We planted a cover crop of fava beans and crimson clover in the old tomato bed a bit ago and the birds (including the chickens and ducks who escape from their pen and make their way into the garden) have dug up some of the favas from their snug soil homes. Some of them insisted on growing anyway. This one appears to be trying to walk away from its neighbors.
Today the chickens graduated from their 17-gallon galvanized washtub into the bottom half of a large dog crate. Now they have much more room in which to stand around all huddled together. They have been very busy growing new body parts, including combs on their heads, and shoulder feathers, and wing feathers, and, well, wings. Tall Chicken (”Necky”) can stretch her head up all the way to the top of the waterer, and they all like to run/hop and flap their new wings. They learned they could jump up on the edges of the bucket when we took off the lid (made of fencing) to clean, and so that is why they are graduated to a new taller house.
This weekend we:
If you have any interest in starts of any of these plants, and it’s a reasonable idea for me to get them to you, shoot me an email at firstname dot lastname at gmail, and I’ll put on some starts for you.
There is more to come, of course; corn, beans, peas, chard, carrots, beets are to be started outdoors, and asparagus comes in live plants. We will also be doing succession planting — that is, planting every few to several weeks, as we eat the existing plants — with the crops that can overwinter here, like kale, broccoli, lettuces, brussels sprouts, leeks, the root veggies, maybe cabbage.
I still owe a post about what I read in February (not much), and what I am up to lately in terms of media
consumption. But don’t sit here and wait for it; go make butter! It is easy and awesome and delicious!
(Song: “Sons and Daughters,” The Decemberists. I love this song.)
So I think I’m going to combine Knitblog and Kitchenisms and this one all into one blog; I think having too many makes me scattered and less likely to write in any of them.
Fortunately, it shouldn’t be too hard to import the old entries; I might combine it with a redesign (to something with working comments!).
We had cancelled our veggie box over the summer, due to farmer’s markets and our own garden, but then we had this awkwardly-timed move. We moved in much too late to plant any fall crops at all, and too late for much of anything that is supposed to over-winter, except garlic, which we planted the first weekend we were here. So we restarted the veggie box, even though they keep wanting to send us totally non-winter things like avocados and bananas. It’s time for KALE, people. Kale, and broccoli, and cauliflower, and more kale.
And squash! Which was tonight’s dinner:
with steak from my pals at Skagit River Ranch. I started from a recipe for the squash, but modified it thusly:
Very tasty. My mom would be proud. I’ve come a long way since the time I held a bite of squash in my mouth for so long that it made me gag and I had to spit it out in the toilet, and she thought I had actually thrown it up and she never made me eat squash again. Now I am planning to grow several different varieties!
PS My house is awesome!!!
(Song: “Flat-chested Girl from Maynardville,” Bobby Bare Jr.)
Last night I went for a run with the dogsters and I could have sworn it was spring. Could have sworn it so much that we were both independently worrying about getting seedlings started. (G. and I, that is, worrying, not the dogsters. The dogs said YAY RUNNING ZOMG RUN RUN YAY RUN ZOMG, and not much else.) It is about time to start tomatoes indoors if we wish to have them from seed, and time to start planning the outdoors situation. He really wants potatoes, which I fully support, so that will take some planning, as they need to have extra months in the ground. I am also interested in garlic, onions, and broccoli.
All day I have had in my head this totally ridiculous country song from when I was, like, nine, and listened to the pop country station. It was quite risqué, at that time, including the song “Black Velvet,” which I now know/suspect to be about young Elvis. Additionally, today’s title, which is about women who use men for their own nefarious purposes. I have something snarky and feminist to say there but I can’t find it among all the wine currently in my mouth.
Everything makes me cry lately. There are dogs who have died (not mine, knock on wood, but one of Oscar’s oldest friends) and there are grandmas gone too (not mine again, knock on wood again) and then there are so many new babies come into existence (not mine, knock on wood more than ever, and hi baby Ciaran! hi baby Mina! hi baby Hank!) for whom life is so small, I am worried for it. And if I spend even a minute on that thought, I become distracted and distraught with how small life is for us all, because really it is, and we are so tiny and chronologically insigificant, and then I will cry for nothing; I will cry for imagining all the so many things that could change all the other small lives so much. I will be forever changed when these dogs and these grandmas and these babies are lost. And it is too selfish to wish that I should be lost first, but I do not know if I can bear the loss of them.
What is the solution? Are all adults just veterans of the war of aging, where there are daily casualties (parents, children’s childhoods, pets & loved ones, garden plants, bus routes, hair lines, waistlines, roadkill, favored shoes chewed by new puppies, all the things large and small in which we used to rejoice but that are now gone)? Or is there some way to avoid it? Must we all submit ourselves to that? Can I opt out of one section of growing up and thereby shed all the rest? If I choose to devote my child-caring to another’s child, not my own, do I mourn with the parents when that child changes, grows, is gone, or do I mourn alone? And do I mourn less or more — does the sharing increase or mitigate the pain? Or do I merely mourn the recent demise of my glass of wine?
I hate being the youngest. Everywhere I go I am the youngest, and I feel inexperienced and foolish. I want to know what will happen to me, and to know if my current situation of conflicting heartache and jubilation will be henceforth a constant. (Big words!) I suspect it will, but more than anything I fear I will be surprised by something that experience (that I don’t have) should have prepared me for. What do I do? What can I do? I can, I guess, love my dogs and my husband and my surrounding friends and family and babies, and I can know that all of that is contingent on their continuing existence. And that love requires acceptance of the fact that they may not continue to exist. And I will deal with that when it comes, I guess.
PS. any post that starts with “I went for a run” and ends with drama and tears and wine and discussion of the meaning of love is PURE WANKERY.
(Song: “Fast Movin’ Train,” Restless Heart. Woo, 1990!)
So I caved and bought 2 years of Flickr pro account. It was mostly because I couldn’t have more than three sets, and I am a taxonomist and I want to collocate things. How can I collocate if I only have three sets? I need unlimited sets! So now I have it. And I put lots of pictures of dogs and even more pictures of food and JESUS GOD THE TOMATOES.
Someday I will post something other than picture links. That day will probably be after the damn hell ass wedding, about which I am freaking the fuck out, and after the honeymoon, which I totally have under control, actually. For reals.
I do not post because I do not want to post about these lame-o things. In the meantime you can look at my pictures.
(Song: “Man You Don’t Meet Every Day,” the Pogues version)
Recently G. rebuilt one of his old mountain bike frames into a cute little comfy bike for me to ride around the neighborhood. It has pink on it! And it is very fun. Last weekend we rode to the Seattle Tilth Harvest Fair down the street from our house, where we bought hippie vegetables and hippie starts to plant for our fall crops. I got to ride home with my bike basked full of baby lettuces & kales & broccoli. (Garden pictures soon.)
Then today we rode our bikes, pedal pedal pedal, down to the Blue Star for post-pirate-birthday-party hangover lunch with old school friends.
In conclusion, I have a bike! Yay!
AND ALSO, I am knitting like a mad fiend to finish a gorgeous lace sweater that I will be posting on knitblog about soon, with pictures.
(Song: “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” the Beatles)
I’d post more often if I were the kind of person who did links posts.
I’m not.
BUT, this is a lovely article about tomatoes. I have some yellow pear tomatoes that are ripe, and have harvested two Brandywines and have one about to turn red, but my two unidentified plants (one said it was yellow pears but is a gorgeous large stripey green thing, and one said it was persimmon tomatoes but are all beautiful disfigured lumpy things that are nothing like persimmons) are still all green. The one-that-is-not-persimmon-tomatoes is the most prolific tomato plant ever.
I just hope it stays warm through September so they can turn red.
(Today’s views of the garden also include jalapeños, corn, lettuce, and cucumber. Especially fun if you compare with the photos from June 13.)
(song: “Spring Street,” Dar Williams)
Several weeks ago I started keeping a real journal. On paper and everything! My archivist brain was sad about not having anywhere to put my artifacts, like museum ticket stubs and receipts from delicious dinner. So I bought the large version of my favorite Moleskine, with nice big pages between which to store artifacts, and I’ve been writing in there. I intended it to fill a different purpose than this site; I just want to use it to recap the things for which I am keeping artifacts, like when folks visit from out of town and we go do Seattle-things, or we have a particularly nice dinner. (OK, I will just admit it: the delicious dinner I have now mentioned twice was at Le Pichet, with which I am now obsessed.) I also thought that maybe becoming more dedicated to chronicling things would make me write here more often. Alas and alack, this has not been the case. I apologize, if any of you are still out there …
In ongoing and surely fascinating toe news, it is not broken. I did get to have exciting x-rays, though! It was fun, though I felt silly for making a big deal over a toe. There was no definitive toe injury, it just hurt when I came back from a longish (for me) run. Other toes hurt, too, so I didn’t think anything of it, but then the other toes got better, and the big toe did not get better. So I had x-rays and they probably stood around and laughed at the crazy hypochondriac lady when they examined them. I went back in to a regular doctor a week later because fine, I can accept it not being broken, but it still hurts, y’all. The (cute!) doctor did various amusing things like poke it, push it, pull it, twist it all around, and apply a tuning fork (for serious!) to it. All of these things let him to confirm its non-brokenness, but he, at least, understood the “it still hurts” aspect of the situation: he prescribed me a whole bunch of Advil, which seems to be helping.
The best part is that a couple of days after that, I dropped what I think must have been a 2.5-pound weight on my other big toe. Fortunately I have learned enough to diagnose it as not broken all by myself, even without a tuning fork.
I picked the first tomato from my Very Own Garden earlier this week. It was delicious but its savoring was somewhat lost on G., who is having some bizarro heartburn issues that did not permit him to have more than a bite of it. Hooray, more tomato with salt for me!
I also have a million billion more cucumbers than I could ever possibly eat, and I can eat a lot of cucumbers. Please notify me if you want cucumbers. Please please take the cucumbers.
(Song: “I Wish I Was A Girl,” Counting Crows. I wish Adam Duritz understood the subjunctive.)
Two weeks ago, I made G. drive me out to Molbak’s, of which I had only heard legends and rumors, and I found them all to be true: it is a Wonderful Place. Fortunately, I had spent all my evenings over the last week or so pulling up weeds in the raised bed in our backyard. (This turns out to be a remarkably comforting & calming procedure, actually, and I recommend it. Work all day, drive home through crappy traffic, get out of car and immediately put dogs in backyard, put gloves on, and start digging in the dirt.) So it was OK that I spent about $200 at Molbak’s. Sort of.
In any case, I pulled weeds all morning and then I put steer manure on the ground and stirred it in, and then we went to the store. An hour and a half later, we came home with four tomato plants (two yellow pear, one brandywine, one persimmon), four basil plants (two regular & two Greek columnar), eight cucumber plants (Orient Express, Telegraph, & Lemon, my favorite), two little jalapeño plants, and several lettuces, both green & red leaf. I spent the rest of the afternoon putting them in and then watering them.
All the plants were sad and straggly, especially the lettuces, because it’s so late in the season. I worried that I had just wasted a ton of money & time, but I felt bizarrely parental about all of the little plants. It was like adopting Ruby: she needed a bath and a nap and lots of petting; the plants, especially the poor wilty lettuces, needed some dirt and some water and some love. I gave them a forever home! AND THEN I WILL EAT THEM.
By that Tuesday, the next day I had time to visit, they appeared to have all taken to their new home. There were new leaves on all of the plants and a couple new flowers on the tomatoes. I loosened soil in some of the empty spots and put in seeds for corn, carrots, & a lettuce mix, the kind where you just seed every three weeks or so and harvest the baby leaves as they come up. I put up my four-month white-board calendar and drew lines to represent when the seeds were scheduled to sprout, according to the back of the seed packet. Then I sat down and was very impatient!
Happily, though, exactly seven days later, the corn started to sprout! That was last Tuesday. I love the baby corn plants. Then a few days later I started to notice little fragile carrot sprouts, and now I think I have a few lettuces coming up, too. They did it all by themselves! Also there are two tiny baby green tomatoes, and three cucumber blossoms. I will have fruit soon!
I have wanted this garden for years and years. I am so happy that it seems to be working. Now I am prepared for the collapse of civilization.
(Song: “What Do You Love More Than Love,” Dar Williams)
Spring seems to have arrived in Seattle while we were in Reno last weekend, and it’s made me realize it’s almost a year since we moved into this house. It’s been sunny and warmish and gorgeous, with blooming tulips and lilacs and green growing things, and the light has been coming into the house at a particular angle and of a particular color, like it did when we first moved in about 11 months ago. It’s making me strangely nostalgic, yet motivated.
So I’m especially glad that it was slow at work this week and I got to leave early yesterday and take all of today off, staying home and doing yardwork. Dogs laid around in the sun and watched me crawl around in bushes and get stabbed by holly leaves. I weeded and trimmed and I installed fence and my new compost maker, and then I decided I didn’t like its location and now I have to move it.
It’s also especially good that it’s nice right now because G’s brother and sister-in-law as well as his dad and stepmom are here, so we have lovely weather for walking around beautiful Seattle and looking at colorful vegetables and sparkly water and also cute shoes and fancy clothes. We also have weather and, now, room in the backyard, since I pruned, for the inaugural barbecue of the year: halibut cheek tacos. Turns out halibut cheeks don’t grill so well, but I’ll still post it on Kitchenisms soon.
(Song: “Spring Street,” Dar Williams)
