Just Breathe.

I feel like I've been swimming in ties lately, and my posts have been reflecting that...I promise to post about other things soon, but for now, this is taking over my life!
I just opened shop yesterday and today am filling orders for 8 ties! I think I hope business keeps rolling in, but at the same time, it's a whole new learning curve for me to figure out how to manage it all--and organize my life so that the things that matter the most are not in any way neglected. I went to bed early last night (9:00!) so that I could get up early and get some things done before the rest of the family was into its normal morning bustle, but Dixon had other plans for me as he was awake from 2:30 -3:30. I did manage to get up at 6:00--in time to make breakfast for everyone, which Mike normally does. Here's hoping Dixon figures out soon that Mom's not coming to get him in the middle of the night anymore.

And just as a side note, someone needs to tell the garden to hurry and get itself planted.

Got Zucchini?

I'm always on the hunt for good recipes to use my plethora of zuccs in. I usually end up going back to my three main dishes: Fried Zucchini, Zucchini Soup, and Zucchini Bread. The first two are pretty set recipes, but as you know, Zucchini Bread has more variations than Imelda Marcos has shoes. I love tasting all the different varieties I come across--especially those that include chocolate in some form--but I got creative the other day and combined 3 different recipes into one, and I think it's the best Zucchini Bread I've EVER eaten! It's really more like a cake, and seriously, who doesn't like cake??? So here it is, along with a couple of pics. If you venture to try this recipe, leave a comment. I'd love to know how you liked it!

Blueberry Zucchini Bread

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 1/4 cups white sugar
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups grated zucchini
1 pt. fresh blueberries
3 T. flour
3 T. butter
1/3 C. brown sugar

1. Grease and flour two 8 x 4 inch pans. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
2. Sift flour, salt, baking powder, and soda together in a bowl.
3. Beat eggs, oil, vanilla, and sugar together in a large bowl.
4. Add sifted ingredients to the creamed mixture, and beat well.
5. Stir in zucchini until well combined.
6. Carefully fold in the blueberries, pour batter into prepared pans and place in the middle rack of oven.
8. Meanwhile, using a pastry cutter, combine flour, butter and brown sugar to resemble a course meal.
9. Halfway throught cooking time (about 30 minutes), sprinkle sugar mixture onto the bread & put back in the oven for another 20-30 minutes or until tester inserted in the center comes out clean.
10.Cool in pan on rack for 20 minutes. Remove bread from pan, and completely cool...if you can wait that long.

I've seen anything from strawberries, bananas or cranberries to nuts, coconut or chocolate chips in lieu of the blueberries. Use whatever sounds good or whatever you have on hand! The blueberries really were fabulous, though!

Doe, a Deer...

Last night after the kids were in bed, Mike went out to see how the garden fared with our daily rainstorms this last week. On his way out the door, he was surprised to see a doe standing in the middle of the garden! For those of you who don't know where my house is, I live on a 4-lane highway, with a spectacular view of the freeway just behind the businesses across the street, which then rolls down onto Hill Air Force Base. How in the world a deer managed to get through the AFB, over the freeway, across the highway and into my garden is definitely beyond me! At most, our wildlife consists of ferral cats we see darting throught the field behind the vacant house next door, and we even had a duck take up residence at the mortuary earlier in the spring (until said cats found her, that is...), and of course we have lots of robins and paper wasps, but deer? Not in the 10 years we've been married have we seen one in Roy, let alone our yard.

Anyway, Mike yell-whispered to me that there was a deer in the garden, so I jumped up (I'll let you imagine that for a minute) to find my camera while he ran downstairs to get the kids. By the time we all converged on the deck, the deer had made it's way into the field to the north, and we could only catch glimpses of it from there. It finally jumped back through the neighboring yard and somehow avoided being hit by a car or two on the highway as it crossed the street and disappeared behind the loan store. Katie slept through the whole thing, but after finding out about it this morning said she needed "proof." Sign-seeker. Mike took her out to the garden to show her the hoofprints, which was enough to satisfy her, and Bridget just kept asking if it was a deer or a donkey we saw. A donkey certainly would've been more believeable, but these pictures do prove otherwise.

On Living my Dreams

Henry David Thoreau once said,
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined."

If someone would've asked me in high school, or even college, what I thought I'd be doing in 15-20 years, I confidently (though naiively) would've said I'd be raising my family. Well, here I am, living the life I thought I'd imagined--I only wish that imagination would've been a little more detailed, because I don't think I ever saw myself doing most of what I do now. That imagination has become a bit more detailed over the years, and has surprisingly revealed my love for gardening, and this dream I have to own acres and acres where my kids can run free and we can all pick raspberries and tomatoes together after riding horses through the open fields. I imagine the kids helping Mike build a treehouse in the monstrous oak in the far corner of our backyard, where we spend hours having tea parties, playing pirates, and reading stories until dark that spark even more imagination.

I think the first step toward realizing this dream has been in all the planning and work in the garden this year. I finally waddled out there this morning to document our progress over the last few weeks. This season has certainly been a learning experience for us, as this is really our first go at serious gardening and on such a large scale. There have been a few disappointments already, but I think all that can be put behind us with one bite of a juicy red ripe Paul Robeson (heirloom tomato) sometime in July!

Head Lettuce is looking beautiful right now, though I have yet to see any heads! We'll keep an eye on these over the next few weeks to make sure it doesn't get too hot to send them bolting befor we have a chance to harvest any. It's our first attempt at a head-type lettuce, so we'll see how we do.

The Red Norland potatoes are looking fantastic! One entire bed, with only a handful that didn't come up is pretty great to me. I wasn't sure if they'd actually grow, since they sat around in the open for nearly a month before the bed was ready to plant them in. In fact, some of the shriveled sprouts were a good 6-8 inches long and I thought they'd immediately die when placed in the ground. I'm glad I was wrong--that's not something I say very often...

These are the Russet Potatoes that we planted a couple of weeks after the reds. With the reds taking off the way they did, I was concerned that these wouldn't because of the opposite problem. They had only had a few days to sprout by the time we needed to plant them, so the tiny sprouts were only about 1/4 inch long. Again, I'm glad I was wrong. (For those of you keeping track, that's twice.)

And here are the Leaf Lettuce that we grew last year as well. These beautiful plants are "cut and come again" which means we'll be having lots of salads and sandwich greens until it gets too hot for them and they bolt, then we'll wait for it to cool down and plant some more! Two of these will actually become our lunch today...mmmmm. I've heard that lettuce is sweeter when you harvest it before the sun comes up, but I've yet to be up that early to test the theory.

These are unknown squash plants that are thriving in part of our compost pile. Don't ever let anyone tell you that compost doesn't make a difference because clearly, it does! These are the best looking plants we have in the garden right now & they aren't even in the garden!

This celery was planted earlier this week, but spent several weeks before that in a flat. I've never grown celery before, so we'll keep close track of it. So far, it seems to be surviving pretty well.

The carrots are planted between the peas and the beets. We've only lost a couple of plants, and the rest seems to be making it okay. I definitely want to plant more of these next year, though.

Our cabbage did not fare too well with the transplant, though thankfully we do a have a couple of them that survived.

Same with the broccoli and cauliflower. These definitely needed to be planted deeper, and possibly planted directly into the ground instead of transplanted. I've also noticed that something likes to eat the leaves, though I haven't seen the culprit yet. Hopefully we can still harvest a few stalks of each this year.

Ahhh, my beautiful Cylindra Beets! As opposed to the round, bulbous beets usually grown, these grow more like a carrot--long and thin-ish, so they take up less space in the garden. These should be ready to harvest fairly soon, and I'm very excited since I'm the only one around here who likes them! I want to try to use the greens this year, but I've never had them. Anyone got a good recipe for beet greens?

When my in-laws discovered we were planning such a large garden, they asked us to grow some tomatoes for them. (Apparently Wyoming is not a great gardening state!) These are the plants they brought us from the nursery-- Better Boy, Roma, Super Fantastic (sounds promising, right?), and four cherry tomatoes. So far, they're doing really well. We planted them in a different bed than our heirlooms, just so we could avoid any cross-pollination. May the best tomato win!

This is a shot across the four southern beds. Far bed is peas, carrots, beets, radishes and swiss chard; next is heirloom tomatoes and one lonely basil plant that actually survived (dill, parsely & cilantro were dead the day after we transplanted...sob); red norland potatoes; then onions, lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower & cabbage.

Every one of the asparagus plants came up this year! Yay! While they do look a bit like tumbleweeds, I can assure you they are not! I'm so looking forward to harvesting these next year...
First year with the onions too, but they are growing quite well, despite a few bald spots in the bed, where some didn't take. Next year we'll have garlic to grow along with them.

This may look like a patch of overgrown weeds, but it's actually our peas! The brown spots are where the cat decided to roll around, so I guess it's a good thing we planted so many. They are just now starting to flower and give us little pods, so by the time this baby gets here, we should be starting to harvest them.

Some of the things I've learned so far:

1. Growing in flats is great for some plants, but not necessarily for others. We'll sow lettuce, broccoli, caulifower, cabbage and herbs directly into the ground next year because I think they might do better without all the handling. We'll also directly sow peas and corn because holy cow it took a long time to transplant those peas, as opposed to poking a seed in the ground!!!

2. Be more careful to harden off plants before transplanting. Plants need to get acclimated to the outside weather before throwing them into the ground.

3. Plant immediately after digging the beds to avoid having to pull weeds again. This probably would've been done if Mike had me to help, as opposed to eight little "helping" hands.

4. Plant at the right depth, which is usually much deeper than you think.

All in all, I'm very optomistic about our harvest this year. Even though things haven't always gone as planned, every failure gives me an opportunity to learn more about how to be successful, and I'm pretty determined to be so. Right now I'm left with a feeling that I may not exactly be living the life I've imagined, but growing a garden is the first step in going confidently in that direction.

Biointensive Gardening Explained

Here's a few websites with great explanations of the Biointensive Gardening method we're using this year. We'll continue to document our progress this year, and you can decide for yourselves if this is something you'd like to try! Five beds double-dug, 4 to go!

http://www.synergyfarm.com/Biointensive.asp
http://www.kililiselfhelp.org/biointensive.htm
http://www.growbiointensive.org/index.html
http://www.greenthumbarticles.com/articledetail.php?artid=509&catid=394

Degenerates

Someone once said, " Even the most divine planning must eventually degenerate into work."

And as it goes, it was yet another laborious day in the garden for us, followed by yet another day of snow. Go figure. But as much as I complain about Spring hitting the snooze button a few too many times, I think the Lord must be looking out for us, because he's been giving us t-shirt weather to dig & plant in, then moisture the following day so we don't have to water!





Mike toiled with the digging of 2 new beds, (the completed one in the back of the picture as well as the one to the left of it), while I planted the asparagus and strawberries in the first bed from last week. Mike is now left with the expected aching back, while my hamstrings are pretty well shot from crouching to plant. (My back would have been aching too, had I just bent over to plant, but my protruding belly keeps me from breathing when I do that, which I've found is quite a necessary function to have, so crouching was the next best thing.) But can I just say that planting was like sweeping a knife through room-temperature BUTTER! I'm already LOVING the double-dig Mike's working so hard on, and I can only imagine what it will be like to pull weeds from these pillow soft beds!





While these may look a bit like crop circles, these holes are where the asparagus was planted in the north half of the bed. (32 roots in all) As I studied more about planting them, I learned that the roots have to be placed about 8 inches into the ground, but only covered by about 2 inches of dirt at a time. The tender spears aren't strong enough to push through that much dirt, so as they emerge, you cover them with an additional couple of inches, repeating the process until the hole is fully covered. I'm pretty bummed that we can't harvest any this year, since the roots need time to establish themselves, but I'm sure next year we'll have an abundant crop! It's funny, because I remember walking down the roads in Oakley, ID with my Grandma Martindale, stopping along the burrow pits to cut asparagus. I thought she was a crazy old lady then, and I never once ate her asparagus, but now that I've actually tried it and LOVE it, I think of her whenever I think of this unusal vegetable that grows in ditches along the side of the road...

The other half of the bed was reserved for these tiny little strawberry roots, some of which had started to grow already. We planted both June bearing and everbearing so that we could benefit from the big plump berries of the one-time Junies and the continual harvest of the everbearing. Again, I'm bummed that we won't be harvesting any this season, but I'm assured that by plucking off the blossoms to prevent them from producing this year, we'll guarantee an abundant crop next year!

We also had a big surprise to see our broccoli and cauliflower already germinate in the flats I just planted 5 DAYS AGO!!! I can't tell you how rewarding it is to see the fruits of our labor beginning to take shape. All this planning and preparing is starting to pay off with VISIBLE results, even though it's definitely degenerated into work...