A Final Update

For a few weeks at any rate. I know it's been a while but I have a million excuses, life has been quite busy and quite stressed the last few weeks. And to be entirely honest I've been exhausted and my mind quite lacking in topics of interest, and things worthy of the time it would take to write and read them. But we'll be on the ups with lots to share when we get back.

Where are we going?   China.    How long?    Three weeks.    When?    In three days.

So the rest of my week will be quite busy, trying to finish everything, pack everything, clean everything, and hopefully forget nothing! Well here are some garden pictures  as well as a few of my corset for you and if you think of us say a prayer for easy, safe, successful and enjoyable travels.

Back to the Garden and something I learned about Squash

 My spaghetti squash gets bigger every day and I'm so excited about it! This however is not that first one I told you about, that first one and the four after it, all shriveled up and fell off the vine. That of course left me feeling devastated  and curious as to what could be the problem!?  So I did a little research and discovered that squashes will start to produce a fruit but if it isn't pollinated or isn't properly or sufficiently pollinated it will shrivel up and fall off. For whatever reason we don't get many honey bees around here, so with knowledge I decided that the next female flower that opened was going to get properly pollinated and as I guess you can see my paint brush pollinating skills are excellent! This lovely is only about a week old but I can't wait to eat it!

       Speaking of eating (I'm starving) this morning I pulled up some young potatoes and I plan to bake them with our basketful of yellow cherry tomatoes using this recipe that I found this morning. It looks amazing and I can't wait to try it (I'll tell you how it turned out)! Now if only I had bought the white esparagus at the whole foods store yesterday that be lovely with it! And then I could make some bread ... Okay enough talk of dinner I really am getting too hungry.

       In the garden I also have Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, Asian eggplants and cherry tomatoes which are trying to be trees (they're already taller then me and still going). Also because I forgot to show you before here is my little satsuma tree. I got on sale for $15, I wanted a lime, but all they had were Mexican Key Limes and if I ever get a lime I want to buy a kefir lime, so I can use its leaves.

Another Garden topic ... seed saving! These bags are fill with seed pods finishing drying up, I want  leave them out to dry as long as possible but the birds had discovered them, so paper bags is in a cool dry place it is!  I have  radishes (I will never have to buy them again), mustard, cilantro, and arugula or rocket. I also have some that are already finished drying and have been put in little seed pouches.  I also have some tomato seeds fermenting in a baby food jar, which really isn't as hard as it sounds and surprisingly works quite well! When I lived in Harbin I saved a  bunch of tomato seeds, just for something to do and ended up with about 20 tomatoes on my balcony the next summer. I had so many tomato plants I didn't know what to do with them!

A Trellis for my Squash

So the spaghetti squash seeds I planted out (from the inside of an actual squash) have turned out to be viable seeds after all, with the first little baby squash appearing on the vine last week. That meant it was time to do something, a couple somethings actually! First I planted out some petunias to deter the squash bugs. Companion planting has been around for quite a while and it's a well proven fact that plants have friends, as you can probably see we also plant marigolds around the tomatoes. HereHere is a list of veggies that grow good together and here are some flowers that deter pests.Well after all that, it was on to making a trellis. Now of course you could go the traditional rout and just let them grow on the ground, but they can climb and do very well that way with a bit of help, also it looks more fun and leaves more room for other things. So I started planning and yesterday I finally got it done! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, I even got to use the tool set my dad bought me for my birthday!

Here is that first little squash I told you about, that little thing has caused a hole lot of excitement!

Not to mention all the mustard greens that have gone to seed

And the peas that have been left on the vine to dry out

And this, this is our Cherokee purple tomatoe! We got one last year and they are amazing.

And a surprise gourd, I thought the seeds were too old and wouldn't grow, so I threw them out and a month later tada!

Garden update

Well it's the first day of summer and though I have rarely felt less so ... My garden hasn't  seemed to have noticed my attitude in the least. She just keeps soaking up the water and the sun, growing more and more every day! 

 So in the spirit of the season comes a little update from my little world of green goodness, it's officially summer and everything is pretty happy. My peas which apparently wanted to be trees when they grew up are finally starting to dry out so I'll get a few more handfuls of peas and then the rest I'll leave for next years seeds. Speaking of seeds, a few of my radish and a couple of my cut lettuces including the arugula (or rocket) have all starting to get nice little seed pods which I am very keen to harvest for planting out next time, the potatoes, squash and cucumber are all flowering as well as the tomatoes which are starting to get small green fruits. My my lavender is blooming for a second time and my potted chamomile looks as though it will flower soon, even though I'm sure they need some more root room. All the herbs are growing nicely though the mint is a bit pot bound, and here is some Rosemary I grew from a cutting I think it will make a nice little topiary.

Tomorrow my mom, my daughter and I are headed to NY to visit my Great Aunt. It ought to be a wonderful couple of days, and promise to take lots of pictures and write all about it later!

Busy days

These lovelies decided to bloom for my birthday, unfortunately I'm not sure what they are. They came in a packet of mixed seeds and grew really well in our terrible sandy soil.(if you know what they are please let me know). This week we also celebrated our 3rd Anniversary and our little Guin turning 8 months old !

A Gardeners Rant

I'm sure you've seen as many of these cute garden markers as I have, anything from old silver spoons to popsicle sticks. I love them because they're cute, and who doesn't love cute things. But they also kind of irritate me, I feel like the only reason you would need them is if you had so many plants you couldn't remember where you put what. On the other hand if you have that many plants and that much space you should be an experienced enough gardener to tell your plants apart. Thus the only good reason left for a gardener to use them is if you plan on sending a stranger (husband, child, or friend) into your garden to get something for you. Would you use Garden markers?

Thoughts on self sufficiency and community

Self sufficiency is another big thing that's started popping up all over the place recently and it takes the idea of green organic living to an entirely new level. Anything from growing your own salads to large kitchen gardens accompanied by chickens and people who make there own of anything they can and try to live off the grid as much as possible. Even if you can't be entirely green and self sufficient, any little bit counts towards living better and less dependent! And while I readily admit this to be a dream of mine I will also admit that in some ways the base of this isn't entirely good.  Now I know perfectly well that the idea is to be able to rely on "yourself" and not " the industry" but we should never be fully self sufficient, if we were to be fully self sufficient we would have no need of others and there would be no community, and though we could do without "the industry" we should never attempt to do without each other, friendship and community are a crucial part of our existence. God said its not right for man to be alone and it's true. We need people, people to love, people to share with, people to help and people to laugh with. People are important and so is community.

Harvesting lettuce

Cut and come again lettuce is pretty amazing! You cut the poor things and they just keep growing. I've eaten a bowl or two of salad from my garden but this was my first big harvest, and it might just enough for the four of us for dinner. The peas are flowering and the tomatoes are all planted out I have two more trays of lettuce growing and my potato and squash are both looking nice.i can't wait for warmer sunnier sky's and more food growing in my garden!

No Photo Update

No pictures, the only real difficulty I've had "blogging with a baby" is finding the time to take cool pictures. But it's been too long since I posted last and if I don't post something soon I'll roll into a non-blogging slump. It's been busy this month ... well last month actually, hard to believe it's May already! We took a trip to D.C. And then to Philly for my sister(in law)s bay shower, which was really a lot of fun, I had been dreading both of those as Guin doesn't go for car rides, she's not that baby you drive around just so she will sleep. Despite all that she travelled really well and the only problem we had was exhaustion from not getting a nap all day.

Last week I also had a pretty exiting trip to a local second hand store I'd never been to before, perhaps sometime I'll post pictures of my haul but for now I'll just tell you about it! I found some nice wool sweaters some of which I plan to keep and some I plan to unravel and re-use, at 25 cent each I couldn't resist. I also found a couple shirts and the grand finally which has me quite excited ... a 4 pelt sheep skin rug in great condition for only $30! It could do with a rinse, fresh air and a fluffing, but is all in all in great condition and for something like 10% the original price.

Well let's see now what else? My little girl has been eating anything I'll feed her (except green beans) and I think will probably be crawling soon. Today has been good so far I managed to cook and mash up some sweet potato and also some pear for freezing, hopefully I can do some banana too!

The garden is looking lovely with all the rain we've been having, seedlings sprouting lettuce growing well, radishes, peas, onions and garlic sprouting higher and the trees and grass as green as green can be! I guess that's all for now, if my sleepy baby will actually start sleeping at nap time maybe the next post will have some pictures!

My Fruit Trees

grafted citrus

I currently have apple, lemon, grapefruit and mango trees growing, all of which I started from seed! Most of these are only a month or two old, the apple tree however turned 5 last month (5 years). Last year, or perhaps it was two years ago I saw this video on YouTube, it's the first of a BBC series called The A to Z of TV Gardening. The idea of the show is they take each letter of the alphabet and week by week talk about different plants that begin with that letter. Well an obvious topic for the letter A is of course apples, now the piece that impressed me most shows up at about 7 minutes 40seconds and introduces us to a man who has an apple tree which through grafting produces over 250 different varieties of apple. Now for those of you who don't know what grafting is, basically you take a branch of one tree and bind it to another and if done properly the two will grow together. This is actually to some extent how most apples are grown because apple seeds aren't true to the parent tree. Well this has got me thinking, you can graft any tree together with another as long as they are from the same family. Last week when we went to our local greenhouse I noticed that they have Lime trees for sale and I have been dying to get a lime tree for some time now, then the thought occurred to me that you easily graft citrus trees together, allowing you to have lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruits all growing on the same tree... now isn't that just a lovely idea!

First of the Year

Finally I get to pick the first fruits of my garden! The other radishes could get a bit bigger but this one was practically climbing out of the earth on its own, I couldn't resist picking it and Guin was of course more then happy to help me hold it. It might be a small thing for some, but this little red orb represents so much more then just a more delicious salad (by the way the salad leaves are also ready for their first picking). It represents a dream and a hope, like Audrey Hepburn said "To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow" and I am beyond excited for the future. It's looking greener everyday!

Green Dreams

I may have mentioned before, but back when I lived in Harbin I found inspiration and solace in watching the Edible Garden by Alys Fowler. I think in my mind watching her putter away in a garden that could easily be my own helped to ease the blues that come with living in a frozen land of concrete, it transformed the winter blues into green dreams. Even now with opportunity to grow things, I still love the simple inspiration of listening to her talk about everything from flowers and herbs to peas and beans. I use to watch it on Youtube but unfortunately it's been removed and I'm not sure why, the only place I've been able to find it is here.  She also has quite a few amazing books and she writes for a number of blogs. Look her up and get inspired!

Garden is Getting Greener

Little update on my garden, peas are getting taller, lettuce is getting leafier and the radishes are just as happy as can be. I've also got some squash growing nicely. Cilantro for the hubby, Rosemary coming back to life a bit. A happy mango and a patch of dirt that's almost ready for some flower seeds! Oh how I love spring!

Growing a Cut Flower Garden

If you've ever wanted to try your hand at selling things weekly or monthly at your local farmers market, you'll  undoubtedly know how difficult and complicated it is. Just thinking about it is potentially migraine worthy! Its not like a roadside stand, you have to know what your selling, when your selling, how much and at what charge (all of this pre-season and if your selling anything edible you have to have insurance.

Well all that mess got me thinking about what kinds of non-edibles can you sell at a Farmers market. Obviously there are a number of homemade goods such as baskets and quilts, but what if you want to grow things? Cut Flowers and potted plants and cut flowers could easily be a great solution. Super fresh, mix your own bouquet, while eat those summer strawberries you got next door.

I love the idea of growing my own cut flowers, but why grow them just for myself. I would love to have a huge cut flower garden and sell them. Allow people to come into my garden and mix their own bouquets of very freshly cut flowers. I'd have a sign by the road with what flowers are in bloom, I'd probably also sell any excess vegetables, eggs, or homemade goods in a little shop off the back of the house. Not sure that I will ever do it, but it's a lovey idea non the less!

field of flowers

What kinds of flowers do you like in a bouquet? Do you enjoy big hot house blooms, old fashioned fragrances or perhaps something a bit more wild. Subtle or attention seeking, purely floral or would you enjoy some herbs thrown in the mix to liven things up a bit? 

Being a Green Thumb

"It's practically an addiction or maybe a disease? Ever read those things that say "gardening is better then therapy ...and you get tomatoes" well they are right. I'm not sure how or when it happened but I've turned into a bit of a green thumb and now it seems no matter where I go, I have to grow something. Whether it's from seed or cutting or store bought plants ... It's just a thing, a thing that has to happen!

Though currently staying at my parents house, I'm working on a veggitable garden. As of this morning there are 11 radishes and 13 peas poking their little green heads out of the ground. I've also started some cut and come again lettuce in egg cartons. Not to mention all the stray seeds that have fallen into wet paper towels. I'm also attempting mostly for my mothers sake to grow chrysanthimums (a tea variety), I'm praying that those grow well.

One batch of lettuce sprouts in egg cartons and another in the works.

First promise of spring, sticking it's little green face out of the earth.

                            

Perhaps my gardening dreams are bit big, but some day they may seem small. Check out my Pinterest board Backyard kitchen garden for more ideas on beautiful backyard gardens and how to grow great food!