late harvest

how to make a tomato basil sandwich

~ Grow tomatoes. Slice them. They are beautiful inside.

~ Toast some whole wheat bread and spread it with mayo and feta cheese.

~ Grow basil. Pinch off some leaves and arrange them on top of the mayo and feta.

~ Place the beautiful, giant slices of tomato on top of everything, put the sandwich together, and slice it in half.

~ Wow.

~ P.S. If you've grown cucumbers, you may add thin slices of those as well.

~ Did I mention Wow?

no time to talk

scarlet runners ~

kikiriki ~

homegrown salad (the tomato in the middle is a black cherry, hence the dark innards) ~

buggy 1 ~

buggy 2 ~

big

I don't mean to brag, but holy moly are my tomatoes getting big ~


They're getting so big that every day I worry about something terrible happening to them, like finding giant green worms devouring all of the leaves of the plants. Which I did. Fortunately, they had little time to do any permanent damage, and they left most all of the fruit alone. We (and by we, I mean Lee and our friend Harry) pulled them off and threw them into a pot of hot, soapy water, which seemed to do the trick.

Because all of my labels faded while the plants were in the cold frame, I've no idea what color to expect as they ripen. I'm guessing pink or yellow. Stay tuned.

summertime things

homegrown white scallop squash with purchased cauliflower, vidalia onion, and garlic ~ sauteed in olive oil with oregano, cumin, black and cayenne pepper, and salt ~ served over whole wheat spaghetti with a carafe of mint tea ~ colorful, no ~ flavorful, yes

~~~~~~~

Not long after Leah was born, I went to Chicago on business, hauling my dual chamber electric breast pump through the airport only weeks after 9/11, awkwardly explaining that it was not an explosive device, then plopping down on the floor in the entrance to the ladies room to use the only outlet I could find.

Later, when she was older and no longer nursing, I went to London for a week on business. I remember trying to explain to my colleagues that I felt a biological drive to be with my child. Childless themselves, they seemed interested for a couple of polite minutes, and then started some other conversation as I nursed my Stella and decided that the next night I would stay in and order room service.

Today, we took Leah to her first resident camp, a Girl Scout campground on Lake Guntersville. I LOVED camp when I was a kid, and I have been looking forward to introducing Leah to the joys of summer camping -- archery, boating, riding, etc. And like any parent who rarely gets a babysitter, I have been looking forward to having time -- time to spend with Neal, time to relax to the degree afforded by having only one kid in the house instead of two. But now that we're home and she's not, it feels exactly as it did when she was so much younger, and I was working full-time and traveling quite a bit, looking around bitterly at all of the stay-at-home moms, wondering how in hell so many of them were able to swing it, and when in hell people were going to get pissed off enough about healthcare options (or lack thereof) to start a revolution. Well, the missingness feels the same. The political stuff doesn't, because this is an entirely different context -- a context of choice. Guess I just kinda ranted there for a second.

But in any context, I wonder if the missingness ever gets any smaller?

sunday brunch

Homegrown black beauty zucchini and early golden summer crookneck squash, sauteed with vidalia onion from the farmer's market, and served with yellow grits. I love it when Lee cooks.

green things

I wouldn't necessarily say we're winning the battle against the squash bugs, but we are managing to pick a few squash here and there ~

The tomatoes are growing like mad, and we are growing impatient as we wait for them to ripen ~

maters! and other stuff

The tomatoes are getting bigger every day ~


I think these are Royal Hillbillies, but there's an element of surprise to this particular crop. I cut up a bunch of old plastic containers to make markers for them while they were seedlings, but the ink faded while they were in the cold frame. They could be Royal Hillbilly, Yellow Brandywine, St. Pierre, Black Cherry, or, apparently, Arkansas Traveler, although I don't remember labeling any as such. I seem to recall reading that tomatoes aren't worth the effort of starting from seed, but as a first-time seed-starter, my experience is that they are just as easy as any of the other things we started.

~~~ other stuff ~~~

These magnolias were blooming on a tree at Lee's grandmother's house in Montgomery ~



This luna moth was on the side of a building ~



This pretty perennial is tucked into the periwinkle ~

These feet are happy in their Merrell's ~

homegrown

I put these Chinese yellow cucumber seeds in the ground last Sunday, and here they are as of last Thursday. Amazing what four days can do!


White bush scallop squash ~

that farmhouse feeling

Two things I like in my appliances: retractable cords and timers.

The past two evenings, drunk with sunshine after a month or more of rain, we have set the timers. Lee made French honey bread that finished baking in the bread machine at exactly 5:50am, just before the magic coffee maker that grinds the beans revved its engine and took off ~


Full of crust and butter and coffee, I contemplate forgiving the chickens for eating my pretty pink roses, which appear to have had enough buds on them to recover ~


It only took one day of sunshine to dry these out, but they sprang right back after a good soaking. I'm not sure what they are; the tag said something as enlightening as Flowering Plant ~


The tomatoes wear tiny fruit that hangs in a graceful droop ~


That's pokeweed growing on the other side of the fence. Lee wants to leave it there so that he can make poke salad, but I for one am skeptical of anything you have to boil three times before it stops being poisonous enough to kill you.

Did I mention we found a turtle? We were loading some wood from a fallen tree when we spotted him beneath the branches. Neal named him George Josh but Lee and I like to call him George Joshington. We made an outdoor habitat of our old rabbit cage. (Which might lead one to wonder whatever happened to our old rabbit. Well. At first he lived indoors with us, but then he chewed through all of the electrical cords, so we moved him out to the chicken coop. Often we let him roam freely through one section of the coop or another, until one day we couldn't find him in any section of the coop. He appeared to have escaped, Alcatraz-style. We later saw him hip-hopping happily in the field. Attempts to lure him back with baby carrots were unsuccessful.)

No pictures of this, but believe me when I tell you that I returned home from a Saturday morning run to find a frog in the tub. We set him free.

(Making progress on the camera front: picked one out, but an untimely flat tire has forced me to delay the purchase until next month.)

mindlessness

I feel like blogging but I don't feel like thinking. I don't feel like doing pictures and text and laying it all out just right. I'm frustrated that I still haven't gotten a decent camera. There is no good reason I still haven't gotten a decent camera, just like there is no good reason I still haven't cut my hair.

A list would be good right about now. Hmmm. Ever wonder what we record on our DVR? No? Oh well, here you go:

House

The Office

30 Rock

Monk

Psych

Reaper

The Daily Show

The Colbert Report

Namaste Yoga

and a bunch of scifi and adult cartoons for Lee

We did manage to get a few of our tomatoes into the ground this afternoon ~

They are actually much taller than this, but we set them deep down, burying some of the leaves as you often do with tomatoes. The soil is amended with coop junk, and the plants are mulched with a layer of compost and a sprinkling of coop hay. They're planted in an area where we're making some raised beds by double digging and terracing, in part of the yard that we didn't turn over with the terramite. Lee has claimed the terramite-turned area -- it is now the island of lost plants. I am ruthless in my culling of seedlings, but he can't bear to let any of them go.

Ah, well -- I couldn't resist adding a picture and text after all. I feel better now.

pretty little surprises

In the spring of 2007, after finding our house in Hayden but before permanently moving in, I transplanted some irises from our yard in Roebuck Springs. They didn't bloom at all last year, so I thought I'd done something wrong -- thought perhaps the bulbs weren't deep enough. Then someone told me I might have to wait up to five years after transplanting them before they would bloom again. This made me feel both hopeful and disappointed at the same time. I had given up on expecting any blooms this year -- everyone else's were sticking out their fuzzy little purple and yellow tongues, and mine were just sitting there making pretty little green Vs at the foot of a tree.

Then one day last week, I noticed that one of them had three buds on it! The others were showing no such signs, but this one was about to pop!

and pop it did (drat that cell phone lens!) ~

These roses surprise us every year -- they are among the many things that were here long before we were (double drat that cell phone lens!) ~

I've been trying to catch roosterman atop his well for quite a while. He likes to spring from here to the treetops. Before we had chickens of our own, I had no idea how high they could fly ~

Here are some of our tomatoes in the coldframe. This shot was taken a couple of weeks ago -- they're even bigger now. They are beyond ready to be put into the ground, but I spent last weekend preparing to go to Utah (business) for a few days, and this weekend was rained/tornadoed out. We'll set them out next weekend, come rain or shine ~


Stay tuned for a recap of the Utah adventure....

books and other stuff

I borrowed a giant wildflower book from the library, but I still don't know what these are ~

~ a little blurry, but perhaps you can help? we had a flowering bush like this when we lived in the city, too ~ perhaps it doesn't qualify as a wildflower?

chickens in the yard

seedlings in the coldframe

We've used The New Seed-Starters Handbook and Guide to Alabama Vegetable Gardening as reference books over the past couple of months. And on the subject of books, I got a couple of great ones for my birthday: The Wall and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I devoured The Wall and recommend it for children as well as adults. I've not yet started the other one -- looking forward to taking it with me to the beach. The beach! Happy sigh.

I love getting books as gifts because it's the only time I ever add anything to the shelf. All else comes from the library. When I first visited The Evelyn Thornton - Warrior Public Library, I was a bit aghast that it consisted of a single, tiny room. I was accustomed to taking the kids to the downtown Birmingham library once a week. But you know how picking things out at the store can be overwhelming these days, because there are just so many shampoos and cheeses from which to choose? I like the Warrior library because it's the opposite of that. There are a few really good choices, and that's all I really need.

action shots and things that hide

At the beginning of the week, we thinned our tomatoes and eggplant and relocated the squash to roomier digs ~

They'll be heading out to a cold frame in the near future -- we've got lots of salvaged windows that we'll be putting to good use.

The kids found some mushrooms tucked between the great big hackberry tree and the monster wisteria vine ~

Using our handy dandy pocket naturalist guide to mushrooms, we think we have identified these as Common Psathyrella (Psathyrella candolleana). Or something like that.

Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor) on a log, I think ~

We're gathering enough eggs to be able to give some away these days, but Lee came across this wild nest underneath some salvaged materials in the yard. As much as we don't need any more eggs (or chickens), it's still a little disappointing that these weren't deposited in the coop ~

Easterius Eggisus

things that happen here

Remember when it snowed a couple of weeks ago?

The very next weekend, we started some of our seeds ~

tomatoes

eggplant and squash.

The only ones that haven't yet sprouted are the ground cherries, which are really a type of tomato. There's no need to start squash indoors, as you can see by the way it has shot up after only one week. We just figured we'd get a head start since we're a little behind on some other things. We have about a jillion more to start, and we've got to tend to these little germinators as well, thinning some and relocating others.

Gone are the daffodils ~

and the forsythia ~

giving way to spirea ~

Periwinkle is its simple self ~


The tulip tree sheds its dressing ~

Lythrum at Goblins in my Garden helped me know these bright little blossoms as flowering quince ~


The shiitake log is busy making shiitakes ~

That little dot to the right of the mushrooms is a ladybug, the indoor population of which is enough to drive anyone mad, but at least now they have a kitchen sprouting garden to visit.

Life grows ~




and leaves evidence of itself ~


in the form of a phone, a globe, a miniature tornado-maker, half of a hard-boiled egg, pistachios and shells, a screwdriver, and the work of children.