Random pictures from the Spring garden

First are the Aronia berry bushes in bloom. We planted these last year and got about five berries from three bushes. Well, actually, the pups got them! This year the Aronias are literally covered with blossoms. And they are all on the upper parts of the bushes, so unless the dogs can figure out how to get a footstool out there (mind you, I'm not discounting that possibility entirely - they can be very clever about getting things they want) then we should actually get to taste some Aronia berries this year.



This is a closeup picture of a strawberry blossom. If you look closely, you will see that I am probably going to have some competition for the ripe fruit later - more competition than usual, anyway. (The dogs have also developed a taste for our ripe strawberries.)



We have a medium size backyard pond that we put in ourselves over the past two years. This is a picture of some of the ground cover that's creeping around the rocks on the edges of the pond. The stuff on the right is a variegated sedum, and the stuff on the left is a variegated creeping thyme. The stuff in the middle, of course, is a rock. ;-)



This is a wider angle view of part of the pond. It has three "tiers" - each of which is a pond and which feeds into the next lower pond via a waterfall. The final waterfall into the largest of the three ponds is shown here, along with some of the irises we've planted alongside.



This is what we call our "Rose Tree." It's a lovely crabapple with the clearest double pink blossoms that just blooms like crazy every spring. The blossoms smell just like tea roses, and perfume the whole yard while they are in bloom. I just wish the hard little green crabapples could be used for something besides compost!



And, that's it for now. I'm so happy it is spring, aren't you?

More Garden Pictures - Growing Challenge

As promised, here are a few more garden pictures from last week. We basically had ONE week of spring - it went from three inches of snow and freezing temps overnight to the 40s and 70s, then to the 50s and 90s - in about ten days time! So, we took the opportunity to put out most of the garden. What a job! But, most of it is in now, so all that's left is mulching, watering and weeding for a while.



Here is one of our gorgeous huge home grown tomato transplants. That's a two gallon grow bag it is growing in, btw, and the plant itself is over a foot tall by about 16 inches wide. I'm sold on grow bags - at least until I can find a more sustainable alternative. They can be reused several times, and fold flat for storage when not in use. They grow nicer plants than the hard plastic pots and they use less plastic. This is a variety called "Fourth of July" and is a hybrid we've grown for several years now because it is so early (49 days.) We grow other tomatoes, but so far haven't found one to beat this one for sheer earliness and overall productivity - although we'll be trialing several early heirlooms over the next couple of years to see if we can find one that comes close but is open pollinated.



Here is a picture of where our early tomatoes are planted. We decided to do the landscape fabric mulch thing this year because we let the weeds go last year. This will keep our weeding down a lot - especially once we cover it over with several inches of mulch. It will also cut down on the amount of water needed for these very thirsty plants. The side of the garden shed is white and faces south, which should also allow us to capture more energy for early growth and flowering. We planted six Fourth of July tomatoes here and two of the heirlooms we started.

That's our approximately thigh-high rhubarb down at the end of the row, towards the back of the picture. It's spreading over some of the perennial green salad onions, so I'm about to go yank a few stalks and see what early spring rhubarbish treat I want to make with them.



Here is a picture of one of the transplants in the ground. That is one of the large kind of tomato cages - the extra sturdy five foot kind. So you can see how large the plant is already. We were hoping that by pampering them, they would suffer little setback and would keep on growing as quickly as possible. So far so good.

Catching up time, for real this time! Also Growing Challenge

Whew, what a busy last couple of months.

I've still been cooking and living as local as I can, but I just haven't had time to blog about it. Around the time we had a death in the family (early March) I was also looking for full time work because my husband's job that's sustained us for the past four years and allowed me to very nearly complete my own degree, ended with little fanfare. Unfortunately, that's the way it goes with grant-funded research, and to be honest we were expecting that might happen with the economy and government expenditures being what they are at the moment. But finding out for sure kind of kicked everything into high gear over here for me.

So for several weeks I was working part time, going to school full time, and seriously looking for work, in addition to all the things I do here at home. Long story short, I finally found a great job! AND, it's close enough I can walk to work! AND I go in early - early enough that when I get home there is still plenty of time to garden and putter around the house if I want.

At any rate, I was all set to get back on here and update all my challenges and such, and then the computer I was using blew up. No warning whatsoever - just...dead. I had backups - I'm a career geek, you see - but I still had to move everything to a borrowed computer for a few weeks and then from there on to my new work computer, reinstall all my programs, reset all my passwords, import all my old bookmarks and also finish up some final work at my old job, and then take a bunch of final exams for school, and then get everything ready for going back to work full time...and then there was the garden.

The garden, I'm happy to say, is doing wonderfully. Despite all the challenges this spring brought (including freakishly long winter weather - you can see three inches of snow out in the yard behind this snapshot of one of our early tomato transplants - and this was during the first week of MAY) we managed to start, grow and transplant pretty much all of our own starts this year. We started about a dozen different kinds of tomatoes, including some heirlooms we want to trial this year, about 6 different kinds of peppers, two kinds of eggplant, red and gold coin onions, two kinds of broccoli, heirloom watermelons, and six kinds of basil! We already have tomatoes - yes, little green ones the size of the end of my pinkie finger - showing on the vines we planted out just last week. Those tomato transplants are some of the nicest ones I've ever grown and in spite of the really late start everything is getting and the over 90 degree weather we had the week we set them out (necessitating twice or three times daily watering until they "took") we should still have the earliest ripe tomatoes we've ever had here. If we're lucky, they'll be ripe by the end of June!

One of the funner parts of the whole garden thing this year has been trading extra transplants and starts with my friend AtomicWombat. I thought *I* was growing a lot of seedlings this spring - I swear she started enough this year to supply a small nursery! So she and I are trading a few tomatoes and some peppers that we have extras of, thereby increasing the variety in our plantings, and some of my wayward chives, raspberry canes, oregano, mints, and shallots starts found a good home in her new garden.

I bought a pressure canner this spring as well, so I can can local meats and homemade soups and stews and low-acid vegetables so I can have room in the freezer for all the stuff that'll be coming out of the garden soon. So far I have canned several jars of "pulled pork" (a southern delicacy my husband just loves) from some local pork roasts I got earlier this year, the rest of the elk stew meat we bought this winter, some red trout that I wanted to can and see how we liked it, and various other odds and ends. I'm planning to can some lamb stew meat that we bought locally just a couple of weeks ago from Lau Family Farm, plus some ready to eat sloppy joe mix from the local ground beef we have left - also from the Lau's. With my going back to work full time this summer, we'll need some convenience food - and making it ourselves from local foods is better for our health and better for our budget.

Right now I'm researching the sorts of herbal teas I can make here at home from things we are growing in the garden or in pots. This year my big thing will probably be raspberry and strawberry leaf tea. We have raspberry shoots shooting up all over the place, so if I have to cut them down I'd prefer to make something yummy out of them rather than just compost. Compost is good, but it doesn't warm your belly in the middle of winter like a nice pot of homemade herbal tea. :-)

I'm going to post this and see how many other pictures of the garden I have that I can put online tonight. So, brb with more pictures....

Clouds are lifting! (In more ways than one) - Growing Challenge

Well, to say it's been stressful around here this past month doesn't even come close to telling it like it is. But things are looking up.

The winter seems to have finally decided to "take a hike" - at least for a little while! We found our first snow crocus blooms today, and it was a real boost to our mood. The yard is a mess from not cleaning things up properly last year, but I think we're all on board with getting it cleaned up as soon as possible and then keeping it in better shape this year.

I opened the doors today to let in the warm, fresh spring air - and cleaned up my funny little balcony off the living room. It's the weirdest thing, I've rarely seen anything like it - it's only four feet wide but over 20 feet long, and hangs out over the garage on the level below. We really didn't know what to do with it the first year we were here. But the second year, it occurred to me that it would make a lovely "Hanging Garden" of sorts, so I tricked it out with a bunch of my potted plants that like to spend the summer outside anyway. Then I bought a small table and a cheap umbrella. Then I noticed that there was an outdoor outlet on one side. And that our wireless reached out there, too....Viola! My own Internet Cafe! And so it has been every year since.

It's still way too early for my potted menagerie to go out on the balcony, but it sure was nice to sit out there today and enjoy the sunshine. But then I noticed that the "view" wasn't all it could be - the driveway and flower beds below were filled with winter's trash - leaves and twigs, mostly, that had blown in over the fall and been covered by snow most of the last three months. So I got off my duff and got a fair bit of that cleaned up, and the rest is scheduled for tomorrow.

Then I toddled off to the side yard and had a go at the cloche. I pulled out all the dead onion leaves - the Evergreen White Bunching onions were still going strong, even after spending the entire winter uncovered and un-cared for. I'm going to pull them out tomorrow and plant them temporarily in a couple of buckets until I can get the garden tilled, and then they will go in their own little corner out there somewhere to live long and prosper. I love this variety, because they don't bulb - they just keep dividing at the base like humongous chives.

Speaking of chives, we noticed today that mine are peeking up through the mats of mulch in the herb garden, so I need to go clear that area out, too. I promised my very good friend Atomic Wombat some starts this year if she wanted them, so I'll probably go ahead and pull a few nice clumps out and pot them to give to her later this week. Goodness knows I have plenty. My chive bed, which started as maybe a dozen or less quarter size plugs and a few seedlings four years ago is now about four feet by six feet long. Chives are something that apparently do really, really well here. Maybe it's all the potatoes. *snicker*

So, slowly but surely I'm clearing away last fall's mess and waking up the garden to this year's spring. And I'm finding that as I do so, the clouds are fading away and the sun is shining more brightly. The weather isn't looking too bad, either. ;-)

Salad Table, Day 31: Growing Challenge

Well, the first of the transplants for the salad table are doing very, very well. I think it's looking quite likely that I will be able to harvest a small Valentine's Day salad for my sweetie and me.

I changed the setup I had planned (again) by recycling some foam peanuts into a draining medium and water reservoir for the grow bags I actually planted the salad greens in. I was trying to keep it on the cheap by using stuff I already had on hand, especially stuff that might otherwise need to be thrown out. So I snugged each growbag bottom into an about four inch layer of peanuts, making sure that some of the drainage holes on the side were kept free and clear and above the intended water line.

Here is a picture of one of the lettuces, close up! I can't wait to have our first home grown salad of the year!

What's going on in the kitchen this weekend?

Homebrewing: I have two fruit wines and a simple sweet mead that need to be bottled. I have another bottle of concord grape wine in the storage room that may also be ready to bottle, but if I can get the three I have upstairs racked and into the little single serving size bottles I bought, then I'll be doing well! (Update: the plum wine apparently isn't ready to bottle yet, once I brought it up into the warmer house, it began to bubble again! So, I guess that one will wait for another couple or three weeks. The mead and raspberry wines are bottled, though, and I even "prettied up" a few bottles for a picture!)

Salad Table: I will have transplanted nearly all the salad starts by the end of this weekend. They are actually doing pretty well! The lettuce is about three inches or more tall. The shallots are sprouting like mad and should be ready to start cutting by next week some time. With luck, the lettuce will be ready for a first light picking in a couple of weeks. Maybe I can serve my sweetie a home grown salad for Valentine's Day. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Cheesemaking: I decided to go for broke and make a batch of Cambozola. It's a Gorgonzola/Camembert hybrid that we just love melted on fresh, hot bread. Since we have fresh hot bread nearly every day now, I figured I'd give that a try. It's also a cheese we can rarely find here in the grocery stores, and when we can find it, it's generally 12-14 dollars a pound. So economically, it's a very good candidate for home cheesemaking. If it works, I should be able to make a little over a pound of it for just a bit more than the cost of a gallon of milk.

Dark Days Challenge: I am still trying to settle on my DDC meal to document for this week. I'm leaning towards oriental food (something we eat a lot of and love) but I can't decide between chicken or pork based dishes. We have both local pork and chicken in the freezer right now, so I could do either. My sweetie is nursing a cold this weekend, though - so I think chicken would be a good idea. I can make him bunches of chicken soup (the roasting chicken we got from a local source here is about an 8 pounder, dressed, so there's plenty for several meals on that one!) and still have lots of meat left to make other dishes.

At any rate, I'll have pictures for all of this up at intervals over the weekend. I have some step by step on the Chicken Udon Soup I made tonight, but it's been a long day with the mead and wine bottling and nursing a sick husband, so it may have to wait till tomorrow!

Salad Sprouts, Day 7

Things are moving along pretty well with the (hopefully) future salad patch. Nearly all the seeds have sprouted, and most are getting their first true leaves. Some of the sprouts were getting a bit tall, so I took the cover off both seedling starters and moved the lights down to just about 2 inches above the tops of the leaves. I also set up some simple reflectors with aluminum foil to make sure the seedlings get all the light they can. I'm not too worried about the longer stems - I'll just bury them up to their leaves when I transplant, and all will be well.

This weekend I decided to finish getting my freezers cleaned out. We had a really busy summer this year and although I managed to keep up with some of the fruit processing, a lot of it just got cleaned, de-seeded and put into freezer bags. As a result, our freezer was starting to run out of room! So I hauled out bags and bags of frozen fruits and made purees, jams, syrups and canned whole fruits over the weekend. We now have about 100 jars of various fruit things on the counter. It was worth it, though, if only for the fact that I found four one-gallon bags of Idaho Huckleberries we hadn't eaten yet from the last time we went pickin'. Huckleberries look like blueberries, but the flavor is many times more intense. Think of the most luscious blueberries you've ever had, and add to that the flavor of the very best, sun ripened blackberries, and you'll come close. If you've never had Huckleberries (REAL huckleberries, not the so-called "garden huckleberries" you can buy seeds for in the catalogs) then you are seriously missing out. Take my word for it - you must fix this - and the sooner the better. Huckleberries are one of the very best things about living in this part of the country.

With what I canned this weekend, plus all the jarred fruit stuffs we already have in the storage room, I think we probably now have enough jam to last us about three or four years. I'm going to have to seriously find new things to do with some of our fruit this summer, or we'll soon have a jam backlog that no amount of biscuits can fix.

Wow, that was fast!

It's been just three days since I started some cold-season greens for the salad table I"m working on, and already sprouts are poking up out of the seed starting cells! The lettuces and the chinese cabbage seem to be the first out of the gate, followed closely by the Bright Lights Chard. For onions, I dug through our very last of the shallots from Fall 2006, and found many that were still firm and sproutable. So I took a couple of dozen of them and pressed them lightly into some moist potting soil so they could begin to take root while I finish putting the main planting boxes together. I checked today and found they are almost all sprouting new white roots - I can't believe these things are over a year old. I'm beginning to think this project just might work out after all!

I've been doing some research, and have decided to modify my setup a bit. I'm going to put a couple of shallow storage tubs on the plastic table, and inside those tubs, set four rows of cut pvc pipe with drain holes. That's to form a water and air reservoir for the grow bags I'm planning to set on top. Each bag will straddle a pipe, with the perforated ends of each bag sagging/dipping down over the perf pipe into the water. The tubs I'm planning to use are clear, which might cause an algae problem after a while, but will also make seeing which tubs need refilling a bit easier. I'm using grow bags because I can swap them in and out of the table and light setup as needed, as plants become too tired to produce or try to go to seed on me - that way what is under the lamps is always fresh and at its peak. If I planted directly in the tubs, I'd have to dump the whole thing and replant, and that's harder to do, messier, and lowers overall productivity.

I have four kinds of spinach, 8 kinds of lettuce, some Red Russian Kale, Bright Lights Chard, and Tah Tsai chinese greens in the seed starting units. As soon as these are out, I'll likely start some herbs. The salad greens should be ready to transplant in a couple more weeks. By then, I should have the table, watering reservoirs and lights all set up and ready to receive them. I figure with luck, a month after that I'll be eating home grown salads again. Crossing my fingers, and I'll be sure to post pictures and updates as things progress!

The Iron Gardener

Our garden this past season was a mess. Every adult in the house was suffering from a serious lack of free time this year, so we didn't do a lot of the gardening things we normally do. One of those gardening things was to plant winter salad and braising greens under a cloche in the back yard in early fall. When we do that, despite our seriously cold and long Idaho winters, we generally have so much produce we are begging the neighbors to take some so it won't go to seed. But we didn't do that this year, and dang, I miss it!

So I'm seeing what can be done this late in the season to remedy the lack of home-grown greens. I'm going to go out the next day it's above freezing and see if I can clear out the cloche area and put up a new plastic cover. I'm starting some salad and cooking greens indoors under fluorescent lights to transplant out when I have the cloche ready. I'm also thinking about doing something new - trying to grow a salad table indoors in our sunroom. We have a bank of fluorescent lights and a plastic table that are currently not being used, plus compost and potting soil and enough garden seeds to supply a half dozen families. Instead of building a very shallow wooden planting box to put soil into, I am going to grab a few shallow unused rubbermaid tubs from the garage and set them on top of the table, with wicking material hanging into a five gallon bucket of water underneath. All the components I need to do this project are here at hand; the task will be seeing if they can be combined into a system that can relieve my craving for local fresh produce in the absolute dead of an Idaho winter! I figure this will be an acid test - an Iron Gardener challenge.

Stay tuned!