Let the garden grow?

Is that an expression? Because if it is, it implies that you just throw some seeds out and crack open a Coke, sit on the porch, and wait. Even if that is the way it works with zucchini, it otherwise doesn't make any sense.


Anyways, I really really want to have a garden this year but have heard all kinds of warnings about doing so while pregnant. I guess it's probably true I should avoid digging in dirt that certainly has rabbit and squirrel droppings throughout. Maybe that's why Penny has been "managing" more than her own waste? Such a helpful dog.

Wouldn't it be enough to wear gloves and a mask? Even if I don't become uber crunchy and use my own carrots to make baby food, fresh green beans just sound too delicious.

Well. I guess it's Fall.

And apparently it's also National Coming Out Day. So that's cool.

Hubs and I took down the garden today, so I thought I would share some last bits of garden delight before the snow flies. OH THAT'S RIGHT - it already did. Are we heading for another infamous Halloween storm? The 1991 Halloween debacle holds the record for the most snowfall in one storm in the state's recorded history (28 inches in Minneapolis; 37 inches in Duluth). Luckily, I chose to be the grim reaper that year. Wearing a cloak, I wasn't so cold that I couldn't still go trick-or-treating.


Aaaaanywho. This, once again, was our garden post-grass-tearing-up and planting/transplanting. Something I learned at this stage: it is WORTH IT to rent the ridiculously heavy and hard to operate sod ripper. Also, do not start your pole beans indoors - they will grow too fast and wrap their tendrils around each other, making it impossible to transplant them. Don't start carrots or herbs indoors, either, because their roots won't be big enough to transplant and you'll be forced to extract the clump of them from their little pot and put the very same clump directly into the ground, lest you try to separate them and thereby turn them all upside-down.


The easiest part of the season is when your little seedlings are becoming more substantial and you're all excited and all the hard work is done, you just have to water. This is the part when you go out there twice a day to see if you can maybe see a little bit of progress or maybe even a bud and it's very exciting because sometimes you actually can see progress! A watched garden, it turns out, does grow.


After a month or so, your hovering and hand-wringing pays off and you have peas! Hubs doesn't like peas, but he liked these ones. Your other plants are now budding and flowering and showing you what's to come. Suddenly, you realize that you should've planted more peas and carrots but fewer broccoli and absolutely no corn. Something else learned at this stage: tomato cages as sold in stores are totally insufficient - they should be about three feet taller and have more rings.


By the time the peas are done and dried out, the garden in is full splendor and the plans for canning begin. We were reading up on blanching and freezing and I can't believe all the stuff we learned in our first year. I started tallying our yields and couldn't be happier with our results. Here are the estimates:

Basil: a couple handfuls and growing more.
Pole Beans: hundreds, perhaps thousands. One day yielded 71 beans. Next year we'll be more diligent about picking every day and freezing batches.
Broccoli: three small heads. Could've picked a few more but they flowered first.
Carrots: aside from the mutants, 11. Delicious.
Chives: a lot, but we never used them.
Cilantro: a few handfuls.
Sweet Corn: zero. Failure. The cobs never got more than 4" or so and then the birds ate them.
Lettuce Mix: one row. Could've planted more rows for another harvest.
Oregano: four or so handfuls that we dried to store.
Green Onions: 10ish. Never really used them, though.
Yellow Onions: a few, but they never got bigger than about 3/4" so they weren't really edible.
Italian Parsley: about 10 handfuls, which is a lot. That stuff is prolific.
Snow Peas: many dozen. We'll do more next year and hopefully freeze some.
Green Peppers: eight, plus I'm still trying to grow some indoors since I couldn't bare to let the poor tiny things just sit outside and die.
Jalapenos: 22, and I'm trying to grow a few more inside as well. The heat level has been really inconsistent, but still worth it.
Red Bell Peppers: seven.
Chili Peppers: seven. Not hot, but good.
Spinach: none. It was too shaded by the broccoli.
Thyme: three handfuls to dry and store.
Better Boy Tomatoes: about 50.
Roma Tomatoes: over 100. Delicious. We'll do a lot more tomatoes and canning next year.
Zucchini: about a dozen. With four plants, I thought we'd be overrun, but we weren't.

And now it's all cleared out, but we've got beans in the freezer and salsa in the pantry. When the kids were here, they really appreciated growing and picking vegetables, even though they wouldn't eat them, and that was fun to see. I'm already excited for next year.

Celebrating GREEN and other summer colors

As often as I remember, I like to take a moment to fully appreciate how lovely summer is in Minnesota, because I know that soon - always too soon - it will snow. Fall is nice and snow is fine for a while...but does it have to go on and on and on through January and February and March and even April? Sheesh. Why do we live here again?

Ah, summer. Gardening has helped me reflect on this since I have to go out and pick a couple dozen beans every day. So I thought I would share more of our garden.


It doesn't look so giant here, but the ripening tomato is giant. We've picked a few tomatoes, and in about two days I'll have handfuls more. Luckily, we also have ripe jalapenos and a green pepper and maybe a couple of small onions (the onions are wearing the garden dunce cap this year). Mmmmm, fresh salsa.


My mom puts fresh cilantro in her fresh salsa, but ours has flowered and I refuse to buy a bundle at the store because you get so much that you throw away 80% of it. But fresh Italian parsley I have in abundance. We've already dried enough to refill our shaker, but it. just. keeps. growing. It's practically eclipsing the thyme and oregano.


Woo hoo! Broccoli. We thought the broccoli was going to be the garden dunce because of a lot of sneaky green worms that had been eating the leaves. But they stopped. And the broccoli grew ridiculously huge (I guess; I've never grown it before) so as to shade and, thus, totally stunt my second planting of lettuce rows. And now we have this one clump and there's a faint broccoli smell in the area.


We also didn't know if we would have success with the sunflowers we started too late. But it looks like, once again *swiping brow*, luck is with us.

Ahem, ahem, ahem....

When I extracted the individual carrots from the mutant carrot-tangle, I only found two that resembled (in my mind) anything interesting.


I had no appropriate props for this one. If I'd have had a mini disco ball, it would be more apparent that this carrot is partying the night away, as you can see by the closed eyes and open-mouthed singing. My sister thinks it looks like an opera singer. And I suppose it could be viewed as a ghostly figure, too.


But THIS one. This one obviously only has one interpretation: shrimp. I didn't even need to give it a face or fins or scales or whatever the hell shrimp have. It just looks like a shrimp. And this is what comes of 20 minutes of diorama-making.

Is that gillyweed??

No, silly! Neville gives you an "T" (Troll) in herbology!*

This is my mutant carrot. I didn't know that when I planted carrot seeds inside early last spring that: 1) you needn't plant carrot seeds inside, and 2) you best plant your carrot seeds spaced the way you want them to actually grow because it is not possible to split them. So when we transplanted in May, the clump of carrot tendrils went into the ground as-is, and then I planted more seeds spaced appropriately. The result is a nice row of long, bushy carrot stems alluding to the delicious veggies brewing beneath the surface. The longest, bushiest part of the row was the clump of transplants, the fruits of which were twisting arms and legs around each other so prolifically that they apparently couldn't grow under ground anymore and, thus, started oozing towards the light - albeit stunted and, well, ugly.

So I pulled the mutant carrot up to see what it looked like. If I get ambitious (boy, if I had a nickel...) I might pull them apart and try to make diorama figures out of them, kind of like you see in Joost Elffers's book, Play With Your Food.


IN CRAFTING NEWS... I have none. More WIPs coming soon, though - a bear, brasilian jasper, and a Lake Superior homage!

* Harry Potter reference. Gillyweed, a squishy and tenticley substance, allows you to breathe under water for one hour. Taken orally.

As the Garden Grows...

Bam! Three days in a row of posting! Although this is just a garden update.

Here you can see how the garden started in modest terms back in May, when we transplanted all our seedlings into it:


And here you can see that, while some seedlings perished, many more thrived and were joined by the superfluous plants we bought from the neighbor girl's school (those are the biggest ones):


Now the corn is definitely more than knee-high, the peas have run their course, we've harvested our first row of lettuce, the carrots and onions are beginning to peek above the soil, and the beans and zucchini are flowering:


AND...we have tomatoes and peppers galore! I've been able to step outside for fresh herbs. This gardening thing is pretty awesome.

Yes, it does look strikingly bare

Upon closer inspection, the plants we started from seed in March/April and transplanted about a week ago don't look so great. I'm hoping it's because conditions outside are naturally more harsh than the ideal of a windless, temperate indoor room with twelve hours of sunlight each day. We'll see. We're learning that some things should not be started indoors, and others should be painstakingly spaced from the outset, and others we could have started even earlier. Whatever...I'm excited to see what we get.

They're alive!

This is the future garden site, although it is now totally un-sodded (about 96 square feet maybe? I don't know) and there is chicken wire around half of it. Classy.


And here are the seedlings:


The peppers have not come up yet, which is a little worrisome. Everything else is doing GREAT. And there's two or three ladybugs that have taken up residence amid the sprouting greens.

Hopefully I'll get myself together and start a slew of marigolds today because apparently they help keep pests (like rabbits, cats, squirrels, and cute-but-naughty terriers) from digging under the fence to feast on my veggies. I realize the squirrels will just climb over the fence, but I can only do so much.