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Category Archives: garden
Did You Hear That Screaming?
This is the plant that I grew from a seed I saved last year and knocked all the leaves off when I planted it.
Not now. It was last night.
I’m setting this to post after I hit the road on Friday.
This is the Early Girl.
I was doing a major watering so my sweetie doesn’t have to worry about it while I’m gone. I was crawling around because tomatoes like to be watered from the bottom and some pink caught my eye.
This is the German Lunchbox. And you know what? I had lunch at the German Deli today. Babe the pig added for perspective.
Then I took a closer look at all my tomatoes. The ripe ones are in the very middle and tough to spot. The same thing happened last year.
Yeah, home grown tomatoes. Stay tuned for me bitching and moaning about how I have too many tomatoes.
Garden Update
I still have plants that haven’t bloomed and I keep finding dahlias I’ve never seen before. I think I say that every year.
Yesterday I noticed that one of my tomatoes (the German lunchbox) was growing so crazy it was pushing its cage over. I propped it up with another cage. We’ll see how that works. I should probably whack back some of the floppy branches on these plants but I’m so greedy I don’t want to.
The cucumbers seem to be major failure. Again. I started about 12 seeds in the house and half sprouted. Then I put them in the ground and half shriveled up. So I started another batch of seeds in the house with similar results. I put them outside last weekend and they are aggressively turning yellow and sad. Next year I’m going to find turbo cucumber seeds and try that.
Future Pumpkins
Whenever I’m running around I always think of a ton of things I want to post about. Then when I’m sitting here I can’t remember. I also have tons of notes but then when I sit here I don’t understand them.
Like this one: “white space”
I have no idea.
Also, I finally posted my photos from the Portland Timbers v. Seattle Sounders game.
You Can’t Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Eat Your Meat
This is the tomato plant that I grew from a seed and knocked all the leaves off when I planted it in the garden. It’s about 4 feet tall and has a half dozen green tomatoes on it.
It is the smallest of my tomato plants. I have two that are as tall as I am with huge branches flopping out the sides of the cage. They are sagging with green tomatoes. The early girl has a few that have gone shiny and yellow-ish. I think I’m going to be eating home grown tomatoes very soon.
I’m convinced that the early settlers stayed alive by eating greens. But you never hear about that. You never find pioneer tested recipes for turnip and beet greens. I don’t even try that hard and I have giant piles of greens that we can’t even begin to keep up with. Especially since I represent about 90% of the greens consumption in my household. The Dining section had an article about all the plant tidbits that most people throw away that you can eat. More garden stuff for the plate.
Last weekend I finally got around to picking some beets to roast. They were soft-ball size with big healthy tops. I saved all the greens plus I yanked up some kale.
The first thing I do with my greens is soak them in water so all the slugs and snails rise to the surface. I know, gross. Better to find them now than later. Then I sauté in olive oil and garlic. Even though the greens shrink when cooked there was a giant bowl which I still haven’t finished. (They taste great with a little ume plum vinegar sprinkled on them.)
The other night I ate about 4 pounds of vegetables for one meal. I didn’t set out to eat that much I just kept finding more stuff in the fridge and thinking, “I want some of this, too.” My digestive system still hasn’t figured out what happened.
White Chocolate – Raspberry Pie
I had two really busy weeks and didn’t have 5 minutes to go out and check up on the yard. When I finally went out there Friday morning it was madness. All kinds of weeds and tall grass. There were flowers tangled everywhere. Some of my garden stuff had bolted. The peas were finished.
I picked about 2 pounds of raspberries and there was at least another pound that was overripe and no good. Raspberries are a part-time job.
But I finally had the time and the berries to do my first invented pie.
Ingredients:
Your favorite 2 crust pie dough.
5 cups raspberries
3/4 to 1 cup sugar
1 T orange zest
1 T lemon zest
2 tsp. lemon juice
8 oz. white chocolate chips (I suspect a dark chocolate would work great, too. I’m going to try that next.)
Combine everything except the white chocolate chips together. Don’t skip the citrus zest, that’s what makes the flavor extraordinary. I was worried that the raspberries would be tart and I used the full cup of sugar. The white chocolate provides plenty of sweetness. Next time I would use less sugar.
I baked the bottom crust for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees and then spread the white chocolate chips in an even layer. Initially I thought I was going to let them melt a bit and try to spread the melted chocolate but I ditched that step.
I kept forgetting that I was documenting my baking process so there aren’t many photos.
Gently scrape your raspberry mix into your pie plate and cover with top crust. This makes a very juicy pie so you’d be wise to set the pie plate on a cookie sheet before putting into oven.
Bake at 400 for 20-25 minutes then reduce heat to 350 and bake another 30-40. If you’re not lazy you might brush a little milk on the top crust before baking to help it brown. I sometimes use foil on the edges of my pie but I didn’t this time and had no problems. Use your judgment.
Those white-bits don’t look especially pretty but the pie is delicious.
Attack of the Peas
If you’re looking at your current pea crop and sad that it isn’t frightening you with its productivity, let me tell you about the seeds I used: Veseys. I can’t remember which one I bought but they all look good. There were so many seeds I split them with co-worker and he’s been harvesting crates of peas, too.
Posted in garden
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Berries!
This was yesterday’s pickings. This is about twice what I picked on Friday. Tons more out there. The raspberries like to hide. Every time I looked back at the part I just picked I’d see another handful.
The first post-4th of July summer nice day commute was only 6 minutes short of my all time record of 82 minutes. (11 miles). This is not a record I’m seeking to break.
Posted in doing it wrong, garden
1 Comment
Sprouts!
I keep calling these pea sprouts but they are cucumber sprouts. I planted them on Saturday.
This is what they looked like on Tuesday morning.
This is what they looked like on Tuesday evening.
This is what they look like this morning.
* * *
Yesterday after work I was waiting for the bus. A woman I know from the bus arrived at the bus stop and came up to me and asked if the bus had come yet.
I didn’t even know what to say.
“Yes, but I decided to wait here so I could tell you that it had already come by.”
There are two buses that go to the park-n-ride. One takes a different, slightly longer route. I usually take the first bus that arrives.
The longer route bus arrived first and this same lady asked the driver about the other bus. “Is it coming? In a few minutes? Did you see it?”
Lady, he’s driving a farking bus, how does he know where the other bus is?
But the funny thing is, he answered all her questions very confidently: yes.
Posted in doing it wrong, garden
5 Comments
They Might Be Giants
I saw this yesterday in the front yard as I was racing off to the park-n-ride. It was all I could do to not pull over right that second and fawn over it. But I always leave for the bus about two minutes later than I should so I had to wait until I got home. It looks like there will be bunch more this weekend.
Check out this tomato peeking out of the walls of water. I’ve never had great luck with the walls of water so I’m often too lazy to even put them out. This year they are doing their job. I’m going to leave them a bit longer and haul out the big, tall, shiny, new tomato cages I bought. All four of my tomato plants look great and have flowers. Even the one that I grew from a seed and then knocked all the leaves off when I planted it.
This is the main garden plot. Most of that is volunteer sunflowers. I need to get in there and yank a bunch out. In normal life I’m freakishly organized but I like to let my garden do what it wants. Last year I had way too many sunflowers and it got a little crazy with cucumber vines crawling up them plus they made it tough to move around in there.
I’ve got a lot of greens. Is there turnip blight this year? I haven’t seen one baby turnip at any farmer’s market and the ones I grew myself make huge giant greens but there’s no turnip. I’m so sad because one of my favorite spring moments is the first bite of a baby turnip. I think I’ve got a potato plant out there which must be from compost. I just started the pumpkins and lemon cucumbers in the house.
In the back that giant bush is my raspberries. I’m going to have a huge raspberry crop this year. I can’t wait to have fresh raspberries for breakfast.
This isn’t my garden. This is the hedge between our house and the rental next door. I’ve mentioned to the last two tenants that they might want to talk to the homeowner about the hedge. It hasn’t been whacked back on their side in years and it’s out of control. It doesn’t ruin our lives and we’re not the most up-to-date whackers ourselves but it seems like a pretty basic homeowner issue that someone should give a crap about. Meanwhile, we’ve talked to the homeowner on the other side of the rental and she also has overgrown hedge issues. She’s much more motivated on this than we are. Now the rental is empty again and rumor has it that the homeowner lives overseas so we’ve teamed up to try to get some action on this.
Posted in garden
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Fast Boring Update
This afternoon I wanted to send a friend a photo of Fonzie jumping the shark in response to the last episode of a show we both watch. When I did an image search, among the many Fonzie photos, it brought up a photo of the two stars of the show I was refering to. HA!
This morning I drove across town to pick up my mixer. It’s all fixed. Yay. And I already put it to work. Then I ran by Lowe’s to get garden stuff. There was a major accident on the freeway north of my off ramp. I didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late and it took a half hour to get off the freeway at my exit, the whole time watching all the cars and trucks smart enough to get off early.
I spent all afternoon in the yard. I still haven’t got the raspberry trellis fixed up. I couldn’t find what I wanted at Lowe’s and thought I could ad lib with something we already had at home but I couldn’t find that either. If I can get motivated I have another idea to try tomorrow.
I’ve got the entire easy side of the yard all put together. The tomatoes in the walls-of-water are doing fantastic. I found a cheeky snail in one of them gorging on the buffet. I put a stop to that. I’ve got peas coming up and lots of other sprouts.
The not-easy side of the yard is a complete disaster. I’ll chip away at it tomorrow.
I just updated my Flickr set with all the Timbers home games so far. Just in case you were missing that.
Posted in doing it wrong, garden
2 Comments
