Fresh Growth

How could the days not be happy when garden-fresh tomatoes are in sight?  My sun-golds are showing signs of ripening, and boy-oh-boy are there a lot of them.  I cannot wait.  I am harvesting beans every day now, and I finally got a grip on my arugula. 

Seriously, it was taking over. 

I planted two rows of arugula, one very close to a row of tomato plants.  I yanked that one out on Saturday.  I suppose that's the idea: plant fast growing crops close, and then it gets to crowded, yank 'em out.  What did I do with my arugula plants? 

Pesto.

- Lots of arugula
- Garlic
- Walnuts (pine nuts would work, too)
- Salt and Pepper
- Olive Oil
- Lemon zest and juice

Process the arugula, nuts, and garlic in a food processor with some oil until it is finely chopped.  Add oil until the consistency is right, and lemon zest/juice, salt, and pepper until the flavor is right. 

I kept some in a jar to use right away, then put some in an ice cube tray to freeze.  I will have little pesto ice cubes.  How cute!

This all lead to...

Garden Recipe #1: Beans with Arugula Pesto

- A good number of green beans or similar (I used a mix of green and yellow wax beans)
- Olive oil
- Stock
- Arugula Pesto (or regular pesto or gremolata)
- Salt and Pepper to taste

Heat pan with a good coating of olive oil.  Add beans to the pan, and a generous bit of salt and pepper.  Saute for a minute or two.  Add about half a cup of stock, then cover.  Let simmer until the beans get nice and tender.  If you're making pesto or gremolata fresh, now's the time to do it.  When you have it, throw a good spoonful in the pan.  When the beans are nice and tender, uncover and cook off any remaining juices.  Toss in another good handful of pesto to taste. 

(You may find that my recipes are not very precise.  I just don't cook that way.)

 NOTE:  Don't let the need for pesto deter you from this recipe.  A gremolata is really very easy: basically lemon zest and parsley and other herbs all chopped up.  Generous sprinkles of dried herbs in the cabinet, while not as fresh, would certainly make for a tasty veg.

Garden shots of the day:

a nice onion bulb

Saturday's Harvest

Sunday's Harvest

newly secured bamboo stakes for the tomatoes

the first baby San Marzano

the first baby Brandywine

today's garden visitor

if only i could capture the stunning iridescence in its wings

HOT.

Sweet.

 

The Plant Friends

It's actually quiet in the morning.  It is perhaps the only time of the day where there isn't a constant stream of cars rushing down Hwy 62.  Each morning, just after turning on the coffee, I walk out to check on the plants.  Carefully, I examine each bed, looking for new growth or signs of problems.  I look under leaves.  I notice the large blossoms now rapidly forming on all of my tomato plant.  The bell pepper is ripening to a deep purple, though perhaps a little early.  It is still too small.  Some onions are bulbing, others dying.  Another nasturtium bloom.  And the arugula thrives, perhaps a bit too much.

Breakfast is made using whatever is around and I spend my day at work.

I may sneak a peek on lunch break, if I manage to take a lunch.

I anticipate coming home and unwinding with an afternoon walk through the garden, but no such thing exists.  As I make attempts at deep breathing to free the persistent anxiety butterflies, I walk again, bed to bed, and think of the list of what's next:

Weeding
Move dirt from the pile to the new flower bed
Plant pole bean seeds where the first ones didn't germinate, this time farther away from the corn
Plant a winter squash plant
Spray the deer repellent
Harvest the arugula and find something to do with it
Crush the eggshells and mix into soil
Perhaps some bone meal around the marigolds?
Do I need to put another bamboo pole in the tomato bed so I can tie it up better?

But first, diner.

Cleaning, cooking, then more cleaning... is it too late to work on my list?  The list is a mental one at this point.  I forced myself to toss my actual to-do list, as I did not feel it was doing me any favors.

And suddenly, it is night.  If I want to get up early, I had better go to bed.  Yet another day with nothing crossed off the List, either inside or out, yet the entire day was spent working on something.  One hour to sit and eat dinner.  Why isn't more done? 

I suppose feelings of despair are part of being a beginning gardener/homesteader, especially when going it alone.  There is a certain amount of pride I feel when I look around and see the beginnings of something good and think, yes, I can do this myself.  But other times, the workload is daunting, especially when thinking about new projects I'd like to start, all the while the housework keeps crying for attention, and those tomato plants are not going to help you get dinner on the table, at least not for another month. 


Next year, believe I need to incorporate yoga into the garden plan...

Garden Thoughts

I like to sit out by my garden in the evenings in one of the old gliders that I found sitting by the side of the road near a friend's house.  It is here that I relax after working (after work), and reflect on what I've done and what I should do in the next few days, weeks, months...

Tonight, I can't help thinking about how long the days have become.  Daylight is my trigger to be working, so it is very easy to stay out in the garden until 8:30 or 9:00, then realize that there isn't a magical kitchen fairy cooking dinner.  And this becomes prohibitive of my next goal:

Sunrise is my favorite time of day.  Every night I go to bed with the idea that I'll wake up and go sit by the garden with my coffee and watch the sunrise.

If it ever happens, I'll post a picture.

Not that I'm complaining.  The lighting bugs are extraordinary this evening, like fireworks in my garden.  The evening is cool, a welcome break from the upper 90s of today (and every other day this week).  I love watching how the light changes the colors in my garden as the sun sets.

A whiff of something reminds me how the smell in the air has changed as the season has progressed.  I never noticed this in my previous years in North Carolina or other anywhere else (and certainly not New York City).  With the first blooms of the season was the huge bush by my shed, casting it's welcoming smell across the yard.  A lilac?  Possibly.  Then came the sweet, subtle iris, followed by the persistent honeysuckle, sure to make its presence known.  I have no idea the cause of tonight's smell.  I do not see anything in bloom.  Who knows, but it sure is a nice reminder of the surprising natural world.

The fireflies really are unbelievable tonight.  My feet are bare in the grass, and I'm sipping on a quality muscadine wine from grapes grown not too far from me.

Now, could someone please go do the dishes?

On another note, some progress shots:

Been hauling dirt from the old garden soil pile into this bed.  Slowly but surely...

I planted some meadow sage and a tick weed out by my bird feeder in the hopes of getting some more bees to the garden.  This soil is hard as a rock and had me about worn out at the start of my work today!  I didn't get very deep; we'll see if the plants survive.

Quite a few buds on my pepper plant!  This is one I started from seed.

Brandywine tomato will bloom soon.  They grow so fast.

Three Sisters... well, just one at the moment, but the beans are starting to come up!  Hopefully will have a replacement squash soon.

I can't eat enough salad to keep up!  I love arugula, but I should have done some more neutral greens as well.  Sun Golds and San Marzanos in the back row, growing strong.  And a lovely nasturtium blossom on the end.

 

You might be eating alone, but that doesn't mean you can't put flowers in your salad.

Arugula, mixed greens, NC blueberries, and my first nasturtium blossom.

Nasturtium has such a unique flavor.  Slightly floral, but mostly spicy.  The entire plant is edible.  I recommend every gardener grow it, if nothing else than for the sheer joy of putting flowers in your salad!

Cleaning house

There is nothing quite like working really hard out in the heat, getting really dirty, then sitting outside and drinking a good, cold beer.

Today I decided I that I've had it with the overgrown "flower bed" behind my kitchen.  I tore into it, and tore it up, then tamed it back down again.  And I planted some lantana.  This was my lantana last fall when I moved:

But this spring, due to my own neglect, this is what came of the bed:

AGGGGHHHH!  It was not a nice backup for my drinking spot.  So I got out my loppers, my pruners, rake, shovel, and a whole lotta back, and dug right in.

The big bush on the left is serious about reproduction.  There are roots, or maybe shoots, choking the entire bed.  Probably no less than thirty little baby bushes did I yank out.

I despise weed block.  I can see its point for some purposes, but only at times when you never see yourself ever needing to get back into the soil and do anything.  Perhaps it's just because this weed block was not well maintained, but I have no intention of ever using it.   I managed to get it all out, but not without war.

Almost done.  At this point, I had just dug up a mini tree or shrub of some kind that was right up in the hydrangea's business.  It wasn't until after I got rid of it that I remembered "leaves of three, let it be."  So far, no reaction to anything poisonous, but we'll see...

And complete.  With two new lantana plants to join the existing one that I found growing, hidden beneath the rogue foliage.

Of course, it's not actually complete.  There is a huge pile of garden soil sitting in the middle of the yard, waiting to get moved into the bed.  The whole reason I tore up the weedblock was to improve the existing soil, and this will be a good step.

As I sit, drinking my heavenly beer, I contemplate the possibility of just buying some bags of soil and scattering the stuff I have throughout the yard, to avoid the endless wheelbarrow trips.  No, I must stand firm!  I will do it using what I have.  But I could be convinced to buy some more plants for the bed...

And of course, with the relaxing effects of the beer, I look around for more potential projects.  I'd really like to get some more flowers in my garden area.  Nothing I have right now is attracting the bees, but the salvia out front is bee-paradise.  Maybe I can destroy the growth around this old house and plant some salvia out front?

A woman's work is never done...

Garden Music #1

Some good toilin' in garden music for you:

I wanna be just like Abigail Washburn when I grow up.

Keepin' on.

After you suffer a loss in the garden, you just gotta keep on.  Yesterday morning, I lost my winter squash plant that was the centerpiece of the Three Sisters garden.  It is now continuing on in the compost pile, which I suppose is worth something.  I believe the cause was cut worms.  I'll be giving everything a good spray of Bt tonight.  Bt, short for Bacillus Thuringiensis, is a bacteria that gets into the system of caterpillars and other worms and does them in.  You can read about it here. 

Luckily, my friends Sarah and Jim have a roque winter squash plant that came up in their compost pile from last year's plant.  I'm gonna give that one a go!

Also, I figured I'd mark the loss of one plant with the new beginning of another.  I decided the corn was tall enough to mound soil around the base of the stalks and plant cornfield bean seeds in the mound.  Looking forward to having my Three Sisters take shape.

I also planted some onion seeds that will be ready to transplant in about 8 weeks and will be later onions for me.  Not sure how well the timing is going to work out, but might as well give it a shot.  And if they don't have time to fully mature, I have learned that onions can be harvested at any stage in development, so the effort should not be in vain.  

After my sad morning in the garden, I went on to meet a friend at the Saxapahaw General Store for lunch and ran into Chris Carter, a man of much knowledge, who was sitting at a table with a butterfly on a basket.  There will be more on that later...

Now to begin my day in the garden - hopefully clearing out a flower bed of weeds and planting some lantana.