The 2016 Garden

I debated whether or not to put some plants into the raised bed this year since there's so much else going on. But I really do get joy out of seeing edibles grow out from the ground, so I headed to Home Depot one day and bought some seedlings.

This year we have sugar snap peas, spinach, broccoli, green beans, two kinds of tomato and some kind of plant that June got when we visited a local farm earlier this year.

We've already eaten broccoli, sugar snap peas and spinach, and the green beans are just about ready!

June can pick the sugar snaps off the vine, so she helps herself and her brother. (He tried getting one himself and he ended up ripping off half a plant!)

Another time, I saw Bennett chewing on something and asked him what he was eating. "Bro-kee," he said, with a little green sprout on his lips.

I looked over at the little plant and this is what I saw:

Ha!

Unfortunately, it turns out broccoli only has one big crop a year, but it does have little off-shoots. So sometimes June will go outside with a bowl and come back in with it filled with little broccoli florets. Maybe when it's truly done I'll pull it out and plant something else? 

It hasn't been too much upkeep this season, and we're loving it so far!

Garden Harvest

A garden update since I found a bunch of photos. I don't think I've blogged about the garden since it was only a few weeks old. 

The far side of the garden has gotten a little out of control. My two tomato plants grew to be humungous, and I just sort of ... let them?

The zucchini plant, which I had hoped would grow up onto a trellis, it turns out is not actually a vining type of zucchini, so it ended up taking up much more space than I had planned.

 

Even if the garden is a little wild, I do love it, and it makes me happy to water it, take care of it and sometimes just stare at it. Bennett really loves it too, and I have to keep him out of the dirt when I'm watering the garden because he loves the mud.

And now the harvest!

We have so many tomatoes that we can't eat them all. We've had tons of big, meaty beefsteak tomatoes. We've been eating them plain, in caprese salad, roasted tomatoes and a bunch of other ways. On top of that, I sent a huge bowl of tomatoes (plus the cherry tomatoes) to June's daycare for them to eat.

The cherry tomatoes are so good, and it seems like there are hundreds of them on there even after picking off all the ripe ones. 

We've been able to eat green beans from the garden about 6 or 7 times this summer, and they have been so good!

While the pepper plants have been fun to watch produce, they haven't been as successful. The peppers so far either don't get very big or they rot on the plant while I wait for them to get bigger. 

And lastly, the zucchini plant. I swear I have never seen zucchinis this big in my life. I know you're supposed to cut them and eat them when they're just 6 inches long or so, but sometimes it seems like they just get so big over night! I've had a few of them that are as long as my forearm. We've eaten them plain, eaten stuffed zucchini and made so much zucchini bread. 

Not pictured are the sugar snap peas, which I pulled out after they got taken over with powdery mildew, a white powdery fungus. We did at one point have one plant that made it, so we did get some good snap peas before it succumbed. 

I also have a basil plant that is not thriving. Part of the problem was that it's early days were spent in the shade of the zucchini plant, so it didn't get a good start. But I'm hoping it'll make a comeback so I can stop buying store basil for my caprese salad (and I just love basil so much).

2015 Garden: Then & Now

Here's a Before and After of the garden. A look at when it was first put in and then how it is now, 6 weeks later.

The garden before:

The garden after:

Before:

Back left: sugar snap peas (only one is really thriving :( The others got eaten by slugs or just failed to really get going.)
Front left: strawberries
Right: green beans (one of the six didn't make it due to there being only one stalk...which got eaten by the slugs.)

After:

Before:

Back left: Dill (We've already used this in cooking!)
Everything else: assorted sweet bell peppers (I'm surprised at how little these appear to have grown. But many of them do have little buds and flowers growing, and one even has a visible pepper growing!)

After:

Before:

Back: Zucchini
Front left: Beefsteak tomatoes
Front right: Cherry tomatoes

After:

A side shot to get a look at the 'after' for zucchini. I built a little homemade trellis out of bamboo and twine to allow the zucchini to grow up. This keeps the zucchini out of the dirt and saves a ton of ground space, which allowed me to plant a basil plant in the space that I had been saving for the zucchini!

The harvest so far:

The Weekend and the 2015 Garden

Ever since we moved Bennett to take one nap a day, it makes more sense to have him come to gymnastics when June goes for class. It's more exciting for him than sitting around the house where we would be struggling to keep making his toys entertaining. So I offered to take both kids on Saturday morning while Michael sat home and ate bon bond. (Kidding. He took care of a lot of much-needed cleaning while we were out.)

And after gymnastics, I'm never in the mood to go back home. It lets out around 10 AM and I always just feel like heading home would be such a letdown. I actually get dressed to go to gymnastics! Which is saying something since most days I only put on jeans to drop off and then pick up the kids, with yoga pants being the choice in between. So I can't just waste actually getting dressed on just sitting in gymnastics. 

On Saturday we went to the Midtown Farmer's Market. We bought donuts and some strawberries and potatoes and strolled around.

That afternoon we took a long walk/bike ride with the kids before it was time to get ready for our date night! Despite this looking like it was a selfie, I assure you that it was June wanting to take pictures again.

When the babysitter arrived, we said quick goodbyes and got out the door. We went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant called Kru. It was the one most recommended in this article I read interviewing the most popular Sacramento chefs, asking them where they like to eat. We had some amazing sushi and experimented with some other stuff on the menu. (Uni [aka sea urchin] - glad to have tried it, but it's not going on the regular rotation for us.)

Afterward we went to another place for dessert, where I tried to snap a photo and Michael took that exact moment to steal a bite of my Oreo Torte.

Then we headed to another spot with the intention of hearing some live music, but they had technical difficulties so we just had a couple drinks. 

On Sunday morning we took a family trip over to Home Depot because I was itching to get my spring/summer garden in place. June went NUTS for this car cart (and Bennett wasn't complaining either) and we picked out a bunch of stuff that has me super excited.

So this is my 'before' shot, the raised bed as it was this morning (after I pulled out the whole-y swiss chard, the rogue broccoli plant and a couple of carrots that made it through the winter with absolutely no help from me):

And this is the 'after':

I planted everything while the kids were napping.

This year we have two strawberry plants (one is leftover from last year). We have sugar snap peas, string beans, dill, 7 bell pepper plants, a beefsteak tomato, a cherry tomato and a zucchini squash. I realize that planting 7 bell pepper plants might seem like a bit much. I ended up buying a 'gourmet pepper pack' with possible ivory, yellow, yellow and purple peppers in there, plus an extra red bell for good measure. I figured that since the snails got my last pepper plant right away, I would plant all of these and hope that at least one of them makes it through the snail invasion. 

I'm planning on building little trellises for the peas and the beans, though the notes at the store said you don't absolutely have to. It's supposed to make it easier to harvest, and to keep soil off of the pods.

After naps, we hung out on a blanket in the front yard, eating snacks and watching June play with her neighbor friend.

It was a fun, sweet, productive and short weekend. And of course I'm already counting down the moments until the next one. :)

Sunflower Harvest

This blog post has been sitting in my 'drafts' folder for a few weeks, waiting for me to finish up with an official 'after' or 'completed' photo. That didn't happen, so here we are!

On Saturday a few weeks ago, we had a little sunflower seed harvest. Or I should say I had a harvest...June was playing in the sprinkler toy and Bennett just...hung out. 

After chopping off the heads of the sunflowers, I hung them to dry for a week or so. I put brown paper bags around them to keep any birds off of them and to collect any seeds that fell off on their own.

There were just tons of seeds. 

They were pretty easy to get out by sort of rubbing my fingers over top of them.

Ever since I planted these things I looked forward to the day that I would harvest and eat my own sunflower seeds.

I think the problem was that they take so much work, especially when you have so many seeds. 

After soaking them, I took up every pan in our house to lay them all out to dry. There was a period of several days where Michael and I didn't know what to make for dinner because all of our pans were in use and every flat surface was taken up by black seeds. 

I'm also a little anal-retentive and every time I'd walk past the sunflower seeds, I'd stop and spend a minute or two picking out little debris or lighter-colored seeds that didn't actually have a seed inside. The amount of time that this ended up taking was...cost prohibitive.

So I ended up roasting some and ended up tossing some others simply because there was no way we were going to eat this many seeds. So now I have a huge bag of seeds and they're...I don't know? They're good. They're as good as sunflower seeds get, know what I mean? 

Sunflower seeds are good, but they are so much work to get that little kernel. So I guess what I'm saying is, it was fun, but if I ever need sunflower seeds again, I'll just be buying them.

Garden Update

Our garden has gotten pretty crazy in the past month and a half since I posted about it. Or at least as crazy as gardens can go, which is to say, not very. We were at a Memorial Day gathering with some neighbor friends and I found myself totally into a conversation with a guy about our gardens. And that's when I knew I was a grown up. 

So, the garden at one month of age:

The garden at two and a half months:

Then:

Now:

 April:

June:

(Those sad two on the right were transplanted from other spots because I'm neurotic and wanted them to be evenly spaced, but also wanted to choose the fittest looking ones. And now I have sad Marigolds.)

And to give an idea of how big our sunflowers have grown, I give you this:

They tower over me now. The biggest one might be eight feet high. And they're still growing. I'm starting to seriously side-eye my own choice of planting "American Giant" sunflowers. Who would have known that little seeds would grow into this...and they aren't even fully mature yet!

They have flower heads on them, though! Each one is about the size of my fist.

Our watermelon is also doing well, and was also transplanted but survived the trauma. I pulled out the parsley to give it some room, but it's still going to end up going over the edges of the raised bed.

The tomato plant is taking over the place. June loves to come out and "check out the plants" with me and she always comments that "X is doing good!" Something could be shriveled and brown and she would enthusiastically say it was doing good. 

We've had two tomatoes ripen way ahead of the rest of them, and I have to say they were delicious! Can't wait for the rest of them to ripen...then we'll be eating nothing but caprese salad for weeks. (Curse you, slugs, for eating my basil plant!!)

Our compost bin was becoming pretty full, so I bought another one. We're going to the system where you let one full batch sit and cook for a while until it turns into compost while you use the other bin to add new ingredients to. If you just kept adding things to the original, it would never all be broken down enough to be usable compost. 

My almost-full bin and my compost thermometer! (I officially drank the kool-aid. At least I stopped short of ordering a pitchfork and machete on Amazon - for use in composting, of course.)

(Although that's the only time I've held myself back. I accidentally got an Amazon Prime membership so everything ships in two days for free and I can't stop buying things please help.)

Speaking of strange things I bought on Amazon, the worms arrived today! (Seriously, send help.)

June did not believe me that worms were in the box that arrived on the doorstep and I sure showed her. "Ewww!" she said, but when I asked if she wanted to help me put them in the compost bin, she had her Crocs on in a flash.

I put about a third of them in the compost bin and two thirds directly in the garden. Hope they like their new home! 

I wonder if they sell a worm-sized 'Welcome' sign on Amazon....