Dinner!

Things are taking off like gangbusters.  (I think I used that word last year, but it's always so amazing what happens when the sun and rain get to work.)

It's downright lush.

Just in time for the 4th of July weekend, my onions from last year (as Rene Redzepi would call them, "vintage vegetables") have produced greens that are up to my chin, with big balls that look like fireworks at the top.  Most have fallen over from their own weight, but a few remain upright and they're pretty impressive.  I texted this photo to a friend and said that this is my onion, and if dinosaurs show up in the yard tomorrow, it won't surprise me.

Corn is looking good, some of it about waist-high.  It's ahead of the game as the rest is about knee-high.

I've already had three zucchinis.  Some are suffering from too much water, but I can't stop the rain so I'm just going to lose some.

The tomatoes are doing well, and I sprayed them last week with copper, so hopefully it will fend off the fungus for a while.  Though, with all the rain we've gotten, if the copper stuck at all, it's probably time to redo it already.  There are a handful of green tomatoes hanging about and I'm looking so forward to my farm eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions from my garden, that my mouth waters just at the thought.

Garlic scapes are my favorite thing out of the garden, so having such a successful crop of garlic growing makes me one happy girl.  I made pesto out of a batch, then made pesto chicken, and with leftover pesto chicken I made a homemade pizza with no pizza sauce, but subbed in garlic scape butter, and topped it with cheese and pesto chicken.  Holy cow!  Magic!

The lettuce looks good.  It's keeping me well-stocked with a daily salad and a grocery bag of lettuce leafs go to work with me daily.  All are pleased with the leafy goodness.  Also, the sunflowers are coming in about 18-24 inches tall in the background.

The corn I started from seed (not starts) is way behind the rest, but it's looking good mixed with the carrots and green beans (with an occasional vintage onion).

And I ate all these green beans last night in a green bean casserole with onions and wild rice.  Tasty!

The butterfly garden is starting to bloom.  Marsh milkweed is a lovely pink-lavender color.

Coneflowers look just about right.  Hopefully they'll get fuller and fuller each successive year and the sparseness of this year is just getting established.

I cannot remember these guys, but I got them because they're yellow.

And the parsley looks like I need to start eating more of it.

For giggles, I'll share what has happened to my $1 hummingbird feeder.

That is almost an inch of carpenter ant corpses floating in there.  They're attracted to the sugar water, crawl into the nectar flower, drown, and float to the top.  It's turned into a very effective way to get rid of carpenter ants.  My neighbor said not to take it down, it's doing double-duty because the hummingbirds will still drink from it, and it's getting rid of the ants.  I'm on board with all of that.

Speaking of my neighbor, I'm a very lucky girl.  The family who bought the house next to mine, in case I haven't mentioned this, is a landscaping family.  The dad works for a landscape company with his brother, who also lives there.  His brother's wife's family own a nursery and give them lots of flowers.  We talk plants all the time, and Juan, the homeowner, cuts my lawn.  No, he doesn't just cut it, he pampers it.  He weeded and fertilized the whole front and side yard, and it's a lush carpet that looks professional.

And lovely though the rocks are around the trees, I'm informed that I did it wrong.  As well as the butterfly garden.  And other things.  But when it gets less busy at his work and he's home earlier, he will fix it for me.  So I bake for him and his family every week.  They're going to put on a lot of weight if he keeps working on my yard.

My favorite new addition is this Strawberry Sundae pink hydrangea.  It's starting to bloom and I cannot wait for the pink to show up!

I recently had a visitor, too!

He said, "Hi, human.  I'm just sitting here chillin', but I would be really thrilled if you picked me way up there by your big pink face and talked like a baby to me."  So I did.

By the time I was done ogling him, the sun had hit the bricks and I didn't know where else to put him, so I set him in my zucchinis, where it's shady.  I bet he loved that.

Those are the adventures so far.  It's good to go out into my garden once a day and pick what I'm having for dinner.  It's kind of amazing and the thrill never wears off.

Burn Pile Gone!

There is a square at the back of my property that has been an eyesore since I moved in. There had been a shed there once, and the ground was dead. It was framed with some old, rotted wood, and the packed dirt in the middle was in need of something to occupy the space. I intended to seed it and make it grass, but it was a depressed area and needed dirt to raise it first. I just never got around to it.

It's quite amazing what happens in nature if you don't do something.

My ex had been using the area as a "burn pile", where he stacked all the branches and trunks of trees he cut down, including a sumac and two mulberries. The haphazard pile of tree debris prevented me from filling it and grassing it in, and odd things started growing there between the dead branches, some of which grew over my head last summer. There were two trees growing up through the debris last year, and this year they were so tall, they were above the power lines. I knew they had to come down.

An image of the pile last summer.

This is a mulberry that just appeared last year, with five big, thick branches coming up from the dirt, right against the neighbor's dilapidated fence. There's a part of the fence being held up by the mulberry in this picture. I hated that tree. This spring I decided to get rid of it and take it back before things started growing again. I had no idea what an undertaking that would prove to be.

It took weeks to clear the dead stuff away, which filled four of the large, 30-gallon lawn waste bags. 

It was particularly difficult as I had only a jigsaw as a power tool, and a hand saw. As I dragged branches and trunks across the lawn to break them down into smaller pieces, I discovered a pile in the back.

You can imagine my fury when I got to the back and found a pile of furniture, furniture I recognized as junk pieces my ex had in his apartment before he moved in with me. This is where he chose to dispose of unwanted furniture, a pile he always said we should start burning in a fire pit. When I reminded him we did not have a fire pit and there was a no-burning law in our town, he said we'd put it in the grill instead of coals. Nope, not acceptable, I'm not cooking food over mystery wood that could be full of chemicals or bugs or all kinds of things I didn't want in my food. Little did I know, the pile of things to burn grew, as I continued insisting we will not burn any of it.

So, there it was.  His junk.

When I looked closely, I realized it was a dining table (legs removed), a complete headboard and footboard, and a cheap computer desk made of composite wood and veneer. Was he really going to burn this? The dining room table was half metal!

Each week I filled my garbage bin with pieces. Thankfully it's just me in the house and I may generate one kitchen bag of garbage a week, leaving the remaining bin for anything else. I filled that bin to overflowing for a full month.

Yesterday I got started cutting down the two trees in the hole, and the mulberry a few feet away. All I had was a jigsaw, which I used to cut off all the smaller branches from the main ones, and then sawed the main trunks in segments with a bow saw until I got to the base. My arms were screaming. I wasn't sure I could do anything else, but I soldiered on.

Once the junk and trees were gone, I got to work on the hole. First I put down the plastic weed barrier, then a layer of newspaper on top, just in case, and finally dirt. It took more bags of dirt than I could count. I started with 7, found 4 more elsewhere, bought 10 more, and before I knew it I'd put 840 pounds of dirt in there and it wasn't enough. I just kept adding, returning to Home Depot over and over, sure I had enough and finding out I hadn't. Finally it was full, so I planted the tiny little white hydrangea in the middle of it. I grew up with a snowball bush in my yard, always loving the spherical blooms of white each spring, until my mom decided to trim it back, way back, and it never grew again. Now I have my own snowball bush.

By then I was so physically exhausted I dragged my arms and feet into the house and stood in the shower until I felt like I might be clean again.

Today, clean and invigorated, I walked back to see my little snowball bush, looking good, and the clear back yard I hadn't seen since moving in. What a relief! Now, if my neighbors replace that ugly fence, I'll be much happier again.

Now I have a stack of branches and trunks to get rid of.

2105 Mini Farm!

On November 6th of 2014 I cut the last of the Brussels sprouts, shoved some garlic in the ground, brought in the hoses, and bid my first mini-farm adieu.  And left it a ridiculous mess as the polar vortex headed our way and I hadn't the time or energy to properly pull and till it.  Spring would require twice the work.  And it did.

I was pleased to see the raised boxes survived the winter when the snow finally melted in March, but as soon as the snow receded, weeds started popping up in a few of them.  In April after weeding 4 beds, I heard someone interviewed on the radio recommending tarping your growing area to block out the sun and keep the weeds from germinating, so I tarped the remaining two beds, the ones with the most weeds.

 

In the four weeded one I got to work and discovered garlic from the fall was actually coming up.  I'd pushed about 75 cloves into the dirt on the afternoon that we were supposed to start a long-term overnight frost period, and I was fairly certain they would not do well going straight into dirt and frozen into a popsicle, but they came up so vigorously in April, it was as if I did exactly what they needed.  I was amazed.

 

Also I had onions coming up big and strong.  What?  Onions are not, to my knowledge, a perennial.  There were a bunch that were tiny and had never grown in the end of the summer when I harvested the onions and I figured they'd break down and become nutrients for the next round.  Nope.  These guys were coming back with a vengeance.

After the tarps had been on the other beds for 2 weeks, I pulled them back to find that all the weeds had died, except one particular type, which was huge and strong.

I don't know what it is, but it may be in the dandelion family.  However, its taproots are longer, stronger, and wider than any dandelion I've yet come across, and these monsters go over a foot down, looking like massive, branching carrots.  I hate them and the curse words that fly out of my mouth when I'm digging them out can sometimes be embarrassing.  I swear a lot when cooking, playing games, and sometimes when crafting, also.  Concentration brings out the potty-mouth in me.

So!  Last year I learned it's not enough to add all new compost and plant your veggies, you have to mulch to keep the weed seeds from germinating.  I gave up on the weeds early on last year, and I don't want a repeat t his year.  Luckily, my local village offers free wood chips for mulch on their Public Works property and I made a trip over with a few 30-gallon containers.  With one bed mulched, my brother came over to help me with Project #2 for the spring: digging up a perimeter around the house, installing a butterfly habitat on half, and mulching all the rest.  We got the 40-foot length of the north side of the yard done, where it never sees direct sunlight and only hostas and mint thrive.  (And creeping Charlie, which is starting to grow on me... no pun intended.)

I got started on the south side of the house on my own last Saturday, drove to the Village to get mulch, and as soon as I pulled up there was a loud pop and I saw wood chips fly off away from my car.  I got out to see that my tire was flat.  My not-so-old tire.

I looked around and there was a sharp, metal spike sticking out of the ground, almost invisible in the dirt, gravel, and wood chips.  Clearly there had been a sign here at one time and it probably got hit, but they left the sharp bottom of it in the ground to kill tires.

 

 

 A distance away was an orange cone, fallen on its side.  Hmmpf. 

Once again, my brother to the rescue!  He changed my tire and we hung out together at the local tire shop while they put a new tire on my car.  (BTW, the village would not reimburse me for this, but they did promptly remove the metal spike from the ground so it wouldn't happen again.)

Back to work!  The perennial butterfly habitat was about to happen!  I'd been to a local nursery and gotten a good, lengthy lesson on milkweed, butterflies, and creating a habitat.  It was not enough to plant milkweed for the monarchs, I needed to plant wide, flat flowers for them to land on that would provide nectar for them to eat.  The milkweed was only half of the requirements.  I learned stuff!  She recommended I put in coneflowers, daisies (my favorites!!) and other long-blooming natives that would feed them.

Delphinium in!

 

Daisies in!

 

Coneflowers in!

 And butterfly weed!  Three of them.  (At $10 per plant I was not ready to fund much more than that.)

 

All down the depth of my house in the front half are butterfly perennials, and there is a teeny-tiny lilac bush in the back, outside my bedroom window.

 

In a few days I came back and added mulch to the missing area to make the perimeter complete.  Good luck butterflies!!

Then the veggies!

At a local farmers market I picked up a small pack of corn.  I don't know why.  I've never grown corn before.  But with it in my possession I decided to try the Three Sisters method, but with zucchini instead of winter squash, and snap peas instead of beans.

Then I bought a pack of corn seeds.  I have no idea what I was thinking, but apparently this year I want corn.

And lettuce.  And peppers.  And tomatoes.  I'm not wasting time and space to grow broccoli that will just go to flower before I can harvest it, or Brussels sprouts, which are still in my freezer.  I got more green beans and more peas this year, and directly sowed the nasturtiums and sunflowers, though if you ask me where they are, I can't tell you because I don't remember.  From this point on, it will be a surprise.

Three Sisters, with the onions in the background.

Two bunches of multi-colored carrots.

Tomatoes, peppers, and a lone marigold sentry.  In the background is the tarp that killed the weeds.  I love that tarp.

More tomatoes and peppers, and another lone marigold.

These are the garlics growing up big and strong!  And plentiful.

Because 8 excessive heads of lettuce last year wasn't a lesson, I planted 12 this year, with a marigold for good measure.

Second-year onions, carrots, and all kinds of peas and beans.

A lonely lupine that survived the winter.

The dastardly weeds that keep coming back, with taproots from hell.  Maybe I should figure out if they're edible.

The 2015 season is in full swing!!