I have been out wandering...

I heard the call of quiet,

of sun warmed rock and cool shade,

of softly moving leaves and the sharp glint of sun

on hidden creeks.

I heard the call of birds

of soft spring earth, new life, new sun.

I have been out wandering...

 

Surprises

Beautiful ! Our garden is full of surprises this year. The yard was neglected for years, and as I go thru and dig everything out the plants are so relieved, and start growing again. Love it !

Mmmm, tonight we enjoyed handmade pizza with fresh spinach from the garden. We love the Artisan Pizza in 5 minutes a Day recipe.  The key is to pre-bake the crust a little. I do feel a little guilty though, I went off the vegetarian bandwagon and ate sausage on mine. Oh well! 

Ahhhh! What is that!?! I am being invaded!

My bed of shame! I added way way too much manure to this bed, and nothing grew. Shame on me! Now to go buy some dirt...

 My Husband built me an elaborate tomato trellis, complete with built-in sprinklers! He was building the trellis with PVC piping, a great inexpensive material, and he thought to himself, why not add water?
I hope this works out, the idea is we are going to force the tomatoes on to the grid of the piping, and hopefully be able to gather the fruits from underneath.
This raises the most important question of our generation, 'why can we send a man to the moon but not build an tomato cage that works?'. Hahahaha!

So here are my little plants all ready to grow. Soon they will be monsters and I will wonder, 'why did I ever think they were small?'

This year i planted Brandywine, Roma, Viva Italia (a type of Roma), and two experiments, Sweet Million, a cherry tomato, and Moscow, a variety that I keep seeing in the nursery.

By the way, can you see my honeysuckle in the background? Its a beautiful variety called Pink Lemonade, the blossoms are yellow and pink. Its so beautiful and it smells divine!

Not all weeds are evil!

Jelly

So in the interests of being a localvore I try to make as many things we eat as possible from scratch.  This week  Lexi and I went on a jelly making rampage! We made orange marmalade, strawberry, strawberry balsamic, and grape (from juice from my friends grape vines). Yum! As a side note, in the past I have had trouble with my jelly solidifying , and after some research I tried using the low sugar pectin. Apparently it helps to use that if you are canning at a high altitude. Works great! Our next project is lemon marmalade. Sounds great right?

So last week I was very ill with the 'death flu' as we have dubbed it, and I was laying around watching my food documentaries on Netflix.  Lexi sat down and watched  "Fat Sick and Nearly Dead" with me, which is the one where he goes on a juice fast for three months. She was very struck by what she saw there, and asked if we could go vegetarian for a week, which we have been. I thought it was going to much more difficult than it has been since I am hypoglycemic. Actually it has been great, we had tons of things to make for dinner, the only real problem has been lunches for us. I seem to need a lot of protein in the middle of the day, so I have been eating lentil soup in addition to a sandwich or a potato. Of course I feel great, veggies don't make you sick! We may have to keep this up!
Recommended Reading: The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman

So here we are at the beginning of a new season, always exciting. I have already planted three quarters of my beds, as we are having a dry warm year. Last week I put in three colored pole beans, mustard green, smokey fennel, Italian fennel,  broccoli, hot peppers, sweet peppers and some icicle radishes. I already had spinach, garlic and lettuce in the ground. I still need to plant tomatoes, and I have herbs patiently waiting to go in the ground. Oh, and I planted some of the local red potatoes from my pantry that were sprouting like crazy. I have never grown potatoes before so this is largely an experiment and I would be happy to listen to any advice you may have for me! My goal this year is to have a large variety of veggies instead of a large quantity of a few varieties. Happy planting!