Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Redesign!

Went to a thrift store with my friends today and bought three canvas totes. They had the usual ugly canvas tote graphics you find on such useful bags. I like cute things, I am more likely to use them if I like how they look so I also bought some kid's shirts with pictures I liked. I then cut them up and sewed them over the tote graphics, with my rather sad sewing skills. But I still like how they turned out.
Now I can go buy groceries and stuff and use neither paper nor plastic at the store, market or Sauvie AND the totes are being reused as well. How green.
And they are cute enough to use for other things too, like knitting supplies!

Good Bugs, Bad Bugs

Yesterday I went out to inspect my lurvlies, my plants, and discovered something amiss. My radish flower stems, some of them, were awash in little fuzzy grey bodies. Oh NOES! I cried. Aphids.
Anyone who has a garden they pay much attention to knows aphids are a big ol' pain. These suckers (literally, they have a soda straw like appendage for sucking the life force out of your tender young shoots.)Are BORN PREGNANT and give birth to live young who are, you guessed it, already carrying new live young. WHA? Gross. The phrase "multiply like rabbits" shall dually be replaces with "multiply like aphids", I decree it!
Anyways, this is one reason why paying attention to things pays off, as they were still only on the radishes, and broccoli, which has not yet formed flower buds. Some insecticidal soap and a shower later, they are in check. At least for now. Today there are many little shriveled aphid carcasses and I also saw some predatory flies munching on them. I also found leaf hoppers hiding nearby. Hopefully these good garden bugs will help keep the aphids in check.

And speaking of good garden bugs, you may not have much love for the following: maggots, sow bugs (pill bugs, rolly pollys), centipedes, beetles (all sorts), worms (red and night crawler), flies and spiders. I however do, so long as they are doing work for me and not doing it in the house.
I turned my compost pile today, where kitchen scraps and yard waste are being turned into valuable composted goodness in my yard, partiality aided by the above 'vermin".
Teaming took on new meaning as every time I lifted a forkful of compost pile there was a massive scurry of bugs that don't like light hiding. Amazing, so many things. So much life. The bugs are only part of the story as well. There was the most delicate little mushroom, about 2 inches high, pale blue grey with a little bell cap. I can’t see the bacteria but I know they are there. (Where aren’t they really?) There is fungus I can't see as well. Enzymes, molds, who knows whats. And the pile does not smell like rotting garbage as you might be thinking. It smells like dirt, like the underside of a log, like damp earth and rain. Like life.

Someday I will write a big ole post on decomposers and composts and why it's super easy and you should do it. But not today. I will just enjoy my bug friends and not enjoy my bug foes and truly enjoy my tomatoes.

Joy of Jam

My jams are not perfect crystalline jelly concoctions of sugar and fruit. They are more thick, compote like, opaque brews of witchery. This is because I am akin to a person who does not like to read manuals on how to work electronics. I do not follow recipes, to sort of quote the fearsome pirate Barbossa, "it's more like, hmm, guidelines". This has lead to some interesting creations and me jams are one of them.
Tasty but not Smucker's. and you know what? That's what makes homemade, unique items special. It's also what makes regional foods regional. Uniformity is for soldiers. Milk and butter used to taste different depending on the season and the grasses the cows ate. My jam has less sugar and more fruit than store jams, but the jelly isn't glassy and clear and sometimes it's not jelly at all, but it goes on toast and down the hatch all the same.

so my recent vats of witchery include peach and raspberry. Peaches for the afore posted Sauvie Island and Raspberries my other half picked up from the Saturday farmer's market. The raspberry, I can attest is lipsmackworthy, the peach, well, the leftover peach-juice jelly made wonderful oil free banana muffins and bread. The jam itself is a mystery! but it looks might fine. How could not with fruit like this:

Other Jams of the season include these concoctions :
blackberry with ginger and mint
blackberry with cinnamon and honey
peach with ginger
mixed berry
blueberry
I hear they are tasty. I have only sampled peach with ginger and chardonnay, which was a limited run, I think there is only one jar left. It is more a topping for yogurt and ice cream than a jam, but the black berry with honey and cinnamon was good, rich but good (honey has a strong flavor in jam when you boil off most of the liquid cause you don't have pectin...)
Each batch gets better in technique and consistency than the previous.
And with labels like these:

who dosn't want some witchy pirate jam? hmm???
yeah, I thought so.

(home made bread by Matt)

Water Baby

I have never seen a wee melon, they are mighty cute. In an ugly baby sort of way...

arrr

so I got the new blogger beta, and as of right now, I can't edit my own html. hope they get on that fast cause I want to have more control over my blog, but don't know enough html to work without a template. So my cool leafy photoshop graphic is at the bottom of the page for now, instead of the top, cest la vie eh? I do like the fact my blog is connected with my email and color and font editing is easier as is links and side bars and whatnot. woo.

Can It, on Jam and "Foraging" for your own food

With blackberries being in the full flush of their fruiting season, I have found myself in a deluge of berries. Our new apartment has a yard, and that yard is bordered on two sides with thick, tangly, gigantic blackberry hedges. Not wanting this free bounty to go to waste, I have started to make jam. I am not versed in the art of jam making and I am learning as I go. My first few attempts were more, spreads or compotes than true jams, but tasty nonetheless. I now have my secret weapon, Pomona's Universal Pectin. A marvel of food chemistry. It's very cool.

I have also ventured out to Sauvie Island to pick my own food. And to buy local produce I did not pick. This is something very rewarding, if you live in a place where it is feasible to do so, you will save money on produce and get more healthful produce in the bargain. Carpooling makes this not just more economical, but more fun, and if you are making jam and need lots of berries, more productive!
My first trip to the island alone, I went to Columbia Farms , and there I picked peaches ripe from the tree, blueberries and late season raspberries. I think I spent a good 3 hours or so picking things.

Peaches and other tree fruit is easy to pick. Berries are work. Hunting down the few remaining raspberries was worth it, the air intoxicatingly fragrant and the berries were the 'best raspberries ever", warm from the sun and melt in your mouth soft and slightly fuzzy the way raspberries are.
Blueberries are a pain, because even if they are blue, they still may not be ripe, and the bushes are loaded with blueberries that may not be ripe. It is a little overwhelming.
But all in all I got enough fruit for several jars of jam. About 2 lbs of raspberries and 4 of blueberries and 8 or so of peaches. My grand total? $12.50. Just try to beat those prices in the store. It was my labor and my shipping and no packaging.

I will no longer complain about how expensive local berries are in a place where you can get blackberries for free on the road side, or backyard. Berry picking is time consuming. I easily spend 30 mins or more out back picking blackberries, making sure only ripe ones get picked. The yard is not that big, but there are a lot of berries... So someone had to pick those supermarket berries and get paid, probly not enough, and then someone had to make the little plastic clamshell they get put in, and someone had to sort and rinse the fruit so no bad bits get by and someone had to pack them all up on trucks and someone had to buy gas and maintain the trucks and someone had to drive the truck and deliver the fruit to the store and at the grocery store, someone had to unpack and display and sign the fruit and someone had to ring you up for the fruit. I think maybe 2-3 dollars a pint is actually pretty cheap now. But not as cheap as doing the work yerself, so I did.

Besides, how could you not want to go to a place this beautiful?

Buying produce from a farmer's market is also cheaper, not the weekend ones in the city(although they can be cheeper than a store, it's definetly still better food), but a market out on someone's farm or a collective near some farms. All they have to do is pick it and pay someone to sell it, or not if it's your farm I guess and you are working there, or get agriculture interns or something. Anyways. It's super fresh food and it's cheap. And it's fun. At least I think so. I also feel better about supporting a local farm with agriculture practices I agree with. I don't have to wait for a weekly market I may or may not have the morning off work. The food is seasonal, I am gaining an appreciation for truly ripe foods grown in the season they are meant to grow. Green beans never tasted so good.

So anyways check out a CSA or find a market out in the farmlands near where you live if you live near such a thing, and give it a go!

So now, armed with Pomona and about 12 lbs of luscious ripe peaches and more blackberries harvested yesterday, I am off to jam some more fruit. If you get Jam from me, you now now it's history. WOooo.
And secretly, between you and me, my favorite part is making the jam jar labels on photoshop. ;)

Squashed hopes and triggering scents

I have several varieties of squash growing out back, pie pumpkins, carving pumpkins, summer squash and zucchini. Possibly some crooknecks, I can"t remember. The plants are more or less huge, depending on their age. The carving pumpkin, be warned growing a Jack o' lantern pumpkin, is reeeelly reeely big and has huge vines with strong threads that will wind around anything they touch. Very cool plant, just be prepared. The zucchini are also very large, but do not vine. I have had several zucchini to harvest so far, they have been tender and tasty, and there is one rapidly expanding pumpkin to be found. But... Nothing else. Lots of flowers, no fruit or weak yellowy icky looking fruit. I was worried, but did some research and Looks like I shall just have to be a little more patient.
Thanks to iVillage's Garden Web
I have found there are a few reasons, but the most likely is my flowers are either mostly male or mostly female. There are certainly enough bees! So I will just cross my fingers, make some Compost tea and bide my time eating tomatoes.

Which brings me to tomatoes. There are two kinds of tomato plants, not varieties, but ways in which the plant grows. Indeterminate and determinate. Most tomatoes are indeterminate, if you leave them alone they will vine, and keep growing the whole season and if the branches touch ground, they will root. My cherry tomato is just such a tomato. I believe my beefsteak is too, but it is a much, much more manageable plant. The third tomato I have is determinate, it is a nice, tidy little tomato plant. Determinate tomatoes stay small. The poor thing is dwarfed by it's companion tomatos, the grape and the pumpkin, yet it has a nice number of fruits, yay!
Back to the monster cherry. Cherry tomato plants are a-maze-ing. They get huge, they fruit like there is no tomorrow. They are also a pain in the ass to stake. I have pruned and staked and bought bigger stakes at least 3 times this season. It wants to eat the lovely carrot companions I have planted next to it, it wants to eat the other two tomatoes. But it is now tamed and the tomatoes are more than worth the trouble with their red, sweet fruit.

I have a tomato story.
Tomatoes, if you have ever sniffed a tomato, a fresh tomato from the field or garden, not a grocery store one, it should smell, not tomatoey, like they taste. It should smell green, slightly off puttingly green, very earthy, and slightly almost poisony, like some household defoliant to insect killers. I swear...But only a little Remember tomatoe's sweet cousin, the deadly nightshade...The lovely little dark purple current like fruits taste like a bitter tomato, the plants are delicate and very attractive and have tiny purple and white flowers that look like tomato flowers and the plant smells like a tomato. I know, I tasted a berry once, briefly, before I realized what it was. (I like wild plants. I wanted to know what it was not kill myself, I spat it out silly.)
It smells to me like summer and gardens and tomato caterpillars and being 6. Like warm sunshine and ripe red tomatos, sitting under corn stalks and tomato plants and gazing at the sky though frondy foliage. Wandering around the garden looking carefully at everything.
My true appreciation of tomatoes is from our garden we had in Tracy, CA when I was 6. I accidentally spilled a cigarbox full of corn seeds in to the dirt and there was corn much taller than my wee self to gaze up at. That sense that I had, accidentally, had something to do with it's deep Kelly green existence was cool.
My mom had planted tomatoes and watermelon and pumpkin, and other vegetable things I had little interest in since they were vegetables. But the tomatos were a thing of wonder. The delicate little yellow flowers, the small green fruits that swelled and gradually turned a glowy amber orange to sunburn red. Watching big fat green caterpillars with dangerous looking spikes on their end eat leaves. And the smell, the smell, the smell. I once took a ripe red tomato, warm with the day's sun and soft and yielding under my small hands, and took a branch off a rose bush, with it's sharp hooked thorns and sat to poke a hole in the tomato and suck out the pulpy warm seeds, like a tomato smoothie. The best tomato I ever did have was on that day. Every time I smell tomato plants, that's where I go. To a warm summer evening with ripe tomatoes and cornstocks twice my size. It's magic.

Trying to rescue the fescue

Ok so maybe we don't water the lawn as often as we should, but now, it will be nigh daily. The lawn is interesting to say the least. Lumpy and patchy with various grasses. Summer is on so it's also dry and brown and patchy. I really hate using so much water to keep something green that's native to a cool damp environment like oh, Scotland. Well I suppose the PNW is close, but our summers can be brutal and the city gets dry dry dry in the heat (ok the "heat", we've only had a few scorchers yet.)
anyway. I have neglected the lawn. It's sad. But it was sad already (remember lumpy and patchy.) Really what the yard needs is to be rototilled and leveled and reseeded. But truly, who has the time? Or money! Where does on rent a rototiller anyways? (or a chipper shredder..I actually do want to use one of those...) So I did the best I feel I can at this point.
I got one of those dangerously evil looking lawn thatching rakes ( the ones with double rose of sharp spines, like a double sided rake of death.) it's akin to taking a razor cutter to ones hair and makes a similar ripping sound in the lawn. It pulls up all the dead, thatched (think straw roofs of ole merrie England)grass and anything else hiding in the thatch (twigs, stones, large pieces of wood, bottle caps) you end up with what looks like most of your lawn, but your lawn is still there, this is all the dead lawn that doesn't decompose well because it keeps water out and air from circulating and yadda yadda. It does pull up some live grass, but grass is kind of like bamboo..It is like bamboo! Grass just keeps spreading so, now that you have thatched it, there is room to breath and for new grass to sprout. Hopefully.
then it got mowed and then I over seeded the lawn, which is a weird way to say I RE-seeded the lawn in hopes some bare sad spots come back. So, with more consistent watering and more air and circulation and new seed, hopefully the lawn will come back.
as much as I feel I have fairly free reign with the garden, I think there might be issue if I got rid of all the grass. Unless I have a great plan first and well, a lot of money. I have a extremely large pile of old grass now along the back wall of the garden. Which will be mighty beneficial as brown material for my compost, or as compost where it is. yay. Lawns are stupid.
and in case you are wondering what the hell fescue is, it's a kind of grass, like bluegrass, ryegrass, or crabgrass.

Och, it's been awhile.

My last post here was in June. Two months ago almost to the day. Amazing. hmm. So the garden has trucked along. Seedling no more, a riot of green has taken over the modest plot of land I amended for planting. Things are a-ripening and it's a promising start.

I have decided to try to make a real blog, and informative one full of real facts and data and sciency things and how to's as I learn them. And happy little anecdotes and stories. And pictures, lots of them if I can keep it up. Any pics you see in here of things that are not a product, are my own photography.

It will mostly be about my gardening and growing of things, compost organic things pest control, but also other fascinating items such as food, cooking, craftiness and the like. We will see how it morphs. Please leave feedback or comments if you have something to share, say, amend, correct or add. woo.

here is the "before" garden. Someday I will take a current pick. This was taken before all my gardening ventures started.