled couldn't easily be disassembled. Pipes out the back side of the middle barrel down to the lower barrel would be a better design. 

See the updated design here: http://itsonlydirt.blogspot.com/p/cad-files.html

Ants in my pants

All around the community garden there have been signs of life. Some of it the remnants of previous seasons some the fresh new sprouts of the hardier spring plants that people have planted over the past month. I've seen garlic, onions, chives, asparagus, kale, chard, strawberries gone wild and myriad flowers throughout. In our own garden we have lettuce, radishes and beets a plenty, but no sign of our carrots or peas yet, and the asparagus went in only a week ago and I'm not expecting to see much activity from that for at least a few weeks.

We also have a few unknowns rising up from the soil. I'm not sure if they're weeds, flowers or vegetable but they're obviously remnants of the previous owners garden that we failed to dig out or kill off with our turning of the soil and removal of the raised beds.

Annie and I saw the arrival of our garden's bees this weekend. I wish Meg had been there to photograph the process as it was fascinating to watch. Alas she was a bit under the weather this weekend and barely rallied for a photo shoot she had scheduled. She did get some post installation shots and presumably they'll be here for your viewing.

The fun is somewhat on hold for a few weeks while we wait for the warmer weather so we can add the other veggies and plants we intend to maintain. I'm antsy. I want to go to the garden every day and have something more to do than watering. I was digging up the roots and grass outside our garden this weekend. I spent about two hours alone on my knees clearing the area to make it ready for some bee attracting flowers, and I experienced the most amazing calm and peace, but was disappointed when I was done. Now there's nothing left to do but water and wait. Maybe I'll go weed somebody else's garden just for the pleasure of alone time on my knees in the soil.

Ratatouille Perfection

Have you seen the movie Ratatouille? Do you know the part where the critic tastes the ratatouille? He takes that first bite and is immediately transformed to his childhood when his mother served him the ratatouille that would define for him what ratatouille should taste like. I never had ratatouille as a child, or at least not that I can recall, but I want to make ratatouille that tastes like that.

I know it's silly taking inspiration from a Disney movie about a rat that can cook, but something about that dish and the critic's reaction to it just makes me want to be capable of doing the same thing. This isn't impossible. Take pizza making for example.

I started making pizza, ...well actually back in high school or just after. It wasn't great it was just pizza. I began the process of perfecting pizza making in the early 90's and by the time the double aughts rolled around I had in fact perfected my pizza skills and to this day I make a pizza that people have been known to request in advance of visiting me, or I them.

So ratatouille can be perfected and I will perfect it. I will be that little rat and I will make a ratatouille that transforms you through time to your child hood and recalls you're first ratatouille.. or at least brings tears of ratatouille joy to your eyes.

Last night I made ratatouille and it was... disappointing. Not horrible. But not the kind of meal you would ask me to make again. Unfortunately for my wife and daughter they will have to experience ratatouille again and again as I evolve the way I make it so as to reach my goal.

Hopefully the ingredients for my ratatouille will eventually come from my own garden. Imagine vegetables from the soil I've tilled... prepared and cooked in a recipe of pure ratatouille perfection. What more could I possibly ask of life?

pin this.

i went to school for interior design but realize my house will never look like it. we live in what i call a shoe box, throw in a 6 year old girl and it's a recipe for stuff. lots and lots of stuff. so i feed my inner design goddess through the intrawebs. there are so many blogs along my stop that it's amazing i'm still not sitting at my desk come dinner time. pinterest has been a wealth of information and visual eye candy for me. i try very hard to limit my time on the web. (yeah right.)  starting our garden has been so much fun for me, now i not only reach for design magazines but now i have started reaching for garden mags and have been enjoying the latest issue of organic gardening magazine. who knew i had it in me! 
but going back to pinterest - i found the ultimate inspiration for our little garden. the center jewel in our vegetable crown will be our herb garden. when we first inherited this 150 square foot plot, it had four (4) raised beds. we decided that 4 beds took up far too much precious real estate. i had remembered seeing a very cool painted bed on pinterest and suggested we just keep one of the boxes for our herb garden and paint it, wait for it..................turquoise! i love turquoise. so last weekend the painting began and i am so pleased with the results. i know our space is small but it's turning into such a sweet garden. pinterest gave us the inspiration to paint with chalkboard paint the wooden paint stirring sticks you get at the paint store. do they have a name? mixing sticks? regardless, annie and i painted them and after they dried annie labeled each one. isn't her handwriting awesome for a 6 year old?!! she even painted some found bricks with chalkboard paint and decorated them with annie hieroglyphics. i'm pretty sure the eye + heart + little girl = i love annie!
you can check out my pinterest boards here - i'm always pinning. xo

Not just another pretty face.

Meg likes to tease me whenever I do something smart. "You're not just another pretty face" she'll say. On our first weekend in the garden it became a sort of running joke every time she made a suggestion and discovered I had already done exactly whatever that suggestion was.

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Composting is a hobby I'd like to start, especially as it would directly enhance our overall gardening experience. For years I've thrown away the tops of strawberries, the skins of potatoes and carrots, the rinds of melon, egg shells, coffee grinds and the outer leaves of cabbages and heads of lettuce. All of these products would be perfect for compost. I have no idea how to officially compost my foods but I'm sure that I can Yahoo it and find the answers.

What I've done so far is to simply turn a 5 gallon plastic bucket into my composter and added some soil from our garden that I sifted to remove the rocks and twigs. Then I added some leaves that have been sitting in a pile in our driveway for the last few years after our neighbor raked the driveway and then simply left them there to rot, which is essentially a compost pile all of its own, but I'm not sure what else ended up in that pile so I'm mostly leaving it where it is and just stole some crusty brown leaves off the top. I added a few worms to help the process and for the past few days I've been throwing in the parts of the fruits and vegetables that we haven't eaten (or cooked) along with some egg shells and coffee grinds.

In the last year of the Tea house we had purchased a single auger style juicer. We had the intention of adding some freshly squeezed juices to our menu, but the one we bought takes about 10 minutes to make 8oz of juice. So our juicer ended up at the house instead of the shop. Now, I would love to tell you that I am the kind of guy that makes his own juice every day but the reality is that this thing sits under the counter way back in the corner where no one ever can reach it and you'd have to pull everything else out from under the counter first just to get at it. And half the parts have been sitting under the sink with the cleaning chemicals and bug sprays.

Today the juicer has become part of my composting effort. Instead of simply adding the unused parts of the fruit  and veggies we eat to the bucket, I'm now running them through the juicer first, which rips them apart into tiny shreds and simultaneously removes the juices so I'm not adding too much wet substance into my bucket.

It's true... I'm not just another pretty face.

believe something wonderful is about to happen.

7am on a Saturday morning. I can hear my father gently call my name. Okay, so it wasn't so gentle. Get up and get out into the vegetable garden and start weeding!! Now!!! Seriously?!! It's not even 8 o'clock. And it's Saturday. I hate that vegetable garden. Why can't it be winter? If it was winter I'd still be sleeping. Maybe I'd even wake up to the smell of Dad's yummy pancakes and bacon. Stupid weeds. They mock me. I can hear them laughing as I begin to pull. Ha ha Meg, pull away we're not afraid of you, we'll be back. And back they were, I perfected the art of weeding, and most certainly with a frown on my face.

9am on a Saturday morning. Freezing cold, snow is coming down at a very fast pace outside my childhood bedroom window. I smell bacon cooking and the crash of pots being moved to make way for the pancake griddle. As I lay there listening to the sounds of the house of my youth waking up, I long for summer, I'd give anything to be in the vegetable garden. I love that vegetable garden.


And so it goes. This was my love/hate relationship with gardening. Ridgefield, Connecticut was a very special place to grow up and Powder Horn Drive was even more special. The kind of neighborhood where all the neighbors were friends. All the kids played with each other from sun up to sun down, riding bikes and playing tap tap, without a care in the world. And of course, hanging in the vegetable garden, following my father as he surveyed the bounty. I remember many an early summer evening Dad would come home from work, change his clothes and head out into the back yard. He'd be gone for a long time. His garden was side by side with our neighbor Larry Hoyt. Dad and Larry would enjoy a summer cocktail after work in their gardens. I guess it was their sanctuary away from the woes of the office, the screaming kids, the burdens of life. Who knows. But I do know it was a special place. Nothing like the first radish pulled from the dark earth sliced and sprinkled with salt, the sweet strawberries that made it more in my mouth than in the basket and the beautiful tomatoes, red and juicy and bursting with summer.


There came a time when that garden disappeared. All the joy and vegetables disappearing into the earth below. Nothing but grass and faded memories. The house and yard now belonging to another family. And my own family, scattered like seeds. I cherish the memories of my Dad's vegetable garden.


My husband Bil and I have taken on our own vegetable garden this year. We are part of The New Eden Garden at The First Parish Church in Newbury. It's wonderful. We can't even drive by it on a rainy day like today without stopping in to say hello to our own corner of the world. It's magical. Annie runs around on the grass while Bil and I dig in the dirt. It has brought our little family together and we can't wait to see the first seeds sprout through the dirt. Each of us has contributed, from the veggies we are growing to the row markers that Annie painted with chalkboard paint and labeled. Of course I will document our journey through my lens and share here on Tomato Sandwiches. Hopefully while eating a tomato sandwich from our own garden.


I know this garden has brought many memories back to Bil about his Grandfather and his spectacular vegetable garden. It too has brought many memories back to me about my Dad's vegetable garden and my childhood. So, in this spirit, I dedicate our garden to Robert William Wilson and William John Manion respectfully. Let's hope their green thumbs rub off on us!


And Dad, I can't wait to weed!! xoxo

Tick Talk

I need to start this off by saying once again that I loathe the words blog, blogger and blogging. Another word I'm not fond of despite my love for Google Chrome & Gmail and any products the Google company puts out there, is the word google when it's used as a verb meaning to look something up on the internet. Why I don't like these words isn't really important, but just so you know I don't blog... I write journal entries and I never google, though I have yahooed quite a bit over the last 15 years.

Okay the real topic today is ticks, specifically as it relates to our garden. I spent some time in the garden yesterday and on two separate occasions, once before 11:00am and once after 4:00 pm I noticed several ticks hanging out on the water spigot and the pole its attached to. With-in an hour of the afternoon visit while I was enjoying an ice cream cone at the local ice cream shop with Meg & Annie, a tick was discovered crawling up my shirt. This doesn't come as that much of a surprise but confirms that in fact this is a particularly ticky (is that a word) season.

Also... while digging at the fence line of our garden I came across a cat's "flea & tick" collar buried about 4" below the ground. My first thought was that I was about to find someone's buried cat or the bones of said cat. There were none, but I began to wonder... have people ever buried "flea & tick" collars near their gardens as a preventative measure against ticks? It's always possible that this cat collar is nothing more than a coincidental fallen off collar that somehow got buried 4" in the earth, but it was a curious discovery.

This morning at home while doing my typical Sunday morning thing of drinking a cup of coffee and hanging out on my computer. I decided to look up organic preventative measures for reducing the likely hood of finding a tick on myself, Annie, Meg or in our garden at all. It turns out that there are a few things you can do. I found a particularly useful article on eHow.com.

To learn more about ticks you can simply yahoo it like I did and discover about the myriad types as well as the life cycle and various stages of engorgement.

Inheritance of Grampa's Green Thumb

My grandfather had a huge yard in Billerica near where I grew up. He had the most amazing garden and a green thumb that I can only envy, but I feel a little connection to him through my own gardening. I think of him often, especially when I catch a whiff of the herbs that are already growing throughout the community garden. I'm always a bit winded as I work around our little space and it reminds me of how winded he always was and how he kept a handkerchief handy because running around the garden always made his nose a little runny. I'm the same way, albeit with a pocket full of tissues.

I remember how my grandfather's sweat smelled so clean. How his basement smelled like basil. How he would tell me about his garden as I followed him around. I didn't understand a word about what he was saying. My grandfather was a bit of a teaser and when he used words like azaleas & hyacinth I didn't know if those were real words or if he was just being silly but it didn't matter, I just liked being around him and my own garden has awakened memories in me of those times.

He lived into his late 80's and I don't think he ever stopped gardening. Here's hoping I can be so lucky. Maybe Annie will pick up some gardening habits and take them with her into a garden of her own someday and perhaps a hundred years from now a blogger will recall their grandmother Annie's green thumb.

(NOTE: I've been waiting for meg to set up some pics for this and another entry I've written but have remained unposted. I've decided to post them without the pics, hoping Meg will feel bad and finally get the pics set up. Yes I'm an evil husband but sometimes this is the only way the husband can get moved up the to do list.)

Megification

In Massachusetts (and Maine) this past weekend was a long weekend with a Monday holiday. It's known as Patriots Day and it celebrates, for all intents and purposes, the shot heard round the world. This day is always on the third Monday in April and starts the spring school vacation week as well as being the day of the Boston Marathon. The weather in New England is always fickle, but this is especially noticeable in the transitional stages of the seasons and probably more in spring than any other time of year. Some years the third weekend in April will deliver us a lovely wintry blizzard. Most years will just linger in the 50's and 60's and we'll possibly see rain, sun, wind, cloudy skies or clear and any combination of the above. But every now and then we'll get a surprise visit from mid summer, and such was the case this year. On Monday in fact the temperatures reached well into the 80's making for some lovely weather to be out and about.

This was also the second weekend since we started our little garden adventure. I find its invading my mind. I'm always looking forward to time in the garden. We haven't even planted a seed yet and I just love being there. We spent 3-4 hours on Sunday and a couple of hours Monday doing more prep work and our space is starting to look a little Megified. [Meg.i.fy - (verb) To make any person, space or object appear as if it belongs in a photo from a magazine.]


(NOTE: I've been waiting for meg to set up some pics for this and another entry I've written but have remained unposted. I've decided to post them without the pics, hoping Meg will feel bad and finally get the pics set up. Yes I'm an evil husband but sometimes this is the only way the husband can get moved up the to do list.)

.a boy laying in the sun

I can't recall the last time I just laid down in the grass and breathed the warm spring air. Well actually I can it was just this morning, but I can't recall the last time prior to that. I don't even have a lawn to lay down on and haven't had a lawn for over 10 years. Even when I had what might be called a lawn in the last twenty-five years it was always more of a place to park my car and/or for my dog Rudy to poop, and you just don't want to lay down in poop... not fun.

So What spawned this momentous occasion you ask? Well I was working in my garden... Oh right, you're probably wondering how I came by a space for a garden if I don't even have a lawn. Allow me to back up here a bit. A year or two ago Meg got this idea about acquiring space at the local community garden. We got onto a list and our number came up this past winter. So we are now leasing space in the community garden.

So this morning we all went down to the garden and started the process by cleaning out the 10'x14' space formerly owned by someone who enjoyed growing onions, chives and some purple flower things. We dug those all up along with some weeds and the four "raised beds", which were nothing more than 2x8 planks resting on the ground within the area defined as plot #32.

The thing is I haven't ever gardened before and I haven't worked out in.. well forever. So I damn near passed out... as in fainted... from over exerting myself while cleaning out good old plot #32. So I laid down... on the grass. I soaked in a few rays of vitamin D and just dreamed about the tomato sandwiches I'll hopefully be eating this summer.

The air was flush with the smell of oregano... which may have come from the "weeds" I pulled... oops was that oregano? The sky was blue with wispy clouds scattered about and the sun was warm against my pale, noticeably aging skin. But I was for a few moments a boy laying in the sun on the lawn outside my parents house.

And so begins the trials and tribulations of organic gardening at plot #32 in the New Eden Community Garden. {B. Silliker}