Vegetable Garden, Spring 2011

purple spinach!

Last summer the vegetable garden was sorely neglected. I was too busy being pregnant and enjoying the hammock to be bothered by watering our poor spindly tomato plants. This year, with the prospect of a youngin' who will be able to enjoy carrots from our backyard, we found renewed enthusiasm for planting. We started by emptying out the boxes and refilling them with a new mix of planting soil and a bunch of composted horse manure from the nearby stables. 

Each tomato plant got a huge fish head, a couple of crushed egg shells and some pulverized aspirin per this method. 

A few years back I put in a drip irrigation system but we still hand-water occasionally to make sure everyone gets enough water and nutrients. We use fish emulsion and compost tea for fertilizing every once in a while. 

Here's a list of what we planted this year:

- carrots

- radishes (red, purple and watermelon!)

- bunching onions

- 7 tomato plants (a big mix)

- basil

- cucumbers, persian and a regular variety

- beets

- sugar snap peas

- haricot verts

- buttercrunch lettuce

- wild arugula

- lacinato kale

- purple hillbilly spinach (!)

- celery

- an entire 4'x4' box of strawberries

- a pumpkin for little E to harvest in october

and then 2 herb pots by the kitchen door with:

- chives

- orgeano

- thyme

- purple sage

- lemon verbena

- parsley

- cilantro

- savory

pumpkin relegated to a wine barrel

***fruit tree update coming next

Around the Garden

Ever wonder how kohlrabi grows? I (wrongly) assumed it grew in the ground like a beet or radish. What a surprise to see the bright purple bulb snuggled in amongst the leaves. The leaves are also very tasty.

Other goings-on around the garden:

Last year we planted 12 strawberry plants. When the first set of blooms appeared, we followed my mother-in-law's advice and pinched off all of the buds. We continued for the first few months and harvested maybe a handful of berries. She swore it would help them develop strong roots over time.

She was very right. This year we've had non-stop strawberries.

Lettuce and wild anise. Any ideas for what to do with anise? So far we've eaten it straight and sprinkled it in salads. We have it growing all over the backyard.

Our lovely nectarine tree has some funky leaves. We're thinking maybe leaf curl? Ideas?

Apricot tree with no funky leaves and tons of fruit. Looking forward to eating apricots....

Fava Beans and Maintenance

I've never grown fava beans but they are just so darn easy. I planted them and really haven't done a thing. I'm also excited to taste them (I've never eaten fava beans!). Any favorite recipes to share?

C pointed out that the pretty white flowers look like butterflies.

I've been feeling slightly unmotivated to post over the last week or two. Maybe it's just a phase or maybe it's the weather. We've been working on the house but it's been maintenance, maintenance and more maintenance. For how much I love our yard and garden, it's an amazing amount of effort just to keep the grass cut, the weeds pulled and the trees pruned. We spent the entire last weekend (when it wasn't raining) just cleaning up and man, it's exhausting. Gardening is nice but yard work...not my favorite.

What keeps you motivated when you're stuck in those dreaded maintenance periods?

***Michelle over at PrettyMommy asked me about my "Everyday Obsessions". Check them out here, thanks Michelle!***

Weekend Activities

Two long, exhuasting days spent cutting and pruning and dragging branches from the backyard down to the driveway. We're clearing the area where we'll build the studio.

The above photo is about 1/3 of the way done on early Saturday.

Spencer from the Oakland Zoo came by again to pick up all of the branches for elephant "browse". We sent him away with an overloaded truck and another pile to be picked up tomorrow.

Spencer says that if you put a pile of Eucalyptus, a pile of Palm, a pile of Oak and a pile of Acacia in front of a hungry elephant, they would probably chose the Oak first and then the Palm.

I took Farmgirl Susan's advice and sprinkled some Diatomaceous earth around the plants that are being eaten. I poked holes in the lid of a mustard jar to make a little cannister. I'm crossing my fingers we'll actually get to harvest some kale and kohlrabi soon.

Cheese and Vegetables

And again with the pests. Something is eating my radishes.

Also spotted on the lettuce; tiny little bugs.

I'm feeling a bit frustrated with the vegetable garden right now and looking forward to nicer weather so I can spend more time and energy tending to the vegetables. At least the arugula is happy these days.

Last week I made some very excellent goat cheese. It was more like a soft ricotta than a chevre, supremely easy to make and most tasty (grainy photos due to the cheesmaking happening late night).

i have no photographic proof of any activity this weekend because lately our camera seems to mysteriously only take photos of puppies. i offer, instead, a brief list of what happened around the house, with photos to follow soon:

- planted the cantaloupe and peas, finally
- cleaned out the front yard and planted another small area. this job is HUGE and will be completed tiny bit by tiny bit. we're making progress...
- moved the huge pile of wood, AGAIN and turned the side yard into an outdoor elli play-pen.
- finished painting the carport
- replaced and restrung the old christmas lights on the carport
- strung outdoor "ball" lights along the back of the vegetable garden area

oh, and a friend told us last night that our backyard looks like how she imagined fairytale forests when she was a child (except that it's missing the fairies and elves). that made me a lot giddy...

our new vegetable garden is growing right on schedule. all of the vegetables look pretty darn happy and seem to be warding off unwanted diseases and nasty pests so far ("kenna hora nicht pooh pooh pooh", as my grammy would say), save for those damn mushrooms that are back with a serious vengance!
ms. wolfie wisely noted that i shouldn't worry about them (and interweb has confirmed many times over); their presence signifies good organic matter in our soil...but they are pissing me off. BIG TIME. ugh.
short of replacing all of the soil ($$$), i don't know what to do. really, just turn a blind eye and let the fungi live in harmony with my heirloom lettuce? that's the plan, for this summer at least. might rethink in the fall....

here's the latest update of our vegetable garden:

(click on image for a larger view)

so far i've planted in the far right box:
+ tomatoes: early girl, sungold, sweet 100, better boy and black krim
+ blue lake bush beans
+ marigolds
+ basil

the middle box is completely filled with strawberries. i grabbed eversweet because the woman at the nursery didn't really know the difference between the two types they had and i was impatient. we'll see how they turn out...

in the far left box we have:
+ bell peppers
+ jalapeno (early and regular)
+ shallots
+ bunching evergreen white onions
+ boston lettuce
+ heirloom australian yellow lettuce

i still haven't planted the cantaloupe. that guy will go in a wine barrel all by his lonesome over in our sunniest corner. last year our garden was attacked by an over-zealous zucchini plant and don't want the cantaloupe to follow in its footsteps...

still on the list to plant as soon as it stops raining: persian cucumbers, radishes, arugula, cilantro, mint, and parsley. i just need to figure out where everything goes. i read in my new favorite book that radishes can be planted throughout the garden as they get along well with everyone.

no drip system installed yet. it rained all weekend and we spent our time inside finishing yet another round of endless touch-ups and fixes. at least our living room walls are free from white wood-patch splotches and the hallway baseboards finally got a second coat of paint. we also discovered the incredible powers of the window paint-scraping tool. how did we miss that one?! sigh...the joys of home ownership, eh?

we spent saturday working on getting the new and improved (take 4) vegetable garden up and running. it's mostly up at this point but no plants in place. sunday's heat wave threw us for a doozy and killed off our big plans to finish up the drip irrigation system. i hope to get a few plants in the ground this week.

more details on the garden coming this week. for now, we have the boxes, soil, tomato trellis and tent frames for the cages built. the cages will be covered with bird netting...

oh and just for fun, i dug up some of our earlier garden incarnations. same area....hard to believe what it used to look like!

sad saturday. ripped out the vegetable garden in a fit of rage over volunteer mushrooms. i've since heard they're fine and won't kill you if you don't eat them. we were more worried about our oak trees catching a fungal disease (sounds so gross).

the good news is the vegetable garden will be back, and better than ever (third time's a charm?).
plans so far (and these are rough):

(click image to enlarge)

the light gray areas are the walkways and the gardening bench doesn't exist yet, but you get the idea. we'll be adding a drip irrigation system.

the two smaller boxes are 4' square, the larger is 8' long. the round tubs are half wine barrels and we got our compost bins from the stopwaste program.

these are a few of the books, articles and websites i've been perusing for a little guidance: square foot gardening, sunset magazine, grow better veggies, you grow girl, companion planting...a little overwhelming but very fun. in the end though it seems the best method for learning about gardening is actually gardening.

C has continued to work in the front, which reminds me that i need to take some photos....the progress is really exciting!

above photo is of my delicious lunch, which i'm sharing with you because it contains beets and chard from our garden (other key players are walnuts, capers and yet-to-be-added goat cheese)! and there was enough to make 2 lunches, not just one (which in my head means that it's a real-honest-to-god-legit garden).

the following photos are of a crazy moth/bug/insect that hung out with us last night. any ideas what kind of moth/bug/insect this might be? it reminded us of "silence of the lambs". that's probably not a great reference...


ps- it was huge. it doesn't look huge in these photos, but it was. i swear.