Sticky

A few years ago, five, I think, I planted a peach tree in the front yard. It was a weedy little thing at the time, barely two feet tall. 

The next spring it bloomed and we got a few tiny peaches that never ripened. 

Ever since then it's been touch and go, the bloom getting hit by frost or the peaches being carried off by squirrels long before they were edible. 

This year is different. The bloom didn't seem that heavy, but there are so many peaches the tree can't hold itself up properly - one of my neighbors volunteered her laundry poles keep the branches from snapping. (One of her laundry poles snapped instead.)

And while there have been peaches scattered up and down the block, there are too many for the squirrels to handle on their own. I've got multiple bowls in the kitchen, waiting to be turned into jam, and on Sunday I did the first batch of five half pint jars. 

That was plain peach. Next up is peach vanilla, and after that peach jalapeno. I'll do another batch of plain if the squirrels leave any by that point.

A few days later, and I'm still waiting for it to totally set up. I thought I messed up, but after doing some reading, it seems that peach jam takes its sweet time to find its set point. 

I care, but I don't. It tasted so good in the cooking process that I'll just pour it over ice cream and call that a victory over the squirrels.

Spring Not Spring

It's my favorite time of year - not - when it's a different season when I leave for work than when I come home. Yesterday morning it was 35 when I went in and nearly 60 at lunchtime. Do I shiver in denim on the way in or sweat in wool walking home?

The garden isn't as confused as me, though it is messy. Past Karen did a fabulous job cleaning up the vegetable garden in the back, and the bed along the side of the house is pretty tidy, but the front garden looks like a heap. Much needs to be done, and apparently by me, though not in time for yard waste pickup this week, alas. I ran out of steam.

So instead I'll show the nice bit. Here's the back garden. Eight raised beds waiting to be topped off with a bit more soil and some compost, and three new beds in the back along the garage wall. The empty space at front left is where my hammock frame sits; once everything is growing, I can hide behind my walls of tomatoes and no one can see me. 

The new raised beds are because I fell afoul of the garden section on Temu. I didn't know they had one, but it found me, and then I somehow acquired three circular beds, a garden cart, netting bags for my fruit trees and smaller ones for the blueberry bushes, and two obelisk trellises for the big pots that anchor the corners of the front yard.

Oops. 

Insomnia shopping for the win.

I'm still gathering seeds and making my diagram for the vegetable garden, but another thing I acquired this year was an electric pressure canner, so I can vary my produce a bit more as I'll have other ways to preserve it than just freezing and water bath canning. 

The garden is really coming along. I made ratatouille this morning in the Instant Pot and the only ingredient I had to buy was onion. It feels good to have all that available. 

Also, in hot weather, there's nothing like coming with an instant pot instead of spending a few hours over the stove. When I first got the pot, I bought an extra liner, which makes labor intensive dishes like this a lot easier - I don't have to dump out the first stage of vegetables, I can just switch in another liner. And I have a silicone lid, so I can just put the whole pot into the fridge when I'm done. 

I like my ratatouille both hot and cold, so it doesn't matter to me.

What's your favorite straight-from-the garden dish?

Garden Therapy

So the book comes out on Saturday, and basically I'm spinning like a top. And what's the best thing to do when I'm spinning like that? 

Go to the garden.

I posted earlier this spring about rearranging the backyard and installing new raised beds. They're all in, they're all full, and they are all planted except for one, which is getting a late crop of seed potatoes because my peas, which were doing so nicely, got eaten by something and now it's too hot and dry to start over with any chance of success.

The beds have two kinds of squash, two kinds of eggplant, cucumber, Lima beans, a variety of peppers from sweet to Mexican spicy, and far too many tomatoes. I planted three deliberately, and transplanted another seven of the volunteers that popped up.

What I finally have to do next week, when there is a little more clear space in my head, is order the wood chips to cover the weed barrier. I hate walking around on that woven plastic-y stuff. But I need to pick a day with a good forecast, and after a few days of clear weather because I don't want to shovel wet wood chips and transport them around the yard.

Pomegranate flowers

In the side yard, the blueberries are about half done. I want to get two more bushes to plant this fall, because I have spaces along the drive where other things didn't do well and they will. The fig tree is taller than I am and covered in little hard green figs. Now, I don't like figs personally, but my husband loves them, and I like to make fig jam. So it's worth the real estate. 

In the front, flowers are blooming away. The cherry tree actually produced cherries this year, but we didn't get as many as the birds did. I think this fall we'll trim it back so that it's low and wide enough to get a protective net over. Right now, I'd have to throw it from the second floor window, and my aim isn't that good. The peach tree isn't having its best year, but it had so much fruit last year that my neighbors were finding squirrel-relocated peach pits all up and down the street.

Overambitious fig

My favorite - although, like the figs, it's not my favorite fruit - is the pomegranate. Just because it feels so weird to grow pomegranates in Pennsylvania. We got 11 last year, and I'm hoping for more this year, because the blooms are crazy.

So that has been garden tour 2024. Inconsistent fruit, far too many tomatoes, and a backbreaking effort to not break my back again next year. We'll see. The whole point of putting in raised beds is to not rearrange things - or at least that's what I said 5 years ago, when I put in the previous raised beds.

Welcome to the farm!

I'm still going to get The Son in Shadow finished by the end of this week. If I have to give up sleep, I'm going to get that book FINISHED.

But I probably won't have to go to those lengths, because it started raining Sunday night and it's still raining. And considering that what I want to get up to in the back yard involves moving soil from my old raised beds (4'x4', 6" deep) to my new raised beds (2'x4', 12" deep), that would be a messy, heavy business better saved for a day with a little sunshine. 

Though I will get the rest of those completed aluminum beds out of the living room, because we're tripping on them and the cats seem to think I'm building an amusement park for them.

These are much better quality than the old raised beds, and the rectangular size allows me to arrange them so that they're closer together (because they're not wider than my arm's reach). I'll be able to grow a lot more this year, while still having an empty space alongside the garage - to the left of this photo - where I can set up my hammock and a small table to hold a drink and a book.

I've got a nice little seating area set up on the front patio, but sometimes you just don't want to be where everyone can say hello, and the hammock stand, as I found out last year, only fits on the patio if the other chairs are removed and the peach tree is pruned back. So I need a little space to hide away, and I'm going to get it, so long as my back holds out.

Fingers crossed that my back holds out.

Tis the season

Garden season, that is. 

In the front yard, the daffodils are exploding in a riot of yellow - so many that I can actually *smell* them. The hyacinths are up, but the grape hyacinths, usually the earliest arrival, are poking along by comparison. The peach tree looks like pink popcorn.

The side garden is still pretty dormant. There are a few daffa, and the iris greens are perking up, but the side is mostly fruit and the fig and blueberries haven't leafed yet.

Im the back is...a mess. Five springs ago, I put in eight 4x4 raised beds, the kind made of recycled wood/plastic. They were cheap, which I needed at the time, but they've lived up to their pricing, bulging outward and coming loose from their corners, spilling soil everywhere.

Add to that pretty picture the fact that we need all new mulch between the beds, and that I spent Saturday helping a friend build new metal-framed beds for *her* garden, and I have a new project. New metal frames are due to arrive tomorrow, and that gives me plenty of time to put them together and figure out how to place them so we can actually use the back yard a bit more. (I have a hammock on a frame that I'd love to use, but there's no room for it). 

The fun part will be getting the existing soil from the old beds to the new ones, considering they're not going to be in exactly the same place. And I need to top up the soil once that's done, and get more mukch. Hoping the local tree service is still giving away free wood chip because them I can afford the higher quality soil/mushroom compost blend. 

The fun part will be when there's a mountain of it in our driveway that will need to be shifted so we can continue to use said driveway.

Tomato Season

It's that time again! This, I regret to inform you, is one morning's take from the back yard. 

Every year, I swear I'm going to plant less tomatoes because I can't keep up, and every year I think, "Just one more. Just in case they don't do well." And then a few volunteer plants show up (thank you, squirrels!) and I'm off to the races again.  I planted three tomatoes this year, and ended up with seven. Even with dropping them off to various neighbors, we have more than we can eat, so today starts the yearly tomato saucing. It's the earliest ever that I can remember, and because I'm going to be doing a heavy can at a friend's house - he has a restaurant kitchen and I'm not turning down that offer - I'll probably end up buying a crate at the farmer's market so I can make enough to feed us for the entire rest of the year.

Also, tomatoes aren't just for humans. Look at this little bugger, sitting there, bold as you please in my neighbor's tree, eating a perfect, red tomato. 

End of season

And so it goes, the end of another growing season.

This was a particularly good one. I'm not sure if it's because I didn't overextend myself and try to grow too many things, so that the ones I did plant worked better, or if it was just a good weather year, or the garden was the one part of 2020 that worked out as anticipated.

Whatever. It worked. 

I took out the last of the tomatoes the other day, and this was the amount of green tomatoes still on the vines. We've had some colder nights, so the vines were dying back, and I wanted to get the fruit off before they got frosted and squishy.

There was an equal amount of red tomatoes, so I threw those in the crockpot and made sauce, which I later canned, but I didn't have the energy to face all these green tomatoes in addition to the number of jalapenos that were left, which also needed to be canned (more candied hot peppers for the pantry). 

My local Buy Nothing group made short work of the green tomatoes. The ones that were left moved around the corner to a neighbor's house. She's a distribution point for USDA food boxes, and lots of neighbors put extra food on her porch for "shopping." So she got the tomatoes, and they were gone by nightfall.

Now I can look out at my barren back yard, and start thinking about 2021. 

 

What's new

Somehow it's nearly October. I know that time has no meaning anymore, but this is getting ridiculous.

I just finished my Readers Group newsletter, with a few changes. I'd been sending it out twice a month, but I've realized that I spend far too much time trying to think of interesting things to put in the newsletter, rather than thinking of interesting things to put in my books. Which is the reason - I hope - that people have signed up for the newsletter. So it's going to once a month after this, unless there's a special announcement, a sale, etc. 

P.S., if you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here.

So I have been doing a fair bit of writing, other issues aside. My third book, Lady, in Waiting, is still in the first draft but has passed the 100k word mark. The eventual publication length will probably be about 115k (that's what Songbird and A Wider World came in near), but I'll probably hit 130k and then edit it back down. I know how I work by now.

A good bit of my writing has taken place outside. I've trained myself to dictate my rough first drafts, which I then upload onto my desktop and tidy up, speech-to-text not always being the most accurate technology. Still, it's better than sitting inside when we're at that perfect end-of-summer-almost-fall weather. 

If I'm not walking around the neighborhood, I'm sitting on our front patio, which has just recently been redone with four orange vintage chairs and matching tables that I trash picked from a neighbor across the street. They'd been in his garage for 10 years, and he finally gave up on the idea of repainting them and using them on his own porch. Personally, I like the orange, so I got a gallon of metal paint in the same shade and I'll sand and repaint once the season is over.

Garden season is nearly over. We've had a few nights in the 40s, and that means the bigger tomatoes have shut down, along with some of the peppers. The grape tomatoes are still chugging along, producing more fruit than I can use, and my neighbors are beginning to hide when they see me coming, in case of tomatoes. I made a roasted tomato salsa last week which came out well, so I think I'll make a few more jars to shove in the back of the fridge.

What about you? Is it still garden season? Are you making anything with your produce, whether it's from your garden, the farmer's market or the grocery store?

Harvest Day

August is definitely when the garden starts earning its keep. It's just a shame that August is also when I start to flag.

Pictured here is ONE DAY'S harvest from the pepper plants. One day.

Did I maybe plant too many peppers? Nah. I'll think of something.

Red bowl: Padron peppers, a Spanish variety used in tapas. We eat these a LOT. They're also topped and de-seeded and vacuum sealed in the bags, because they cook up well after being frozen. Win/win.

The big peppers in the front are an Italian sweet pepper called Carmen. Almost large enough to stuff. But we visited NJ this past weekend to talk to Mario's mom at the nursing home window, and stopped at an Italian sausage shop in town, so sausage and peppers is on the menu.

The red peppers are Padrons that got away from me. They'll be chopped and mixed in the jalapenos, behind them, for another big batch of candied peppers.

You don't even want to see the tomatoes. Trust me. It's going to look like a bloodbath in my kitchen when I get started on them.

Day to day

What does your new normal look like?

Honestly, for me, it's not that different from the Before Time. I know how lucky I am to be able to say that, and how lucky I am to live in a place where I can still get outside, to live with a person who makes me feel safe rather than not, and to have enough food in the house that we don't have to venture out too often. Mario's job has transitioned to working from home, and while there's not a lot happening on Etsy right now, and craft shows have disappeared, I'm continuing to work as if they were ongoing, just to keep myself feeling "normal."

I'm actually being more social than I would normally. I've had many (distant, shouted) conversations with neighbors. I've checked in by text and phone and DM with friends, especially the ones who tend not to reach out on their own. I remind Mario consistently to call his mom, who's in a nursing home in NJ and locked down to visitors. They've recently instituted a video call program, so it's been good that he's been able to see her, and vice versa.

Beyond that, I'm writing, when I have the focus. Loss of focus does seem to be one of the markers of this strange time we're living in, but I'm not beating myself up if I'm not productive. It's a pandemic, not a vacation. If I don't produce a new novel by the end of shelter-in-place, who's going to judge me - besides possibly me? No one.

The front garden is looking good, but I'm waiting on vegetable starts for the back yard. I have started some seeds in the cold frame, but other than radishes (which I don't like - growing for a neighbor) and lettuces, not much is happening. I have a new cherry tree to put in out front, just haven't decided where yet. It's a dwarf size, topping out at 8 feet, so it won't take over. But it's a cherry tree. I wouldn't mind if it did.

What about you? How has your life changed? Are you feeling okay? Need a virtual hug?

Stay Home

The peach tree I planted
last summer is blooming!

So I'm doing my best to keep distancing and distracting myself. There's a fine line between being well-informed and driving yourself around the bend. I thought I knew that already, but it's even more important now.

So while I'm on the computer, I'm letting Mario have most of the bandwidth for his obsessive Googling and news-gathering, and I'm trying to write. It's going. I'm not sure how well it's going, but it's going.


Mainly I need to keep from climbing the walls, and that seems like a good way to direct my energies, since it isn't garden season yet.

I did get out there the other day - it was nearly 80 degrees and the dirt was calling to me - and I felt "normal" for the rest of the day, and the next morning, until I caught up on the news.

Moral of that story: dig in the dirt, stay away from the news, and STAY HOME.

That's all I've got for now.

Garden bounty

You can't afford to look away in August.

Garden goodness

I planted some new crops this year, alongside the standby crops of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and potatoes.

Watermelon (not ready yet), corn (more than ready), and lima beans.

I grew up on canned lima beans and thought they were one of the world's nastiest vegetables, and then a few years ago, we got a small bag of fresh limas at the farmer's market.

Those were a whole different vegetable.

I put in 4 small starter plants in May, and they've now covered their trellis to the point where I have to climb inside it to pick beans. But it's worth it.

Also, I now know why they're so stinking expensive at the farmer's market - there are only 2-3 beans per pod, so it takes a lot of picking and shelling to get enough for a side for 2 people.

As an illustration, the bean photos here - it took 3 bowls of pods to get that single bowl of beans for dinner.

But again, worth it.

And fresh corn, picked right before dinner, is a revelation. Since it's been really hot, I haven't wanted to heat up the kitchen with cooking, but I've found out you can quickly steam corn in the Instant Pot. Also the lima beans. Also the stuffed peppers I made the other night. Instant Pot, where have you been all my life?

Early harvests

The garden is coming along well.

We've alternated biblical rain storms with 90 degree weather, and the vegetables, especially the tomatoes and peppers, really seem to appreciate it.

This is today's harvest. The tomatoes are Juliets, smaller than plum tomatoes, which don't work well here - they tend to get blossom end rot, and I've just given up on them. The darker green peppers are chipotle, and the lighter green are Padron, a Spanish variety we loved in Barcelona and which I grow evert year.



This is what happens to them.

It's a very simple preparation, they just get blistered in hot olive oil, sprinkled with sea salt, thrown on a plate very briefly and then swallowed whole.

Dee-licious.

O what a beautiful morning

How high is an elephant's eye, anyway?

I'm not sure if we're there yet, but it's coming close. The corn is anywhere from six to eight feet tall, two ears on each stalk, and they feel like they're developing nicely.

It's kind of hard to tell how they're doing, since I've never grown corn before, but they aren't quite full-sized and they don't feel quite as thick as they should, so I think they'll be ready to eat in another week, maybe two.

Corn is something new for me to grow, and I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy it, but even without getting something to eat at the end, this has been fun to watch develop. I'll definitely grow it again next year.

30 Days

What a difference a month makes.

That is all.

This a first

In my garden, anyway.

At the old house, I always wanted to plant asparagus, but I balked at the time you had to let it grow before you could harvest.

"Three years," I grumbled. "Who wants to wait three years before eating asparagus?"

Well, considering it was readily available at our weekly farmer's market during that time, it wouldn't have been a hardship. We bought it and ate it anyway.

And three years would have passed. Hell, eighteen years passed in that house.

So this year, I bought a pack of 15 asparagus crowns from an organic online gardening place. (Couldn't buy less than that, thought I was skeptical that I wanted 15 plants). Then I read the planting instructions and realized I couldn't have 15 plants, unless I wanted to dedicate 3 whole raised beds to their planting.

I gave away 10, planted 5, hoping for the best. Since my beds are raised, I can't plant as deep as recommended. But gardening is an experiment, so I ... experimented.

Lo and behold, many weeks later, there are two little stalks of asparagus waving over the soil. BTW, I didn't keep the bed wholly for asparagus. I planted lima bean starts in each corner with a trellis, so hopefully they aren't intruding too much. Nobody gets that much space in limited real estate. They'll have to fight it out.

Updates

New bed from the corner of the drive

First, because I guess this is more important, I had my follow up exam with the eye surgeon today. We're a little more than 2.5 weeks out from the surgery, and he was very pleased. More importantly, he was pleased enough to put my next appointment at the end of September, so other than twice-daily eyedrops until I run out, I'm FREE!

Second, almost as important, the front hedge is gone and I'm well on the way to having the garden borders I only dreamed of when we bought Sleeping Beauty's cottage-behind-the-hedge.

It's taken a few weeks, ten yard waste bags and a few trash cans full of debris, but the entire frontage is now clear of hedge, English ivy, and vinca (which I loathe almost as much as ivy for its ability to run everywhere and pop up where I think I've removed it).

I put in some plants that I split off from mine - I love coral bells' ability to increase magically during the season. Between those and hostas and a few lavender from the local garden center, and two Autumn Joy sedum picked up at a yard sale on Saturday, along with a puny hydrangea that I got at Aldi for $4, the beds are furnished and covered in leftover wood chip from the back yard.

The side bed was done last fall and some early spring

Large scale gardening is never a budget-friendly thing, but if you've got a strong back and patience, it gets done on the relative cheap. I figured out that between landscape fabric, raised bed kits, 2 yards of wood chip, 2 yards of mushroom soil/topsoil combination, veggie starts and seeds, and those few new plants for the front border, I've spent just under $500. It's a little ouchy to think about, but the bulk of that expense will never be repeated, and the plants will either give us food or more plants for next year.

So I'm calling it a win.

Obligatory before photo

And yes, I'm tired from all that digging. Mario helped when he got in from work, but since I'm home all day right now, I did the bulk of it because...impatient.

Serves me right.

Bonus tidy back yard status photo

It took a village

2018 - Before before

As always, my back yard is a work in progress.

At the old house, first it was roses, then roses and flowers, then roses and veggies, and finally, veggies with a few roses shoved in around the edges.

I'm trying to be more organized here, and I've found a way that keeps me from changing my mind every year. The front yard is flowers. All flowers, all the time. The side yard is flowers and the blueberry bushes, because the like the sun there.

The back yard is veggies, and to make me stick to that plan, I've installed eight raised beds, covered the paths with wood chip, and filled the beds with a mushroom soil/topsoil blend.

When I say I've done this, I do mostly mean I've done it. I got the raised bed kits last summer, and they spent the winter in the garage. About a month ago, I cleaned up the yard and rolled landscape fabric across the entire space, except for the back corners where I still need to get shrubs removed (I know, should have been done first, but can't anyone to do it). Then I placed the beds, and ordered the wood chips and soil to be delivered from a local place, each load a week apart.

Beds in, wood chips down

Last week, two yards of wood chips. I borrowed a wheelbarrow from a neighbor, and it took about 2.5 hours to wheelbarrow all of it from the driveway and spread it around the yard. I was tired, but not too bad. I figured the soil would take longer, it being heavier.

I was right. Soil arrived yesterday, mid-stucco repair. The driver, deciding for himself that I hadn't ordered enough wood chips, added an extra half yard on the house, and he shoveled those out first. (I was actually fine for wood chips, but my policy is never to say no to a freebie, so...). Next he dumped two yards of soil.

It didn't seem like a big pile. The driver actually shoveled the first barrowload himself, because he said he needed exercise. The stucco guys did a few loads, while I brewed them all a pot of coffee. Then the men got back to doing what they were being paid to do, and I started shoveling. And shoveling. And shoveling.

Even more than it looks like

The soil arrived at 11 a.m. My next door neighbors, whose half of the drive was filled with my dirt, came home around 3 p.m. and told me to sit while they shoveled for a while. The brother was strong, but a little too energetic with the wheelbarrow, so the extra wood chips will come in handy to cover where he dumped soil on the paths. They eventually went in to start dinner, and I continued shoveling until Mario got home at 6. By that point, there were about 5 barrow loads left, plus the sweeping. I sat on a raised bed and directed him, because by that point I couldn't raise my arms, my legs were shaking and my feet hurt from being on them non-stop for hours in cheap sneakers.

Just as I was heading up for my shower, I got a text from my neighbor down the street. "Saw your madness, you must need food. Clean up, be here at 7." She fed us a lovely roast chicken with Thai rice and string beans, and we brought a bottle of wine.

I was in bed by 9:30, and I can't say I've ever been happier to go to sleep while the rest of the world was still wide awake.

As done as it gets - for now

Today I'm mostly okay, and the parts that hurt at least tell me I was lifting properly - my hamstrings, inner things and my abs are killing me. My back and shoulders are just tired.

But now I have a clean slate, and when I can look at it without flinching, I will plant it.

In the meantime, I'm happy to know that while I can do it myself, it's nice when my village chips in to get it done.