Garden Quick Pic

Here's a picture of the garden taken yesterday. It's a-growin'!

So far we've harvested a little each of chard, green beans, snow peas, zucchini, red radishes, white radishes, and collards. Our lettuce has struggled, but it looks like it's almost ready now and we have tomatoes setting on. There are blossoms on our fall squashes and the cucumbers are finally taking off and should be climbing the fence soon.

Have a great weekend!

Get A Load Of This, Too!

If you have the kind of connections we do*, then ten bucks will get you a truckload of horsesh...um...horse manure.  Good food for the garden soil.

The guy even loaded it in with his tractor and packed it down for us. What a deal!


*we found it on a craigslist ad

Fall Has Fallen

Brrr! Fall has definitely arrived here. I'm not ready to have the furnace or our Edenpure heaters on full-time yet, but I started shivering the minute I got out of bed this morning and was more than willing to run the furnace for a couple of cycles; just long enough to get the chill out of the house. You know, it was probably just my internal thermostat going haywire again. It was 67° in here when I got up. Not really that cold, especially since I didn't have any problem yesterday morning when it was 68° in the house when I got up.

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Today was picture day at school. One of the last things we do in the morning is get Kat dressed for school; this is so if she spills breakfast, it goes on her PJs and not her school clothes. With less than ten minutes left in our morning, Kat came to me and said she was ready to get dressed! What?! She wasn't dressed yet? How had I forgotten to set her clothing out? I rushed her to her room and pulled out the clothes we'd decided she would wear for her pictures and found out the top was too small! Grr! It was my fault for not making her try it on at the store. Luckily, the Plan B top was clean, so I put that on her, brushed her hair and made it to school with about 2 minutes to spare. This wasn't one of my better demonstrations of preparedness. We'll see how the pictures turn out in a few weeks.

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Today is kitchen cleaning day. I've grown tired of the Tupperware and Cool-Whip containers falling on me when I open the cabinet doors. The thrill is gone.

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To my Pay It Forward ladies: Watch your mail next week. :)

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My parents may come to visit tomorrow morning, or they may not. They are at that age when all plans depend on how well they feel when they get up. I guess I'm still fairly young; only half of my plans depend on how I feel when I get up.

So, our Saturday plans are up in the air, but Sunday we have a firm date with our lawn. It's time to start winterizing. This will probably take a couple of weekends. We need to empty our "rain capture system" (I can't believe I haven't taken photos of that yet...maybe I will before we empty it), dig and store canna bulbs, till some compost into our empty garden beds, empty and store flower pots, straighten the storage shed a little, put summer tools in the shed and bring the snow shovels to the garage, put away hoses, save seeds from our annual flowers and who knows what else? We still have some food growing in the garden; we'll have to harvest all of that soon. I've already scraped frost off the van once, and have the feeling our first heavy frost is right around the corner.

What are your plans for the weekend?

Fall Gardening

Time for another garden update!

Our tomato plants developed a fungus, so on Sunday we picked all the tomatoes from the vines, set the green ones to ripen in the kitchen window and on the counter tops, and cleared out that part of the bed. With that, everything we planted in the spring is gone now. As of Sunday evening, we'd grown 199 pounds of food this season, all from just 120 square feet of garden space.

But we're not done yet. In August we did second plantings of leaf lettuce, romaine lettuce, Swiss chard, spinach and radishes. We also planted a few cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower plants as well as some parsnips and beets.

Most of the salad greens are doing well. The spinach is struggling, as it did in the spring. I don't think our soil is sandy enough for spinach to thrive.


I love our little cabbage patch...


...and one of the broccoli plants is doing well.


The other broccoli plants and the cauliflower are living, but not growing very quickly. I didn't take pictures of the bed where the radishes, beets and parsnips are planted, since it's not very pretty. The radishes are doing well, but the beets are struggling and the parsnips are off to a very slow start.

What about these marigolds?


These are the flowers Kat planted in cups at school last spring. By the time we finally got them in the ground, they were scrawny, spindly little things that we though for sure would die. Instead, they've turned out to be the tallest, biggest marigolds I've seen. We had planted them at the end of the tomato bed and they had sprawled everywhere. We finally staked them up when we cleared out the dying tomato plants. They are at least 3 feet tall and some of the flowers are 3-4 inches across. I'm not sure how/why they got so large, but you can bet I'm saving the seeds from these! Our other marigolds in the front yard pale in comparison.

And of course, we're good at growing cats around here. Here are four that sprouted up overnight.


I apologize for the bad photo quality. It was taken through the screen of the only window that looks out on the garden.

A Garden Update...Of Sorts

It's been a while since I gave a garden update or even mentioned the garden in a post, so I thought I'd do that today.

While there is plenty to write about, there isn't much to photograph right now. In fact, the garden is kind of ugly these days. Therefore, no pictures.

From the beginning I admitted that Shane and I don't know beans about gardening, and with that in mind, I think we've done fairly well. To date, we've harvested 92 pounds of food from our modest 120 square feet of beds. Right now, we are bringing in tomatoes, green beans and cucumbers, along with a few banana peppers and the occasional zucchini.

While the zucchinis are almost finished because of some problems with rot at the base of the plants, other plants have flourished. The cucumbers have been prolific, but are starting to slow down now. The green beans actually seem to be on the increase, and there are lots of green tomatoes on the vines waiting to ripen.

I've made many pints of refrigerator pickles, frozen a good deal of zucchini in slices and shreds, frozen a few pints of green beans, made three pints of pickled peppers, made dried zucchini chips in our dehydrator and later today I'll be water-bath canning some more pickles. Soon I'll probably be canning tomatoes. I will probably just can them all as chopped or diced tomatoes, then use them later as the starting point for pasta sauce, salsa, tomato sauce, etc. I won't really have enough to make batches of each of those things to can.

The volunteers from our compost pile - potatoes and what we thought was baby watermelon -- haven't fared as well. The potatoes seem to be a hybrid of pretty foliage but no blooms or potatoes, and the baby watermelon turned out to be a miniature pumpkin instead. The first one rotted at the stem before it had a chance to mature. There are two more on the vine, but I'm not sure if they will mature or not.

BTW, for those of you who were wondering about our upside-down tomato planters, our opinion isn't good. The tomatoes in the planters have struggled all summer long, despite daily watering and feeding of tomato food. The tomato plants in our raised beds are towering above my head with only water and no plant food. We believe that the hanging planters just don't have enough soil in them to properly feed the plant and allow root growth. We may try peppers in them next year, or maybe flowering plants, or maybe we won't use them at all.

We've been lucky and haven't noticed many insect pests at all. Our main problems have been overcrowding of plants (which we suspected we'd done from the beginning) and an animal pest of some kind. We think it's an opossum, judging by footprints in the soil and bite patterns in some of the tomatoes. We also found a dead 'possum under our storage shed recently. Whatever the culprit, it's been hitting our low hanging ripe tomatoes pretty hard. It has also completely destroyed our green peppers, eating the plant but not the peppers. It hasn't eaten our green beans, but appears to have slept or rolled around in them. So far we've tried sprinkling cayenne pepper around the plants, which didn't work. We haven't decided yet whether we'll try to find a commercial repellent of some kind, or just give in and share our bounty. I don't mind sharing a little with bugs and "varmints", just as long as they don't take it all.

Anyway, we're still learning as we go and hope to do some things differently next year. However, we've had some successes we hope to duplicate next year, too.

Next on the agenda is to plant lettuce, chard, spinach and collards again for a fall harvest. I should have already researched these, but I don't think it's too late to plant them for fall. However, with our weather as cool as it has been here in Missouri, I wonder if I could have already sewn those seeds. I need to get off my butt and look these things up.

Overall, we've been happy with the turnout of our first real gardening effort and plan to build more beds as summer turns into fall. We're going to give "lasagna gardening" a try. The new beds should be ready to go by the time Spring '10 rolls around.

A Good Time To Review The Budget

It's hard to believe the year is half over already!

I like to review our budget every six months and make any necessary adjustments. I wasn't surprised to learn we were way over budget in our Lawn & Garden category. In the past, that category has mainly been for things such as lawn mower maintenance, items like citronella candles or Tiki fuel so we can enjoy our time outside more, and things like charcoal that don't really fit in any other category. Since the gardening bug bit us this year, it seems we've gone overboard! Luckily, a lot of those expenses are either one-time purchases or things that won't have to be replaced for a few years.

I'm happy to say that most of our other budget numbers were still good or just needed minor tweaking.

I also took Kat to the doctor today. She wasn't feeling ill at all, but she'd found two small lumps in the back of her neck. They were under the skin and about the size of BBs. I remembered that a few days after our last camping trip, I found a tick biting her scalp behind her left ear. I'd missed it when I checked her earlier or she may have picked it up later. I didn't think it was a serious problem, but did suspect the lumps were related, so I wanted to have a doctor take a look. The doctor said the lymph nodes had some infection from the tick bite. She also noticed some infection in Kat's left ear, which she said was probably caused by the infection in the lymph nodes. The doctor prescribed an antibiotic, so hopefully the infections will go away before Kat feels under the weather or in pain at all.

Tomorrow Kat leaves for the weekend with her mom (and another birthday celebration), while Shane and I go camping again. Since it will just be the two of us, I've planned some foods that are a little less kid-friendly than usual. I'll post about them early next week.

I'll also try to get next week's menu ready for Sunday, although I've noticed (and read) that Blogger has been having some issues with their advanced scheduling options. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

That's it for me until at least Sunday. Hope all of you have a fun and safe weekend, wherever you are!

Garden Bargains (And Lots Of Pictures)

We've lived in this house for three years (this is our fourth summer here) and we've made a lot of improvements to both the inside and outside of the house. Although our exterior improvements really did improve the visual appeal of our lot, they weren't of the gardening or landscaping variety.

This year, however, has turned out to be "gardening year". A side effect of building and planting our raised vegetable beds is that we've been bitten by the gardening bug. Shane was bitten especially hard by it.

Gardening and landscaping can be expensive projects, but we've managed to cut the expense quite a bit by being flexible. Instead of deciding on what to buy then going out to find it, we waited for sales then went to see what was available at discounted prices. We also were able to get some things (like open, but still full bags of mulch) for pennies on the dollar, and even some plants for free or for just a few cents each.

Little by little, our lawn is taking shape; it is, and probably always will be, a work in progress. It was basically a blank canvas to begin with, so whatever we add will be an improvement, and we haven't had to break the bank to get it done.

Here are some of the things we've been able to add this year.

Hostas (33% off) before.

Hostas after.

Cannas (all bulbs - about 12-15 of them - for $1) before.

Cannas after.

Open bags of mulch and such. This...

...and this...

...and this, too. All for just $12.

White dogwood in front of house (33% off).

White dogwood in back of house (33% off).
Not as close to swing set as it appears.

Whitebud in front of house (33% off).
(Wish the owner of the empty house across the street would mow his lawn.)

Tiny maple in front of house (free). This was a seedling that
sprouted up in, of all things, a bag of sand.

African daisies (free). A Mother's Day gift from my daughter.

Hens and chicks (free). Just a few of hundreds. I found these in a box marked FREE at the end of someone's driveway a few years ago, so they weren't added this year. I'm tired of the tippy pots, but that's probably where they will stay for at least a while longer.

If It's Edible, Eat It

While we already try not to be wasteful in the kitchen (or anywhere else), we've noticed that in growing some of our own food, we make a point of being even less wasteful. We are trying to eat all edible parts of the plants we grow, whether or not those parts are normally considered edible.

For example, many people cut the stems out of their chard and collard leaves and discard them as waste. Why? They are perfectly edible parts of the plant.

They take a little longer to cook than the leaves of these plants do. The easiest way to prepare them is simply to start the stems cooking a few minutes before putting the leaves in the same pot. Both stems and leaves will be tender at about the same time.

Another way to eat the stems is to consider them a completely separate vegetable. Collard stems are sweet and crunchy, and can be chopped up to be added to salads and eaten raw.

Chard stems look vaguely like celery or rhubarb stalks. To me, their flavor is similar to beets (and they are, in fact, known as silverbeets in some parts of the world). They can be simmered in water until tender and eaten with just a little butter and salt. Because they taste so much like beats, I decided to pickle them the same way I do whole or sliced beets. They turned out great, IMO, and I think I actually like them a little better than pickled beets.


Pickled Chard Stems

Chard stems, removed from leaves and cut into 1-inch pieces
Water
Sugar
Vinegar (white, cider, rice or even balsamic)
Whole Cloves (optional)

Place chard stems in a saucepan and add enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until stems are fork-tender.

Drain, reserving both stems and cooking liquid. Measure enough cooking liquid to just cover the stems. Return stock to the pan. For each cup of stock, add 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup vinegar and 2-4 whole cloves. Bring brine to a boil and stir until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat.

Combine stems and brine in a bowl with a lid. Let cool to room temperature, cover with lid and then chill before serving. Be sure to remove whole cloves before eating.

Serve as a relish with your meals.

Weekly Menu - May 31 through June 6

Planning our meals gets harder for me this time of year. Last year, we were members of a CSA group and didn't know what produce we would receive each week. This year, we have our own garden which I plan to supplement with purchases from our local farmers' market; again, I won't usually know what produce we'll be eating ahead of time.

That said, for the next few months, my meal plans will be incomplete. I'll decide on the main dish and probably a starchy side dish, but the fruits and vegetables will be largely unplanned.

BTW, in addition to the radishes and green onion tops, our Swiss chard and collards are just about ready to eat. The lettuces are close, too.


Sunday, 5/31 - Country Style Pork Ribs on the grill, Sour Cream Potato Salad

I didn't have a chance to make these last week as planned.

Monday, 6/1 - Mystery-shopped Pizza

Tuesday, 6/2 - BBQ Pork Sandwiches on Homemade Buns (using Sunday's grilled pork), Sour Cream Potato Salad

Wednesday, 6/3 - Monterrey Chicken, Chicken-Flavored Pasta

Thursday, 6/4 - Leftover Monterrey Chicken in sandwiches made with Homemade Flat Bread

Friday, 6/5 - Miscellaneous Leftovers. If no leftovers, then Cowboy Breakfast Sandwiches

Saturday, 6/6 - Cajun Shrimp Skewers, Caramelized Onion Risotto

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Ours is off to a good start; we've seen quite a bit of growth since I posted photos two weeks ago. That's very encouraging, since we're practicing by-the-seat-of-your-pants gardening.

I just snapped these pictures, so there's some morning shade, but they'll all get full sun for several hours before the day's done. And a good watering, although the soil is not nearly as dry as it looks.

This bed is the home to green beans, onions, radishes, very recently planted beets (they're just now coming up) and cucumbers.


The second bed is planted with zucchini (which, as expected, is growing more quickly than everything else; we'll have to add a piece of fencing for it to climb soon), rainbow chard, mixed lettuces, green bell peppers, and green leaf lettuce. You can also see one of our upside tomatoes in the foreground.


The third bed is growing spinach, banana peppers, collard greens and tomatoes.


Now that almost everything is well established, it's time to put down some kind of mulch. I probably won't be able to get to that until next week.

Finally, here's a grouping of pots on our deck: Two succulents (hens & chicks and everlasting), lavender, two kinds of thyme, basil, oregano and cilantro. Some of the herbs are doing much better than others.

Tuesday Tidbits

I'm a few days late, but I hope all of you (especially you female readers) had a Happy Mother's Day. I spent the holiday cleaning my kitchen from top to bottom. I know that doesn't sound like much of a holiday, but it's what I wanted to do, so I did.

Instead of going out to eat, Shane and I went to the grocery store and bought some food for the grill that we wouldn't ordinarily buy: sea scallops and a couple of store-prepared stuffed salmon fillets. We had a nice seafood dinner at home instead of enduring a crowd and a long wait at a restaurant.

I'm over the cold bug I had last week, but Kat has it now. She stayed home from school yesterday, which meant I didn't have a lot of time for the computer. She went back to school today and I'm spending the day trying to catch up on laundry and other chores. I spent the entire morning outside working in the garden and (finally) re-potting the herbs I started from seeds last month. I planted some beet seeds in the one remaining empty space in our garden, and planted some asters and African daisies that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day in a deep window box. I watered everything, using captured rain water where it was convenient to do so, and a hose where it wasn't. The forecast calls for rain this afternoon, but I watered a little anyway because Missouri forecasts aren't exactly reliable.

As if I'm not busy enough around here, my daughter sent me a link to Tastespotting. It's a website that features hundreds (probably thousands) of foods photographs. The photos alone would keep me enthralled for hours, but here's the kicker: just click on the photo and you'll end up at the blog or website that includes the written recipe.

OMG! I'll never get away from the computer now. And I swear I'm going to make these Bacon-Maple Cookies. How can they not be fantastic?

Monday Miscellanea

I'm down with a cold today and not feeling like doing anything very physical. It's been a good opportunity for me to catch up on my favorite blogs, explore a few new ones and admittedly, to spend some time playing Farm Town on Facebook. I'm seriously thinking of deleting my Facebook account because I let it suck up too much of my time, and I don't seem to have willpower enough to leave it alone on my own.

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Over the weekend, Shane was able to finish the last of our raised vegetable beds. We may have made a mistake with the beds, but I don't think it will kill us. At least the University of Missouri Extension says it won't kill us. You see, we made the beds from MCA-treated landscaping timbers that we had purchased for a different project. We knew not to use the older CCA-treated timbers for food gardening, but Shane was halfway through this project before either of us thought to research MCA. Ideally, we should have made the beds from cinder blocks or a naturally rot-resistant wood such as redwood. Still, according to MU, the newer types of pressure-treated wood contains no arsenic and show "insignificant movement of compounds to the soil".

I guess this mistake can be filed under live and learn, but I seriously doubt we're going to be in any more danger eating our homegrown produce than we would be eating grocery store produce.

Anyway...here are a couple of shots of our gardens. They are small; two of them are 15' x 3' (interior box measurement) and the other is 15' x 2". Regardless of their size, they should not only provide a good deal of produce for our small family, but should give us a good idea whether we want to expand our gardens next year.

What's in them? Well, we decided to plant either produce that yields abundantly for the space it requires, or produce we know we love. We have green beans, onions, radishes, green leaf lettuce, mixed lettuces, zucchini, cucumbers, rainbow chard, collard greens, green bell peppers, sweet yellow peppers. We also have both Roma and beefsteak tomatoes.

All but one of the seedlings I started indoors transplanted successfully, and most of the seeds I sewed outside are starting to germinate. So far, so good.

If you're wondering, the brick red stuff between the gardens is some kind of artificial turf or track surfacing. Shane is currently working on a large university's sports complex project and he rescued it from a trip to the dumpster and eventually, a landfill.

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Did you notice our pop-up camper in the first garden shot? We moved it from the back of the yard to it's summer parking spot. Very soon, we'll need to set it up and make sure it overwintered well and get it ready to go for our first camping trip on Memorial Day weekend.

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Our school is having Staff Appreciation Week and today was the day for Kindergarten parents to take in goodies if they liked. I made some cupcakes yesterday and sent a dozen of them to school. I didn't feel up to baking from scratch, so I used a mix (strawberry) and some homemade cream cheese frosting I had made up in the fridge from an earlier dessert. I opted for simple decorations for the dozen I sent to school -- just an edging of multi-colored sugar crystals.

Kat decorated the other dozen we kept at home with sugar sprinkled lightly over the top with SweeTart candies added. This idea came straight from the cake mix box, and I thought it might be cloyingly sweet, but the candies actually add a nice tart touch.

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Now that the camper has moved from it's winter parking spot (under our clotheslines) I can begin hanging laundry out again. I've already missed some beautiful laundry days in between all the rainy days we've been having here.

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Saturday morning we went to city-wide garage sales in a neighboring town. For a dime, I brought home this double-sized mug. Filled to the brim, it will hold a pint of hot tea or coffee, but because I'm klutzy, I only fill it with a meager 12 ounces! You can see from my fingers how heavy the full cup is in my left (weaker) hand. That's a lot of coffee or tea to drink in one sitting! But I've already gone through two fill-ups of tea this morning. It gets cool before I'm done, but I don't mind.

Everything I Know About Gardening Would Fit In A Seed Packet

Yesterday afternoon turned out better than the horrible morning I had, then by last night, a hot lavender-scented bath and few pages of a good book fixed me right up.

Today, I'm going to talk about gardening. Shane and I have decided to try a little vegetable gardening this year.

Neither of us know much about gardening, although our few previous attempts were fairly successful. We know that you plant seeds or seedlings in the ground, which are supposed to grow and produce vegetables (or flowers or pretty green plants). We know there are different methods (organic, non-organic, in-ground, container, raised bed, etc.). Unfortunately, Shane doesn't have time to do research and as much as I love to read, I have little patience for reading about gardening.

So, we've decided on the raised-bed, semi-organic, by-the-seat-of-your-pants method of growing food. This method doesn't do much to ensure success, but I always learn better by doing than by reading, so it's right up my alley. Our topsoil is not organic. Some of our seeds and seedlings are organic; others aren't. However, we will be using organic practices otherwise (no chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides). We'll also be using our own compost that's been "cooking" for the past several months. We'll study up if we can find the time and inclination, but for the most part, we're going to plant, weed, and water...then hope for the best.

To begin with, we had a load of top-soil delivered last Saturday. Here it is sitting in a low spot in our front yard. (Our thinking was that any dirt leftover will be used to fill in this spot.)


Just after it was delivered, it started raining, so we tarped it over. Shane also had to put away the lumber he was going to use to make the raised beds. Our next best chance to do any gardening will be this weekend.

We had to pay for the soil, but we have plenty of lumber leftover from previous projects and all the hand tools and garden tools we need. I bought most of our seeds, but did save a few from last year's CSA veggies. We've bought a few bedding plants and will buy a few more. All told, we expect to invest about $400 in our gardening efforts this year. We aren't sure we will save any money -- or even break even -- this year, but feel confident that we will by next year.

By the time the growing season's over, we'll either have a great learning experience behind us or a few good laughs at our own expense. It's a win-win situation.