Wee little gnome.
13 May 2012 Leave a Comment
For my birthday last week my mother in law sent me a box of garden related items. Most of them were to be used for a drip watering system, but she tucked a wee little garden gnome in there. I might possibly be in love with this little garden gnome.
Fuchsia
27 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
Almost a year ago my mother-in-law, while traveling, found some Fuchsia plants on sale. She came home with 10 of these tiny plants in little square cardboard seed pots.
Now for those of you who haven’t met her, my mother-in-law happens to be a flower junkie. She has a green thumb, but she is CRAZY about plants that flower. Wes regales me of stories from his childhood of her stopping in various neighborhoods, parking lots, and recreational parks to pull buds or stems off of plants with beautiful flowers to bring them home and coax them to grow.
Anyhow, she brought us this spindly little plant. After a few weeks it was clear that it was root-bound so I dutifully re-potted it and put it in our dining room, which has a southern exposure and receives gentle sunlight throughout the day. I didn’t know how the plant would do given the varying midwest climate, and that I was only familiar with outdoor fuchsia plants in California.
After a few months we had one solitary blossom. And then one more. And the plant grew sending off countless vines. So we clipped a few, let them soak in a salsa jar filled with water for a few weeks, and planted those cuttings back in the same pot to full the plant.
And my poor mother-in-law who took home 9 of her 10 fuchsia plants has potted and re-potted them and seen nary a blossom.
So you can imagine my surprise in the last few weeks when suddenly what was a tiny sprig a year ago is flourishing and covered in beautiful blossoms. Don’t tell my mother-in-law!
To-may-to, To-mah-to
27 Aug 2011 1 Comment
in A Picture's Worth 1000 Words, Domesticity, Farm Fresh Foods, Finding my Green Thumb
Last weekend Wes and I went out to the yarn to find it chock full of tomatoes. Sadly the pests have gotten some of them but there were still a fair number to pick. But given our one disastrous attempt at canning (we won’t speak of the pickles ever again…), I had to come up with something quick to do with them. Enter this fabulous recipe at Smitten Kitchen.
1. Pick tomatoes, wash them. Any tomatoes will do.
2. Set up a pot of water to boil. The first step is to blanch the tomatoes. Take a knife and score an X at the bottom of the tomatoes and drop them in the boiling water for 10-20 seconds.
3. Quickly move the tomatoes from the boiling water to a bowl of ice water.
At this point the skins will have burst and will be easy to remove.
4. Remove the skins.
5. Now remove the seeds, while keeping the juice. I found the easiest way to do this was to squeeze the tomato over a strainer and measuring cup. Since I had scored the tomatoes on the bottom, and these were small, this got rid of most of the seeds and juice.
6. Now chop the tomatoes up in whatever form you want. If you want the sauce to be a little chunky, give them a rough cut. If you want the sauce to be smooth, you can use an immersion blender or puree.
7. Now let’s chop a few veggies to flavor the sauce. Here is 1 carrot, 1 stalk of celery, 1 small onion and a bit of garlic.
8. Now (finally!!) let’s get cooking! Start with some olive oil and all the veggies in a pot. Cook them 10-15 minutes, or until they start to soften/lose some color/cook.
9. Add in your tomatoes. Let the sauce simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30-45 minutes. If the sauce ends up too thick, add some of the tomato juice you captured earlier during de-seeding. Add salt to taste.
YUMMY!
We made ours a generic tomato sauce. We could put this over pasta as is, or make it more of an Italian spaghetti sauce by adding basil and oregano. I’m sure you could can this, although I only made a few servings in this batch so I opted just to freeze it. I can’t wait to thaw it out a few months from now when it’s snowy outside and enjoy it that much more because it came from my own garden!
My green thumb.
27 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in Farm Fresh Foods, Finding my Green Thumb, Learning to be a Midwestern Gal
It’s amazing how life takes twists and turns that you never expect. If you ask anyone I was going to live, love and die in Los Angeles. I could never have foreseen moving to the Midwest with my sweetie, much less loving it here. I don’t know if we’ll stay forever, but then again I keep threatening that I’m never going to move house again.
One of the many things I never saw myself doing was starting a garden. Now don’t get me wrong – I have no use for flower beds and I still abhor getting dirty. But there’s something about growing my own food in the ground that tempts me. Tempts me enough that we planted part of the enormous raised bed that the previous occupants of our house left us.
It is to my great joy and frustration that our yarn is exceedingly fertile. Vegetables = good. Endless weeds and plants that I have to hoe/weed/pull/curse at? Less so.
But then there’s the lettuce:
And the beans:
And the cucumber invasion:
(and there you can see the part of the bed we didn’t plant that I’m still fighting with!)
And even though we started a little late, I’m hoping for tomatoes:
And maybe one day a strawberry patch:
I can’t take credit for it, but I’m super excited about our blackberries!
Now if only I could do something about the “artist” formerly known as the chicken yard:
(for reference, we tilled the chicken yard about 8 weeks ago – what you see is ONLY 8 weeks of growing!)
Okay
04 May 2011 2 Comments
in Deep Thoughts, Finding my Green Thumb
It has been two weeks and two days since our lives changed. I’m struck by the dichotomy of feelings. There are moments, moments where we are laughing and telling stories and loving and it seems like we will all be okay. And then there are moments, other moments where the world doesn’t make sense any more and it feels like we will never be okay.
Going back to work has been both wonderful and terrible. I am grateful for the routine, the normalcy, the tasks to keep me busy. And yet I’m equally horrified that life is continuing on, much as it did before.
Many years ago I noticed something odd. Often, I would go to the movies or the theatre. Sometimes, when the production was particularly moving, I would emerge from the theatre feeling like some part of me had been fundamentally changed and that anyone who hadn’t seen what I had seen couldn’t possibly be seeing the world the same way I did. Usually the feeling only lasted a few hours or days, and then I felt like I returned to “normal.” I see the parallels now; the world doesn’t look quite the same to me and we have to try and find a new normal.
But we must move on, whether we like it or not. As I’ve been wondering how to do so, and more specifically what I could come back and post about that wouldn’t feel too trivial, too hollow, I was struck by it tonight. Tonight we borrowed a tiller from some friends and tilled our vegetable bed. We’ve been meaning to do it for weeks, but the weather has thwarted us. Tonight, before dinner, while it was still light out, we took time out to start preparing our garden. It’s a new beginning for us – neither of us has ever planted a vegetable garden before. And it feels like a metaphor to me – we’re starting anew and trying to move forward. And that’s okay.
What I did this weekend: Evicting the fowl.
16 Aug 2010 3 Comments
in Weekend Update, Domesticity, Finding my Green Thumb, Farm Fresh Foods, A Home of Our Own
When Wes and I saw this house, we really fell in love with it. We did not, however, fall in love with the kitchen. In fact, we both agreed that the kitchen would be the first area of the house to see a little improvement. You might be wondering why. Well see, the previous owners liked roosters. A lot.
I’m sorry, you probably can’t see it quite well enough. Let me show you a closeup:
The night after we closed, Wes and I drove down to the house to see how easily the wallpaper might be removed. We peeled a bit and low and behold the vinyl portion of the paper just came right off. Starting to look better already.
Saturday, after a BIG trip to Home Depot we got out our DIF blue goo and smeared it all over the walls. A few hours of scraping and we got all the paper removed. What was underneath? Well burgundy walls of course!
Yeah. We don’t get it either.
Sunday we primed and painted. Our walls our now Cancun Sand, which basically means a nice cream color. Tape comes off tomorrow so this shot will have to suffice for now:
Of course the other fun thing about our house is that the previous occupants were serious gardeners. This means we got lucky and get a bit of the end of the season produce. We watered today, and collected an enormous zucchini, a squash, a couple peppers, okra, tons and tons of tomatoes (the cherry ones are SO good – and I don’t even like tomatoes!), blackberries and concord grapes. YUM!
ETA For more pictures of the house visit the whole album here.
It’s like Ohmigod!
25 Jan 2009 2 Comments
in Finding my Green Thumb, Funny, Learning to be a Midwestern Gal
You can say many things about me. I possess many talents. Gardening, however, is not one of them. In fact I’m spectacularly bad at it. Since moving to Kansas City, you might say that I have a one way relationship with potted plants and cuttings, one of virtually assured destruction.
My only briefly successful foray into the growing world was the Aerogarden escapades of this past spring/summer. And I have to say it was kind of cheating. It was grow lights, water, prepackaged seed pods and food pellets.
Last weekend Wes and I decided to try our hand at growing again. We spent a little while at Home Depot pondering our options and ended up with a Burpee Grow Kit. The kit comes with a plastic tray, a watering system (reservoir and absorbent mat), and some “magic” dirt pellets (they expand when you add water). At the end of the evening our newest project looked like this:
We planted a variety of vegetables and herbs. From our previous experience we expected the herbs to sprout within a 7-10 days and be ready for harvesting and transfer within 4-6 weeks. From reading the vegetable packets, we expected our plants to be transferable in about 6 weeks and mature in 60-90 days. We reasoned that this would be at earliest, March, and at lastest April, perfectly warm.
A mere 6 days later, this is what we have:
Those there on the left are the BEANS OF DOOM with root systems already OUTSIDE the plastic tray. In the middle you can see a melange of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and onions. Those big sprouts on the right are the broccoli.
Not much action from the herb section:
Apparently the hubs and I are genius gardeners huh? We’re also in SERIOUS trouble.
Mary Mary Quite Contrary
26 Apr 2008 1 Comment
Our garden seems to be growing! We can already smell the basil (the big green and purplish plans) and the chives. The only one that hasn’t grown too much yet is the parsley (that’s still domed). I can’t wait to harvest though, because every now and then I get wafts of wonderful herb goodness.
It’s also evident that spring has sprung here. Everywhere trees are full of beautiful blossoms (whites and pinks and reds and yellows), tulips edge lawns all over the city, and it has rained most days a little bit, despite being in the 60s and 70s. Wes and I have recently decided to exercise together (he gets the credit for the idea, and for pushing me to do it) so now we go walking together a few times a week. Our complex is right next to a golf course and a pretty park area and there are some 15+ miles of walking paths. So far we’ve only conquered about 1.5 miles of it (that’s a good 3 mile walk out and back), and it’s really peaceful wandering among trees and lawns and furry little creatures, even if there are adjacent homes and golf carts sometimes. There’s a pond and several ducks right near our house, a creek that runs through the area and tons to see and photograph (especially for practice!) All that makes the exercise go quickly. What more could I ask for?
