Category Archives: garden

Here you can see the tomatoes that live on the windowsill, the freshly picked tomatoes in a bowl and the tomatoes that are about to go into the oven to be turned into pasta sauce. Plenty more out there and it’s supposed to be toasty the next couple of days.

Last night both of us went to bed at 9pm and slept like the dead until the alarm went off. I always say we get logy when the weather changes but in the back of my mind I think it’s a myth. It’s a myth that always happens.

Yesterday I picked up my first new glasses in about 5 years. Clear vision is amazing. I would wear these things to bed if I knew I could keep from rolling over them.

I need to take a day off just to catch up on email. My desktops, real and electronic, are still a mess from before the Atlanta trip. I can’t find my camera battery charger and I haven’t had time to look for it. I’m going to sneak out early this afternoon and see if I can get a little bit organized at home.

Although it’s hot and sunny, I might have to sit out in the backyard and enjoy it before it all goes away.

The tomatoes are finally getting out of control. I had two days of harvest like this.

I’m sure the 8 feet of rain we had this weekend is going to bung things up but it’s probably just as well since I have a couple of busy weeks ahead.

This weekend I made tomato soup. It’s an easy recipe. Melt some butter in a pot and add your tomatoes, halved or quartered if you want. The recipe calls for shallots as well but I didn’t have any. Let it cook for a couple hours, put through the food ricer and you’ve got soup.

I had already eaten a big bowl when I realized I didn’t take a photo of the finished product. Here’s what’s left for tonight’s dinner. I add a splash of half-n-half. It’s incredible and will make you forget that tinny tasting stuff from a can.

Also this weekend I made some pasta sauce. So I’ve got the tomatoes back to a manageable pile.

It was a good weekend except for the 8 feet of rain. I don’t mind rain but monsooning over Labor Day is not my favorite.

Bob went to Seattle for Bumbershoot.. It’s amazing how little food gets eaten in our house when I’m the only one home. It took me all weekend to finish one bowl of leftovers and I never got around to eating an acorn squash or that pretty bundle of chard in the garden.

Look what I found in my pumpkins. Out front I have 6 vines planted in a small bed shared with a junipery shrub. An ornamental cherry with long weepy limbs shades the area. How did these manage to end up in between the vines tucked behind a pumpkin? I’ve gone through all sorts of scenarios: someone fell from their bike and their sunglass case flew into the pumpkins; a dog grabbed it and dropped it in the pumpkins someone with evil intentions was inspecting the pumpkins and karmically rewarded by losing their sunglasses.

Remember the volunteer squash shaped like a heart? How about shaped like an acorn?

We ate one acorn squash last year and tossed the innards into compost and we’ve got all kinds of squash volunteers. Actually, my sister identified it for me. She identified a few other things, too, including these big giant things with thick red stalks.

She said: “This is . . . you know what this is? This is . . . a weed.” I kinda already knew that but I yanked them out right then because they were casting huge shadows over the cucumbers.

I also picked tomatillos. I have a few recipes stashed somewhere. This is another volunteer that I get every year and never seems to do anything with.

I’m a little scattered at the moment. The heatwave threw me off completely and then I got a chest cold. Last week I took it easy and tried to get it together.

I don’t know what happened today. I was trying to get started and then it was 2pm. Then it was 4pm. The only thing I accomplished was making a loaf of bread to go with dinner. Everything else remains a loose end.

Pearl District

One thing I did was check in with our credit union just to see what’s doing on. I got a “we don’t support your browser” window with the suggestion that I upgrade to some cutting edge (sarcasm) version of Netscape Communicator. I sent them a note suggesting that they either get with the program and support some more browsers or in the alternative, they ditch a message suggesting people upgrade to an antiquated browser because it made them look like they didn’t know technology.

I’m sure they’ll embrace my suggestion like all of corporate American embraces my suggestions. By ignoring them or else with robot responses like “Thank you for contacting us. We strive to deliver great customer service. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Although a work related entity thanked me for sending a URL explaining URL shorteners. I forwarded my success to co-worker who responded, “Um, congratulations?”

The work of “You’re Doing It Wrong” is never appreciated.

Tomato Harvest!

Did you hear a distant squealing this morning? That was me when I went out to check the garden and saw that I had three tomatoes ready for harvest. I ran and got the silk pillow and platinum clippers and carefully separated them from the vine while singing the harvest song of the golden tomato keepers.

I’m taking care of a couple of items and then shutting down the computer for the day.

You could stumble upon any month of July in the archives and see the same dahlia photos. But I never grow tired of taking pictures of them.

I ran out of the house early this morning to get food for the weekend. I should have timed it about fifteen minutes earlier for perfection. The madness was quickening while I was in there. Tan people in tank tops and shorts throwing beer and hamburger buns into their carts.

That was me except for the tan part. I haven’t been tan since the eighties. Actually I didn’t buy buns either because I think those squishy things are nasty. I’m going to make these.

According to the hippie gardening book, my potatoes are ready for harvest. I thought they’d be bigger.

I have about six more plants. I’m going to leave the rest of them in there and see what they do. Meanwhile, these will become the world’s stingiest potato salad tomorrow. I’ll add a bunch of green beans or something.

How did people stay alive when they had to grow their own food?

I’m still not sure what I’m making tomorrow so I bought a lot of scallions. I figure they fill in for anything I’m missing. I think it’s going to be burgers using this article for inspiration, the tiny potato salad and some sort of lentil/grain salad that I will make up at the last minute. And lemon buttermilk ice cream.

I’m feeling ambitious now. Let’s see how I feel tomorrow.

Here’s my giant tomato plant. I think this is the Roma. I was going to photoshop myself standing next to it and looking up at its vastness but I’m too lazy.

Time for writing. Week 2 Beg-a-Thon update tomorrow.

Awesome trip. Got back this afternoon and I’ve been unloading and cleaning up.

Hung out in the garden long enough to bring in the first wave of the raspberry crop.

I’m not sure if I’m going to make a pie or use them in a topping for ice cream.

I’m not sure what we’re doing dinner this week but I bet there will be peas.

We’re off to a dinner. More at some point in the future.

We have this giant green bush in our front yard and today it was a giant vibrating house of bees. I tried to take a photo but it just looked like a big green bush so I tried this close up. Regular bees don’t scare me but I am absurdly terrified of wasps.

I’ve needed to put the cages on the tomatoes. I normally don’t wait this long. One of the plants is getting really bushy. But I was afraid to go into the shed where they are stored because of all the wasps.

I finally bought some sort of earth-destroying spray in a giant yellow can and I went out there early this morning and with trembling hands, shot a high-powered stream of poison foam onto their nest building project. Wow, there is a great opportunity for an inappropriate joke. I think I’m going to let it pass.

Then I screamed like a girl and ran away and went back a couple hours later to find their twitching bodies on the floor of the shed.

I got the cages out and mangled the beautiful tomato plants to get them stuffed in.

The smallest tomato is the one that was growing in the walls of water. The walls didn’t contribute much this year.

The greens part of the garden isn’t too impressive. Everything is either bolting or getting eaten by what my hippie gardening book calls maggots. I guess it’s going to happen to us all someday.

I did pick a boatload of peas today and served them with Prosciutto and pasta. And I put the cucumbers, round two out in the garden.

Every quarter Bob and a group of his colleagues have a party to celebrate the end of the quarter. This time it was at our house so on Friday I decided to go see Star Trek.

I was never a big Star Trek person although I did watch several seasons of The Next Generation and I could probably do a post about that if I can get myself up for it one of these days.

Since the moment the new Star Trek was announced I’ve been getting headaches from rolling my eyes. I couldn’t understand why this had to be remade. I read a lot of sci-fi nerd news online and I would ignore the Star Trek movie as much as I could.

A long time ago there was this movie called Pacific Heights. I’m going to tie this point back to Star Trek so stay with me. The movie stared Melanie Griffiths when she wasn’t nearly as annoying and Matthew Modine and they were a cute couple who rented an apartment to Michael Keaton who turned into the crazy psycho tenant from hell.

Michael Keaton played this role so effectively that I completely loathed him and transferred all my bad feelings about his character to him personally. No Michael Keaton movies for me.

But then a couple of years later, I finally got around to seeing Batman the 1989 version that stared Michael Keaton there’s probably a way I can tie all this endless rebooting of old ideas into new movies again and again in right here but I’m too lazy to do it and I forgave Michael Keaton. That poor tortured Batman needed a hug.

Returning to the more recent past, I was a huge Heroes fan for about one season and then I thought the show went to complete doodie. And I hated Sylar. I really hated Sylar and when I found out that Sylar was going to be Spock it just confirmed all the reasons why I thought the Star Trek movie was a terrible idea.

But, everyone kept saying the movie was good and here I was at the movies and so I picked Star Trek and I thought is was FREAKING AWESOME. And Spock was so adorable and tortured. I wanted to take him home and bake him cookies and read him a story.

I wasn’t sure about the movie at first. I’d be too ashamed to write a scene (inconsequential spoiler) where a pregnant woman is labor right at the exact time the space ship is being evacuated from an attack by a terrible badass. Seriously? But fifteen minutes later I was biting my nails and sitting at the edge of my seat thinking: I can’t wait to see it again. *And* Karl Urban!

On that note, I guess it’s time to wrap this up. I have a super busy week coming up with some long days and then on Thursday I am rolling out of town to California for a long Internet-free weekend. Posting may be light. We’ll see.

Photo courtesy of peppergrass. Thank you for CC photos.

Dear Amanda: Lemon Cucumber are one of the special delights of summer. They are delicious little cucumbers shaped like lemons. One of my favorite memories is of eating lemon cucumbers with my Grandpa. Look for them in your farmer’s market this summer. Or better, grow some.

Sometimes I wake myself up early on my days off. This morning I set the alarm more for Bob than me.

It went off and I clicked it off and Bob got up. I kinda drifted in and out until about 6am there was this strange sound that rattled the walls. Normally I would assume it was something Bob was doing. But I heard him say, “Huh?” So then I very carefully peeked out the window in case some sort of stealth vehicle was cruising out front. Nothing.

I love all the theories. The railroad. Police testing bombs. Sonic boom. Earthquake boom. I’m going with alien invasion or National Guard sonic boom.

This is from the bag of assorted tulips. I like them.

Today was a pretty decent day. I did my errands. Paid my property taxes. Made progress on a writing project. Baked cream cheese brownies for a dinner date tomorrow. I would have done some yardwork but it was one of those days where it’s sunny for 5 minutes and then monsooning for 5 minutes. All day.

Look how sweet the pink ones look today. I never should have doubted them.

Every time I look in my backyard there are giant crows sitting around staring at the house. I finally put my camera on the kitchen counter so I could send a picture to Kira. But the minute I got it out, they disappeared.

The pretty red ones out front. Last year there were cream-colored ones mixed in. Do white tulips transform to red? That sounds like a fairy tale.

The moment I went outside to take this photo, an osprey flew exactly overhead with a fish in its claws. It was so low I could hear its wings beat the air. And it moved so quickly out of sight, I couldn’t take a photo.

Chukchuk what am I to do for you?