Thursday, July 16, 2009

Only kind of a gardening post

Well, I was wanting to do some kind of nice gardening post, but not feeling like I have any great pictures to go along with it. Two of our beds have been recently cleared, ready for the next crop of warmer weather veggies, so there really isn't that much to show at the moment. So how about a picture of the girls sitting on the garden fence instead, even though it's from last year, and you can't see the garden at all...


Today the girls and I harvested all of our fava beans. They were huge! It was fun. Shelling the beans, then blanching them, then popping them out of their skins. But we had half of one bed planted with the beans, and from that got enough for one dinner. I don't think we can afford to give that much space to a crop that provides us with just one meal. It was really good though. I just sauteed them with some onion, garlic, and ginger. Everyone liked it a lot.


Here is part of our new flower bed that Jason is making bordering our backyard fence. Early in the spring a friend dug up some of her perennials for us, including hollyhocks. I have wanted to grow hollyhocks for the past 15 years, but have never planted seeds because they don't even flower the first year and we have never lived anywhere long enough to wait for them to bloom. But now, soon! I will definitely be posting pictures of those! I filled in the space around them with cosmos and calendula. Chloe took over the space in front of the bed for her fairy house. Looks like the fairy house people have some weeding to do! (By the way, fairy house people are not real fairies, they are regular people like us, just little. According to the girls. There are a lot of fairy house people, and they all have names, and they all have their own voices. They get quite loud out there sometimes!)


And here are our tomatoes. Growing tomatoes here can be tricky. They say you shouldn't set the plants out until night temps reach 50 degrees. But we would be waiting almost forever. Even this week with the hottest weather ever, which for us here in the mountains means 90, it can still get down into the 40's at night. Last year we didn't transplant our tomatoes until the beginning of August, even though we knew it was probably pointless. (Totally pointless. Beautiful plants that froze just after the first flowers came.) This year we got them out at the beginning of July, and we already have our first tomatoes on the way. They may be pretty small still, but we are impressed. We'll see how it goes. I scattered some basil seed in front of the tomatoes. We also have three tomatoes in pots up on the deck. Although to be honest, we nearly let the plants die, and then transplanted them into the pots yesterday. But at least these ones can get pulled inside at night once it starts getting cold.


And on a totally unrelated topic, our cat Shiloh just fell off the windowsill. He was sound asleep. He of course woke up, but pretended nothing had happened, cause he tries to be cool like that.

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