Building a Hot (Pepper) House

The south side of our house is the perfect spot to grow our tomatoes and hot peppers with sunshine from sun-up to sundown.  This year we decided to try enclosing our hot peppers to maximize the heat, and hopefully boost our yield.  I was able to utilize the small hothouse enclosures that formerly housed my seedlings, but unfortunately they were not designed to hold larger pots and so could only hold half of my plants!  I searched for larger enclosures but either the dimensions were wrong, or the price was more than I'd be willing to pay.  So I built my own!

Spring is Here! Time to Start Working on the Garden.

Spring has arrived, and with it visions of fresh vegetables are dancing in my head.  Here is a photo of our front yard from last year.  

I've been dabbling with vegetable gardens for about ten years.  First I tried growing some tomatoes and herbs in containers on the back deck, slowly expanding our garden by adding a new vegetable or two each year.  When I had more successes than failures I started planting in raised beds.

A Bird Visitor Keeps the Pets Entertained

 This morning I was drinking coffee, checking my email and suddenly there was such a ruckus from the cat and the dog over by the window.  I ignored it for a bit but then Vincent's yowling drew me to the window to take a look.  A Flicker!!  A Northern Flicker, to be more specific. 

Refreshing Kale Mint Smoothie

 

A friend of mine just gave me the largest bag of kale you have ever seen.  It is probably the equivalent to 8 bunches of kale if I had bought them at the grocery store.  Her husband is of the super gardening type and manages to keep fresh produce coming all through winter while most of us give up and let the weeds take over until spring.  I took it on to try and use all of this splendid kale and not just in the normal, add it to a saute or soup kind of cooking.  I decided some smoothies were in order.

We've Been Flocked!

Yesterday a couple showed up at our house and "flocked" us.  It's a charity thing for my dad's Rotary group.  You donate money to charity and get a house of your choosing flocked.  He chose our house.  It's pretty neat and makes me want to have someone else's house flocked too!  You can see how eco-friendly (read: lazy) we are by letting the grass die instead of watering it.   

Vincent is confused about the flamingos, but loves the dead grass.  

He spends a lot of his time rolling around,

acting like a goof ball.  A hippo-sized goof ball. 

Moneypenny is not impressed. 

Finally, Vinnie ends the morning by photobombing Moneypenny.

  Moneypenny is still not impressed. 

Spring has Sprung

The one decision about our new yard was that I wasn't going to do anything to it this first year.  It has lots of mature plantings and I don't know what a lot of them will look like in bloom nor where any bulbs are planted.  I was sad about leaving my big herb garden at the old house so as a teeny tiny concession, I decided I needed to buy some herbs and start a little herb garden on the upper deck right outside the kitchen.

So far I just planted oregano, rosemary, and mint.  I still need chives, lavender, and thyme.   Grow, grow, grow.

It's fun watching bulbs come up and trees bloom.  These colors are just out of this world.  

We had a twig of a Magnolia at the old house that was only a few year old and would get about 10 blossoms a year if we are lucky.  This Magnolia in the front yard is deliciously full of pink buds.

And is this a Star Magnolia?  Not sure, but it sure looks awesome!  Unfortunately it is being horribly stunted by a pruned to death Douglas Fir that will have to come down.  Maybe I will be able to coax it into something resembling a real tree.  

We finally broke down and bought a lawn mower yesterday.  The weather is so lovely now, it makes all the rain worth it to get all these blooms and color!

A Week of Firsts

Every time I do some boring household chore around the house this week, I keep thinking, "This is the first time I have done this at the new house."  It's a little silly, I know, but I can't help it.  I think it because we love the house so much that we keep talking about how we live in it.  I never did this with my first house.  Is that what people go through with their kids?

So I have stopped to notice the little things.  First time making a fire in the fireplace.  First time cooking supper.  First time changing a roll of toilet paper.  First time using the compost bin.   (I'll spare from having to see a photo of changing the toilet paper!)

We had to have some serious debate about the compost bin.  What's to debate about a compost bin, right?  Well, the former owners left the bin way way down in the back corner of the lot, a serious walk from the kitchen: more like a hike, really.  We knew we needed to move it or our kitchen scraps would migrate into the garbage can.

We finally found a spot in the front yard that we thought wasn't too obvious.  But then as I was bringing in the mail, I saw that the bin is totally framed by our front entrance arch!  

I am thinking nobody but me will probably notice it there so this just may have to be a situation when form follows function!

Let the Harvest Begin!

This hot, late summer we are having in the Pacific Northwest has been a perfect storm for actually producing some delicious tomatoes for once.  You can't get more organic or local than this!

Usually I plant tomatoes and am lucky if about a third of them ripen. 

But this year, I am getting dozens per day.  I heard a trick that you should stop watering them and that will get them to ripen and so I cut back on the water but we have been having so much sun that that could be the trick as well.  

I am thinking slicing up these Romas and seasoning them with a little sea salt.  Yum!

37 Things: Blog 175 Times

Hard to believe I have hit 175 blog postings in 10 months.  It seemed like a daunting amount of posts at the time.  Next year I will need to set my goal a little higher! 

My backyard is looking luscious right now.  The mint shrub is in full bloom and the bees are as excited as my neighbors at an all you can eat buffet.  My veggie garden is on full throttle mode as well.  The zucchini and leeks are pretty boisterous.  And my tomato plants are spilling out of their little cages all over the place.  They never make it into the kitchen.  I stand in the shade and pop the sweet cherry tomatoes right into my mouth. 

I moved my Adirondack chairs out of the way for our big dinner party and I am liking them in this spot in the shade.  Perfect reading spot.

I still have many items to complete on my list of 37 Things To Do Before I Turn 38 but I am in progress on a few of them and I am satisfied that the most important ones have been completed.  (Get off the continent, run/walk a half marathon, donate blood, throw a fundraiser.)  Two months to go before I start my next list! 

Yard Beautification

This post could have been titled:  How to Make an Ugly Yard Look OK.  I don't think this is ideally how I want my yard to look, but when a free source of wood chips came into my life, I jumped on it!

It all started with some friends of ours moving.  They have a lot of boxes right now.  And then another friend is a source of all these wood chips.  So. I put 2 and 2 together and came up with finishing the back yard.  Here it is all covered with plastic.  We suffered from truly horrible, invasive weeds and covered the whole spot with tarps and plastic for the past 2 years to kill everything.

It was truly awful and shabby looking.  I really hated it and spent most of my time ignoring it.

  

The side yard was looking slightly better, but barely/

So I spent 2 days working and now have a very sore back. I started by weeding everything.  Then I carefully overlapped the cut apart cardboard boxes that we had diligently removed all the tape from.  Then, I wheel-barrowed in much of the 6 yards of wood chips we shoveled into my dad's trailer and had dumped in the alley.  (Two trips in the trailer, mind you.)

This whole side is naught but shade and dandelions, so the wood chips will work well. 

 

I am really liking how the back looks.  Okay, after blue tarps, anything will look good, but I love the path I put in and the focus of the Ginko tree.  I love my Ginko tree.   Also, in the background are 2 small blueberry bushes.  They may be small this year, but they both are getting fruit.  Hopefully they will grow more next year. 

 

 This bit is right by the deck.  Now I have to finish the veggie garden and start on the front. 

As we were telling our friends that just bought their first house, it really is a never ending process and maybe too expensive or too much work for some.  But I would never give up my own yard or space for anything.  Ask me again this weekend after I have spent another 15 hours or so and I may be singing a different tune.  For now, I am content.

37 Things: Plant Rhubarb and Kale and Swiss Chard

This item on my list of 37 Things I Want to do Before I Turn 38 was really about getting my vegetable garden in order. I cleaned out the old plot and built new beds. They are woefully small for any sort of exuberant plantings, but they have gotten me off in the right direction.

A few herbs around the yard managed to survive and not need replanting, like this lovely chive.

Here is my kale, looking fabulous. I need to thin some of that out and eat it tomorrow for lunch! I planted the chard seeds at the same time and it is a third the size.
One surprising bonanza crop are the bok choy plants. I will need to thin out the middle one of these tomorrow too.

List of plants planted so far this year:

• bok choy (starts)
• swiss chard (seed)
• kale (seed)
• walla walla onions (starts)
• leeks (seed)
• fennel (seed and start)
• cilantro (from starts from Randy and Shari)
• tomatoes (starts also from Randy and Shari)
• arugula (seed)
• pansy (starts. I want to put these edible flowers onto cupcakes)
• sunflowers (seed. I will transplant these to the front yard)
• rhubarb (starts)
• Japanese eggplant (starts)
• zucchini (starts)
• garlic (starts)
• lavender (seed. These will also get transplanted. I am trying to be cheap this year)

My mint, chives, thyme, and oregano are going strong from last year. I also have some shallots coming back, which is surprising. I lost two rosemary but one managed to survive. And our fig tree is producing two figs! It's taken 2 years to get any and critters might get to them before I do, but I am satisfied I didn't kill the thing.

I know a lot of people in the Pacific Northwest have been complaining about all the rain we are getting but it has been doing my veggies a world of good. We finally turned the heat off this week. Heat on in June is just ridiculous and wrong!

Organic Gardening is a Never Ending Process

Note to self: Please don't wait until the grass is knee level until you want to cut it. That was how high it was in our little patch of eco-lawn in the back yard. Weed whacking all the way. The front yard was better: only 8" or so tall. I was able to get out the push mower to do a lot of it but I had to go over each spot two or three times.

Now, most of my neighbors think we are crazy to use a push mower instead of the old gas powered one I had and gave away. Sustainable living requires commitment. We are not so good in all levels of our life, but in taking care of the lawn I would rather have a bunch of weeds than weed killer.

I love this little volunteer fir that is coming up. I have to keep trimming it like a Bonsai or it will tear apart the wall!

Many parts of our yard are looking pretty good now that we are finally past the cold spells and into the heart of Spring. Alliums are my favorite flowers.
Other parts are not looking too hot. This whole bit needs to be dug up because invasive grasses and asters have taken over. It looks awful right now and it is the part that is most visible in our front lawn!
Fingers crossed the weather will be mild enough all week that I can keep going out and dedicating an hour or three every day to weeding. Then I will let myself plant some new items, but only after things are starting to look decent!

Do It Yourself: Veggie Markers

I have been so ready to plant in my new garden beds. I stand out on the deck and look longingly at the pine boxes, imagining them full of leafy greens and onions and tomatoes. But it has been an unusually cool spring, or so the weather pundits say. Finally, the sun is coming out and the soil is getting warm and I decided I needed to plant the onion starts and kale and swiss chard seeds asap.
Now we have friends that have a giant garden and plan everything out way back in January and grow everything from seed in a greenhouse. I am not that motivated. Most of the items I like to plant, like the tomatoes, and onions, and shallots, I buy as starts. It is not warm enough to plant tomatoes, but the onions are good to go. I actually bought them a few weeks ago and put them in the potting shed and now I am worried I will lose a good deal of them since they are looking a little scruffy. But better to get them in the ground and see what happens than let them all rot.
I didn't need fancy plant markers, just simple ones to remember where I planted the rows. I started a new trick this year of laying perlite right over my furrow of seeds so that I will know exactly where to water them. I have an alphabet punch set that I rarely use. I wish the lettering was a tad larger, but you can read them a lot easier in person than in the photograph, so they will do the job! They are a little rustic looking, but I think I will make some more and see if my designs evolve!

Now I am going to run to the farmers' market and get some of their veggies and maybe some more starts.

Playing with Garden Design

The one thing I have learned with gardening and garden design is there is no right answer. I am constantly moving plants around or re-doing beds or just plain killing plants. A lovely garden is never grown in a perfect, over night attempt. Sometimes the plant you think would be perfect never grows to its promised full size or maybe something that was supposed to be small suddenly took over the whole parking strip (I am talking to you, Purple Aster.) So you dig it up and move it or throw it in the compost pile and start over.

You typically get better results if you start with a plan in the beginning and maybe a few goals. Do you want a veggie garden? Do you get full sun? Do you like to have cut flowers in your house? Do you like to entertain? Do you have pets? There are a lot of things to think about.

Our front yard is pretty much an ongoing disaster because I never had much of a plan or color scheme until several years into it and now it is a constant busyness of digging up, moving, replanting, etc. trying to get it to where I want it to be.

The back yard, on the other hand, is looking much better because we had a plan and put (mostly) the right plants in the right spots and thought about functionality for veggies and herbs and entertaining.

Now I am branching out and helping my friend Rosie design her garden. She is starting with a clean slate and it is pretty fun to walk around the neighborhood with her and see what kind of plants she likes and then go home and start drawing. This is the sketch for her yard. It looks a little on the busy side but it really isn't. Her yard is fairly shallow so it allows for some fun plants without having to worry about a boring old lawn.
I can't wait until we actually get to go to the nursery and then start playing with the placement of the plants! While it is still cooler than usual here, the sun has been out, and that is getting me into the spirit of full garden mode!

Productive and Sunny Weekend

Wow, it was actually sunny this weekend for the first time since I think at least last fall. Maybe I exaggerate a bit, but barely. This has been one of the wettest springs on record for a while! The kitties can barely stand the sun; they were staggering around on the porch with their eyes at a squint.

We took that little bit of sun and ran with it by filling our new vegetable beds with new Tagro potting soil and mowing the lawn. I still need to figure out how exactly I want the fence around it. And it turns out the fig tree that I thought may or may not be dead is actually alive and forming new buds. Now if it would only form a fruit or two this year, then I would be really happy.

And to top off a nice sunny weekend, this is my second week of getting the New York Times Sunday delivery. I was reading too much online to go much further without paying for the digital package and the paper itself on Sundays with all access digital is only $7 a week so I had to sign up. So far I can only think, why on earth did I wait so long to do this?
Sunday mornings in bed with coffee and the kitties and the paper is pretty much heaven. Until I had to get up to run 6 miles and then I didn't feel so warm and fuzzy anymore. Our half marathon is in just under 2 weeks now and this was the last long run until the race. The run was fine except for some soreness in my calf but I have been resting it and iced it and I think it will be just fine. I was actually feeling pretty good with my 6 miles until we ran into a friend tonight that is preparing for the full marathon and just ran 20 miles yesterday. Sniff, sniff. Oh well, it's all small steps to get to where you need to go.

My Dad is Very Helpful and I See Hard Labor in my Future

Last time I showed you the veggie garden area, it was looking pretty nicely weed free, but still needed new raised planters.

I don't have a big truck so I called my dad and he took me over to Home Depot where I was able to buy enough wood to make 2 large planters for just $25. I actually had a little wood left over too. I just used 2 x 8s for the planters themselves and 2x2s for the corner braces and cross pieces. I needed to make room for my fig tree, which may or may not be dead, so I designed "L" shaped planters.

I originally saw a raised planter tutorial over on The Pioneer Woman and I thought it was a little silly how complicated she made the instructions. My dad and I are cut from the same cloth: we are not slaves to detail when something is as simple as a raised planter.

With me on the Skil saw and him manning the drill, we were able to whip out these babies in about a half hour. Not too shabby. And no wasting time predrilling or measuring out where to put the screws!

In place but looking pretty empty. I need to dig up that rosemary plant that is in the way.

To complete the project I needed dirt. So the next day I called my dad again and we went and picked up his dump trailer over at my stepbrother's. Now this task of getting dirt ending up taking all afternoon because Brett left the trailer full of grass so we had to go all the way back to the Tacoma landfill to dump off the yard waste and then all the way back to the port to get Tagro potting soil and then we couldn't dump it in my alley because the battery on the dump trailer died. So dad had to go home and charge the battery and then come back 2 hours later to leave this pile of 2 yards of deliciously stinky soil in the alley. Sheesh.

Looks are deceiving. That is a pretty darn big pile of dirt.
And on this I am on my own. Dad said, "Have fun moving the soil." My husband wasn't too interested in this either since I am the one that out of the blue decided I needed raised planters now. So this weekend is supposed to be nice and it is going to be me with a shovel and a wheel barrow. And I still can't plant anything because it has been so cold out but I will be satisfied with my work!