Another Garden Post

Anyone who might be there is likely to be tiring of gardening posts, I would guess, but I still have one more to share. Garden season is coming to an end and crafting in front of the fireplace season is about to begin.

In the meantime, one more gardening post.

Tonight I made my first soup of the season! With lovely leeks from the farmer's market and broccoli from my garden (which wasn't very photogenic), I made Molly's Broccoli Soup with Lemon Chive Cream. So good! I even got to use some garlic chives from the same (most helpful to this new-to-gardening-few-vegetables-eater) farmer at the market. I hadn't had the soup since last winter and had forgotten how just good it is. Good way to start soup season!

Must remember to keep the woodchuck out of the garden next year so I can make a whole lot more of this then.

As for the lack of crafting, beyond soup-making, I blame the apples. Which are seemingly never going to end. But, luck of all luck, yesterday this new, wonderful gadget was sent to me by my thoughtful mother. Now I can peel and slice the apples in half the time. And, as an added bonus, my waste bowl was not looking quite so equal to my cookpot (in other words, the peeler keeps me from wasting so much fo the apple). Too bad it doesn't cook them for me too. . .

Encouraged by Potatoes

Who knew that digging potatoes would be fun? It reminded me of the time that my family went digging for diamonds in Arkansas (no one found any) but I could eat what I found in my garden. And anyone who knows me knows how much I love eating potatoes. Plus, as an added bonus, potatoes take practically no effort to grow. No pruning or tieing up or constant worry over bugs, just bury them, add a little more dirt a few times, keep them watered, put up tomato cages, and dust for the obnoxious earwigs once in a while. And look at what came out of that little patch of dirt! I'm estimating that I have 3 pots of Yukon Gold Potato soup from my 4 little seed potatoes that I planted. Next year, I think I'll try growing the potatoes more vertically (although I plan to build wooden boxes rather than using tires) but, for a first try, this year was great!

And, as an added bonus, from under the dying potato plants (I was told that the potatoes would be ready when the plants started to die), I unearthed another lovely butternut squash. I so hope that these guys ripen before the frost hits!


I also have an obscene amount of apples, given to me by a friend who wasn't going to use most of the yield from his trees. These are being peeled, cut, cored (by hand -- I need one of these cool gadgets), mixed with cinammon, sugar, lemon juice, flour (a la Joy of Cooking), put into quart freezer bags, and frozen for wintertime apple pies.

If I can get back to cutting today, I plan also to make apple butter from my favorite canning book.

And, in the meantime, I leave you with a photo of my flower bed and my favorite snapdragon (my favorite flowers in general).

Three (French?) Hens

We picked up our little hens yesterday. Three Buff Orpingtons. Petunia, Mildred Pearce, and Georgia Brown. I don't know that there is much to say about chickens but Patrick and I are both very excited and looking foward to lots of fresh eggs in January.

Patrick built this lovely tractor for them (there is now chicken wire over the part on the left).

Dyeing

I never thought I'd really want to learn how to dye yarns. It's silly but there are so many great options out there already that I felt like I needed some parameters somewhere. But that was before I started gardening at my own house and read about a dye plants lecture at the local Weavers and Spinners Guild. I don't spin and I didn't (I've since been very generously given one which I need to learn how to use) have a fancy harness loom but those are both things I'm interested in so I went to the lecture (back in April) and was promptly convinced to join the guild. Then I looked forward all summer to this dye workshop which was held on Saturday.

Not only was the dyeing itself a lot of fun but learning about the histories and materials behind many of the dyes was fascinating! Above, left is cochineal which is a bug which is a parasite on cacti in South America. It makes a beautiful red/pink and was monopolized by the Spanish for 300 years and second only to gold in value of products from the "New World".

In the middle is madder root. I think I may try to grow some of this in my garden next year as it was my favorite of the colors shown (surprisingly -- I thought my favorite would be indigo). We may be a bit too far north but it never hurts to try. The yarns on the left in the photo below are done with madder root. Our batch didn't work out too well so I overdyed my roving (yes, it's true that I don't spin -- but I do want to learn!) with cochineal -- photos of that to come. But I'm willing to try again, for sure. This is the dye used for the reds in real Persian rugs. Always beautiful, right?

The last of the photo mosaic at top (the photo on the right) is a thing called oak galls. These occur when a certain wasp stings an oak leave and creates a kind of cancer in the leaf that grows into one of these galls. The insect lives inside and crawls out through a hole. These can be found on the forest floor, although rarely. She said that the basket in the photo represents half of FIVE YEARS of collecting these doodads. And she's a park ranger! I don't know what color they make but it sounds like a fun treasure hunt to search for them and give them a try someday.

The thing about natural dyes, as mentioned above, is that they are not particularly reliable. But that's part of the fun, really! All we did was mordant our yarns or rovings (with potassium alum) while the lecture was given and then the dye pots were heated and we all ran, full speed ahead, at the dye. It was crazy but a whole lot of fun! I'll post photos of my dyed roving once it stops raining here (it's been raining non-stop for the past two days) and I can get a decent shot.

Pickling Part Two

The pickling of the 4 beets I picked from the garden (supplemented by a few from the farmers market) and more of my cucumbers became quite a saga. I started it all on Monday, only to have the power go out about halfway through. It certainly made me miss my gas range in Brooklyn! The power stayed out for 8 hours! I've seen tornadoes in Oklahoma but that storm was quite scary, even compared. It blew down all of my garden plants and even blew a few pictures off of the walls in the house (before I closed all of the windows)!

But, luckily, I'd just finished the cucumbers (although not the "processing" as directed by my book -- the lids of the jars did pop so I'm hoping that that's good enough) and just poured the water off of my half-boiled beets and put them back in the fridge. They were finished today. I definitely could have used a few more beets but they're still pretty to look at! Fingers crossed that both of the batches are safe. . .

This enamel canning pot (even with a wire jar rack inside!) is the treasure of the junk I cleaned out of my basement earlier in the summer (the house was completely packed full when we viewed it and the sellers only took about 3/4 of the things away). It made the 3 days spent in the mildew and bugs kind of worth it. Isn't it pretty?

An Important Lesson About Carrots

Hmm. It seems that carrots take both more than 2 months

And less than 3 months

To be of a reasonable size. Or perhaps they need somewhat less than 3 months and more sunlight than the ones planted in June were given as the parsley grew to be a monster and cast its shade over their portion of the bed. Either way, these are some monster carrots!

A Wine Bottle Border and Finally Something Happening in the Flower Bed

We now live so far north that it seems to be quite difficult to get flowers in the growing season unless they are wild (we had 6-foot floxglove a few months ago!) or started indoors first. And I suppose that doing a better job than I've been able to do of keeping the deer and woodchuck at bay might help as well.

I always admired dahilas like the one above at the Brooklyn farmers' market. I'm so excited that my bulb worked out reasonably well. Even if the flowers from seed had a more difficult time and the volunteer roses caught some kind of disease or something and stopped blooming after about a week.

Here are the sachets I've put up in an attempt at deer control. Unfortunately, the cats find them quite appealing and keep pulling them over. You can also see my little concrete mushroom back there. Can't have a flower bed without some sort of cutesy little tchotcke. I saw little ones like this in England but had no garden or space in my luggage for a concrete thingy. I found this one here in Sullivan County! Just behind the mushroom are the most unfortunate hollyhocks. I love hollyhocks but so, apparently, to do all of my garden pests. Oops. I doubt that I'll get any flowers from these guys this year.

But at least a few of my snapdragons (started from seed) are blooming now. I think I should have thinned them a bit more to get more blooms.

And here is the wine bottle border. I don't remember where I originally saw this idea. But it certainly stuck in my head! I suspect that it was before we even thought of buying a house or having a flower bed that I saw this idea and filed it away in the back of my mind for "some day".

This whole how-to is fairly self-explanitory. All you do to "build" one of these borders is to collect wine bottles (it helps if you have European friends to save their bottles for you) -- preferably of approximately the same size/shape/color, dig a trench about the same height and width as the bottles, and then to bury them upside-down. We liked the way our border looked best when we removed the labels from the bottles (so that tiny bits wouldn't be peeking up) and buried them with only about 3 inches above ground -- it looked a too obtrusive to us with more than that -- we were going more for the look of green stones or something along those lines.

Refrigerator Pickles

An overgrown garden


yields a ton of cucumbers (these were just the ones picked in one day)

which make some lovely pickles. Very strange and interesting but good pickles. From this recipe (which seems to have a typo in that all of these ingredients fill a one-quart jar rather than a two-quart jar). We'll be making more of these ones for sure!

In the Jungle

Wow, the last week really got away from me quickly. But an upside is that I have a lot of things to share here now! Most immediate is a garden update since it's started growing like crazy and will look so different tomorrow that if I don't post these photos now they'll be totally irrelevant!


The corn is starting to look kind of like corn.


Cucumbers for pickling (I didn't realize cucumber plants had such huge leaves!)


Watermelon vine. Another branch of this vine is growing along the ground in between the edges of the raised bed and the woodchuck-deterring fence. I don't know how it's going to do out there but I figure I'll try leaving it and growing this bit up the vine and see which does better.


I'm doing a Square Foot Garden this year. Now that my garden has turned into an impenetrable jungle (I pulled about 2 dozen string beans off of those buxhes in the foreground while bending across the garden border, around a corn plant, and under my rampant roma tomato), I'm thinking I need to set about planning more carefully next year. Like watching out for placing plants with lots of small things to pick behind tall plants with only a few things to pick. I can't even see my carrot plants any longer. At least I got the parsley right -- it's growing more crazily than anything else but it's on the edge of the bed so it's only trying to crowd out the dill! Live and learn (I knew my first garden wouldn't be perfect but I have to keep telling myself that just the same).

When Phil Attacks

We've noticed a woodchuck (or groundhog, whichever you prefer) hanging around our house for some time now. I'd been told he'd attack my garden but I was waiting to see what would happen. Well, last Tuesday, he fulfilled his promise, as a woodchuck, and mowed down my broccoli, carrot tops, some parsley (there was luckily a ton of it), and, insult of all insults, sat on my dill plant. Now that's just mean!

In retaliation, Patrick has now dug a 50-foot trench, all the way around the perimeter of the garden, 9 inches deep and 12 inches wide. We buried a chicken wire fence all the way around.

Yesterday morning, on our way downstairs, we noticed Phil nosing at the edge of the fence but unable to get at our tiny garden (hey, Phil, what about those other plants there, or those there, or that grass over there?) A small but satisfying victory!

Now if we could just get a gate built so that I can get into my garden. . .

After the Rain

It rained and rained for about a week. And my garden is all the happier for it! I'm sure that the last time I took a look at it, there were not any peas. Now they are almost ready to be picked. I know what's for dinner tonight!

How the Garden is Growing

It's doing pretty well. Especially the parsley (which I'm sure is entirely thanks to Melissa's lovely marker). Although something has been munching on my bush bean and cucumber seedlings. I need to read up on what to do about that. I can't see any sign of a bug on or around the plants whenever I look for any clues.

Over the Past Weekend

Some more great friends came to visit (photos of their room soon to come -- hopefully the sunny weather will hold out so I can get some good shots this afternoon). Coffee was consumed (by most) from the new Italian coffee maker given as a housewarming by generous friends the weekend before. (Patrick has always used an electric percolator -- which isn't supposed to make good coffee anyway -- which I bought for him for his high school graduation!)

Impatens were planted in the sadly neglected window box (when we moved in, it contained 10-year-old fake greenery).

A cute old bench was found in the basement and given a shady new home under the One Big Tree.

A lawnmower was purchased and the "lawn" mowed by Patrick (as you can see, there really isn't much grass but it was still growing quite long).

Poppies were identified (by the ever-wonderful Melissa) and promptly, upon being given proper recognition and a proper weeding, burst into full bloom.

Lilac bushes were admired, in lieu of our own giant lilac bush at the corner which had to go.

Walks were enjoyed.

And ice cream consumed.

And, last but not least, a compost bin was built (according to the directions in this current favorite). We managed to buy only 1 sheet of plywood for the whole project, using salvaged lumber for the rest. We also found a gallon of orange exterior paint which had been abandonned at the paint store and was subsequently sold to us at a steep discount. More photos to come when I've managed to paint the completed bin (when finished, it will have 3 tiers like the one shown here, plus the lid, which does, since this photo was taken, have a complete roof).

The Lilac Bush at the Corner

before (Feb/Mar 2010)

after (April 2010)

It had to go. It was sad but it was way overgrown and was planted right back in the foundation. The stump that Patrick wound up digging up looked like it came from a medium-sized tree. And this was a lilac bush. Now the corner looks naked but at least our foundation is no longer at risk.

I'd like to get some sort of evergreen (that doesn't look like a "Christmas tree" -- Patrick is adamant on this point and he isn't adamant on very many points) which could live in a container to cover up the meters and such on the corner. This is the approach to the house (although it is actually the back of the hosue) and I don't think that the meters make a very attractive welcome mat.

Another Mystery Plant Query

I had such success last time with my Mystery Plant that I thought I'd try again with another one. These plants are only on one corner of our house and they look quite strange so I'm tending to assume that they were, once upon a time, purposely planted there. It is fairly shady on that corner so, in order to have survived for all these years, assuming that Elsie planted them when she lived here, this would have to be a shade-loving plant.

A Red and Pink Weekend

One of our overgrown bushes (although we plan to keep this one! -- we've cut down about 6 others which were less attractive.) Does anyone have any idea of what kind of plant this is? (eta: It is a Flowering Quince -- thanks Melissa!)

*This is, by the way, the view from the TV Room window.

A honey bee in the mysterious pink-blossoming bush Flowering Quince. I find the number of bees in this bush highly encouraging as I only yesterday received my seed packet for The Great Sunflower Project.

A pink flower pot from Liberty of London for Target. It will soon have basil planted in it (I need to either find a Dremmel Tool to borrow or some gravel to put in the bottom before I plant any seeds as this is one of the all-too-often-found pots without a drain hole.)

A new, pink English Daisy -- the first flower in the newly-dug flower bed. Although we also planted a lot of seeds. It is nice to have at least 2 (we have 2 English Daisies) actually flowering flowers instead of just a spot in the yard of dark dirt.

I'd never seen an English Daisy before but they are rapidly becoming a favorite. These tiny little flowers are only about an inch across.

Our one and only big, real tree is starting to grow some red leaves.

A stoneware paint pot (complete with handle) with a reddish-browinsh transfer from the Red Barn "Flea Market". We'd seen the sign for the Flea Market on 17b almost every day and always meant to go and check it out. It turns out to be a completely fantastic garage sale in a lady's red barn, more than an actual flea market. But completely full of treasures. We bought another green glass lampshade for our planned de-fluorescenting (we have those industrial-style, large, in-drop-ceiling lights just now) of our kitchen.

And the peach tree continues to blossom!