Week of May 21st 2012

I couldn’t tell you how many weeks I’m in with my garden at this point.  The plants are growing well and the few strawberries that came off the vine this weekend were delicious. 

What I have found recently though, again, once you start spending more time in your yard it leads you to think about the other things that you need to take care of out there as well.  In the last few weeks we have:

·         put up another fence – one that had been falling down all winter long, and as soon as the weather get’s a smidge warmer I’ll go out and put a sealer on it. 

·         Dug out the center of the lawn and put gravel in for our above ground pool – much to our dogs’ dismay since it’s reduced their bathroom space.

·         Put up the pool and purchased a saltwater filtration system, all of us have some sort of issue with chlorine and it is more eco friendly in the long run.

·         Planted more bulbs in the front yard – hopefully the gardeners won’t pull them up – yes I have a gardener, although recently I’m wondering why – since I seem to do most of the work anyway

·         Harvested the first batch of lavender and hung them to dry

·         Harvested a batch of basil and cilantro – basil immediately went into the processor for Pesto and the cilantro I froze – I read somewhere that it was better than drying for flavor, I’ll let you know if that’s the case.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon fixing the drip system in the front – again from the gardeners, I guess the weed whacker really does a number on those rubber hoses and they apparently don’t care that they’re there.  Well really Steve worked on the drip system after I gently reminded him of the problem by turning it on while he was out front watching me trim back the roses and attempting to trim the maple – I’ll have to do some research on that one since I don’t really know what I’m doing but it seems that the tree is really trying to make itself into an impenetrable bush and I have to figure out what I can trim back without killing it.

So where does that leave us?  Well waiting for plants to grow, I may be able to harvest some spinach this week and replant to get another few batches before the end of the season.  Lot’s of watering and puttering and if I’m really smart about the whole thing I’ll start with a plan of attack so that my wanderings in the yard actually lead to something productive as opposed to small projects here and there that help but don’t actually look like I’ve done anything at all. 

Until next time.

Week 5

I think that Farmville might have done me a disservice in the area of instant gratification.  I’m realizing as the sprouts are just starting to pop through the ground (all of my transfers except for a single sunflower died), gardening takes a lot of patience.  Unfortunately patience is not something I’m known for, as I wander through my yard day after day, I search for sprouts in empty boxes and am practically begging them to grow at an abomidable rate.  Another small downside of gardening is you tend to spend more time in your yard, and if you’re like me, your not so great looking, untended to yard. So this weekend while I was willing the plants to grow I got out and really looked around, realizing that I wanted to spend time out here and if I was going to spend any number of hours on any given day, I’d really like something nice to look at.

So out came the trimmers to tame down a wayward camellia tree (I know they’re supposed to be bushes, but this one stands almost 10 feet tall with blooms at the top and it’s really pretty) that was encroaching on our gutter and a butterfly bush (I honestly don’t know what it’s called but it blooms 3 times over the summer and is really, really pretty too, thank goodness the woman that owned the house before us had an eye for color and need in the back yard).  Once we filled the green can and tamed the 2 plants, I looked around again for what could be done easily on a Sunday morning.  I spotted a table and set of benches that are well built but look a little worse for wear, to the point that no one wants to sit at them for fear of splinters or staining from the wood, after a few minutes searching for a sander we went to town on the tops and sides of the benches and table, a few coats of polyurethane later we have ourselves a nice seating area on the patio to spend our warmer afternoons and evenings on.

With a little bit of time left in the afternoon and feeling very “Earth Mother Hippie”, I wandered around the yard again thinking about what I could do to keep my green momentum going, as I realized I had no more space in the green can and no real money to start plunking away at the more obvious things I spied my ignored rose bush, for some reason the less I do with it the better it grows, full of blooms that were going to go to waste quickly if I didn’t do something with them, so I trimmed back all of the beautiful blooms and searched for a “rose water” recipe on the internet, found a wonderful blog listed below and got to conjuring up a batch – As my husband calls it.  With a decent batch of rose water in my fridge and a start to a more livable yard I figured, the sprouts can take a little more time to grow, that way when they do start looking like a real garden I’ll have a nice place to sit and look at them – and if things don’t smell so great I’ve got a very nice batch of rosewater in my fridge to help out.

Rosewater Recipe

Week’s 3 and 4

We have achieved GARDEN!

Last week was such a blur, between getting the last of the boxes together, ordering dirt – unfortunately, yes I had to order dirt and getting the dirt into the back yard I have been exhausted.  I can see why farmers aren’t up much past sundown, I’m surprised there isn’t a joke about them falling asleep in their dinner, Thursday, Friday and Saturday I barely made it through the beginning of any of my shows.  But the good news is, the boxes are made, the ground was leveled and turned, the dirt was hauled up the hill, and finally Saturday afternoon the plants were in the ground. 

I did end up having to re seed quite a bit of my crop, but I figure that will just give me a staggered crop and more, late season vegetables.  Also I broke down yesterday and bought Strawberries, and herbs from OSH , I don’t want to have to wait 2 years for my strawberries from seed to actually fruit and the gnats that have been tormenting me for the last few weeks really did a number on the herbs I had been trying to grow in the house. 

Now if they can survive Tara Hills weather will be another story entirely. I was so happy when the weather turned last week and we had more than a few days of 70+ weather, but by yesterday afternoon, the temperature dropped back into the 60’s and the wind kicked up yesterday afternoon to almost gale force. I guess the plants are going to have to learn to survive that anyway but being the Bleeding Heat my husband always calls me I worry that the little plants aren’t big enough to survive. OH well I guess that’s why they give you so many seeds in the packages. Until next week! Check out the pics and hopefully soon it will be greener in the boxes.

Week 2

This week moved along a lot faster than I expected it to, we lost a few of our seedlings to mold, I think it’s because we’ve got them in the living room and with the humidity from the rain and the warmth of the heater I set up a bad climate for them to grow, I’ll try to re-seed when I actually get them in the ground.  In addition I think the spinach I planted bolted, so they’ll be more re-seeding outside, other than that the remaining seedlings look like they’re doing really well, the cucumbers and zucchini are getting their second set of leaves already and the corn that has survived is almost 6 inches tall.   It’s really funny how the plants grow at different intervals even though I planted them all on the same day, I’m just starting to see sprouts from the watermelon and sunflowers but I have onions and lettuce that are ready to be weaned out.  I did do some research on strawberries, and I’m thinking, the seeds that I stared will be good to put in a pot this year, from what I understand from the article I’m not going to get any fruit from them for at least 2 seasons, so I’ll go ahead and grab some starters from the local garden store when I get closer to planting in the ground.  With that I’m looking at getting things actually into the ground by the middle of next week if not sooner, I want to give the plants a few more days indoors and with the weather forecast I don’t want to start the hardening process until I’m sure we’re no going to get below 40 at night. 

On another up note we did get the bottom planter boxes finished, and we were able to use the rest of the good wood from our old fence, so thankfully we didn’t have any cost out of pocket this week.   On the downside we don’t have enough wood to start the planters on the upper level, but, since I know what size they should be now and since the dimensions we used can be made with untreated fence boards we should be good to go after the rain stops this week.   For the upper beds we’re making them 2 feet wide by 5 feet long, 2 boards tall and just putting some longer 2 x4’s in the corners to dig into the earth a little bit.  The lower boxes we made into an L shape for each of the corners of our lawn, one planter is 2 feet by 5 feet and the other is 2 feet by 3 feet so they frame the edges of our “grass” – I use the term grass very loosely, between the dogs digging and the doughboy pool we put up last year there’s very little grass out there – on top of that there’s nothing level about the yard itself so we’ve have a few more issues that one would have thought trying to get the planters into the ground a few inches and still have them look level or eye pleasing – my thought is that once the plants are in and growing well that there won’t be as much of an emphasis on the empty boxes.  The dogs are adjusting to the boxes as well – for a while on Saturday both Tara our shepherd and Zola the bulldog mix spent time hopping in and out of the boxes trying to figure out what they might be for and if they were edible – I’m sure they’ll try and do the same thing with the plants.

 I did some calculations for the amount of dirt we’re going to need and it’s almost double what I thought it was going to be, that makes sense though since I only planned originally to put raised beds on the top tier of our yard not down on the grass level but in order to get all of the basic plants I wanted I needed more room.   So hopefully this weekend we’ll have the raised beds done up top and have a local company deliver 3 cubic yards of topsoil/compost mix to our house to get the outside planting started.

I know I said I’d put pictures up, and I’m sorry I just didn’t get to it this week – I’ll try really hard to make a point of doing that this week.  Until then Happy Planting!

Week 1

Sometimes I think I want to garden because it seems that no one else in my family is interested in being outside and it gives me a few minutes every day to spend alone.  We've been in our house for almost 3 years but this year will be the first time we attempt to plant on a large scale (I use the words we very loosely - it'll be me).  I'm hoping that we get veggies and fruit at all since our last smaller scale attempts have not come out so well.  I've done my research this year and even put together on graph paper the plans for how I want to plant everything so if things go wrong it won't be for lack of planning.

We just started planting our seedlings last week and our starters are doing really well.  I know it's late in the season but since we live in Northern California I think we'll be fine, or we won't and that will be a learning lesson for this year.  On the downside it's been raining like crazy here the last few weeks and we're behind on getting the yard ready to plant the seedlings.  Hopefully I can get my husband outside with me for a little while to get the raised beds put together and borrow the rototiller from grandpa, we're using our old fence boards for the beds this season, mostly because we're broke but also recycling is good.  I'm not exactly sure how they'll come together yet but if I can get them to work right I'll post the directions.

As we get farther into the season I'll try to add some pictures and plans for how we did things, since right now most of it is in my head and I have no idea how things are actually going to work.  Wish me luck!