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Monday, March 15, 2010

springing, further

It's that beautiful day that comes every March: the first lovely, sunny, springy day, the day when the kids and I head out in our shirtsleeves and start the garden going for the year. Add in a load of freshly washed clothes hanging in an even fresher breeze, and a dozen hens and one very nervous rooster clucking around freely in the warm grass, and this is maybe the best day of the year.

Today we cleaned out the few remaining stalks from last year, gathered up the odd bits of garbage (a defeated looking "boffer" weapon [google it], some planting trays, the old destroyed bathroom scale we used to weigh the weeds we pulled last year [don't ask].) Speaking of weeds, the chickens had done an excellent job keeping those down all winter. Seriously, it's worth having a few hens if for no other reason than that you can turn them out in the garden each day once you're done harvesting, and they'll eliminate the need to go in and weed in the spring. Try it; you'll like it.

Then we cultivated the raised beds and planted things in two of them. Joy joy joy! C repaired the pea trellis and carefully set in last year's peas along the base of it; I broadcast onion and carrot seeds into their bed; LT and I planted rows of spinach. Over the weekend, I'd already planted trays of tomatoes, peppers, and herbs in the house; they'll be going out after frost. Also still to come: crookneck squash, zucchini squash, zucchino rampicante, cucumbers, potatoes, corn, and I can't remember what-all else. I love this time of year so, so much. Have I mentioned that?

Monday, September 28, 2009

Garden, chickens, puppy.

No, I didn't take any pictures; what do you think this is, 2008?

I just wanted to relate that the garden is doing well and we're eating a ton of stuff out of it and that it is a great reminder of how fast the year is slipping by. I was watering it today, thinking about how many weeks of tomatoes I would be enjoying before frost, because after all, we don't generally get frost until the end of September, and that's...

the day after tomorrow.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. On a DAILY BASIS I experience this jarring what the frack sensation every time I realize that September? Is over. If you asked me when I was half asleep and didn't have time to consciously think about it before answering I know I would tell you that it was mayyyybe the fourteenth or so, at the latest, but it's gone. Life is like a banging, slamming, speeding, whooshing freight train and my poor wee brain just can't keep up. (This is still the case even though we had C's birthday party on Sunday and I know that her birthday is at the end of the month. The party is over, it was an insane madhouse full of crazy fun and there's no way I can forget that it happened, but I still catch myself thinking that her birthday will be coming up soon and we'll have to start planning for it. Because, you know, it's getting on toward mid-September now. Somewhere. Maybe in the alien civilization where apparently my brain has been forcibly relocated.)

Also: Our chickens have laid two eggs. This just started yesterday. It was a Big Event.

Further also: I forget. (I TOLD YOU.)

Oh yes. Rowsby Woof is getting bigger. He's still very adorable and he still pees everywhere in the damn house without seeming to mind or care that he gets praised for doing it in the grass and scolded for doing it on the floor. And he's teething, which means that nothing is safe, whether I as a reasonable human being would think of it as chewable or not. This includes our couches. Oh well, I've always wanted to slipcover them.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

this turned into mostly a garden update

Twitter won't load and Facebook is a minefield of inscrutable "we're broken" errors. This is a sign, obviously. No, not a sign that I need to close the laptop and go do something, you ninny; it's a sign that I need to write a blog post instead. Sheesh. Do something?

I woke up this morning to delightfully chilly air, very rare in late summer, and the smell of dew on fields of dry grass, which is even rarer and made me think of autumn. We have a low-pressure system hovering over us today, and the weather is supposed to be beautifully uncharacteristic of August in the California foothills. For just this one day, our high is supposed to be IN THE SEVENTIES, and considering that last week our high was 107, I would say that yes, this makes the weather a bloggable topic.

Oh my goodness, that's the ugliest word I ever saw.

Fairtime is approaching and I have once again entered a bajillion things. I think I entered about ten photos and fifteen baked items and four preserved foods (the BLACKBERRIES this year, they are to DIE for) and a handful of knitted things, in addition to being the adult coordinator for C's 4-H club's feature booth. I have no idea what compelled me to sign up for that. It is so outside my comfort zone.

Blackberry jam, made from free blackberries.

the free blackberries. YUM OH MY GOSH.

Speaking of food that grows in the ground, and stuff, I haven't been a good garden blogger this year at all. Here is an update:

Tomatoes are doing REALLY REALLY WELL. I might actually be canning some soon. After an initial bout with blossom-end rot, we're getting LOTS of healthy, juicy, beautiful red tomatoes on the Sioux plants, which are definitely going to be my go-to tomato for the rest of my gardening life. The cherry tomatoes are also thriving, but the Illinois variety I tried because they were supposed to be prolific and early must not like our heat, I think. They're putting on a few tomatoes per bush but they're not very happy about it.

This is where I'd put a picture if I had a recent one but I don't, and if I went out to take one now I'd get all sidetracked and never finish this entry. So. Moving on.

Peppers are also doing well. I did pepperoncini again even though I swore I wouldn't, and this year I'm going to let them get completely ripe before I pick them. Pepperoncini I buy in the store (which I'll never do again because I have a lifetime supply in my pantry just from last year, and I'll have another lifetime supply after this year, I'm thinking, so I'll be set well into the afterlife) is yellow in the jars, so when my pepperoncini got yellow I thought they were ripe. Turns out, silly me, that this variety is ripe when it's red. So I'm going to allow myself to hope that it was this fact, and not my own inadequacy as a food preserver, that made last year's batch rather limp and squishy once they'd been processed, and I decided to give them another try this year. I'm also growing the same orange bell peppers I did last year -- we've been eating lots of those green but they haven't started changing color yet -- and some lovely long red peppers that are just starting to turn.

Squash is so-so. We had some early zucchino rampicante that was WONDERFUL and we LOVED it, and now it seems as though the new ones on those plants are getting... BLOSSOM-END ROT. I am not kidding. If it's not that it's some similar squash-ish thing. The ends just rot away. I'm so sad.

Unrotted zucchino rampicante. If we don't get any more healthy ones than these (and there are a few that look like they might make it), it will still have been worth it.

Regular zucchini is slow, but doing better now that I've decided to water it every day instead of every other day, and yellow squash is FINALLY going to give us something, if it doesn't shrivel up and die at the last moment like yellow squash sometimes tends to do early on.

My pumpkins and melons are very backward and behind and looking like they're not going to do anything, and that's mostly my fault, I think, because I planted them about three weeks later than I meant to because I was lazy about getting out there and getting all the weeds cut back.

Claire's stuff is doing wonderfully. We've eaten at least ten pounds of her potatoes -- from FOUR PLANTS; T has decided that potatoes will be our Survival Garden Staple for the rest of our natural lives -- and these aren't ordinary potatoes. She has two plants of blue potatoes, which are gorgeous and a conversation piece and oh by the way UNFATHOMABLY DELICIOUS. We are hoping they'll keep producing long enough that she can have a good fresh one to put in the fair.

She also has two plants of Russian fingerlings, which are yellow and hearty like Yukon Golds when you mash them, and also delicious in every other possible way you could ever conceive of cooking potatoes. Alas, no picture of those.

The ******* gophers ate all my beans. Grr. Next year: more raised beds.

Outside the garden, we have two apple trees. Last year they did nothing, and I assumed that they were useless like several of the other fruit trees that were here when we moved in, but I am so glad that T didn't listen to me and cut them down to make more garden space, because HOLY COW THE APPLES THIS YEAR. The trees are COVERED in lovely green apples whose cheeks are just starting to turn pink.

Free apples! I hope we can harvest them before the squirrels do. The deer have already kept the tree nicely trimmed up for us, and they come along to eat windfalls and stare longingly in at our garden, which makes me stare longingly at them thinking about nice tenderized chicken-fried venison steak with mashed blue potatoes and some rich brown gravy, and sliced tomatoes on the side.

I meant to tell you all about the roller skating and the school planning and the seven units I'm taking next semester which starts in ELEVEN DAYS OH MY GOSH but I can't now because Twitter is back up I have stuff to do outside. 'Bye!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Garden update with a gratuitous chick picture

OK, we have had our first garden casualties this year:

Spinach, being devoured by striped cucumber beetles. EVIL EVIL BEETLES. I offered the kids a bounty of a dime a beetle and they found and squished over a hundred of the demonic little beasts. Anyone know if we can wash this and eat it, or if we should just count it a loss?

Something also ate a bell pepper plant down to its stem. The others have a little damage here and there (grasshoppers? More beetles? Tomato worms?), but this was pretty extreme. Wonder if it will miraculously come back.

But all is not lost; here's a pea blossom.

And most of the pepper plants look more like this. (Fortunately.)

itty bitty baby zucchino rampicante plant. Grow grow grow!

I still need to plant the rest of our squash and the melons. This is SUPER LATE to be planting. I felt all motivated to go out and do that a few minutes ago. Lemme check -- OK, nope. All gone. Darn. (I'll do it later anyway.)

Tomato plants.

Tomatoes and basil. Early on something was eating the basil but the new leaves seem to be OK. Probably because the beetles all headed for greener pastures in the spinach bed next door.

Claire's 4-H bed. :) She's got potatoes (which we need to bury; another project for today or tomorrow), onions, a tomato plant, a pumpkin vine, a Jerusalem artichoke, and probably something else that I'm forgetting.

And as promised, cute young chicks:

HA HA I'M SO FUNNY. (They look like teenagers.)

Friday, May 08, 2009

Garden and CHICKIES.

I have been INCREDIBLY LAX with garden posts.

Well, OK, I've been incredibly lax with ALL posts, really, but let's put that aside for the moment.

Anyway. I still don't have pictures of the tomatoes and peppers I'm planting tomorrow, because I am A SLACKER. But I do have SPINACH PICTURES. Yes, that's right, for the second year in a row, something I planted in the ground has actually grown.

Itty bitty carrot tops! Oh yeah, I said spinach.

This year's spinach! Popeye would be proud.

And even more exciting:

Volunteer spinach, sown naturally from seeds that fell from last year's spinach after it bolted, and not discovered by us until we were cleaning out the bed to plant in it in April. This whole nature thing, it really works!

And MOST exciting of ALL... baby chicks!

We're allowed to like them because these particular hens will have long lives of egg-laying; they're not for meat.

One of the chicks (we bought twelve) on the day we bought them, when I THINK they were about two days old but I don't know for sure:

You'll notice that they're reddish and not yellow. That's because they're Rhode Island Reds, see. Not Rhode Island Yellows. (Actually, I think yellow chicks grow up and become white chickens, if it's anything like it is with ducks.)

After a mere week of gorging herself on chick mash:

(full disclosure: I have NO IDEA if that's the same chick. There is virtually NO WAY to tell these girls apart, except that one is kind of small and retiring like a runt.)

A few in one spot: (They had their first outing today; we took them out and put them in the chicken-wire enclosure around the base of our recently-planted apricot tree. SO CUTE to see them scratching and pecking at bugs just like real chickens. Oh. Yeah.

This chick was in the process of being really loud and drawing both Smokey and Scout from the far reaches of our property to gaze ravenously in at her:

She's also, by the way, sitting in one of the FIVE beds we mulched today, in preparation for the aforementioned planting of peppers and tomatoes tomorrow. Is it possible that I might do two blog posts in a row? Don't count on it.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Thinning.

Today I had to be really, really mean.

Poor little babies never got a chance. It's not THEIR fault they weren't the biggest, or were growing in the very corners of their compartments, or were in a spot where I'd accidentally dropped seven other seeds instead of the usual three per square. I'M SORRY, BABY TOMATO PLANTS.

Here's the tray of the WINNERS, who have made it to the next level in our exciting competition and who now have a chance at being transplanted to a sunny beautiful raised bed in glorious downtown Bootjack, California:

The peppers aren't quite ready for thinning, but their sad day is coming soon, I'm afraid:

Stay tuned for further heartless adventures in botanical eugenics, coming soon to a gardening blog near you.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Sprouts!

This year again I was really surprised at how quickly things sprouted in my seedling trays. I peered in at them on Monday and there was nothing. Wednesday, this:

Tomatoes and basil! Mmm, think of the future pizza! :)

(the peppers are making a much smaller showing but they're starting to come up too.)

Saturday, March 21, 2009

GARDEN. Yay!

Oh how I have MISSED doing garden posts. I didn't even realize how much until I was taking pictures for this post today. If nothing else it gives me something to post about each week, right?

(Really I've done SO MUCH STUFF in the last three weeks. Among other things, we took a week-long trip to Arizona and I typed up this really detailed and nice trip diary and took a zillion pictures and now I'm thinking that it's all pretty boring to everyone but us so I don't think I'll blog about it. Some of the pictures are in my photostream and others will be appearing as I process them. We had a FABULOUS time. Amazing. Wonderful. Delightful. Also, we had our fifteenth wedding anniversary just the day before yesterday. Fifteen years is a long time to be this happy. ALSO the day before yesterday, I took the kids on a flower-observing hike to Hite Cove to look at the river canyon's A-MAZ-ING display of poppies, and took some pictures that I really like, many of which are likewise in my photostream. Also I have a laptop. ALSO also school is going very nicely for me and for the kids. But I'm not going to write about any of that stuff. On with the garden pictures.)

IT HAS BEGUN. Let's see, today I planted:

• peppers -- three kinds:
  
  • corno di toro russo, which sounded so good I couldn't resist it from the catalog;
    
  • orange bell which I did last year and LOVED, and
    
  • pepperoncini even though I hadn't planned to do them again until I found out from the picture in the catalog that I had picked mine before they got ripe; they're supposed to be red. So of course I HAD to try again.
• tomatoes -- also three kinds:
  
  • Chadwick Cherry, which were HUGELY successful last year and now my mouth is watering,
    
  • Illinois Beauty, supposed to be, um, hardy and tasty? I forget, and
    
  • Sioux, which are supposed to tolerate our hot summers really well.
• wild strawberries

• and basil.
  

I think that's all.

One of my many projects this weekend was to make my first attempt at a bed mulched with spread-out newspaper and wood chips. Claire had some onions and a couple of Jerusalem artichokes she'd started in cups at a 4-H meeting, and they needed to be planted out, so they became my guinea pigs yesterday.

For Christmas I asked for gift certificates for the local feed store so that I could buy myself some bareroot trees in January. I did get enough to do this (thank you Mom and Dad!) but I didn't buy the trees until yesterday (the first day of, um, SPRING, which is kind of late to be doing this project but I think it'll be OK). I planted a Fuji apple and a Harcot apricot in our garden, because it's fenced to keep the deer away. It's my hope that by the time they become a shade/root issue (this year they won't take up any more space than a couple of pumpkin mounds would) we'll have expanded our garden anyway. Of course, that was our rationale when we put our chest freezer in my tiny little makeshift hothouse-porch-thing -- we were going to make me a greenhouse by spring. Oops.

In non-vegetable-related planting news:

We have a whole bunch of little pine trees that are, um, doomed, because they are growing at the edge of our little woods, where they create a fire ladder that endangers our woods and therefore our house. We hope to transplant a lot of them elsewhere -- anyone want some little pine trees? Claire wanted one for a Christmas tree for her room last fall, and since they have to go anyway we potted one up in our biggest pot and she decorated it and kept it on her desk. By some kind of miracle, it actually survived. After Christmas we kind of kept forgetting to replant it outside, although we did move it from her desk to our porch. Yesterday we finally took it out and planted it by the driveway, where, assuming it continues to miraculously survive, it can grow as tall as it wants to. (I think. Did I put it under a power line? I'll have to check.)

Lastly, some more Christmas presents from my parents that finally got put to use yesterday:

Dad did the woodwork, Mom selected and lettered the verses (some of which are just AMAZINGLY apropos, don't you think?), and finally on the first day of spring, three months after I got them, I planted flowers in them.

EDITED TO ADD: Mary pointed out that it's hard to read the lettering on the boxes, so here's the text: Boxes beside door: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever." -- Isaiah 40:8 and "The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind, and God saw that it was good." (This one is more hopeful than humorous.) Window boxes: Petunia bed: For the sun rises with a scorching wind, and withers the grass and the flower falls off, and the beauty of its appearance is destroyed; so the rich man in the midst of his pursuits will fade away." (Good thing we're not rich, but I don't think this is good news for the petunias.) Pansies 1: "Consider the lilies, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, but I tell you even Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these." (again, hopeful.) Kitchen window with pansies: "So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth."

All in all, this has been a fantastic way to spend the first weekend of spring. Yay! :)

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The garden: RIP.

Cami (who is, I just realized, my very oldest* Internet friend -- in fact, she was the first person I ever met on the Internet. I have no idea why it took me twelve years to fully grasp this fact) asked me about the garden. In short: The garden died.

*Not that Cami is old, of course. Is there a good way to word this concept? "My internet friend of longest duration" sounds terribly awkward.

But wait! It was supposed to die! That's right, I, me, Rachel of the Black Thumbs, actually maintained a garden from seedlings to first frost. Well, not all of a garden. There were those beans that looked really cute and amazing when they first sprouted but then they never did anything. And, um, the broccoli, which I planted at the wrong time of year and finally gave up watering sometime in June. And then the corn went and got corn smut, and it hadn't been doing too fabulously before that either, so we didn't eat any of our corn this year. (Really, really small ears. Definitely doing a different corn variety next year.) And there were those squash plants that the gophers demolished, but not until after we'd at least had some squash from them... and the watermelons that never got bigger than footballs... and the winter squash that, shall we say, underperformed. But really, the fact that I even noticed that a frost had happened and killed what was left in there is kind of amazing. With past gardens (really, just corn and tomato patches), by October the stuff had long since died of neglect or at the hands (hoofs? teeth?) of the neighborhood deer gangs and I didn't notice when the frost came along to finish it off. This time I had tomatoes and peppers and a few squash hanging in there right until the very end. I even did a last-minute frosty-morning harvest of the bell peppers, which I then chopped up and froze for use in spaghetti during the winter.

So I would say that Garden 2008 was a minor success, and definitely a huge learning experience. Next year, DEFINITELY more compost, even if I have to (sigh) buy the stuff. You apparently need a whole lot of compost if you're going to use it effectively in a good-sized garden. It's shocking, really. I have compost on my Christmas list. That's how determined I am.

I'm thinking of trying onions over the winter, just for kicks, but my main goals for the fall (between now and the onset of the wimpy drizzle that passes for a rainy season in California) are: to get all the plant remains mulched, mix that and our measly supply of compost in with the top of the soil, toss in some worms, and cover the whole thing with spread-out newspapers and then wood chips, in hopes of getting some nutrients into the soil by spring. If there are any gardeny types who've just read that and either laughed out loud or recoiled in horror at the shuddery wrongness of it, please please comment and tell me what I should really be doing because honestly I don't have a clue.

Monday, September 22, 2008

The puzzle about FAIL

C created a crossword for her family newspaper today.

Oh, heck, you know what? I'm just going to post the whole newspaper. Except I don't think she's done the comic yet.

THE FAMILY GAZETTE September 22, 2008

Lost and found
On Saturday my kitty Smokey did not come Home, and he remained missing for two days! And yet on Monday morning at 4:30 my daddy said 'open your eyes ' and there in his arms was Smokey! And now you must know that I had been praying for Smokey all this time so I was really glad to see an answer to my prayers, well Smokey is safe and still an extremely good cat and he either ate something big or has a swollen belly. Praise God that Smokey is safe!

Bodie
In this ghost town I became a junior ranger on Saturday! It is cool really cool but not all of it is abandoned! There is an old chapel, hotel, bunches of mines, the Daniel Boone store, an old school house, an old vault (the bank burned), lots of Houses, an old gas station, and an old well.

joke
Bill: What do you get if you cross having to die when an hourglass runs out and a packed hourglass?
Jane: a long life silly!

And the crossword is here. She managed to document every single thing that went wrong in our garden this year. My favorite clue is the following: "16. These did not do well AT ALL even though Mom built them a trellis." Hey, this year was a learning experience, right? I get a free pass, right? The Real Garden, that's next year's... right? (P.S. You may have to google the "smut" thing. Just for pete's sake be careful. There's a lot of unpleasant stuff that pops up if you google just that one word. Not that I would know.)

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