Fall mini-goals

I've been having a bit of an up-and-down attitude about my current situation. I was actually in a good mood about my broken hand situation for a long time. I felt that I could get back on track for the marathon, that I was managing daily life pretty well, and that I was lucky and the injury could have been much worse. Then I fell again and decided to pull out of the marathon, and stopped running, and started eating a lot of stuff I shouldn't, partly out of stress. This week, my husband's been gone and the kids have been pretty awful, to the point that I cried multiple times yesterday. I'm missing the rush I get from exercise, and physical therapy has suddenly gotten pretty painful (to the point where I am sweating and squirming and grabbing my seat in pain - sort of like mini-labor). Today I asked the physical therapist what she though about my progress, and as I suspected, it's not as good as she'd like. Which is understandable, since with 2 toddlers and no help around, it's been impossible to do my exercises as often as I should.

I decided today that I would go for a run, with my splint to protect my hand. I just got back and I already feel better. In a matter of a couple weeks, I went from being an active runner ready for a half-marathon and well on her way to a full one, who felt confident and healthy,who was ready for an awesome cross-country ski season, to someone who is becoming a couch potato and couldn't even keep herself from snacking on cookies every time she felt a bit of stress (and the amount of stress I felt yesterday worked out to about 15 cookies).

So. I need a goal again. And I have a few in mind. My mini-goal deadline is Thanksgiving, which the hope of re-establishing some good habits.

I'm still signed up for a 10k for November 17. Until then, I will run 3 times per week, 3-5 miles each time. I will work out at least 2 other days per week by doing exercises at home or going for a bike ride if my husband is home.

I will not snack between meals (possibly except of fruit, I'll see how it goes). I'll go back to my usual schedule of a healthy breakfast (usually a slice of whole-wheat bread with cream cheese, or yogurt and cereal), lunch (need to get this healthier), afternoon coffee, and dinner without second helpings. Dessert for special occasions only or nights out. No more cookies! Coffee only once a day, and don't drink it if I don't really feel like it. Tea is fine in the morning or evening. Try to eat fruit after every meal. I've done this kind of diet for years, I don't know why it feels so hard now.

I'd like to have a few other goals, and one thing I want to work on is gratitude. I was doing well for a while with no goal or program - I really wasn't at all down about my accident and surgery. I felt that things could have been a lot worse, and I was lucky. And it was all true. But then when I lost my long-term goal of training for a marathon after two months of hard work and good results, followed by a week of really difficult two-year-old behavior, I lost a bit of perspective. I want to get that back. So here's to that - to trying to get my perspective back with a bit of good, old-fashioned gratitude.

Starting with: today, at this moment, I am grateful my husband is on his way home. I'm grateful I have made at least SOME progress with my physical therapy. I'm grateful my friend and my sister are coming over tonight for a crafting night. I'm grateful for all the good food I've been eating and will continue to eat. I'm grateful for mochas, and now especially salted caramel mochas (maybe that's not a good thing to be grateful for). I'm grateful for my general good health.

It's a good life.

Local dinner

Local dinner

Last night my sweet husband cooked dinner while I was at my mosaic class. He made a sort of fall vegetable ratatouille, which he presented to me saying “The only thing that’s not from the garden are the carrots!”

I thought about that for a second. “Um, and the potatoes? Oh, and the onions.”

“Oh, right” he admitted. Oh well. Actually we usually have carrots from the garden, and next year we’ll certainly have onions. I’m hoping we’ll have potatoes too.

The rest of the dish consisted of (from what I can tell) turnips, bell peppers, the few green beans still hanging out in the fridge, chard, and eggplant. (And garlic?)

We also had some homemade bread (from the freezer), and salad with lettuce from the garden, and tomatoes from the farmer’s market. We’re really sorry to see the tomato season end.

I’m having leftover ratatouille for lunch. Sadly, I’m having it without the leftover bread because I only remembered the bread after I was several minutes from home on my bike. And as they say (or as they should say) trains wait for no one!

P.S. Read the (uncorrected) Italian version of this post here.

Um ... where is fall?

It's still warm! I can tell it's getting closer to winter because the days are getting darker, but still. This is ridiculous.

I have barely been to the garden lately, and barely done much of anything else, either. There just isn't time. I did plant my shallots, finally, on Saturday (or was it Sunday?). I can't even remember how many I planted. Twelve? Something like that.

Thanksgiving is next Thursday. I can barely believe it. I'm going to write, really soon (I hope) about my hopes for a local Thanksgiving, what it represents, why it's not going to happen, and what I think about that. Hopefully I'll have time to write it!

Fall-winter garden, 2008

Fall/winter garden overload

I spent a crazy amount of hours in the garden today. I planted two rows of carrots, three rows of beets, two rows of fava beans (about 34 seeds), and 33 garlic cloves (I need to plant 3 more for 36 total.

I also planted 70 assorted onions (walla wallas, red torpedo, sonoma (sonora?) white, red burger (burgundy?), and an early yellow variety). I put them around the edges of the new seeds, the lettuce, and in front of the fava beans.

I did a bit of chores as well - took out the basil (and got a huge bag to make pesto to freeze) and the eggplants (one more little guy!), and did a bit of weeding.

In general, everything looks great!

Rainy day weather

Now it really feels like fall. It started raining yesterday, right before I had to bike to the train station, and kept right on going until after I biked home. I don't actually mind when it rains on my way home - I love stripping out of the wet clothes, putting on my fleece and slippers, and being cozy and warm while listening to the rain fall outside.

This will be great for the garden, both the veggies and the weeds. I have a huge list of things to do before winter arrives, but I still have time. The most pressing things are to get the basil and lima beans out, and plant more seeds (beets and carrots). It would have been great to get those seeds in the ground before the rain started, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

My plan this weekend is to hold up and do a ton of chores and fun stuff around the house. I’ll be working on my mosaic, making bread and soup, cleaning, crafting, crocheting, and hanging out with my sister while she does a bunch of the same things. Check back for an authentic, easy Eastern European soup recipe this weekend, along with some background info on the one connection I have to my cultural roots.

Tomorrow, I will make a run out through the rain to the farmer’s market to get fish – we haven’t had any in a few weeks, and I’m craving it. And I’ll probably have to stop at the Davis Food Co-op to pick up some essentials (we’re almost out of olive oil! Oh no!). But in general, I’m looking forward to hanging around the house in my pjs, drinking tea, eating soup, and just enjoying a slightly more relaxing weekend. Except the part where I take Cricket to the clinic for her shots. I don’t think anyone will enjoy that.

Happy Halloween!

Changing seasons - fall and winter

Fall is in the air. While it’s still too warm for mittens and heavy sweaters, it’s cool enough for a morning mug of tea, sipped while the sun is still rising and the slanted early light gives the world a surreal look. My morning ride to the train station is becoming colder and darker. The quality of the late afternoon light is changing from bright and blue and sunny to warm golden and amber

Some people may see fall as a harbinger of cold, barren winter, a time for isolation and dreariness. I prefer to think of it as a time for gathering in houses, celebrating the harvest, enjoying the crisp clean air, reveling in the colors, bundling up and taking long walks and stepping on the fallen leaves just to hear the satisfying crunch under my feet. The bright colorful blossoms of spring and the green of summer (or brown of summer in the Sacramento Valley) give way to the rich, subdued hues of autumn – earthy oranges and reds and golden browns.

In my life as a gardener, I suppose could think of the end of summer as a sad time, as my garden is dying and I’m finishing up the last of my canning and freezing. The plants that still remain from my summer garden are making their last efforts and drying up. But, like, most gardeners I suspect, I’m already thinking ahead. I’ve already started planting seeds and seedlings for the fall and the winter, and in my head I’m mapping out the spring and summer gardens for next year.

And like most things in life, the change is gradual as summer eases into fall. Even though the green beans and zucchini are fading fast, the eggplant and peppers, the vegetables of late summer, are holding their own while I dig up the garden around them. I’ve recently planted turnips and carrots and beets, sturdy, reliable root vegetables that will go into soups and stews to warm the quiet fall evenings.

Throughout the fall and winter, we’ll have lettuce and spinach, cabbage and cauliflower, broccoli and squash. We’ll open jars of tomato sauce or thaw out pesto for our hearty pasta dinners. We’ll spread some strawberry or peach jam on some homemade bread for breakfast along with our morning tea. In the evenings, we’ll enjoy mulled wine with apple or pumpkin pie, snuggled on the couch with the cat.

When I’m too busy, life often passes me by without a second thought. I don’t take time to notice my surroundings, much less appreciate them. But in the fall, life at home slows down just like life in the garden, giving me a little more time to think about my blessings, and meditate on the amazing change of seasons that never lets me get bored.

Settling into fall

Fall is definitely arriving. While the weather has warmed up again, it's definitely more of an Indian summer, and it's getting dark earlier and earlier in the evenings. We're still eating outside because the weather is so nice, but we need to turn on the lights even when we eat a bit early.

The garden is looking good, although the bermuda grass is already coming back. I can tell it's going to be a huge problem this year. The fennel, leeks, turnips, and radishes have sprouted, and in no time I'll be back to weeding. We should be eating our own lettuce by next week, with luck.

We're about to have the last of the eggplant, and tomatoes as well. The peppers are still there, but they're clearly at the end of their season as well.

Does anyone know what to do with lima beans? They're about ready, and I have to confess that I don't know if I've ever eaten lima beans, let alone grown them. I am completely clueless. It'll just be another experiment, which I'll write about after the fact.

Even though the zucchini is gone from the garden, the fridge is still full of it, so we'll be eating that for a while. Too bad, Loris.

It's late (for me, I'm old) so I have to get to bed. There's laundry to be put away and straightening up to do, but it will have to wait for another day. Maybe another week.

Garden update

After a week of digging, adding compost, weeding, and planting, here is what the garden actually looks like.

Beginning of fall garden diagram

This isn't quite accurate - I haven't planted the fava beans yet. But otherwise, it's a plan-in-progress for what's happening in the garden right now.

First fall plantings

Now that we're finally having some cooler days, I can think about planting my fall and winter garden. It's still in the low 90's in the afternoons, but the nights are cool, and the days are bearable. It's a good idea to give the plants a start before it gets too cold for them. Plus, this way we may have some vegetables for Thanksgiving!

On Saturday, I cleared out a lot of the garden, dug in some compost, and planted lettuce and chard seedlings, and fennel seeds.

Today, I dug in some more compost and planted two rows of carrots, two rows of turnips, one row of radishes and one row of beets. I would have planted more beets, but I ran out of seeds. Whoops! It's the same package I started in the spring.

So we'll have the lettuce and radishes for salad by mid-October, and turnips, beets and carrots by late fall, hopefully. It will be my first time growing fennel so I'll have to do an update on how it goes.

Three cheers for the new seasons. If you have garden-attention-deficit-disorder, like me, you'll find that the seasons are just the right length to always keep you interested and excited by what comes next.

Busy, busy days

Yesterday I spent 2 HOURS weeding the garden. It's crazy, but I'm learning lessons. Like, no matter how much I love sunflowers, I should never let volunteers grow anywhere they want to in my garden. They turn into minitature trees that are a huge pain to remove. And I really need to weed around the zucchini when it's small. And the green beans, too, because it's so hard to weed when they get bigger.

So yesterday, I almost completely cleaned one section of my garden - the only things left are the melon, butternut squash (which I planted too late, I guess), a few carrots, and a wall of basil. I'm going to start planting winter veggies there as soon as I can get to the store to buy some seedlings and compost. Here it is, the end of August, and we are suffering 103 degree heat. It's hard to think about planting fall and winter vegetables.

The early and mid summer vegetables are tapering off. We certainly didn't have much luck with tomatoes in general this year, and especially the heirlooms. One plant, the watermelon beefsteak, did especially well, and the costoluto genovese did, too. The others all pretty much sucked. The zucchini and yellow squash are definitely slowing down, and so are the green beans. The peppers, on the other hand, are still going strong, along with the eggplant, and the lima beans are full of pods, just waiting to fatten up.

Pretty soon I'll be planting carrot and turnip seeds, and maybe some leeks, and some cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. In a few months, it will be time for the garlic and shallots, which we are immensely enjoying from last year's crop. Fall is just around the corner - and I have to get ready, even if it is sweltering outside.