Birthday Projects

Last week was my mom's 70th birthday! You would never know it form looking at her or even spending a day with her. This woman has more energy than I know what to do with!

The boys and I went down and spent Easter break with them and helped her get a few things done. We installed her vegetable garden which this year is a mix of raised beds, container and straw bales.

We sanded down and oiled her badly dilapidated porch swings.

Papa took the boys fishing. (Which gave mom and me a nice day to be with each other.)

And Ryan got a new dog.

Ok, so this last one wasn't exactly a birthday project for mom - but it did get rid of one of the dogs currently living at her house. Which makes her very happy!

Photo of the Day

The Sad State of My Garden

My garden did not perform well this past year. Actually, to say it was pretty bad would be an understatement! Part of the problem was that I did not give it the attention it deserved - just too much going on. Secondly, I did a huge expansion of the my original space. Because the ground was so compacted and terrible, I brought in loads and loads of compost as well as shredded leaves, horse manure, chicken manure, shredded bills, straw and just about anything else I could find and think of to use. Not sure the plants like this very much.

And the plants themselves just acted weird. I would get blooms, but no fruit set. Both the tomatoes and potatoes ended up with blight, and even the over producing squash just languished. I had one tomato plant that gave me one tomato. And three plants that didn't produce a single ripe tomato all year! The grapes weren't happy campers either.

The surprise star of the garden was the lone eggplant planted next to the driveway - It produced at least two dozen nice sized eggplants if not more.

I was going to plant a cover crop this fall and turn everything over and try again this spring, however the possibility of losing my house has me not wanting to put much effort into something I might not see.

As I'm writing this, I am reminded of a book I recently read, Farm City. It was a great book, full of humor and city-bound, homesteading insights, where the author farmed an empty plot next door with the constant threat of having everything torn down. But she did it anyway, for the love of growing and harvesting and seeing living things thrive.

I love to garden. That's why I became a Master Gardener. But lately, it has become just one more thing that's not getting done right. I guess that is my perfectionism/procrastination coming out - if it can't be done perfect, why do it at all?! And after all that hard work, to see everything just fail...

The state of my yard and garden is atrocious! But last weekend I got out there for a while and pulled all the dead plants out of the garden, cleaned out the chicken coop and spread it over the top of the beds and let the chickens in to scratch and claw away...I got out my seeds and garlic heads which I will plant when this deluge stops...If I get to harvest - that's just a bonus!

Slow Food

I am a big fan of the slow food movement. After all, I absolutely love food. Well, good food. I can fore go eating if my only choices are fast food. (Which is really not good for me or the people around me.) There have been many a night where something like crackers have been dinner because nothing else in the house was good.

But back to the slow food movement. It's an organization dedicated to preserving traditional food. I can get on board with that! Additionally, they believe that the best way to preserve traditional breeds that are going extinct is to get people to eat them. Sounds counter intuitive, yet increase demand and supply will increase.

I have bought Heritage Turkeys for Thanksgiving in the past. In fact, one Thanksgiving I cooked a heritage turkey, a traditional turkey and a wild turkey so we could taste-test them side by side. Let me tell you, that heritage turkey made me a believer. It actually had flavor and texture, and you know - that turkey could still actually have sex (well before they killed it for us).

I would raise heritage breed turkeys and chickens if it wasn't for that whole plucking thing. I've already done it and it does not hold good memories for me. It might be different now that I am an adult and it would feed me and my children...hhhmmm

However, one of my problems is that I am impatient. This too might be an understatement, but there it is. It's not that I don't cook from scratch; most everything I do cook is from scratch. I can whip up a fresh tomato sauce in slightly more time than it takes to open a can, but most of my meals in the past 8 years (since I got pregnant the first time), have been of the 30 minute variety. A few of them go longer, but really it's all about getting a good dinner on the table as fast as possible.

Again, this is not to say, that they are not fresh - just fast.

As we are getting home from the conciliatory ice cream after stitches this morning, my sister tells me that we have a ton of eggplant. My eggplants are planted in the strip between my driveway and my neighbors yard and she normally parks on that side of the driveway. So, apparently it was time to make eggplant Parmesan.

This is not a quick dish. This takes slicing eggplant, draining in salt, dredging, frying, baking, making tomato sauce...Today it was even slower since halfway through I realized we were out of pasta.

Completely out.

No pasta of any kind in the house.

I really don't understand how this is possible, but it happened.

I used to make my own pasta in college and this was hands down every one's favorite dish of mine. There is nothing like fresh pasta. And surprisingly, it is extremely easy albeit extremely messy to do.

The dough takes about 3 minutes. I figured the boys would help roll it and cut it in my pasta machine - no problem. Except the pasta machine that I haven't used since college, doesn't really cut the dough. More of an imprint really.

So, now I have been cooking for almost 2 hours. And we have pasta looking type stuff. More of sheets with spaghetti imprints and globs of dough. We put it in the boiling water, waited about a minute and drained it. I threw on the eggplant, a little extra sauce and served the boys. Ryan said it was the best meal he had ever eaten and could I make this every night? Max said yum, but halfway through decided he didn't like the purple skin; but he ate everything else as long as it wasn't purple.

The good point of all this is that our meal completely came out of my garden! This made me so happy and willing to take the time to do this. (I also made another one to put in the freezer.) Everything except the oil and the flour - I grew!

Lately, I have been feeling frustrated and sad regarding my gardening capabilities. I have thought that if my family was dependent on me and my garden for food - we'd be starving. But tonight, tonight we had tomatoes, garlic, onions, basil, oregano, eggplant, eggs and an old pasta machine for the most unbelievable pasta ever!!! This was slow food. And it was good.

But now I have flour over every surface of the kitchen and dining room...

Summer Happenings

I haven’t been writing much lately, since we are in the throes of summer around here. I have started working, which is bittersweet…I’m very excited to have a job (and one that I just spent years in school for!), but it takes time away from the punks I call my children. These particular punks require constant supervision if I would like my house to continue to shelter us. A wonderful example is last week when my father was watching them in the pool, they managed to go around to the front of the house, open the gate, get one of the bikes, bring it into the back yard, hoist it into the pool (which is over 4 feet off the ground) and ride the bike in the pool. (They do have amazing creativity and team work!)

We have also been doing everything we can to not die from heat stroke. Right now it is 10 at night and it is 101 degrees outside. It’s starting to cool off from the 110 of earlier. I said chuck it all, and we went to the movies to use their air conditioning! However, the heat is awesome for drying laundry...it dries almost before I get back in the house!

Not only are we having a difficult time with the heat, my garden is sad and pathetic. I would like to blame it all on the heat, but the truth is…my garden has not done well from the very start this year. My third planting of beans has pretty much dried up – and I didn’t get a single bean from any of the plants. I have planted my zucchini, squash and cucumbers four times now and they all keep dying.

I have never had this problem before and I think it is my soil. I brought in many, many truckloads of compost from the city along with straw, horse manure, chicken coop clean outs, shredded paper, shredded leaves, worm castings…and everything is dying in these new beds. I have not picked a single pepper and my plants are barely surviving. Both the peppers and tomatoes have blossom end rot and something (not a tomato horn worm) is eating my tomato plants and marking up my tomatoes (on the good parts, away from the blossom end rot, the little suckers had to damage the edible parts).

The chickens ate my corn seedlings and my melon vines are the same size as when I planted them back in April. Needless to say, I am frustrated. If I had to survive off my garden, we would be starving right now! There is also the issue of hard work. I was really excited to see the fruits of my labors…Thank God for all the Farmer’s Markets around me so I can eat the fruits of other peoples work!

One of the other problems we encounter gardening in this valley is the intense heat. Instead of having one enormously long season from late March to mid November, we have two short seasons separated by a long, dry, HOT summer. The news said something about the next 30 days being over a 100 degrees…and plants just shut down. And really who could blame them, I don’t want to do anything in this heat either!

As much as I am frustrated with my food endeavors at the moment, I know I will keep trying and I am already starting to think of what I can plant this fall…In fact, I just harvested the tiny little seeds from my lettuces yesterday. As part of the seed to seed challenge, I let my lettuces go to seed instead of pulling them out when they bolted...and I now have lettuce to plant in a few months when I can go back outside in daylight hours.

However, I did get 6 eggs today! The teenage chickens are laying these tiny little things…very cute. And I’ve gotten a few of these tiny, paper-thin eggs that you can’t touch. I added some Oyster Shell to their diet so hopefully the shells will get a little harder.

Just to let you know that I am also counting my blessings in the midst of my complaining - We got to see the new Harry Potter movie today, I didn’t cook a single meal for any of the 15 thousand people in my house today, and my punks bring me so much joy it physically hurts to look at them sometimes! Of course, I’m watching them sleep as I type this when they are even more adorable and not getting into trouble! We had an awesome afternoon just the three of us.

Harvesting

I harvested a few things this past week...Something had gotten in my bed of garlic and onions and pushed everything over. The garlic had turned brown and even though it hadn't grown as big as I would have liked - it needed to come out. Since I was harvesting the garlic, I decided to take out the onions that were in that bed as well. They weren't forming good size bulbs and I really needed the bed to plant my watermelon and butternut squash plants...So here are my onions:

and my very first garlic braid!

My first few yellow tomatoes and of course I usually get two eggs a day. I can't wait for teenagers to start laying...2 eggs a day is no where newar enough for this household who have all become egg snobs.

Although I think the brown one is a double yolk...

Weather and Water

The weather has been amazing this past week! I have lived in Fresno for the past 9 years, and I have yet to experience more than a week of spring. We tend to go from fogged in to 3 digit temperatures overnight. We have had rain. RAIN! Which is awesome considering the humongous draught we are in.

Puffy clouds in blue skies. Also very unusual since our skies tend to be either fog, or some smoggy, smoky, grayish color. When Ryan was little I told him the sky was blue and he argued with me! I can go outside without the possibility of heat stroke. I can send the kids outside without the possibility of heat stroke and red flag days which mean that no one should be breathing the air let alone running around outside.

Although I realize I am lucky to live in a zone where we (not me for some reason, but people around me) are already harvesting tomatoes and peppers, the weather is very difficult thing for me to handle. Besides that fact that heat is my own personal enemy, it is also my plants enemy. In fact, we almost have two short seasons rather than one long one since plants shut down in temperatures over 96 degrees. This sucks since we count the number of days in a row over 100 with regularity. I have been known to say, it's only been 5 days over 110...

I love the puffy clouds and beautiful temperatures!!!

Garden Update

I'm having mixed success with my garden this year. My onions and garlic look awesome, but the onions aren't producing bulbs.

My potatoes are growing like gangbusters, but I think they have early blight. Anybody know if this is why some of them look terrible?

I have replanted my zucchini, squash and cucumbers three times now and am considering one more try. Not sure exactly what is going on. My absolutely best looking plant is a volunteer tomato plant. Three years ago, I planted a yellow pear tomato. It has reliably seeded itself every year since and is always my most prolific producer.

The rest of my tomatoes I started from seed indoors at the end of January and diligently took care of them every day - took them outside to visit the sun, brought them in at night. None of them compare to my volunteer which started to grow at the same time I planted out my other tomatoes...gardening can be a maddening process!

I do have a few tomatoes though!

I had two peas that germinated from seed. I cheated and bought seedlings at a sale a few weeks ago. I'm considering planting more seeds and just see what happens. The beets, spinach and radishes didn't germinate at all! They were all in the same barrel, so I'm thinking foul play - probably the cat. She likes to sleep in pots! My carrots sort of came up, so they are going to get a re-seeding as well.

The lettuce is done, it just gets way too hot here. I am already excited to see whether reports in the 90s, because it means it wont get that hot!

The peppers are starting to look good and my tomato plants are growing, just no tomatoes yet. I am trying to finish making my tomato cages so they can have some support.

The melons didn't like the sudden heat and neither did the strawberries. Everything probably would have been fine except I didn't have the drip system up and running smoothly yet. So the strawberries are toast and the melons just keeled over. And I don't think the chickens helped out either!

My lemon tree doesn't seem to be doing so well. I have all these tiny little lemons that are already turning yellow and falling off. I'm hoping that some of them decide to stay on the tree and actually turn into lemons.

Onions

I planted my onions back in December along with my garlic. Instead of ordering onion sets from a catalog, I planted the sets my local nursery had stocked - red and yellow onions. They came up beautifully and are one of the prettiest parts of my garden. However, they are not forming bulbs.

I have no idea whether I planted long or short day onions. I do know that long day onions are not a good idea for my zone 8 garden, but they were not marked. So, I may have planted a huge amount of green onions! Which wouldn't do me any good since I hate green onions and really only use onions for cooking. In order for me to eat them they must be completely cooked to the point of disappearing in the food...I know that I am weird. I have all kinds of crazy going on in my head most of the time!

Commitment

I never planned on staying in my house. For many reasons my house holds memories that are not very happy. We bought this house because I was 8 months pregnant with my second child, had a 12 month old, and the house we originally had put in an offer had fallen out of escrow. Oh, and we had already sold our house (which I loved). This house became available and had a large back yard so we bought it. My daughter never came home from the hospital. My first piece of mail was her death certificate. Max came home less than a year later, but within a few months we were separated and then divorced. I did a lot of crying in this house.

(When we bought the house in 2003)

I kept it to give the boys some stability after the divorce, but planned on selling this summer after I earned my Master's degree. With the market the way it is, there is no way I could sell and make what I need to even break even. Because I had planned on leaving, everything I did to the house was with my eyes on resale. I landscaped the backyard as therapy.

(This is what the backyard looked liked going into winter, same view)

And I never really committed to my vegetable garden. Until now.

(2003, so many chemicals - not even a trace of a weed)

I have posted many pics over the past couple of months of the tearing up of the side yard and the not so pretty (yet) new vegetable garden. I have also planted asparagus, which is a very long term commitment. I am thinking about fruit trees, and yesterday I bought 2 blackberry and 1 raspberry vines. Commitment is scary. What if I lose the house? What if it doesn't work out? Will it hurt more after I have put in so much time, effort and sweat?

(2006, it was pretty for a while!)

(the picket fence was rotten and took up too much space...)

Mushrooms

I love mushrooms. I have since I was little and I think a large part of my love is from my mom. We would go mushroom hunting every fall/spring. We lived out in the country and she had some hippy friends who taught us to look for horse mushrooms. These are huge! They look like portabellas, but have a milder taste and can be up to three times the size. They also grow in fields rich in horse manure – hence the horse mushroom name. I was really good at mushroom hunting, and every year I can still smell them (or the fungus they grow out of).

After a few years my mom got scared that we might eat a bad mushroom and accidently kill ourselves so we stopped the hunting. But I still crave those mushrooms! Nothing else I have tried quite tastes like it. My mom would slice them, batter them in egg and crushed saltines and then sauté them in butter…mmmmm.

This year I went a little crazy. I ordered asparagus crowns and since I spent more than $25, I had a certificate for $25 free. I ordered the mushroom growing kit, well actually 2 of the mushroom growing kits.

It was really cool. The soil is inoculated; you open the box, wet the medium and let it sit in a cool dark place for a few weeks. (my closet)

I now have mushrooms…and they grow overnight.

This morning I went in my closet to get dressed, looked down and saw my large crop. I knew from the last time I harvested, that if I waited until I got home they would be too old to eat. So this morning my mom made me sautéed mushrooms in bread crumbs for breakfast…mmmm. And I even had a Dr. Pepper to go with it!

Fruit Trees

I am having a theoretical issue with paying to water trees that don't produce anything.

Don't get me wrong - I love my trees. In fact, when we first moved in to the house we spent a lot of money on planting trees and trying to provide shade to the backyard. Now these trees have matured and for the first year ever, my Ash tree is actually shading the play structure for the boys...and part of my vegtable garden.

However, the Ash is infested with whiteflys. I have tried many things trying to get rid of them over the past few years with nothing working. Finally this past year, I actually purchased and used a chemical pesticide which still didn't work. We drastically pruned the tree this winter to help, but I have already seen a few fluffy things flying around the yard...

I'm considering taking down the tree. This is a hard decision for me because I have waited for 6 years to get good shade and the boys now have a shaded playstructure (which they honestly don't use that much anymore). But if I take it down, I can replace it with to least 2 fruit trees. For some reason planting fruit trees seems like a huge comitment. It means that I will be in this house for a while...maybe I have other issues...

Any suggestions for small fruit trees?

These are my ideas, please vote and if you have any other suggestions - let me know!

Cherry

Nectarine

Citrus

Apple

Garden

I have added to new sidebars - my 2009 garden so far and my harvest tally. I'm hoping that this will allow ya'll to follow along. And I am terrible at records so I thought this will force me to make some sort of record of my garden.

Here's the garden last week as I was getting ready to plant. Now that most things are in the ground, it's really hard to see the plants!

Does anyone have any experience with asparagus? I planted an asparagus patch this year, but it is just sitting there...not growing...did I kill it?

Craziness

I haven't posted in a while because my life sort of exploded over the past few weeks! Not only am I going crazy finishing my masters, presenting my thesis, trying to get my garden ready to plant and the baby chicks living in my laundry room, but there have been some health concerns in my family.

I personally went through a breast cancer scare several weeks ago. Let me tell ya' - biopsies are no fun! My tumor turned out to be benign. However, my sister also decided to get tested and her results came back malignant and it has metastasized. Obviously, this means that she will having radical surgery and chemo. She is also a single mother and we have decided that the best thing overall will be for her and her kids to move in with me and my kids. (My house isn't very large.) Additionally, my mother has decided that for the foreseeable future, she will coming and staying with us Monday-Thursday to help with kids, cleaning, laundry...

If anybody has any suggestions on how to stay sane through this trying time, please feel free to let me know! As a side note, I am finishing my masters for my therapy degree - in other words I am a Family therapist. This doesn't help much when the painful family dynamics are happening in your own family!

Garden Beds

Okay, I couldn't resist. It was such a beautiful afternoon yesterday, my class was cancelled and I had to buy chicken feed. The chicken feed only comes in because I was at the feed store and they have straw. Since I have heavy, heavy clay soil and stupidly gave away my rototiller after my divorce, I decided it would be easier and better to do raised beds without being enclosed.

I have been saving all my yard waste for a while now in anticipation of digging it into my new vegetable garden, but instead of spending hours and hours that I really don't have right now, we will be trying to Lasagna garden technique.

In case you have never heard of lasagna gardening it is a process where you layer stuff to about 2 feet high and then just plant directly in it. So far, I have a layer of straw, the bottom of the chicken coop, shredded bills courtesy of my parents (they seriously had bills from the Baptist kindergarten they sent me to over 30 years ago), a layer of leaves and some horse manure. I still need to add about another foot of stuff, so I'm not sure if I will try to repeat the layers or go scavenging in other peoples yards...

Seed Catalogs

I got two new seed catalogs last night in the mail. Actually, they probably came last week, but I am not good at checking my mail - I only get bills or ads. And since I don't want either one, I tend to ignore them. I keep hoping the that bills will just go away, but they don't and somehow I end up paying them all in end!

But, my new catalogs are making me covet. See, I have already started my seeds for my new garden. I haven't gotten the new garden beds made yet, but the seeds have been planted for a few weeks now and getting to the point where they should be transplanted soon - if not in the garden then at least larger containers. But, here is this new, shiny catalog with beautiful looking produce that I don't have...

I don't want to say that seed catalogs are like porn for gardeners, but I can't think of a better analogy. I can't go outside and work in the garden because it is too wet (Thank God for the rain!). It is too cold to plant. And I don't have the time right now. However, I bet if it was nice weather I would be in the garden despite the fact my thesis is due in less than a month!

So what do I do about the seed catalogs? Do I open them up and drool over the pretty pictures and enticing descriptions and possibly be disappointed with what I have already purchased, sown and happily watched grow? Do I put them away for next year? Or maybe I can buy one or two more seed packets and somehow find enough space in the yard for just a couple more plants? What would you do?

My garden

We are getting ready to harvest our first head of broccoli from what's left of our winter garden. Although I originally wanted my chickens to be completely free range, they were very happy about my freshly planted winter garden and quickly decimated the entire thing ignoring the beautiful, fresh weeds sprouting that they were supposed to be eating for me.

They now have a chicken run attached to their coop. I am very excited about their run, but also a little sad. I am excited because there will no longer be poop on my patio, my garden will be safe at least from them and maybe they will lay their eggs where I can find them! However, I really enjoyed sitting in my backyard and watching the chickens run around - it soothed my nerves and just made me happy! I will probably let them out to run around while I am working out there avoiding my thesis...

Back to the garden. Hopefully this weekend I can get the new beds ready for planting. While the rest of the country is under a blanket of snow - I live in California's central valley. It is beautifully sunny (even though we desperately need rain) and should be about 66 degrees today. Eating locally is easy here because we grow most of the food that is shipped to the rest of the country. However, growing conditions can be tricky. The last frost might have been last night or could be sometime in April. However, April could also be 90 degrees already. Our summers are HOT which means that plants shut down growing and producing so we almost have two short seasons instead of one long one.

To combat this issue, I have started some tomato plants from Mexico that are supposed to produce even in the heat of the summer. I have turned my laundry room into a plant nursery with grow lights and have started most of my seeds already. In fact, they popped up so quickly I'm not quite sure they will make it to planting time without some issues.

Not only is my laundry room home to my seedlings, but in a week or two it will also be home to my new baby chicks. I know that Darrin did not expect any of this when we started dating...

My future garden...

My seeds are up! The heating pad trick worked like a charm. In fact, most of the seeds sprouted within 3 days!