Garden Woes and Hope of Spring

After my previous post five months ago, a few things happened.

One, more blossoms appeared on my pepper plant, and quite a few ended up fruiting, so that was not the last pepper of the season.  As a matter of fact, I just picked the last tiny pepper off the plant four days ago and sauteed it for topping an Italian sausage I had for dinner.

Two, I planted my cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower... however the dogs didn't like this arrangement and dug most of them up for me.  So no sauerkraut from the garden, though there will be a nice, big, beautiful hardware cloth fence around the beds soon, as I've ordered my plants for this summer's garden and the dogs also made a hole in the chain-link fence, so when we picked up the repair materials for that, it was quite easy to get the other stuff.  It was practically on the same shelf.

Three, I have shifted my blogging focus.  A nice gardening blog is all well and good, but not when the author is a craptastic gardener.  The dog fiasco didn't help much.  So I've started an additional blog over at Knitter's Media Reviews to focus on movie, television, and book reviews with an eye for recommendations for fellow knitters and crocheters who like to have something running on the TV while they work.  I will still be posting my personal journal-style posts here, but they will probably be much less frequent on average.

I know, I haven't posted in four months, and you're wondering how I could possibly post *less* than that, but I did say "average".  Over there I'm trying for a consistent five posts a week.  Here I've posted 482 posts at an average of 5.75 posts per month (I started this thing back in 2008, can you believe it?!?)

Anyway... I'm not hitting new movies very often, but I am working my way through the Netflix and Amazon Prime catalogs in a fairly regular fashion.  I review mostly independent, action, sci-fi/fantasy, and rom-coms that strike me as interesting or have someone I like in them, but they're usually on the older side.  Come check it out and see if my taste is the same as yours... and if it is you may find a hidden gem or avoid a real clunker.

The last summer crop, three peppers and a blossom.

The last summer crop, three peppers and a blossom.

I'm trying to put a post together... the first part in a series about growing your own cabbage and then making your own sauerkraut.  Unfortunately between Burpee sending my seedlings, but then taking a week to get here, UPS having a delay with one of their pallet trucks, and other delays, the first post is about a week later than I wanted.

However, I do have two new garden beds installed.  I just have to get about four more bags of dirt to fill them (we're prone to flooding in this area, so I don't want to create any low spots in my yard by just shifting it) and we can get this thing started.

Warning, there are a lot of Amazon affiliate links in this post.  Help a sister out and click 'em if you're interested.  I only get compensation if you order something within a certain time frame, so feel free to browse all you like.

I have twelve cabbage seedlings, six broccoli seedlings, and six cauliflower seedlings on the way.  The broccoli I will make into florets for the freezer, shredding the stem parts and adding that to the cabbage for some of the kraut.  The cauliflower is my favorite part of my home-canned jardinere.  Okay, the pickled cauliflower and the pickled carrots.  The celery is actually quite good too, not mushy at all, which was a surprise from last-year's batch.

I got two more beds very cheaply on Amazon... Greenland Gardener 8-Inch Raised Bed Double Garden Kit.   Compared to other raised bed kits, this is pretty inexpensive.  What cheesed me off though was that I didn't do the proper math, and didn't realize they weren't a full eight feet long.  So now that they're lined up next to my full-length cedar bed, they're coming up short.  This is gnawing at my OCD/Asperger's side to no end.  If I'm still here next year, I am totally getting two more of the short beds and installing them on the other side of the cedar bed so it is symmetrical.

They are super-simple to set up... it's just a set of boards with inter-connecting tabs and grooves.   Once the boxes were in the back yard, I could set them up by myself with no problems and no tools... although I did have a rubber mallet handy.  They're made of a composite of wood and recycled plastic, so I expect them to last for quite a while.  The color is a bit... blah.  I considered painting them, but don't want the chemicals near my food crops.

The dogs helped with this one.  :/

I always put down a weed barrier of some type.  For this pair I splurged on a roll of weed barrier landscape cloth... mostly because I wanted to start a barrier between the beds so I wouldn't have to use the trimmer to keep the grass down.  This allows me to make the space between the beds a little narrower than normal, too.  Eventually I will fill this space with pea gravel and stepping stones I make myself.  Inside the beds I also put down weed barrier cloth in overlapping layers.  I topped that with cardboard boxes (what do you think I do with all my Amazon boxes?  Compost and weed barriers, baby).  The Amazon boxes use soy ink, so I'm not too worried about those... except the shipping labels, which come off a standard printer.  I peel those off as best I can.

On top of the cardboard, I put down a brick of coconut coir that I've re-hydrated in a plastic storage bin.  That's one 11-pound brick in each segment of the garden bed, so I put down four in total.  I am thinking about another four, however, as the large bags of potting soil from Walmart or Home Depot are a) friggin' expensive, comparatively and b) of terrible quality.  It's supposed to be potting soil, and it's got more wood chips in it than most bags of topsoil or mulch.  It's like wood chips and bits of Styrofoam.  And I'm really not happy about Styrofoam, but most of their "garden soil" bags ask for them to be mixed 50/50 with local soil... and I've already stated why I don't want to dig one part of my yard to move it elsewhere.

The coconut coir is NOT a nutrient rich growing medium though, so I will have to seriously amend it with compost and liquid fish/seaweed fertilizer.

Now... figuring out the most sane and humane way to keep my dogs out of the garden beds.  :/

Gardening Roadblocks

Inspired by the resounding near-success of my late-planted tomato and pepper plants, I have decided to put in a second-summer crop (most likely a marketing term, but what the heck, it fits) of cabbages and other brassicas.

I could NOT get my basil seeds to sprout this summer.  In fact, there are four spots in my new raised garden bed that I direct-sowed SIX TIMES and nothing happened.  Either my seed storage is terrible (a distinct possibility) and I killed my stash of seeds, or a certain company that will not be named has a terrible germination rate if the seed is older than one year.  I'm leaning towards the first one, since I also had seeds from a second company that failed to produce anything.

So what I did to remedy the situation was to take my culinary sprouting skills and apply them to garden seed sprouting, then plant the few seeds that sprouted in the jar.  And it worked!  They're coming up.

It's pretty sad, though, when I got better results from a bag of beans from the grocery store (a few white navy and kidney beans reserved before making a batch of Boston Baked Beans this week) than anything in my seed stash.  Maybe the porch where I keep my box of seeds is too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, or maybe it's the weird humidity levels that yo-yo up and down, or maybe the stock I bought from both the unnamed internet company and my local Home Depot was old before I ever got it.  In any case, those empty spots are now almost filled, and hopefully the first frost will hold off till very late in November (our Texas norm is mid-November, so that's not unreasonable).

I had really, really wanted to grow my own pumpkins this year.  I love our local pick-your-own, but it is such a pain in the butt to get to in the summer for strawberries (cars are lined up for two miles just to get onto the parking lot, and that's AFTER they changed/updated their whole driveway and parking system) and the pumpkin patch situation before Halloween and Thanksgiving is only marginally better.

Yes, I have made my pumpkin pies from whole, roasted pumpkins.  And I'll do it again, because it's delicious.  And it's such a Real Food thing to do, doesn't take a lot of time (attended time, that is... the oven does most of the work), and you can feel good about the ingredients.  And it's a 1-to-1 swap of canned solid pack pumpkin to roasted pumpkin flesh.  Just lose the outer rind and mash it up or run it through a food mill.  Plus the whole pumpkins last in the "root cellar" really well, or the roasted mash can be frozen or canned in a pressure canner.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to September when the unnamed company will be shipping my seedling brassicas.  I didn't have much luck with their seeds this year, but the 50% off plants I planted in June are going nuts.  Here's hoping the trend continues.

Preparedness? Sure... in a healthy way

In sharing about my life, I'm pretty sure I've shared the fact that my daughter is on the autism spectrum, and that I strongly suspect I am also based on the reading I did after my daughter's diagnosis.  I have this weird mixture of craving attention and recognition while being completely anti-social.  And aren't blogs perfect for that?

I've been reading a lot of books lately, mostly because of Amazon's new lending program, Kindle Unlimited.  With a Prime membership you can check out ten titles at a time, turn them in when you're done, and check out more.  One at a time, or all ten at once, it makes no difference.

I cannot tell you how much money this has saved me, especially in the cooking, gardening, and prepper genres.  I no longer have to spend $10 on a title, only to find out the person has poor taste, poor writing skills, created a deceptive title for quick cash, or is Paranoid Beyond Belief.  Seriously, some preppers think the National Guard is going to be marching down our streets *tomorrow* grabbing the Big Macs and rifles out of our hands and making us stand in line to beg for a cup of rice.  Some of those people are freaking scary.

BUT... being the person on the spectrum that I am, I am a big enough worrier that I DO believe in being prepared.  I have no expectations about WHEN I'm going to need these things, but the scary preppers do, and that's the difference.  They're motivated by the panic that they may already be too late.  Me, I'm motivated by the adage "better safe than sorry".  To be honest, after living through Hurricane Katrina, then Hurricane Ike just a short time later, and a couple of instances where utilities just went out for days with no apparent reason (other than the local electric or water company was abysmally incompetent), I prepare because I do not like the feeling of scrambling to make sure my family stays healthy and fed.

I mean, what would you do if you opened the kitchen tap tomorrow, and nothing came out?  You'd run to the store and buy a jug of water, right?  But what if you're in the midst of an emergency, like a hurricane or storm watch, got to the store and it was all purchased already?  Or worse, the stores were closed?  You'd be standing in the yard with a bucket, praying for rain.  Not a happy feeling.

So I prep where I can.  I believe in having a pantry of food that you can draw from if your spouse loses their job.  I believe in gardening for your own food.  Not only is it therapeutic, but with grocery prices increasing on an average of almost 50% over the last five years, it's an economic necessity.  I still haven't managed to make rain barrels to capture and store water yet, but I plan to.  You'll get the necessity the first time you cut up a chicken, go to the kitchen sink to wash the salmonella off your hands, and nothing comes out of the tap.  Yeah, that was a fun day.

At the very least, I believe every grownup in America, whether you have a family or not, should have enough food in the house to live for at least a month.  Even if you are responsible enough to have money saved up in your account, if you lost your job tomorrow would you want to see that money dwindle away on food?  You may need that to go job hunting... new suits, running to Kinko's for a nice resume printing, or gas money.  Plus, canned or stored food can be more convenient than fast food when you're tired from hitting the job market.  I mean, it's already in your house, how much more convenient can you get?  And then if you haven't got a job by the end of the month, you will have saved money otherwise spent.  Am I right?

So I say be prepared.  Don't make me trot out the story about the ant and the grasshopper.

The Difference a Week Makes

So there's the same pepper you saw last week, as it appeared yesterday.  Don't get excited... we ate it last night.  I had some shredded pork in the freezer, so I fried up the pepper with some onions and made homemade flour tortillas from a recipe on the back of a 25lb. bag of flour.  Awesomely delicious.  I think this is also the first time I made flour tortillas where I wasn't completely disappointed with the thickness when they were cooked.  Let me put it this way... you could see through the dough a little bit when I was done rolling them out.  I think the proper term is "paneing" as in a window pane.  Also, I may or may not have used rendered bacon fat in the dough instead of the listed shortening.  Ahem.

I'm on my last square for a comfort project for a friend who survived a disaster.  After that the crafting for the Etsy shop begins again in full earnest.  Today, however, is Mom's Day Off.  I have plenty of posts on the subject (okay, I know of two) but I did want to get these thoughts down today before I blinked and realized yet another week had passed.

I'm already looking at plants for fall planting and harvest (brassicas, mostly... that's your cabbage, broccoli, etc.) and deciding if I'm digging a new bed for garlic.  Garlic is a little... committed.  And I was strangely reluctant to actually use last year's crop.  It was just so pretty once it'd been cured and braided.

The teenager starts back to school on Monday.  So now I'm going to have to start setting my alarm and (gasp) setting the parental time controls on the internet so she's not up until 2am.  But I will have uninterrupted days with the dogs again.  If only I could send those crazy kids off to school, too.  Especially the shoe chewer.

This Week At Hullion Arts...

I took photographs.

I drew stuff.

It's on my RedBubble

I crocheted several rounds on a new doily, and did red motifs for a poinsettia dimensional doily.  Lack. Of. Focus.

My problem is that even though I make very piddly amounts on my RedBubble stuff (20%... unless I mark it up outrageously) it's the format where I feel the most inspiration right now.  While crochet and embroidery are nice and relaxing, they are also soooooo very slow when it comes to cranking out product.  And I feel this need to put a lot of work out there... I feel like I've been sleepwalking for ten years and just got my artsy mojo back.

And yet I have a ton of unfinished WIPs that need to be addressed.  Not the least of which is the handwoven shawl that is still on my loom from before we moved TWO YEARS AGO.  Okay, I know why I haven't wanted to tackle that one... the warp tension got all messed up when we moved the loom, and I don't have the heart to dig in and see if I can rescue it, or if I'm going to have to cut it off.  It takes me a full day to warp the loom... I just don't know if I could do it.  Plus about ten knitting WIPs that I'm scared to work on after what the new dog did chewing on my crochet thread.

The garden is going awesome.  I have peppers and tomatoes that are working up to getting ripe.  I'd have been harvesting for a long time now if I'd gotten off my butt and planted in April and not June, but then I wouldn't have gotten those garden-ready plants from Burpee at 50% off.

If every single tomato blossom ended up with a fruit, theoretically I'd have over thirty pounds of tomatoes.  These plants are *supposed* to bear 2lb. individual tomatoes.  Not coincidentally, 2lbs of tomatoes is what you need for one quart of canned tomatoes.  I would imagine that would work out to a pint of sauce, or a half pint of paste maybe?  Anyhoo, considering the number of bees *inside* my house, I'd have more than just the one pollinated blossom outside my house.  Maybe it puts out so many blooms because it only wants to support one tomato at a time and it's making sure there's plenty left alive for the next one?  Don't ask me, I'm tomato-stupid.

But the pepper plant, now... that's got five fruits on it in varying stages.  The original one is just about to start turning color.  I'm thinking stuffed peppers, or pre-cut frozen bags for Italian beef sandwiches.  Oh yum.  I just wish my zucchini wasn't so puny.  I'd be pickling those suckers.

Cooking: Meatless Monday, Lentil Salad

Trying hard to work in a "meatless Monday" every week.  It's cheaper, healthier, and reduces my neurotic worry over our cholesterol levels.  It's also higher in fiber when you include legumes, like this lentil salad.

I heavily modified a version I found in the "Forks Over Knives" cookbook.  While their version uses a lot of cilantro and mint, I wanted to create something a little more like a cross between three-bean salad and hummus.  Sort of.

My Roja garlic hadn't performed up to my expectations.  Only half of them came up, and I wanted the garden bed space for lettuces, so I picked most of them early.  I replaced the green onion and garlic cloves in the original recipe with two too-young garlic shoots.  I added a bit of cilantro, but omitted

HtH: Garden is In?

Technically, the best bed of my garden has been in since November, when I planted my garlic for overwintering.  The outer leaves (?) died back a little in the winter cold, but now they're sending up multiple new shoots.  Each green leaf (?) equals another clove in the bulb, so I'm happy to see their new spring growth.

If you look down the middle of the garlic bed, you will see a brassica that also survived over winter.  To be honest, I don't know if it's a broccoli, or a brussel sprout, or a cabbage.  I tried to start several of them, and the sprouts just kept dying on me, until I spotted this little guy near the edge of the bed where the water had washed the seed, so I transplanted him.  We'll see what he turns into.  Click through to see the rest.

HtH: Why, hello there little guy!

I may blog about gardening often, but let's face it.... I have not been particularly successful.  I did not have a house until about eight months ago.  June was far too late in the year to be starting a new garden in this Texas heat, and my patio container attempts at the apartment were laughable.

I am starting to gain confidence, however.  My fall-planted garlic is still doing well, despite a couple of days last month where we dipped below freezing.  And now, there is this:

That my friends is a lemon tree seedling sprouted from a supermarket lemon.  Here's how I did it.  (Click through to see!)

HtH: House to Homestead

I'm starting a new segment in my blog called "House to Homestead".  In it I'll be featuring the little things... weekend projects, big projects... that we're going to be doing around the new house once we close and take possession of our new house this month.

It's a 2,000 square foot house situated on a third of an acre.  We are very close to a river that runs out to the gulf of Mexico.  The lawn itself has been mono-cropped to death... the soil is dead and mineral-like.  There's an ugly chain-link fence around the perimeter of the back yard, while the front yard remains open.  There are a few trees on the lot, but they are non-edible trees, and are thickly choked with Spanish moss.

Right now, while waiting for the paperwork and inspections to get done, I am trying to get my gardening plan worked out so that I can hit the ground running when we take possession.  I've already started seedlings in coir pots on the balcony, but I really wasn't prepared for how quickly they'd take off.

This is one week's growth.  What you're looking at is six cucumber plants, and two pea plants, started originally in my aerogarden seed-starting tray, but when I realized how large they were getting so quickly, I carefully separated the roots from the growing sponges and replanted in the coir pellet pots after three days.  If we don't close before June first, I think I might have an overgrowth problem, lol.

This is six bean plants and two more peas.  Bugs might have gotten to these, but since their brothers and sisters are growing like gangbusters, I might wait until we're in the house before I plant replacements.  It will stagger the harvest that way too.  And since our growing season is so VERY long, I'm not worried about freezing in the fall.

This is a tomato plant from LAST year.  It survived the winter on my balcony with absolutely no extra attention from me, and it is already growing one fruit.  That's probably all it will grow, but since the plant was so winter-hardy, I will try to save the seeds from this little gem and use them in next-year's garden.  I figure I'll be starting seeds indoors in January.

This is a square-foot planter from Simple Earth that I planted... hmmm.  I want to say I planted it in March.  It is supposed to be a single tomato plant surrounded by basil, but the day after I planted it and placed it on the balcony, it rained a LOT... and unfortunately my building maintenance crew has not cleaned the gutters since we've lived here, so a sheet of water poured directly into the planter before I noticed and went out to move it.  After the seeds came up and the true leaves began to show (so I could tell what was what) I redistributed the sprouts in the container, but I had to be really careful not to destroy the tiny roots.  Two tomatoes came up.  I should probably snip down the smaller one, to let the larger take over, but I haven't had the heart to do so yet.  They seem to be growing really slowly, and I'm not sure if that's a fault with the coir soil medium that came with the planter, or the fact that the seeds got sloshed and buried the day after they were planted.

The Christmas rosemary tree did not survive being indoors with us.  At one point, my daughter and I both noticed it was dry and both watered it on the same day. I think that and lack of light might have been what killed it, so we set up a watering plan and are keeping this new one outdoors.

I did not take a picture of my Bay laurel plant, but the original plant sent up a new shoot at the edge of the pot.  I waited until there was significant leaf growth and snipped the top of the shoot off to promote bushy growth.  I'll plant them close to the kitchen (shading my new workshop, perhaps?) when we get to the house.

As far as the vegetable garden, I am going to be following a plan from Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens which I hope will contribute to my success.  You start small, and over the course of three years, increase the size of the garden.  I debated long and hard whether to go with the Easy Bag Garden, where you plant right into bags of organic soil instead of the intensive digging needed for regular yard dirt (especially with the dead stuff under our lawn at the moment) or go with a raised-bed system and try the Family Food Factory garden, which should supply a family of four with enough to eat for the year, with a continuous year-round growing cycle.

On the one hand, I am tired of eating genetically modified, crappy food from industrialized farming, and I want to feed my family as much organic produce as possible.  On the other hand, I know that I can be essentially lazy and/or hard on myself... I don't like doing things and failing at them.  Doing too much all at once seems like a recipe for failure, to me.  We have a good, locally grown produce farm that sells to the public, but they are really expensive, and last-year's drought  was very hard on their crops, and I noticed chinese garlic, california avocados, and other non-local produce for sale in their bins.  I just can't be assured that what they will offer will be the good stuff.

I think what I'll end up doing is going with the easy bag garden plan, try it for the three years, and then if I feel I can tackle the food factory, year-round growing plan, I'll try it then.  Now I just have to convince hubby to buy me a gazillion fruit trees, and I'll be set.  :D

Food: Container Gardening Makes it Possible!

Believe it or not, you can still grow a decent(ish) garden even when you're living in a dinky apartment.  Between the upside-down container planter and various 6 to 12 inch pots, I have a little corner of greenery going on my narrow patio/entry area.  Behold, not one but two six-inch Italian sweet peppers:

And they haven't even thought about turning red yet, so they could get much larger before that happens.

I am not very happy with the results of the upside-down part of the container planter, though.  The upright plants have far outgrown their topsy-turvy counterparts.  I don't think the tomato plant has even grown, much less blossomed.

This is my motley collection.  The only one not present is a cherry tomato plant that I moved into the sun before I was inspired to grab my camera.