first harvest

We've had a somewhat dismal summer in terms of sunshine. I'm not really complaining, I know most of the country is broiling and we are still at the blissful highs mostly in the 70's stage of summer, which is nice but boy is it wet. The lack of sun, the lack of dry days where we can get out and take down the trees that are blocking the little sun we are getting in the garden and the crazy (CRAZY) amounts of rain mean that our garden, instead of providing the vast amounts of vegetables and herbs for eating and preserving that I dreamed about this winter, is waterlogged and looking a little sad. The only thing rocketing along are the potatoes, maybe I should have just planted potatoes.

The rain has also washed away much of the local strawberry harvest. Picking started late and ended abruptly less than two weeks later. My mom and I went out on the (surprisingly sunny) last day that any strawberry farm within driving distance was open for picking and brought home 17 pounds of berries. They aren't as sweet as I'd like, what can you expect when they didn't get much sun, and I had to go with full strength pectin instead of lemon juice or low sugar pectin because I worried about getting it to set, but an evening of topping, chopping, mashing and cooking and we are stocked for the year with 18 jars of ruby red strawberry jam. The jam shelf in my make shift-basement stair landing pantry (it's on the project list to expand the couple of shelves into a much bigger, nicer pantry soon) is half full as the strawberry joined the rest of the marmalade and a few jars of apple butter from the fall. I love seeing bursting with mason jar pantry shelves. I suspect that if I want to keep filling up my shelves with home canned goodies I'll be doing more pick-your-own and farmers market buying instead of picking from my garden, but oh well. All that rain keeps it green here, right?

digging in

Oh the garden. It seems like it's been a looooong time in coming. And it's still not done. Not that it will ever really be done. Or big enough. But I mean done enough to plant. We've got plants and sets to go in and I think we are past our frost date. I think. I hope.

Because we've got so many things that need to be done in the spring- grass to plant, flowers to put in, trees to chop down, firewood to get in and stack, chickens to chicken dance with, the garden will be smaller than I'd like this year an the paths are just hard ground with patches of mulch here and there where we filled low places. But still, there's soil and walls to keep it (sort of) in. So we are almost there. Ready to plant.

Since we've got a lot (a LOT) of fallen rotted wood and leaf mulch laying around, we are trying something new this year. Hugelkultur, which I found while puttering around Pinterest looking at woodland gardens. The idea, as I understand it, is to fill the bed up mostly with rotted wood and then composted leaf mulch and then soil on the top. The plan being that the wood both rots into nice, mulch soil eventually and in the meantime it hold water from the rain, releasing it to the plants as needed. At least that's the plan. We'll see if it actually works once we have all the soil in and the plants planted.

Where are you in your garden plans for the summer?

the ladies

Our little chicken are, predictably, getting a lot of love and attention (how could they not with all that fluffiness?) and so they are very used to us already. They eat quite happily out of our hands and hop up onto our fingers  and cheep loudly until we open the door to the bathroom (their temporary home) when the stop and look at us expectantly, hoping for food or playtime, which we generally offer up with smiles and coos.

The older ladies, also predictably, are a little more standoffish. They were raised among lots of other hens in a large farmyard with no kids around. Although they had lots of dogs and are absolutely not afraid of Nigella. In fact, this weekend, as everyone but the cats puttered in the garden, it became pretty clear who is in charge of the backyard (it's not the dog, in case you were wondering) But little by little, they are getting used to us. They don't run to the other side of the coop when we approach anymore and once we catch them when they are roaming (still a little tricky, but we're getting there) they are happy to be held and pet and generally loved on.

It's been a long time since we had chickens in our yard. In Charlottesville, of course, we had the neighborhood coop, but it wasn't quite the same. Having them clucking and boking away as I check the bees or watch the kids or just walk to the car makes me smile. Every time.

 Two eggs a day doesn't hurt either.

prepping

Thank goodness spring evenings are long. Time enough between dinner - which has lately been eaten hurridly on the porch instead of at the table, the better to get it doen quickly and get outside - and bedtime to have a few precious hours of time in the yard. I won't say garden, because it isn't, yet, but we're getting there. There are so many things I want to do to the yard, too many. Landscaping and grass for playing and tree thinning here and planting there and the vegetable garden and the bee yard and the chicken yarn and a place to sit and eat and laze the summer days away. Too many to realiztically get it done this year. I keep reminding myself that there will be other springs and summers to turn our little bit of neglected woods into the something we have in mind.

Right now we are focusing on the impending needs. Seedlings that need to go into the ground in the next week, bees that will arrive in a matter of days, chickens that need to be bought before it becomes too hard to find what we want. So it's a few beds, instead of many. And if the coop is unpainted for a while, well, so be it. There is no pretty path to the bee yard, just an area wide enough to walk where the blackberries have (I hope) been whacked back into oblivion (the rest have been left alone because...well...blackberry honey sounds pretty good, doesn't it?) There is a lot of bare earth where the bread oven or the flower beds or the grill or the grass will go, when we get to it. In time. I just have to keep chanting that. All in good time.

and on the last day of winter

Over the course of the day we got more a foot of new snow. It snowed and snowed and snowed, all day long. The UPS driver was not very pleased to be delivering three big boxes in the middle of the storm, but he did, trudging down our road with them because he didn't want to get the truck stuck. And ohhh, I'm glad he did. I've been waiting for those boxes. For weeks, and also for years. It's been almost three years since I took a class on beekeeping and talked Will into this crazy plan of mine. In between we've moved twice, acquired another degree as well as two kittens, spent a year in an apartment and bought a house in the woods.

When I ordered our hive (from here, in case you are interested in one as well) I didn't expect it to arrive in the middle of a snowstorm. But it was the perfect end to winter (technically the end, at least) something so purely summer in my mind that I didn't mind digging out the car this morning. Because summer is COMING. It must be. The hive is here. The bees are heading our way (not for another month, but still, coming!) Bees!

in the garden

Well, I couldn't resist. After spending another hour or so yesterday in persuit of clean closet nirvana, the day became just too sunny to stay indoors and so Evie and I headed out to work in the garden. Heaven.
Last year we plowed up four looooong rows running along side out house and while this worked fine, I decided that I really prefer shorter beds, it makes weeding not seem wuite as daunting somehow to have lots of little beds instead of a few huge ones. Will also hated trying to mow between the rows to we wanted the grass out between beds, so a lot of digging is in order. Add to that the fact that we've decided to fence in the veg garden to make it look more formal and the rearranging needed to actually have a square garden and in some ways we are starting all over again.

The good news is that I love to dig when the weather is still a little cold. I'm not sure if it's my Northwest upbringing or the English blood in my veins but I really enjoy being out in the garden when you're only warm enough if your digging and wool sweaters and wellies are a must.
I remember spending hours out in the garden with my dad, getting things ready for summer, when we lived in Idaho and so gardening in just barely above freezing must be imprinted on the gardeners portion of my brain. I hate digging in the heat which makes summer weeding around here kind of a no-go, but I'm trying not to think about the hot days to come and am just focusing on this perfect gardening weather.

Evelyn, apparently, doesn't agree that it's perfect garneding weather and decided to dress for snow. Or maybe it was a fashion thing.
Yesterday I managed to get the garden staked out and the first two beds re-dug while Evie collected worms and today I'm hoping to do a few more. My sugar snap seedlings are actually ready to go in and I'm on the hunt for some of these tomato towers which I've used before to give the plants a head start. And now that I'm going to have small beds that can each be devoted to one crop, I'm starting to look at things like adding extra manure to the bed where to potatoes will be and trying to figure out what specifically the corn will like (lots of compost if the popcorn that went wild in the yarn waste corner last year is anything to go by!)

This won't be one of those elegant vegetable gardens, I imagine it will look pretty utilitartian once it's going, although I have plans to grow morning glories and gourds on the fences and have sunflower seedlings started to grow along the front side (where they won't block the rest of the garden from the sun). If I'm lucky it might look like a smaller version of this. But if I could I'd make my garden look like this, isn't that gorgeous? Someday... although, really, I think a full to bursting vegeatable garden is pretty gorgeous regardless of the ornamentation, but maybe that's just me.

How are your gardens coming along? Does the cold but sunny weather get you ramped up or keep you inside?

whispers of spring

There may be fresh snow on the ground outside (not much, but snow none the less) but under the window in the office we have been seeing the first signs of spring. I even got to start digging in the garden beds last weekend. Much as I love winter and cozy fires and lots of knitting, I'm ready to get my hands dirty in the garden.
Are you planning a garden this year? Planting anything exciting? We're hoping to expand out beds and grow a lot more tomatoes (for canning) and popcorn (for popping, of course) How about you?

Planning, Plotting, Dreaming (and a leetle Scheaming)

Briton came home from school yesterday on a mission. A mission to earn money. At first he wanted to pay all of his friends 10 cents to help make cards and then sell those cards (to his friends presumably) for $1 which, you know, from a Donald Trump point of view is probably pretty smart. But from a be-a-good-citizen-in-our-small-town point of view, not so much. His next plan involved mowing lawns (which he estimates will take him about 5 minutes per lawn, humm) or to make belts like the ones we made in the boys sewing class. When I explained how much he would need to spend buying belt making materials though, he moved on to plants. And since I had the seed catalogues out and my gardening notes from last year open, well, plants, I can do. (And yes, I know it's only January, but last year I started seeds in early February so it really is time! Eek!)
He has been more interested in gardening this winter than he was during the summer when the actual gardening was going on. It could be that he'll loose interest once we have to, you know, actually dig in the garden. But he's spent a good amount of time thumbing though my John Seymour book lately - we've gone over the difference between root crops and vine crops and have discussed the possibility of a) bees (possible, if I can talk Will into it) and b) goats (probably not, considering the look on Will's face when we brought it up - oh well) as well as whether or not we could make cheese in our kitchen (kid after my own heart, my boy).
So while I went though the Southern Seed Exchange catalogue (my best luck seemed to come from seeds from them last year - thank goodness for note taking!) Briton looked through the rest of the pile and debated his options. His first thought was roses but he was put off by the cost of just one plant and quickly moved onto seeds, settling on sunflowers and tomatoes, and maybe zinnias, which, you know, I think might be some good choices. Neighbors of mine beware, my son will be knocking on your door come spring. If he can keep up with the watering. ;)

Oh, and storm door? Up. All me. Ok, it needs a little adjusting. But I did get the door up while my husband lay prone on the couch with the stomach flu. And it's so much warmer in here! Yay! I did, however, decide that it's time to get a girl drill. Will's new, fancy drill, which he loves, is a little to crazy powerful for me. I need a lightweight, not a lot of vroom vroom kind of drill. And if it's a fun color, even better.)

Autumn in a Bowl

This week I've been fighting one of those wont-go-away kind of colds that has left me wanting to do nothing that involves getting off the couch. And since Will is also wrestling the same cold, dinners have been pretty simple affairs around here. Lots of pasta and pizza and tortilla wraps. The kids have been overjoyed and the lack of dishes has been much appreciated by the adults.
Yesterday afternoon, taking advantage of what I can only guess was a Dayquil induced energy spurt, Evie and I dug up the last of the carrots and the first of the parsnips and sweet potatoes. Washed, peeled and chopped, the tail end of our garden produce made a very yummy and very warming roasted vegetable dish for last nights dinner (and today's lunch). This recipe was inspired by this and this (which was recommended to me by a reader and is still on my list to try) and then also using up what was on hand. I should forewarn you that I like strong curry flavors, particularly when I'm sick and can't smell much of anything, so if you aren't a huge curry fan, you might want to tone down the spices a little. But if you want something cozy and easy one of these nights and chicken soup is not in the cards, here you go.
Curried Root Veg and Beans


1 cup of peeled carrots, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
1 cup of peeled parsnips, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
2 cups of peeled sweet potato, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 tsp curry
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
2 T olive oil
1 T sherry
1 can of Great Northern Beans, rinsed
Dressing - 1 T tahini
1 tsp sherry
1 T olive oil



Toss everything except the beans in a bowl till well coated (hint - it's easier to toss the veg with the spices first and then add the oil and sherry) and spread out on a cookie sheet. Roast at 400 degrees, turning every once in a while, for 45 minutes or until everything is soft and starting to carmelize. Slide into a heat proof bowl and gently toss in the beans and dressing. Top with chopped pecans and sour cream.

*The kids and Will ate this over pasta but I ate it straight. Good both ways it seems....

Garden Clean Out Chutney

I've had it on my list to make chutney all summer long but somehow it always got pushed aside by jellies, jams and sauces, not to mention everyday cooking. But finally, finally, I got around to it yesterday and now I have two lovely jars sitting in our pantry waiting to be eaten up throughout the winter.

I haven't always been a chutney person. When I was doing my student teaching, my mentor teacher gave me a jar of kumquat chutney for Christmas. It looked beautiful, but I had no clue what to do with it, particularly on our ramen noodles for dinner budget. It sat in our fridge for ages, eventually getting stirred into some kind of stew I believe, before it went bad. What a waste. But hey, I was young and clueless.

When Briton was about two I fell in love with Indian food. Hard. I'd had curries before, but mostly of the homemade and basic variety. It wasn't until we were living in Dublin, where curry take-out is the norm and fantastic Indian food can be found cheap in almost every neighborhood center that I really discovered it, and chutney.

And then our supper club had a burger extravaganza and one of the offerings was a lamb burger with goats cheese, good mustard and sweet-savory chutney (try it! you'll never look at a burger the same again!) and I finally got what all the chutney lovin was all about.

It's a good thing I finally got around to making some then, eh? I'm calling this Garden Clean Out Chutney because most of what's in it was what was left when I ripped out everything from three of our four beds. But I could also call it Pantry Clean Out Chutney, because it also has some strange-o things that I pulled out of the back of our shelves (chili spiced mango from Trader Joe's anyone?) After reading a bunch of recipes though I think you can use pretty much any combination of fruits, veggies and spices that you have hanging around, but here is what I made:


Garden Clean Out Chutney

4 cups diced green tomatoes
1 cup diced green apples
1/2 cup raisins
1 small jalapeno, finely chopped
1/2 cup chopped dried chili spiced mango ( you could just dried fruit, but then you want to add chili powder to taste)
2 cups apple cider vinegar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1 T salt

Mix all ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan. Simmer on medium until everything has muddled down and reduced by about a third. Pour into sterilized jars (this makes about 2 pint jars, I used 1 pint jar and one of my tab top jars because I needed an excuse to get down my Wide Mouth Jar Rubber Box and have a laugh) and process as you would with jam.

Sunchoke Harvest

When Will, Briton and I (Evie wasn't born yet so sadly she missed it) lived in Dublin, we were devotees of the local farmer's market that was held every Saturday morning in the play yard of one of the local elementary schools. And I say play yard because it was just a yard, no play equipment. I guess Dublin children don't need play equipment at school. They're tough. Or maybe just more imaginative.

Anyway, back to the farmer's market.

This market was wonderful. WONDERFUL. To the extent that farmer's markets here in the US, nice as they are, just can't quite compare and tend to be a let down. To be fair, this market was more like the street markets that are in Paris than a normal farmer's market. You could just about buy everything you needed food-wise for the week there. And we often did. Fresh meat and fish, cured sausages, pesto, mustards, muesli, dried fruit, cheeses that would make a gourmet shop here weep with joy, hot samosas, cold bottles of cider and vegetables...oh the vegetables. Specked eggs sat out in a shallow box nestled in newspaper and you had to know to bring your own carton to carry them home. Truffles, the first I'd ever seen in person, were kept safe in a rice filled container (we splurged and bought a teeny one for risotto..ummmm) and a whole table was filled only with a zillion varieties of potatoes, tiny ones, huge ones, blue ones, faintly pink ones.

Not everything was familiar. I had no idea, for example, what to do with celeriac, wasn't quite sure what a quince was and was a little baffled by those bumpy, ginger looking things called Jerusalem artichokes. But the stall owner, a sweet older man who knew his customers by name and could tell you just the thing to do with that particular variety of potato, was patient and filled me in as I bought something new on each visit. The celeriac wasn't bad, although Will wasn't a big fan, the quince were pretty darn yummy, but kind of a pain to deal with, but the Jerusalem artichokes, now those were a hit.

We ate them quite a bit over the almost two years we were there. Mashed, roasted, pan fried, in soup. They appeared almost as often as potatoes on our table I think, which, given that this was Ireland, is saying something. But in the years since we've been back, I haven't really had much chance to indulge in eating them since I almost never find any here. So when I was puttering through seed catalogs during the snowy evenings last winter and came across some tubers, I had to try growing some.

When they arrived I read a little more about their growing habits and decided that their height (8-10 feet) would be a little cumbersome in the veg patch, and as they are part of the sunflower family (news to me, but OK. Although that explains their other name - sunchoke) I planted them with the flowers.

All summer they grew, and grew and grew. And drove Will nuts because they kept falling over onto our gardenia (which I think they killed, but we're hoping for a comeback). I would tie them up to the fence and they would get bigger, and heavier, and the string would break, and down they'd go again.

Today Evie and I were sprucing up the yard for this weekends home tour when I decided I'd had it with propping the stupid things up. I knew they weren't done growing but oh, well, I'd just go without Jerusalem artichokes this year, and cross them off for next too. Because really, they did fall over all the time, and ten feet of plant splayed across the flowers isn't very pretty. So up they came, and with them, about ten POUNDS of tubers. Holy cow! After forking out all the tuber from the first two plants I pulled, I decided to leave the third (I mean, wow, 10 pounds out of two plants is a lot!) for later.

Evie and I bagged them up. Then she tried to haul the bag behind me as I went to the compost heap which caused the bag to break, so then they got loaded into the doll stroller until the doll needed it when they went back into a pile on the ground and finally back into a bag that I promptly put on the counter in the kitchen, just in case she got any more ideas.

I scrubbed and sliced up a few to saute for my lunch and they were divine, just as I remembered. Nutty and rich and somewhere between a potato and an artichoke, which I know sounds strange but there you go, it's the best I can do to describe them. If you get a chance this fall, pick up a few pounds and give them a go. I know they look weird and knobbly but you don't need to peel them, just give them a good scrub and your ready to get cooking. And if anyone out there is already a fan, got any recipes? That is one big bag in my fridge, I'm open to suggestions...

Homegrown Popcorn

This weekend Evelyn was puttering around the yard with a mini wheelbarrow, hauling things here and there. Dolls from the porch to the treehouse. Piggie from the picnic table to the steps. Leaves from the raked pile to back under the tree (gee, thanks Evie) One of her trips took her by what was the popcorn patch and she returned with four ears of corn that I'd missed when I was ripping out the stalks last week.
Our sweet corn did dismally this year, ripped to shreds by the freak storm we had mid summer, right about the time that the ears were just starting to look promising. We ended up giving all the underdeveloped ears to the chickens and stuffing the stalks into the compost bin. But on the other side of the fence, in a the spot where out compost bin used to be, the popcorn did fantastically. I ordered it on a whim, not even sure popcorn would grow here, and not wanting it to cross pollinate with the regular corn, we tossed the packet of kernels in the uneven but apparently well protected little plot and just let it go. No watering, no tending. Just sun and rain. Maybe we should take that approach with the whole garden!

We started pulling ears mid August and they've been drying in a bowl in the dining room ever since. But I hadn't decided how (or even if, they are so pretty on the cob) to pull off the kernels. The cobs Evie found were a few that I had thought weren't ripe enough, or pretty enough I guess, to bring in. But now they were dry and vibrant, and the kernels popped off easily when you ran your fingers along them. The kids sat on the neighbors driveway and pulled off the red and purple and golden kernels.Popcorn is, in general, a favorite around here. A tab top jar of unpopped corn has a permanent home on the counter near the stove. Since we don't own a microwave so we pop it the old fashioned way, over the stove with a little oil which, I must say, I kind of prefer. No fake butter taste, no burning hot bag, just the rattling lid on one of our heavy pots. It reminds me of being a kid and watching my parents pop corn in the giant avocado green pressure cooker, our heaviest, biggest pot.

The popcorn was perfect. Sweeter than the variety we usually get and whiter too. At Briton's request I added melted butter and sprinkled it with a little sugar and salt. They ate it down to the last kernel.
Add it to the "in next year's garden" list - more room for homegrown popcorn.

One Thing

How did we do last week? I saw in comments that people made progress and hey! that's the name of the game, right?

So here is the sweater. Although it was hot in the days after I finished, it's cooled down now, especially in the mornings, and so it's nice to have something cozy to pull on when I head out to wait for the bus. It is way to big however. Kind of hard to keep on my shoulders at times. When I read through the notes on Ravelry I was worried about it not being long enough, I didn't think about it being too wide. I may try to block it again but I think it's just going to be a way to big cozy sweater. We all need one of those anyway. I may actually try making another one, taking a few inches out of the width. We'll see. Knitting may be like sewing for me, I never like to make the same thing twice.

How did your projects go? Any pictures? What is your One Thing for this week?

My goal is to get out and winterize the vegetable beds. We've been working so hard at painting the house that it's gotten neglected a little. Time to shut down most of the beds and plant a few winter crops in the one I'll leave open a little longer. I have discovered that, much as I enjoy a beautifully landscaped yard, I still prefer vegetable gardens to flower gardens. I can't seem to feel much interest in keeping my yard and flower beds weeded and tidy. I do it the same way I clean windows or bathrooms, because I must. But I love digging in the vegetable patch. It's cathartic and rewarding and now that it's cooler, my fingers itch to get out there and dig and weed and rip out overgrown plants. I'm already plotting over what to plant next year if I want even more beds or longer ones or if what we have is enough (never!). Hopefully the weather will hold and I can take a morning that isn't filled with work or projects or a visit to the apple orchard with Evie's class and get digging.

One Thing
A new Monday habit. Share the one thing that you want to do this week, just for you. Click to enter below and link back to your blog so we can see all the fun things you do!
So, what will you be up to this week?

Saintly Figs

Ok, maybe saintly isn't the word for them, consecrated? Except they weren't actually growing in the cemetery, so maybe not that either.

I love old cemeteries of any kind. I find them peaceful and beautiful with their overgrown plants and their hard to read gravestones. One of my favorite places in the world is a tiny cemetery tucked into a hillside int he Wicklow Mountains. In college, Will and I used to take out lunches to one on the University of Oregon campus and sprawl out on the shady grass between the tombs. But to combine an old cemetery and a fig tree, well, now you're talking!

Last summer one of our neighbors turned me onto a fig tree that overhangs into a nearby cemetery. It is growing in a garden next to the cemetery who's ground is much lower than that of the level of the graves, making the upper branches easy to reach and the figs easy to harvest. Perfect, except by the time I learned all of this last year, the figs were all but gone and I was only able to bring home enough for a few mornings breakfast. This year I was determined to get up there when the tree was bursting with ripe fruit.

This morning Nigella and I set off for our walk with a big basket and crossed fingers, and boy did we hit the jackpot. Because I know that there are other who pick from this tree (the owners have given full blessing, they don't like figs - crazy people!) I only took the fruit from one of the many branches. But even with the one branch limit, I was able to fill my basket up with fat, firm fruit, perfect for a second batch of my grandmothers dried figs. Heaven. Of course, after I'd finished picking and was attempting to hold the leash and basket with sticky hands, I realized that some dude had been sitting under the next tree over reading to himself while I chatted to the fruits I was picking about how pretty they were. So now there's one more person in Charlottesville who thinks I'm nuts.

The last batch turned out exceedingly well. The figs were smaller to start with the the variety that grew on my grandmother's tree, so the dried figs are only about half the size, but they taste almost exactly the same, and I've already worked my way through a third of the batch, which doesn't bode well for my plan of having enough dried fruit to get me through the winter. But hey, a few more early morning tromps through the cemetery and I might make a dent in the amount of figs we consume throughout the year.

My garden is coming to the end of it's season and I have to say I learned a lot about growing vegetables in Virginia. Corn, for example, will need to be planted in a more sheltered area (as seen in the total destruction of the main crop during the microburst, whaaaa) The number of tomato plants could easily be doubled, or tripled, if I want to make sauce. The sauce I made a few weeks ago was delicious, really and truly yummy, but it only made one large jar, which we finished off last night in a lasagna. Kale is crazily hardy, if only I can find something to do with it. Pumpkin vines whithered in the heat while squash and cucumbers went bonkers. Next year I'll want more pepper plants, more herbs and probably less carrots since I'm the only one who really likes them anyway. The popcorn was a hit, the beans went out of control and were all ripe at the same time, so next year I'll plant them in succession.

I'm puttering with the idea of pickled squash, or maybe canned squash if I can get my hands on a pressure canner for a few days. and Evelyn and I made a jar of grape jelly this weekend using the grapes from Will's "vineyard". One jar because, well, his vineyard is two and a half (the half is so little it didn't produce any grapes this year) young plants. That and Evie discovered that Nigella really likes grapes, so a good third of what we did manage to grow went to the dog.

It seems weird that, technically, the summer is almost over. Or at least the gardening part of the summer. Not that there wont be more canning to do in the next few weeks. In fact, the rest of August and September will probably see our pantry fuller than it's been all summer, starting with a fruit share that I've ordered for tomorrow and carrying on through the rest of the peaches, plums and apples. But school begins for both kids next week, my boy turns eight (EIGHT!) tomorrow and despite the heat, my mind is starting to think fall. Now if it would only cool down enough to actually feel like fall...That, would be fantastic.

Ter-maters

When Will and I were in college, we had this monster, MONSTER vegetable patch in our way overly large for two college students yard. And when I say the thing was big, I mean it. Right now our garden is plenty big for the four of us (which doesn't stop me from making plans to expand it) and I'd guess that it's a third the size of the space we planted back then. I'm not sure what we were thinking. Actually, Will was thinking I was crazy and just went along for the ride and I had - no surprise here- dreams of growing most of our food. It hadn't occurred to me to get chickens at that point, probably good since we were poor as dirt and couldn't even splurge on things like, say, tomato cages, so building a chicken coop would probably have been beyond our means a bit, not that we wouldn't have done it anyway.

Because we were experimenting in pretty bare bones gardening, our cageless tomatoes were held up, sort of, with some sticks tied together with yarn. Not much help. By August the tomato patch, which was oversized, even by our garden's standards (I had started tons and tons of tomatoes from seed because I had heard it was hard to get them going, and then they all lived, and I couldn't stand the thought of killing any of my little plants so, yeah, there were a lot) was a giant tangled jungle of brandywines, sweet one thousands, yellow pear and beefsteak tomatoes. We couldn't possibly eat that many tomatoes. Not even if we'd had them for breakfast lunch and dinner. I wanted to preserve them, somehow, and sauce seemed too complicated with all the warnings about botulism and spoiling and the need for a presser canner, which, given the fact that I didn't have tomato cages, was not high on my priority list of things to buy.

In the end, I dried them. I took all the screens off our windows, hosed them down and filled them up with slices and halved tomatoes, stacking them inside the barbecue that we got at a garage sale for $5 and which almost blew up the first time we used it (scared us off of gas grills for years!) My reasoning was that the barbecue would help collect the heat, covered in black who-knows what as it was, and I could close the lid each night to keep the evil raccoon that lived under our house from eating my garden largess.

Surprisingly, it worked. I had stacks and stacks of sun dried tomatoes. Most went into baggies and then into the pantry, some were packed in jars of oil, and for the rest of the year we ate sun dried tomatoes in and on and with, just about everything. Not a bad way to dine for a couple of starving students.

I've never gone that crazy with tomatoes again. It was too much work to keep up with the harvesting and drying. And besides, we use our grill too often these days. But I did plant eleven plants this year. Most of them heirloom varieties that came in a mix from Southern States Seed Exchange with a few garden center romas thrown into the mix. Despite the heat of the summer, it wasn't until last week though, that any of our fruits were ripe enough to pick. But suddenly we have tomatoes coming out our ears. And isn't that always the way, you wait and wait for that first garden tomato and then all of a sudden you have more than you can handle.

So far I'm not drying them, although I have a scheme that involves Will building a solar dryer like the one my grandmother had in her yard. But that really hinges on how bold I feel about harvesting the figs off of two trees down the road (the owners are away in France all summer, last year I took some here and there, but for this to work I'd need tons. On the other hand, they are just falling to the ground up there...) In the meantime, I've decided to try making sauce.

I still don't have a pressure canner, but after perusing many, many recipes, I think I've come up with a plan that will produce a good sauce without killing my family. Batch number one is in the works right now, cut into chunks and roasting in the oven (no oil! Oil is bad it seems in terms of canning) making our whole house smell wonderful. And if at the end of the day, it doesn't taste good enough to jar up, well, I've still got another basketful of ripe beauties waiting for some other recipe, and several more that will be ready tomorrow.

And now that I think about it, we do need to pull off all the screens to paint.

The Hideous Deck (Not Quite as Hideous Now)

So you know how you can not notice something has changed until you see it in a picture. Like, say, you gain ten pounds, but you look the same in the mirror, and then you see a photo of yourself and think "Whoa Nelly! What happened there?"

Well that's our deck. Not that it had changed, it's just that I've spent the past year (ack! We've owned the house a year next week!) walking past the deck and just not noticing. It was always ugly, beefy and red and looking a little like a tick on the side of the house. But to make matters worse we've been using it as a staging platform for the past year. We cast the concrete counters out there, we've painted cabinet doors out there, we've stored toilets and wood scraps and bags of drywall that need hauling to the dump. And, over time, a lot of crapola has ended up under the deck to add to it's general ugliness. But it wasn't until Will was taking photos a few weeks ago so we could photoshop some house colors in that I realize what a pit it had become. But NO MORE.

OK, so a little bit more. There is still stuff under it. We still need to sheath the sides and finish painting. But still, there is a plan. And white paint. And dark grey with a tad of blue paint that will also go on the house.

It's been hotter than, well I can't really say without being rude, let's just say really hot, and then quadruple that, and you get the picture, but the evenings haven't been horribly humid so Will and Briton and I have been working on getting the white paint on the upper parts of the deck this week (Evelyn has been adding to her collection of chigger bites while we paint by rolling in the grass) and while it's no where near "good" it's at least starting to look better. It helps that we pulled most of the junk away where it awaits various craigslist/freecycle/Habitat Store/dump destinations. And there are large blotches of different shades of blue gray all over the back of the house where we tried out different colors. But still, better.

Tonight we are hoping to do the floor and the base, and next weekend we'll hit the Habitat store to look for something to sheath the sides in so you can see all the bits of wood Will still wants to keep down there. In time we want to add uprights and beams across the top to create a private outdoor space as the rest of our yard is very, very exposed to the street. We like being out with the crowds, but sometimes, like when I want to drink my morning (decaf still, blah) coffee outside in my pj's, it would be nice to not show off my crappy old yoga pants to the whole town.