Tomatoes

Our garden is in full swing and we have many successes and of course losses! This big success are the tomatoes. We planted four varieties this year. Cherokee Purple (Charles' favorite), Black Krim (Looks Like a Cherokee Purple and we cant tell them apart!), Persimmons, and Costoluto. The Persimmons (picture left) is a pale orange and tastes fabulous! It has a really creamy texture and is not overly sweet. The Costoluto (picture right) is an old heirloom paste tomato and so far this is the only one that has made it. The bugs and the birds seem to really like them a lot. Not sure I will though. I started new seeds today of the two favorites for fall plants and hope to replace them as they get too big.

The cucumbers and squash did not make it. A combination of vine borer worms and fungus took care of them for good. We got a few cucumbers and squash but that was it. We had a good load of radishes and we have eaten half the carrots. Turns out that Mustard likes carrots. I pulled one up to see how big they were. I walked over to Mustard to pet him and he grabbed it out of my hand! He tried so hard to eat it! Who knew that dogs liked carrots.




I also have bunching onions and basil. The cilantro bolted very early and we didnt get much out of it. I think we are having a harder time becuase of the heat. We have had over a week of 100+ degrees and I'm getting a little tired of it! I have also discovered that the Kale doesnt like heat so it is gone! I think I will try it in a winter garden. They are supposed to be okay even in the snow! Hope everyone is having a great summer!

Leftovers

Before putting in this year's veggie garden we found a few surprises. There were potatoes which we never harvested any because we thought they all died! And there were a few baby carrots. I think these are from seeds that didn't germinate (there were many!) and decided it was time when the weather warmed up a bit.

Tree Sale

Well lets just say that the tree sale sucked! Now it is pretty much my fault. We should have been there earlier. The sale was from 9-2pm and we got there at about 10am. There was a line and we finally got in at 10:45 and there was almost nothing left. I asked a volunteer person what happened to all the trees? And he said "You have to get here by 11 to get what you want." I told him that I still had 5 minutes if that was the case! There were a few things, but not what I wanted to get. It was quite disappointing. Then we went to Whole Foods to get lunch. The chicken roll wraps that I normally get are no longer gluten free. So there went lunch and I just got a salad. Then we went to the paint store and got some paint since we were going to be in that area. I wanted to try a new Benjamin Moore no VOC paint in our back room. I got the primer and some paint samples/chips. We got home and I started to look up stuff on another class I was going to go to today. It is on fruit trees (but not sure I was going to be in the mood since I did not get my fruit trees). It turns out they will have a fruit tree sale next week. Yippie! This place is an hour away, but I thought it would be worth it to go twice if I could just get my trees! So I went. And guess what? They were selling some of the fruit trees that would be at next weeks sale. They had 3 of the 4 trees I wanted to get. The other one was one Charles wanted (a pear tree). They didn't have many trees so I bought mine before the class. But that meant I did not get a seat in the class before they filled up. So I waited. They said they would do a second class since there were so many people that didn't get in. After all that I am now a happy camper. I sure wasn't for a while though. Now next week I can get ready to start some seeds for this springs veggie garden!

Fall Garden

Tomorrow I hope to add to the fall garden. Hopefully carrots, garlic and mixed winter greens. We already have peppers on the jalapeño plant and the Cherokee Purple Tomato is already 8 inches tall. Both made it through Ike without any extra help from me. I also have some sage for fresh herbs to use in my holiday recipes. This winter I will go to the annual Urban Harvest fruit tree sale in January and will hopefully get some trees to provide more bounty to our fridge! I would love to get a satsuma tree, a lemon tree and an apple or pear tree.

I want to share a video. These people have a blog that I love and websites with lots of great gardening info.



It's hard to believe that they have property that is one fifth the size of ours and grow that much food. I am adding to ours slowly. But I am also trying to add things that do not require to be replanted every year. We shall see. Baby steps!

The BIG Post

Well, lots has happened in the past month that I have not gotten around to post about. So here it goes!

Charles added a new raised bed to our backyard. It took the whole weekend and he did a great job.

You start with this...


and add this...


and you get this...


Those are blueberry bushes. I am going to order strawberry crowns and plant them in the middle and around the edges.


Then I harvested enough basil to make pesto all year long. This was about half the pile washed and trying to dry it a little.

This was all of it with the stems removed.
Then processed in the new food processor with olive oil.
I filled a few ice cube trays and popped them in the deep freeze. Now I have two bags of basil cubes. It only take one to make enough pesto for one dinner and some leftovers for spreading on toast for my lunches.

And lastly, Logan went to a local YMCA overnight camp for first time campers. It was from a Sunday afternoon to a Friday afternoon. From the moment he got up Sunday and every two minutes, he was asking if it was time to leave yet. He was so excited! After about two hours of "Is it time to go yet?" I got out the digital timer and set it to count down to the moment of departure. Then for the next five hours I heard, " Only 4 hours and 23 minutes until we leave." He wouldn't go play or do anything else except follow me around and announce the minutes to go every two minutes.




This is his bunk. We got to help him set it all up. Camp was a great motivator to get him to start doing things on his own. Like he would usually not take a shower without someone turning on the water and waiting until he got in and then you had to magically be there when he got out. I told him that if he didn't learn to do it himself that he would be the only one there with a Mommy in the bunkhouse. It also got him to start cutting his own pancakes and such. Worked like a charm!


These last two were added because Dad thought Logan looked a little worried. He was really jumping off the walls. The last ten minutes he was really quiet and didn't say anything.


Oh and I was also in a car accident. I was rear ended by a pickup truck and the driver had no insurance and no license! Luckily I have uninsured motorist and rental car on my policy. Hopefully I will get it back next week. No one was hurt at least!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Animal, Vegetable , Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver is my new favorite book. I don't get much chance to read a book through but I "listen" to them in the car while I drive all day for work. I had listened to this one earlier in the year and I just re-listened to the whole thing and I love it even more. This is one that got me motivated to do the garden. She is an award winning writer who decided to write about her family's experience homesteading and eating mostly local foods in western Virginia. They moved from Tucson where things don't grow easily to the lush mountains of Appalachia. They gave up things that they could not find locally like bananas and mostly ate what they grew themselves or bought from local sources. It took them about a year to get the resources set up and they started the next spring. They even raised their own chickens for eggs and meat and started a flock of heirloom turkeys for the meat. Parts of the book are very funny like when her turkey hen started to woo her husband since they imprinted on humans as their "family". It also explained the current politics and growing practices of the 99% of our current food supply. Most of which I already new was bad for the planet and for people. It turns out that the majority of food grown conventionally (with pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics, and herbivore meat animals forced to eat other animal remnants) is much, much less nutrient forcing us to take supplements to meet our nutritional needs. Like regular eggs have a lot of cholesterol and saturated fats. But free range (not the same as cage free, believe it or not) chickens produce eggs with more of the good cholesterol and unsaturated fats and are naturally high in omega 3 oils ( I used to wonder how they got those omega 3s into the egg with cartons labeled "higher in omega 3s").

I have to say that we are really enjoying our garden produce and are already planning for the fall garden. This book is well written as are all her books and was a big inspiration to getting out there and just doing it. My new prescription of Nasonex also helped since I don't have the side effects of allergies like I did last summer. I would even think of getting a few hens for the eggs but I think at this point that would be biting off more than I can chew. Maybe when I "really" go part time. She also has a nice little website with meal ideas and recipes.

Good Eats!

Last night we had a fabulous dinner! We had pasta and a Chicken/Apple sausage that was very tasty. It was a little heavy and would be great in the winter. Then we had a salad that was made almost completely from things in the garden: cucumbers, cherokee tomato, basil, salt, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. It was the best salad all summer! Then today I finally bought a food processor. The first thing I did was roast a whole bunch of left over veggies laying around and pulverized them. I mixed the mash (garlic, onions, red bell pepper, asparagus, carrot and tomato) with an equal part of low fat sour cream and a bit of salt. Viola a great chip dip. That was today's lunch. I probably should have eaten the dip with cucumber (we have plenty - can you roast cucumber?), but the chips really hit the spot. I will put a few spoonfuls of the stuff in the fritatta that I will make tonight and serve it with a salad. It should be pretty good. Then tomorrow I will be harvesting basil again. That was one of the reasons for getting the food processor. I used a blender last time to process the basil and olive oil. It took an hour and was quite a mess. The herbs were not heavy enough to get down to the blades in the blender and I'll never do that again! So in a few days I will have a ton of ice cube shaped blocks of basil and oil. Hopefully I will get a few more harvests and will have enough basil to last the year.

Bon Appetite!

Catching Up

I'm finally getting back to doing all my usual things. I haven't written much this month, so here are some things I meant to post when I was sick.

For Memorial Day, we went to The Health Museum to see a new exhibit called "Grossology". It talked about all the gross things your body does, like farts and bugers. It's interactive and Logan thought it was a lot of fun. There is even a station where you name that smell! Just imagine stinky feet, armpits, bad breath and you guessed it, farts! It is a temporary exhibit just for the summer. Then we toured the rest of the museum that was more serious but I was really disappointed. About half of the interactions did not work and you were left wondering what it was all about. Here is a picture of Logan on the "blemish" climbing wall.



Here is Charles pulling nose hairs!




Then one early morning we went blueberry picking at Moorehead's Blueberry Farm about 10 miles away. We got 8 pounds at $1.50 per pound!



Logan and I can only take about one hour of picking then it gets way too hot. We go back and wait for Charles and eventually we have to call him on his cell phone to get him to give it up. So this year he went back on his own one morning and came back with eleven pounds! We ate some fresh for a few weeks, gave some away and froze the rest. We will have enough to last us till next picking season.





Then there is the garden. I really think we planted too much in this little space, so next year we will spread out a bit more. We are planning a few more beds and it will make it a little easier. Here is a picture of the garden earlier in June. And since then it is even bigger. The Cherokee Tomato is now much taller than me. We had to add extra support to the tomato cages. We had a good storm the other day and it caused all the vines that are standing nice and tall in the picture to bend back toward the ground over the cages. We may loose a few branches because of it. Next year we will probably not use the cages but build a tall frame and tie them to it.



Here are "Red Star" and "Cherokee Purple".


We have been picking about 20-30 cucumbers each week. Our co-workers love us!



Well that's it for today. I have a few more things to post about. But it will have to wait. Too much to do!

Stumbles

We had some bumps in the road this week. The first was that my garden is a little sick . It has a fungus. We had to pull out 6 of the 9 squash plants, a few cucumber plants and I should have pulled at least one of the tomato plants out but I am trying to see if it will live. I went to a local garden center that has a lot of organic solutions to your garden woes. I had a branch of my tomato plant in hand and after careful inspection with a magnifying glass the man there declared it was a fungus. So we now have this stuff to spray on it. Guess what it is? It's another fungus! Who would have thought. So far no more plants have died and hopefully the rest of the growth will be healthy. We are still getting a lot of cucumbers and since they don't freeze well we are giving most of them away. We have probably had almost 20 of them now. We have eaten all of the squash that was picked but the plants that are left have stopped producing. Hopefully that will change.

The other bummer this week was that someone siphoned nearly a full tank of gas out of Charles's truck. It happened sometime over Memorial Day weekend and right in our driveway. And he had even installed a driveway light a few weeks ago that comes on by itself at night. Go figure. So now he put some thingamajig in that will prevent a tube from going down in the tank. That will hopefully stop them!

So it is a new week and hopefully things will be better! Hope all is well for everyone else!

Garden update

Well it seems I have grossly overestimated the amount of things I can grow in a 9ft x 9ft space. Things started to get a little wild and we had to take some quick action. Last year our garden was a complete wipe out due to too much rain and poor drainage in the back or our property. So we have started to make some raised gardens. With only one completed I wanted to make the most it. We never grew things organically before and just relied on the standard Miracle Grow to guide us through. We never grew plants this big before. The cucumber started to spread out to the grass so Charles made a trellis. The tomato plants that we bought (Cherokee Purple) just started to produce some tomatoes and they are already to the top of the tomato cages. And the squash leaves are crowding out the basil. Maybe next time I will learn. Things need a little more space. But what we have had so far has been pretty good! We did have a problem with fungus on the basil and it started to take the tomato plants. But I found that sprinkling corn meal on the ground and the leaves inhibits fungus growth. I also spray garlicky, soapy water on the leaves to repel bugs. But it does have to be done pretty often. So far I have not had anything devastating that I needed to go out and buy some chemicals to fix. I gave each plant a few handfuls of compost two weeks ago and within days everything had lots of extra growth. Next year I will plan a little better. But looking at all those seed packets made me hungry!

The Garden is Growing!

We planted the garden in a new spot this year after last year's spot got flooded and everything was lost. This time we have a raised bed and are trying to do it all in an organic way. This isn't so easy when you get fire ants but so far I have had some good luck using orange oil. It is a little more work but the ant hill came up right next to the plants and I really didn't want to spread ant poison inches away from the cucumbers!

So here is the garden before the seedlings were planted.

And here is the garden this morning. We have summer squash (front, left), cucumbers (front, right), sweet basil (down the middle), Cherokee Purple tomato (back left - we bought those already 10 inches tall), and San Marzano tomatoes (back right - from seeds and probably transplanted too early). In the pots on the left are blueberries that we will plant in a bed against the garage. In the pots on the right are plants that are supposed to repel mosquitos (not really effective).

The first squash blossom even opened this morning.

Here are some pictures I took last week of flowers in the front yard. They are all gone now except the weedy ones (the yellow flowers).

And here's one of three of the boys!

So if you happen to be around in about a month, drop by for dinner. We will probably be having pasta with a tomato basil sauce, sauted summer squash and a cucumber salad!