Harvest of Gold

A sink full of lettuce to bring to my boss today.  He was very excited about the idea of salads and BLTs and it ignited a taste for a BLT for me as well.  This zucchini, the first one harvested, has already been shredded and is ready for to be put into zucchini bread.  So excited!

Broccoli flowers.  So pretty.

Almost invisible is the yellow spider living in the broccoli flowers.  With his legs curled up, he looks just like a little bud.  The flowers were clean when I brought them in, but a couple hours later this spider got busy and had started a web already.  Pretty cool. 

The fun just doesn't stop.

In Bloom

Well, I've been eating broccoli and lettuce for a while now, and I read somewhere that if you let a head or two go to flower, it will help produce more heads of broccoli, so I did it and look what pretty flowers broccoli make!  So pretty and delicate.  And these flowers are residing in the little dots that make up broccoli!  It's ridiculously amazing.

So weird, it reminds me of something I heard on NPR recently about the caterpillar's transition into a butterfly.  An entomologist explained that when the caterpillar is in the chrysalis, it turns into this liquid goo and from that goo a butterfly will emerge, which is shocking because you might assume the caterpillar just grows big wings and the body shrinks, but it actually liquefies most of its body.  And the weirdest part is if you slit a caterpillar open, inside are the wings!!  OMG, the butterfly is inside the caterpillar all along!  And so are the broccoli flowers, scrunched up inside the teeny green buds that are our favorite parts to eat.  Enjoy those broccoli flower buds, folks.

I think two of my Brussels sprouts aren't a sprout at all.  It looks a lot like a cabbage to me.  I guess that's okay since I'm still eating the Brussels sprouts from last year, and growing thrice as many this year seemed a little foolhardy.  Cabbage is a welcome surprise! 

My buttercrunch lettuce is huge and I've been bringing bags of it to work for my coworkers.  I'm getting tired of salad.  Particularly when my tomatoes haven't popped out yet.  Oh, and look at those awesome onions poking their oniony tentacles up all around!  

I don't know what is going on with my zucchini.  Some of the fruit rotted before it grew more than a couple inches, and there are all these broken leaf stalks.  Does it do this to provide more sun to the fruit?  Did I screw something up?  DID THE DOGS TRAMPLE IT??

Still, there will be zucchinis to be eaten, thankfully.  More please!

These are my pumpkins growing in the semi-shade of the zucchini, doing very well, I think.  Goooooo, little pumpkins! 

Cucumber flowers mean that cucumbers are not far behind.  I don't care about cucumbers except for the delicious cucumber salad recipe I got from a coworker (which is heavy on the vinegar and takes my breath away) and I'm looking forward to trying that with my homegrown cukes.  Bring it on, baby! 

How these long things are supposed to turn into round, rotund, Rubanesque cantaloupe, I'm not sure, but at this point, whatever grows is going to be eaten and enjoyed, regardless.

And just because life is so awesome to see sprouting up, here's the pic I took at a forest preserve of a snapping turtle laying eggs right on the side of the road.  She's a brave one.  I don't know how smart this is, but there they are.

Maybe soon there will be baby snapper hatchlings scurrying into the water here.  I'm going to keep watching for them. 

And in front of my house, the columns on the front porch have always had sparrows but this is the first time I've seen babies.  There are three up there, on top of the column, but only one likes to hang its head out and see me.

It's probably wondering where the worms are.

It's a sad frown baby birds wear, but I think they perk up once they can fly.  Have a good life, little birdie!

Mmmm, Broccoli!

Hey man, I got the brocc.

It was good, too!  I had it steamed over a yellow potato and some cheddar.  Perfection!

So, this is the spread.  Things are growing, and it's not just weeds. 

The lettuce bed has the most stuff, mostly because the 50 onions really puts it over the edge in productivity.  6 marigolds are doing well but still small, the back is lined with sunflower seedlings that are coming up like gangbusters now that the weeds are pulled, and the foreground is wildflower seedlings starting to come up.  And, obviously, there are 2 big heads of lettuce and 4 each of red and green leaf lettuce heads behind them that are still growing.  It's tasty.

Brassicas.  Broccoli in the background, cauliflower in the center, Brussels sprouts in the foreground.  There are some miscellaneous marigolds around the edges but nothing else came up, not even the onions.  Peas and green beans are behind them, barely pictured.

Peas.  They are getting so big!  And there are some newborns down around the ground there.

This is the pepper and tomato bed.  There are 2 tomatoes doing well in cages, a couple peppers about a foot tall, a few tomatoes about 8 inches tall, a few marigolds, and 4 basil plants.  They're just not growing very fast. 

This is the brassica #2 bed, with broccoli in the background, then cauliflower, then Brussels sprouts.  Again, no onions came up.

Cantaloupe are the big ones and 8 cucumbers are hiding behind them.  A few onions came up here and there in this bed but mostly it's just weeds.  Reminds me, I gotta get more mulch.

ZUCCHINIS!  And pumpkins.  And a couple marigolds.  BUT ZUCCHINIS!

Look at those flowers!  They're going to yield me some awesome zucchinis!

They're in there!  Look at them!  Just waiting for me to eat them!

Marigolds.  Yay for deterring pests.

These are the baby cantaloupes coming in.  They look kind of long and cylindrical for melons, but I'm not picky.

These are the lupine.  Yes, they're lupine.

And another shot of the peas on the other side.  So eager!

The tomatoes have flowered so I know there are tomatoes coming.  Someday.  Until then I have to eat lots of lettuce.

First Yield

Having a mini-farm and still having to buy produce at the farmers market is irritating, but it's too hard to bring myself to eat food that isn't fresh this time of year.  My local farmers market surprised me on Friday with the most fragrant strawberries -- I could smell them wafting from 20 feet away.  So I bought them.  As well as meat and tomatoes and some fine looking zucchinis.  At home I made this low-carb feast that had me full to the tip top and singing the praises of the zucchinis.

That's a salad from my lettuce!  My lettuce!  THIS lettuce!

And a grass-fed burger with egg and cheese on top.  But the highlight of the meal was the zucchini.  I sliced them into medallions, put them on a baking sheet, added a can of organic diced tomatoes with juice, and grated fontinella cheese and a light sprinkling of feta on top, baked at 375º for about 45 minutes, and the result was quite possibly one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth.  I cannot wait for more zucchinis!  I'm going to make this every week until I run myself out of zucchinis!

Bring it, baby!  Bring me some zucchinis!

The broccoli, too, is almost ready to be harvested.  YAY!

There are a couple pumpkins coming up from the seeds I shoved in the dirt in desperation.  I'm not too hopeful.  No watermelons showed up.  A few peas have popped out of the dirt from seed, and I think two green beans.  No nasturtiums.  Not the heaps of results I hoped for, but I'm pushing it for time at this point.  My sunflowers are starting to peek up, as are the wildflowers.  The onions that came up are doing awesomely, but not even half came up.

Transplant-wise, the few things that made it from the house to the soil are doing okay.  Marigolds are starting to bloom, which I was hoping for because everyone is complaining about rabbits eating their veggies right now and I (knock on wood) have not experienced any critters yet.  A couple of the tomatoes and peppers are doing okay, but they're so far behind I don't know if they'll yield anything.  This makes me angry, but I'm breathing deep and encouraging them to c'mon up, enjoy what life they will have.  The lupine made it.  That's rather amazing to me, particularly given what I've learned about their extremely deep root system and now I'll have three squares of lupine in my garden forever.  Pretty cool.

Last week we had a couple days of rain, kept me out of the garden, but when it stopped my garden was full of weeds.

I'd been waiting for the seedlings to come up before I mulched, but with this many weeds I had no choice but to pluck and protect.  It took a couple days and I'm still working with certain sections, but I got it mostly mulched and it's doing better.  My back is the color of walnut from being out in the sun bent over so much.  I think this must be how my ancestors looked and it makes me happy.

Tonight may be the night I go home and have broccoli and a salad from the yard, and some chicken from the store.  One day we'll be able to have chickens too, and I'll be one happy girl when that happens.

Weed Me, Seymour!

Oh god, the weeding!  The millions of tiny little weeds!  I suppose it's good to know the soil can support life well, and I suppose it's good that I'm outside frequently, enjoying the fresh air and getting some much-needed sun (my back is a dark bronze already), but my calves and quads are stretched to the max from constantly squatting and bending, picking these damn things out of the dirt.  It's tedious!  I finally understand why they use herbicides.  NOT that I will.  But I understand it.

And my basement is flooding daily because the sump pump isn't doing what is required to get the water out to the veggies.  It's a failed system.  I'm not sure what to do anymore and I'm ready to quit the whole process and manually water from now on.

If my ancestors were farmers, they were stronger people than me, which isn't surprising.  But I'm working on it.  It's a work in progress.  Me, that is.  The mini-farm is already where it's going to be.

Setbacks, Slow-Forward Progress

Okay, so there have been many developments, none of which I've documented because of the constant developments and insanity.

First of all, the soaker hoses failed because I drilled so many holes in them that all the water came out in the first 6 feet and none made it to the end.  New hose bought and I let it just ooze water as it was intended to do, but then it took too long for the barrel to drain and the water was evaporating before soaking into the soil.  THEN I decided to drill holes again, but this time one shot clear through the hose but about every 12 inches instead of every inch.  This did the trick.  Water comes out at a reasonable rate, equally distributed throughout the length of the hose.  I'm trying to refrain from having a potty mouth in this process, but fuck, man, the hoses and water issues alone almost made me jump off a bridge.

Also, I started bringing out my seedlings to acclimate them to the outside and within a few hours of being in the direct sunlight, they all croaked.  Just shriveled up and fell over dead.  I lost all the sunflowers, carrots, Brussels sprouts, nasturtiums, green onions, wildflowers, lettuce, beans, and peas.  Gone.  Two months of effort shot all to hell.  One zucchini survived, a few pumpkins, a couple lupine, a few Galapagos tomato plants, and a  few peppers made it to be planted in the beds.  In the house I still have really immature broccoli, really immature cauliflower, really immature romanesco, and some Walla Walla onions that won't stand up straight.  SO!  Given that I had 6 flower beds (190 square feet of dirt) and not much to plant, I hit the nurseries and found some gigantic veggie plants for no more than $2 each, often $1.50 each.  I got 2 pea plants, 6 broccoli plants, 6 cauliflowers, 6 Brussels sprouts, a few tomatoes, basil, chives, some zucchinis, a bunch of lettuce, my favorite cantaloupes: muskmelons!, and a bag of 80 red onion starters.  Later I got a bag of 75 yellow onion starters, so there are something like 155 onions planted in my garden right now... yikes.  And then yesterday, in the pouring rain, I shoved a bunch of seeds in the dirt that had nothing planted in it yet, and decided to see what happens, so there are now more pumpkins planted, watermelon, sunflowers, wildflowers, bush beans, and peas.  At this point, I'm kind of burnt from all the disappointment and expense and if anything produces food, I'll be relieved.  This is the view from my bedroom now.  (Still have to do the mulching.)

All of this was going on when the house renovation stuff started.  Last Tuesday morning this big truck showed up at 7am and my roofing material was dropped off.  My construction salesguy said they'll start sometime this week, but Wednesday morning at 7:30 another truck pulled up and a team of guys with ladders began invading my yard.  These were the nicest, coolest guys and I loved every minute of having them pound away on my roof.  13 hours later, it was done.

Thursday morning at 7:30, another truck pulled up and a bunch of guys got off and started tearing off my siding.  I asked if they should be doing that, given that the replacement material hadn't been delivered, and they said yes, it was on the way, and they were in a hurry because there was an inspection scheduled at 11:30.  They pulled off the siding to reveal that the original siding was still on the house!  AND!  AND!  I could see where the original house started off, and where all the additions were made.

Here we have the back foyer on the far left with cedar planking.  In the center is the bathroom, which was an add-on from the original house!  The original house consisted only of what is my front room, dining room and kitchen (kitchen windows on the right).  Much later in the game, the two bedrooms and the back foyer were added, which included the cement and cinder block half-basement beneath these parts.  WILD!

Bathroom addition.

This is a photo of my dining room window with original siding, and beyond that are the two windows belonging to the two bedrooms.

Also, there was a south-facing window in the front room that was walled off and re-sided when they made the attic into a bedroom and put in the staircase.

And apparently they didn't get the house wrapped in time for the inspection, so the inspector left and couldn't return until 1pm on Friday, which set the progress back another day.  So, it sat, wrapped, until they were able to come back on Saturday morning.

And now it's done!  Well, everything but the gutters, and of course, it's done nothing but rain since then, and getting in and out with the roof dumping gallons of water on you is difficult.

So, Saturday afternoon, when I was supposed to be working on the neglected garden, I noticed that the front (which didn't need new siding, as it's protected by the porch and is a vertical wood paneling) and the new siding all around the house clashed really badly, were dramatically different yellows, and I ran to Home Depot and bought color-matched paint for the front.  I then painted the front of my house!

I need to paint the dormer and the trim still.  And get new address numbers for the house since those broke off in the removal process.  But my house is almost done.

To celebrate, I spent the weekend canoeing.

And fishing.

And now I'm ready to get back to farming.