Recovery

We've been back in Davis for a just under a week, and it's so nice to be back.  The trip home was uneventful, in the sense that the kids behaved, the flights were smooth and on time, and there were no national strikes or natural disasters.  I did not fare well, however, which is fairly typical for me, since I generally can't sleep on planes and 22 hours is a long time to stay awake while eating crappy food, not drinking enough water, and having to constantly monitor two munchkins.  Halfway through our longer flight from Munich to San Francisco, I developed searing headache that didn't go away until several hours after we got home.  That was followed by about 5 days and nights of jetlag that our kids just couldn't seem to adjust to.  It was rough.  I was in a complete daze, and didn't manage to unpack until yesterday.

Now things are nice.  The kids are happy to be home and have their old toys back.  I am happy to be home and have my garden and my house back.  I spent today out with the kids running errands, and worked in the garden while they slept, then went for a run and had a nice shower.  We cooked a yummy dinner.  Now I should probably be cleaning litterboxes and picking up toys and folding laundry and sorting mail, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Yesterday we went to the library, after two months of not having access to one.

Everyone was thrilled.  Turtle begged for Thomas the Train books, since he remembered that we used to get them there, and we had to have a librarian go dig some up for us, since another mom had taken all the ones available on the shelf.  We also got a few Richard Scarry and Berenstein Bears books, our other new favorites.

Today I worked in the garden, and it was sunny and glorious and awesome.  Even if it's too early to plant much, I'm taking advantage of my enthusiasm and trying to get as much done as possible before I run out of steam.  I planted some lettuce under our beanpole teepee, which will get some super-long climbing green beans later in the spring.

This is where the tomatoes were, which I pulled out today.  I should have waited to take the pictures until AFTER I leveled this plot and planted a few spinach plants in the corner, but oh well.

And here are some of the leeks I planted last spring.  They didn't do much last summer, but they look great now!

I also have some bush shelling peas germinating on the counter, and I prepped some 6-packs to start more lettuce in, but then the kids woke up from their nap, so that will wait until tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning we will go visit our Montessori preschool for a while.  I'm super nervous about leaving the kids there since they've become MUCH more attached to me.  While they've never been the type to run away from me without looking back, they have become much more nervous about letting me out of their sight.  Possibly two transatlantic flights plus two months in a foreign country away from their home and schedule will do that to a two-year-old.  Sigh.  Poor babies.

Tomorrow is another day, though - more housework, more gardening, definitely not more running just yet!

Really quick garden update

Cucumbers - taking over the garden. Should have given them more space. Had a cucumber salad the other day with our first one - delicious!

Peppers - Really producing, 95% of them doing fantastic, a few that I still can't tell if they're going to pull through.

Zucchini - the yellow squash really faltered and still hasn't really recovered. The light green variety I planted from seed died, but I replanted it about a week ago and now I've got three little sprouts. I'm hoping with these temps they catch up soon!

Tomatoes - first Juliet is almost ripe! Hopefully more will follow soon.

Green beans - producing like crazy. We have 2.5 pounds just from the last few days. Will need to look into canning them.

Eggplant - getting established. Not expecting big things any time soon.

Melon - Really taking off, but no little melons yet.

Winter squash - not doing much, I'm hoping with the heat it'll perk up soon.

Onions - almost entirely harvested - only about 10 left, but we have at least 15-25 at home still.

Carrots and beets - still quite a few left, will need to pick soon (but we still have carrots in the fridge!).

Overrun by weeds

I'm struggling with the weeds this year, more than ever before, it seems. Bermuda grass, in particular, is a scourge I wish I could eliminate entirely from the garden. It's driving me nuts, and I don't think I'll be able to dig it out this summer for fear of damaging the roots of my tomatoes. I might settle with getting out as much as possible, then putting down a nice layer of mulch. If only I can figure out what kind of mulch to use.

I still have to plant zucchini, eggplant, winter squash, and melon. I'm hoping to do it tomorrow, after a big session of weeding and mulching.

I finally built my little tomato watering system, although I'm not sure how great it works. I did get a T-joint, found my old tubing and cut it in half, and ran a line into each channel. It seems to water a little slowly - to get a good deep watering, I think I'll have to let it run several hours, which isn't always possible. The tomato plants are looking fantastic, though - some already have some small green tomatoes! I'm busy pruning and staking and tying the vines, and Loris even said that they don't look completely out of control yet, which is always a good thing =)

Everything else is doing great:

1.We've picked most of the lettuce because of the hot temps.
2. The peas didn't produce because I planted them too late.
3. The peppers are mostly doing extremely well, except one or two that didn't pull through the heat.
4. The green beans look fantastic.
5. Radishes are almost done, and the flavor is getting too strong because of the heat.
6. Carrots are coming along well, and I'm harvesting regularly, although a few have developed hard, woody centers.
7. The leeks mostly went to seed, so I pulled them and will make do with the edible parts.
8. Spinach bolted - I have no luck with spinach.
9. The basil suffered from the heat, but is now rallying well.
10. Ditto for the cukes - I might replace one of them.
11. Onions - yum! They're still not really drying out, and a few have put up seed stalks, but we picked one and are slowly eating it fresh in salads.
12. Garlic - looks good, but I haven't dug it up yet to see. It's probably ready any day now.

One exception - shallots. I pulled a few, and the bulbs were all mushy. Not sure what's wrong, but it makes me very sad. =(

Next time: Decisions on mulch, garden update, and hopefully some pics

Summer's ... not quite here yet

Brrr, it's cold! Where did summer go? After biking to the train station last week in capris, sandals, and short sleeves, I'm back to long pants, socks, a jacket and gloves. It'll warm up again by next week (I hope!), but until then, we seem to be back to spring instead of early summer. I'm a little concerned for the seedlings I bought last weekend which need to be protected from these cold nights.

The garden has undergone a major transformation in the last week. Loris and I (but mostly Loris) put up a chicken-wire fence. We bought 3 rolls of 25-feet long, 3-feet high shicken wire and some poles and erected a somewhat flimsy fence around the garden. It didn't quite reach because the edges were so ragged that we lost about 6 inches to a foot off each end of all three segments, so I had to make up the difference with some different chicken wire and poles, which were harder to put up.

But! Now we have a garden fence. With a doorway. It's not really going to keep anyone out who really wants to get in, but hopefully it will keep out errant dogs, trash, and people who think my garden is abandoned and they can help themselves to my veggies or supplies without any guilt. Now, hopefully, they'll feel guilt.

Really, though, the important thing is the veggies. I planted most of the tomatoes yesterday, probably too close together. I put eggshells and compost in each hole, then buried the tomato plant fairly deep at the edge of the usual trough I dug in the center to hold water. Each tomato plant gets its own stake, with the exception of the romas which will be held up by string tied between stakes placed every three plants.

I didn't have enough space for all the tomatoes. I only managed to fit 24 into a space where I was hoping to fit 30, and they're still really tight. I'm reformulating my garden plan right now. It's tough. I have 12 romas, 6 brandywine, 4 super Italian pastes, one Juliet, one Cherokee purple, and 3 yellow/orange varieties. I want to get three more yellow/orange varieties (or maybe 2 plus one more purple or other heirloom), for a total of 6 more plants to find space for.

I finally pulled out all the chard(it was going to seed), turnips (Loris is thrilled), and fennel (we ate it all last week, yum). I have basil and peppers ready to plant, if not for the stupid cold weather. I also have some green beans that will get into the ground today. I need to get more, though.

This year, I'm planting two hot peppers for my sweetie - the same Anaheim pepper I planted last year, and a Cayenne pepper. Otherwise, I also have red and yellow bell peppers, and hopefully I'll find some orange ones.

And that's it! Photos and updates to come.

Monday night

I stopped by the garden today on my way home from work. It's looking great. I accidentally picked our first tomato, which isn't quite ripe yet, but will be shortly. I also picked another zucchini, a few handfuls of green beans, basil, and parsley.

The lima beans are already up, they started poking out of the ground and uncurling their first sets of leaves on Friday. More are still coming, as I can see from where the dirt is cracking open. The two melons are getting bigger almost daily, but I still don't think we'll be eating them before we leave for Europe.

Tonight for dinner we had green beans cooked with onions, tomato sauce, and parsley, and store-bought gnocchi with freshly made pesto. And homemade bread, which is getting a bit old. And the last bits of cheese from our rafting trip yesterday. We just took a walk to our "neighborhood store" (Rite Aid) to buy milk to eat with our leftover chocolate chip cookies. It's going to be a good evening =)

Garden update - end of June

It's the last week of June, and things are looking pretty good. Here’s a rundown on the garden:

1. Cucumber – really great, we’ve had 4 cukes so far and they’re all delicious. These are pickling cukes, so I could pickle some, but I have to check and see how many jars we still have from last year. We don’t eat a whole lot of pickles normally.

2. Melon – doing fantastic for now! We have two melons about the size of a baseball. Unfortunately, they’re starting to climb the leeks that I haven’t gotten out of the ground yet. I’ll have to take care of that this weekend.

3. Basil – growing quickly. We still have frozen pesto from last year, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with it yet (except make liquor!).

4. Sauce tomatoes – the roma tomatoes are doing very well, we have a lot of green tomatoes so far and they’re growing nicely. I’m doing my best to keep them trained to the stakes, and it’s going decently well. I think these varieties are a bushier variety and training them to stakes may not be the way to go. Some of them are climbing the stakes pretty well, but others aren’t. I can’t help wondering if I’m accidentally limiting the harvest by pruning them or not. I have to learn more about it.

5. Heirloom tomatoes – 5 plants now have little green tomatoes! Woohoo! The last one doesn’t – it’s a beefsteak, which I’ve read don’t do that well in Sacramento because it’s slightly too hot here. We’re having a spate of slightly cooler days now, so I’m hoping it will set fruit. I’m so excited about slicing into our first heirloom tomatoes.

6. Peppers – I can’t remember if I posted that I planted 6 MORE pepper plants. I believe I now have 36 plants (plus one spicy pepper for Loris). A bunch of them have pretty good-sized peppers on them now – I’m quite happy with how it’s going.

7. Zucchini – We’ve had 5-6 good-sized zucchini so far and they keep coming. Yum!

8. Shallots – I dug up one bunch and they were delicious. It seemed like they’re still dividing. I don’t know how/if I should store them, so the others are still in the ground.

9. Beets – doing well – see previous post(s)

10. Lima beans – Just planted, June 22. Total experiment – let’s see how it goes!

11. Green beans – are doing extremely well. Most of them have grown big and bushy, and we’ve had enough to make a big green bean and potato salad, with another big batch in the fridge.

12. Yellow summer squash – this seemed to suffer after I planted it, but now it’s picked up and doing pretty well. I expect it to start producing any day now.

13. Carrots – Doing well, but they’re also sort of “unwrapping” the outside layer from the core. They’re still edible, but they look awfully funny. I didn’t do the best job of thinning them, so I’m not sure if that’s part of it or not. They do seem to be too close together.

14. Eggplant – The four original ones I planted are getting big and starting to flower. I think we’ll have some eggplant when we get back from Italy, if not before. The last one, which I just planted within the last month, had a hard time after transplanting, but seems to finally be perking up. Whew.

15. Parsley – Growing quickly into bushes. Hopefully I didn’t plant too much! We’ll be making a lot of bagnet this year, I hope.

16. Leeks – are flowering. Not good. They’re forming a woody center stalk, which makes them difficult if not impossible to eat. I have to get them out of the ground to salvage what I can. They do have beautiful flowers at least. They never got big like the ones you buy at the store. Loris says it’s because they’re too close together. Honestly, I’m not sure they’re worth the trouble. I can see lining the border of a bed with them, but dedicating a whole space to them is probably not the way to go. We just don’t need that many.

Harvest day

Just a quick note about the garden today. I picked several handfuls of green beans, two cukes, two zucchini, five beets, and a small bunch of carrots (to add to the carrots already in the fridge). And the only thing in the harvest we ate for dinner was a cucumber. I guess we better get busy.

On a side note, the current spate of wildfires (over 800 at last count!) is putting a crimp in my biking to work plans. Luckily I still have the parking pass until Monday.

Summer garden shaping up

The weather is officially warming up, and the garden is slowly transforming from spring into summer. It's amazing how quickly everything takes off as soon as the warm weather arrives.

Here's a brief diagram of what things look like right now:

The tomatoes are growing like crazy, and I can't always catch the suckers before they get too big. Luckily, I've still got things mostly under control, and I've starting tying up the vines to their stakes. I'll write more about the tomatoes soon. Suffice to say we've got quite a few green ones.

The zucchini is also growing amazingly quickly. We have one small green one, which will probably be ready today or tomorrow. Now THAT was fast!

The green beans already have tiny, little fruits, I'm really looking forward to eating my first green beans of the season. I have at least two or three varieties planted. Green beans seem to go through a shock when they're transplanted. They always seem to wither a bit and take a few days to recover. The most recent transplants are still suffering, but the older plants are quickly turning into bushes.

The carrots are coming up just beautifully. (Reminder to self - post a picture!) Despite my thinning, they are still to close together, but I'm trying to pick the bigger ones in each group and leave some space for the smaller ones to grow some more.

The eggplants aren't doing much. I'm hoping they wake up soon, and realize that summer is almost here!

I may have planted the beets a little late, I was just trying to get something into the ground in a small patch I have available. I'm actually having weed issues in that corner of the garden. The peas are drying out, and almost not producing at all anymore, so they're coming out soon, possibly this weekend. After I harvest the beets (and carrots), I may do a serious weeding session and try to conquer them. The real issue is my garden neighbor, who lets his lot go pretty badly in the winter. The weeds just keep spreading over to my side from there.

The garlic and shallots are drying out! I turned off their sprinklers a couple weeks ago, and they're starting to turn brown. Good timing, since our garlic from last year is going bad pretty quickly. Lukcily we only have a couple heads left. I'm really looking forward to braiding the garlic this year, and also to trying our first home-grown shallots!

Everything else is doing really well. The basil plants are quickly becoming bushes, the cucumber is starting to climb it's cage, the ambrosia melon is spreading in all directions, and the leeks are ... still there. They don't seem to be getting much bigger, but they're just as delicious at the size they are now.

And that's everything! I guess my updates aren't ever really that quick!

Tuesday morning musings

We have had cooler weather here the last week - after a week of record hot temperatures. We also had Memorial Day weekend, and I was so busy that I didn't have time to get out to the garden almost at all. I only spent about an hour there yesterday, just enough time to prune and water the tomates, pull a few weeds, and plant the green beans and yellow summer squash that I just bought.

I counted my green bean plants - if you include each individual plant, we have 50. I'm even considering planting more, because they're so versatile. We make green bean salads, put them in pasta sauces, make soups, add them to giardiniera, and I can freeze them. I could try pickling and canning them, too. This year I got smart, and I've planted them around the edge of one of my beds for easy picking.

I think the peas are going to have to go soon. They're drying up, and I haven't seen any new flowers in a while. We have only a handful in the fridge, so we'll probably make a pasta sauce with them.

The garlic and shallots will be coming out soon - I just turned the water off to them yesterday. I need to decide what I'm going to plant there when it's available, and also what I'm going to plant when I pull out the peas. I already have plenty of tomatoes, and I'll have plenty of peppers by the end of the week (I hope!). I may leave the space for the peas open for the melon I have planted over there. And I suppose I could plant either more eggplant or a winter squash where the garlic is. The problem is that there's really not enough room for a winter squash, because it's pretty close to the zucchini, which I know is going to get big. So I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I'll have to give it some thought.

It will be a late fall harvest this year

Poor, poor garden. It needs so much work, it's overrun with weeds, and I won't be able to take care of it for a month. Theoretically I should be planting my fall seeds in the next couple weeks, but I won't be here. Before I do that, I should be pulling out old plants, starting to turn the soil and add compost, and getting things ready for the fall, but I'm going to be a month too late. It's so sad =(

Today I think I picked the last of the green beans. We didn't have a bad harvest. I think we had around 12-15 plants in the end. Lessons for next year include planting them in easier to reach locations, such as in a row along a path, or around a block of other plants. Planting them in a big block made it really difficult to pick the ones in the middle. Also, picking them regularly in small amounts is much easier than spending 1-2 hours picking them in the hot sun.

The tomatoes are totally pulling their supports over. Lessons for next year include using more stakes, putting the stakes in deeper, planting the rows slightly farther apart, doing a better job of tying up the plants, and doing a MUCH better job of cutting off the suckers before the plants get out of control. And that goes double for the heirlooms, which are finally easing off, as well.

Next year I also want to do ONE green zucchini plant and one yellow one. And that's it. Also, just one pickling cucumber and no other ones. And maybe not a melon, either. I'll put the peppers closer together and maybe have more of them, and keep the eggplants all together, too. And maybe not so many. Certainly more purple ones and fewer white ones.

My garden is also invaded with bermuda grass. I'm terrified of having to get rid of it when I get back. I'm going to have to spend an entire day in the garden, and I really hope the weather will cool off. And it would be great to get some help, but I don't think that's going to happen. I'm looking forward to planting: beets, radishes, carrots, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, chard, onion, garlic, and hopefully quite a few other winter veggies this year. It's going to be a LOT of hard work! Whew!