Ironically, the one thing that has been doing well in our garden is the okra I planted on a whim.
We gathered enough the other day to make gumbo! And I just have to say – my wife’s gumbo is da bomb! Don’t ask me what it is but cajun cooking comes easy around here!
Lo and behold after four years I learned today that one of my vines is a red grape.
We caught up a bit more on the garden work this weekend. As Sharon mentioned earlier, we transplanted the peppers and tomatoes to Mel’s (mix) garden. They’re holding up much better and showing some life. The squash and beans are going strong as well as the cucumber, parsley, cilantro, and basil. We started one other tomato in a pot.
Grapes are looking good. We may have an early harvest.
We thought we’d give a try at swiss chard and okra with the space left over in the west garden after the transplant. I don’t particularly like either of those but they are in planting season.
The melon patch is a bit slow. We have one cantaloupe sprouting and a watermelon seed is germinating.
My hops are starting to take off. I strung up a 14′ trellis since the Nugget really needed the rope to start its accent.
The Cascade broke the surface earlier this week. This variety tends to lag behind a bit of others but its very vigorous in comparison.
I got one more variety – a Willamette – last week and will plant it in front of the house soon.
Our friends Lauren and Matthew were over today and Lauren made a remark that we haven’t posted anything in a while. So I thought I’d give a little update at the joys of life that have been keeping us busy.
Car Accident: I was in a car accident a week and a half ago. It was really not a big deal except that our hatch and window on the van had to be replace. It was in the Sun Harvest parking lot. No one was injured. God blessed me that the guy with whom this happened was very charitable. I don’t even think his truck incurred any damage. My insurance company was just really great and everyone was really nice in all our conversations. And it turned out that the day it happened, a friend, Kelly, called and she mentioned her husband works for Caliber Collision. So I went with them for the car repairs. I was originally going to get the car fixed at the location on 620 but they wouldn’t see me until May 18, because of all the hail damaged cars. When I told Kelly, she told her husband and he called around the other locations. I ended up taking it to the location on North Lamar and I dropped off the car on Monday and picked it up yesterday. They did a fabulous job and were very timely. If you ever get into a car accident, I would highly recommend them for any repairs.
Gardening: This is probably a no brainer, but if you don’t water your garden, things won’t grow. I somehow always think that Adam should have a green thumb since his dad’s a farmer and all, but that’s not the case. Our gardening experiments in the backyard have been good learning experiences. We have a 2×9 plot based on the Square Foot Gardening. The mix is composed of vermiculite, compost and peat moss which makes for very good drainage…too good. It also means it need more watering than a soil mix, which is what our other two garden plots are. After some extra watering the last week, the seeds are finally sprouting. I ended up transplanting our tomato and pepper plants from the other gardens to this one because they just weren’t growing in the other gardens. I hope they take off. There have been a few days that I sit cursing Adam and Eve! Adam’s grape vines are doing well, but yes, they too require more water. The hops has spouted and my husband is getting all kinds of ideas that I’ll let him tell you about some time.
Homeschooling: Adoremus books had its big Easter sale recently (20% off the order). I like to order our homeschooling materials from there when they have their big sale because I certainly can save a bit if I order all our materials at one time. Of course this means I would have to know what we’re doing next year in terms of our curriculum. So, in a week’s time I had to figure that out else I miss the big sale. I already had some ideas but nothing set in stone. It meant contacting a few friends to see what they’re using and why, and making a trip to Mardel to see some of the stuff they have and be able to actually look inside some of these books. It was also nice to have a serious conversation with Adam about how we want to approach teaching subjects such as history and science. I didn’t choose one curriculum such as Seton or Kolbe. Although I like parts of them, I didn’t like all the materials either offered. In the end, I chose the following:
Anyway, I got the materials ordered. It looks like I’ll have a nice summer planning before Baby G makes his/her arrival in September.
Other: Our parish had a book sale of old books/movies from the library they are getting rid of. I pick up a few books and a bunch of VHS movies for the kids and us. Now, if there’s a way to convert those to DVD we’re in business.
Our God daughter, Lindsey, accepted a job offer to teach at a middle school as the theater arts teacher in the fall. Yay! She used to work at Dell and was laid off. So this one less unemployed person. She’s going to be great!
Then I mentioned Matthew and Lauren spent the day with us observing famiy life (i.e. playing with the kids). To celebrate the Feast of St. Mark, we made homemade strawberry ice cream. It was SOOOOOO GOOD.
Here’s the recipe:
Heat the milk on medium heat until hot. Remove from stove. Beat eggs and sugar. Gradually add hot milk. Return to sauce pan and heat stirring constantly until slightly thick (8 minutes). Allow to cool.
In a blender, puree strawberries in the cream. Add this to cooled custard. Stir and add vanilla. Cool in refridgerator. Then crank it out in your ice cream maker.
First a little update.
A few weeks ago we planted tomatoes and peppers – thanks Roses for the seedlings! Unfortunately, two were attacked by squirrels (or something) which prompted me to put up the net. We are hopeful they will recover. This week we’ll plant pole beans along the back trellis.
Interestingly enough, the net saved the rest from last weeks hail storm. I can’t say the same for my grapevines. Last year I had one cluster. This year I counted over twenty on a single vine. The hail storm took out about a third of those. Again, we’re hopeful; One of the vines had just started budding and the others are recovering.
Beautiful weather this weekend to continue where we left off. The first task was to get the second bed up. This bed was roughly based off the same no-dig approach but a bit more economical – we substituted the compost and manure with our community’s free compost and the Natural Gardener’s cow manure respectively. This will be the melon box hosting watermelon and cantaloupe. Fulton was all over helping with this garden since he’s the one who requested watermelon.
Next up is my own personal project:
What are these you ask? They are rhizomes. What are rhizomes? Roots used to propagate hops. You heard right. I am experimenting on growing my own hops for homebrewing. These here are Cascade and Nugget ordered from Freshops; two varieties that are pretty hardy and can be used in a large selection of brews. One they start growing – and they grow fast – I’ll rig up poles for the vines. They can climb up to 30 feet!
I’ve also added to my reading list The Homebrewer’s Garden
Here’s the box for the Cascade:
And the small one in the foreground here is the Nugget:
The other box in the background is our final and third raised bed. Sharon and I recently stumbled upon the All New Square Foot Gardening
We’re taking another stab at this gardening thing. Each attempt has provided better results but we need to kick it up a notch. The last time we used the native soil in our backyard we learned that the garden would not drain properly – even with additional garden soil and compost – and the plants were constantly fighting fungal diseases. The best solution to this problem is to increase the depth of good soil; which means a garden bed.
I searched craigslist for a couple days for free lumber and came upon some the other week. It was rather convenient that it was actually wooden crates for transporting glass; it was just the right size so we just had to break it down and transport it home (thanks for the help, Marc)!
We decided on trying a no-dig approach as described here. Playing it by the book, I was able to find Back to Nature’s chicken manure and cotton bur compost at Barton Springs Nursery and the garden soil, decomposed granite, and pine needle mulch at The Natural Gardener. You can get a significant price break on a variety of soils, composts, and mulches at The Natural Gardener if you bag it yourself.
All in all, it came out to be around $1.72/sq. ft. for materials. Subsequent plantings won’t be quite as expensive as we’ll use our community’s free compost and occasionally add another layer of manure with fresh soil. You could also bring the price down a bit by using chipped cedar instead of the pine needles for mulch.
The question now is what to plant?
Last week’s converstaion about the garden went something like this (keep in mind we haven’t seen a single veggie come out of that garden in weeks or months)…
Me: So, any cucumbers yet? Any more beans? I know the tomatoes are a lost cause.
Adam: No, nothing. I’m not convinced of this whole gardening thing.
Today for grins and giggles, I decided to see if that one single 2 inch tomato was ready to be picked. Therese has been wanting to pick it FOREVER and it finally turned red. While I was at it, I check on the cucumbers. We had so many blooms I just couldn’t believe we didn’t have fruit yet. Blessed be God! I found small cucumbers starting to grow. Therese picked her tomato–and ate it as soon as we could come in to wash it. And she saw that our cucumbers are finally growing. There may be hope for this whole gardening thing after all.
We harvested our first round of snap peas! Oh and are they yummy!! It wasn’t a whole lot. And Therese probably ate half of them as she was sneaking back into the house after we washed them to keep getting more. But there are more on the vines.
I also realized that I’ve been too lax in loosening the soil as the peas seem to have developed yellow leaves near the roots that result from poor drainage.
We have two tomatoes still going strong and the runner beans are about to flower!
Adam spotted another tomato starting on one of our plants a couple of days ago. This of course means we needed to do something to stop our little furry friends from eating it. So our first and hopefully only course of action is a garden net. Adam can also use the net with his grapes when they become large enough to attract our kids–I mean the birds.
So we wrapped our garden “snuggly” with this net. I’ll post a picture soon. Let’s hope this is enough of a deterant.
The very first sign of fruit has appeared in the vineyard!
