Backyard Garden

Yesterday was the first day of Summer, and most of the garden is doing well. It has been providing us with salad greens for the past couple of weeks, along with fresh kale. The early salads were and Asian mix, and if I had the seed packet, I would tell you what was in it, but I don't. It was spicier lettuces that showed up early and began flowering recently. One day it wasn't, then it looked like it might and them boom! Flowers. Jen is leaving them around for the bees while we plot where we are going to plant the next round of lettuce.  Aside from the Asian mix, we have some buttery soft lettuces, and again I don't know what the names are. I'm sure Jen could tell you but I can't. Those are not flowering and seem to be a never-ending source of fresh salad greens. Its been pretty great and we'll be planing more of those.  Greens are easy though they grow early, and you eat them. What's really cool is the salad turnips were ready, and we ate some already. Look ...

The garden is doing well. We've been eating the salad greens and many of the herbs. The oregano and the sage came back from last year. The sage is just about flowering, so that's good for the bees. The Chives came back, and we finally gave them a permanent place in the herb garden. Jen's parents brought some rhubarb from their garden up in Sumner. We planted that in between the Pear and the Japanese maple. Next summer we should have our own. We have one row that we have not planted anything in yet. Likely we will use it to rotate out some greens. The rest of the garden is dotted with plants and flowers. At least it will be dotted with plants and flowers as soon as they grow. Now the battle for the garden begins. We had turned up out lawn, and this is our first year with the new garden, so the grass is coming back. It seems to like the new soil as much as we hoped our garden plants would. Along with the grass and weeds, we have a number of volunteers from where we added ...

Garden update from June 12th. Lavender bed Lettuce (asian greens mix) gone to flower already in the background and the salad we were eating in the foreground. Kale! The herb garden and the beautiful sage flowers. Napa cabbage. Tomato plants and marigolds in the large tubs, we grow them on the south side of the house by the driveway and they do very well there! Plus they don't crowd out the other plants...they get very large. Flowering chives int he herb garden. Storage cabbage. Beets coming up. Daikon radish coming up. White turnips ready to eat. More lettuce... Scarlet runner beans and pickling cukes in half barrels.

So it's a bit of a gamble, but it shouldn't be. The weather has been great this past week, hovering in the mid-60s. We hit 80+ degrees one of those days. It's Memorial Day weekend and should be a perfect time to transplant the seedlings Jen has been growing and raising for the past month. Maybe more than a month. We spent the day planting the seedlings and sowing the seeds in the garden, then watering the little beasts in the hope that they take and grow. Looks good, though. It is a gamble because last night, around 11:00 just before heading up to bed, I decided to check the weather. I never check the weather at night because I'm going to bed and I don't care. It's going to be colder than it was when the sun was out. Maybe it will rain, maybe it won't. I don't care because I'll be sleeping. But I checked it, and it said it was going to get down to 38 degrees. Not quite a frost, but along with that temp, the app gave a frost warning. I...

Every year on our birthdays, we get to pick dinner or where to go for dinner. This year, however, we were not going anywhere. We are not big fans of take-out, and due to the stay at home orders, there was not any place to go. Not that we would want to sit around in a mask being waited on by people in gloves and masks. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll be going out to eat for a long time. Luckily we have food, cookbooks, the internet, and a desire to eat things we can't just buy. We decided on noodles, like a ramen bowl or something like that. That turned into Udon, and then we found out that we can make our Udon noodles, and that is something people do all the time. Not people I know, but people somewhere do it. So we did it. The ingredients were: 2 cups or 300 grams of all-purpose flour (we threw in a little gluten flour as well) 1 tablespoon of salt added to 3/4 cups of water (mix well) That's it for the ingredients, and the rest is work. Pour the water around the ...

The garden is doing what gardens do in early May. The lettuce, spinach, and peas Jen planted are trying to bust through the soil while we work to remove any little grass bits that are trying to make a go of the nutrient-dense soil we've tilled into the back yard. She is also tending to the seedlings growing on the front porch, and we are letting them grow for a couple more weeks out there before we even think of transplanting to the garden. Last weekend we hauled a giant oak bourbon barrel up from the basement. Jen's brother James had brought it to the house five or six years ago when I was still brewing beer. The intent was to make a few batches of strong ale, fill the barrel, and let it age in the charred oak barrel for a few months before bottling and enjoying whatever came out of it. I brewed beer in batches of five gallons, so this barrel would have taken ten batches to fill. At around $45-$50 a batch, this experiment would have cost close to $500. Not worth the risk. I ...

This post falls under the category of life in Maine. Thursday afternoon, April 9th, it started to snow. All the weather App's assured us it would rain, so we were hoping to just get rain. It didn't snow a lot by Maine standards, maybe five inches, but it was five inches of heavy spring snow. Five inches of stuff that was just light enough that you couldn't call it slush, but if you touched it, it turned to slush. Jen and I went for a walk around the college campus just after eight pm. The roads had not been plowed; the sidewalks were not cleared. It was slow walking but a good work out. We were dressed for it. On the walk, we saw the tree's weighted down from all the snow and a couple of ducks quacking on the pond as the big chunky snowflakes fell. Some of the college students who were not able to go home when the school closed because of the pandemic had built a couple of giant snowpeople and were throwing snowballs at each other. We got back to the house, threw som...

So in the spirit of staying at home (more than usual, but just barely more) and less time shopping we are doing more making things we like to buy. We don't get kombucha that often but often enough to think it was time to start our own. I had tried doing a kit a couple years ago with a dehydrated scoby and that never worked out, I just never pursued it after that. We are always wanting to add more fermented foods to our diet so I tried again. I read that you could make your own scoby from commercial kombucha as long as it was still active, which sounds great to me.  The first try is actually working, a scoby is forming, but I used a small mouth jar and did not give it a lot to eat. So I am getting ready to transfer it to a larger jar with more tea and sugar to eat and I started a second scoby from commercial kombucha in case this one fails. The first try... (3 weeks fermenting) second try back up (1 week fermenting) The type of kombucha we used: What you ...

The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w...

So that worked. Who could have known that following instructions would result in something that the instructions were supposed to deliver? We soaked the beans overnight, then blended the soybeans (without cooking them - I learned), then into a pot with seven cups of water. We boiled it, strained it, and that was soy milk. If we wanted soymilk, we could have stopped there, that was not the goal, though. We added a packet of nigari (sodium chloride) made from saltwater to the bowl of hot soymilk and waited, stirring occasionally. Everything curdled up and started to separate, kind of like making cheese. We put the cloth in the tofu press, and the tofu press into a large dish. The large dish was to catch the water that drains from the curds as they are ladled into the tofu press. I'm willing to bet someone somewhere has started to ladle the soymilk curds into the press without something to catch the water. I bet given the right day; I might even do that myself. We were able to...

A few years ago, we received a tofu press to make tofu at home. I think it was Jen's sister Julie who got it for us. Thanks, Julie, if it was you. We were excited; as vegetarian soon to be vegans, tofu was and is a staple at our house. We eat it a few times a week, seven or eight different ways. We could now make it ourselves so, cool. We order a five-pound bag of organic yellow soybeans from amazon, put the tofu press in the cupboard, and waited. The soybeans came in the mail, but the time was not right, so they sat. Then they sat some more, and then we forgot about them in the pantry for months. The soybeans were moved around the pantry so many times it stopped being a bag of soybeans and became something we just moved around. Our brains stopped connecting the green bag to what was inside it. They should have been turned into soymilk and tofu, but they didn't exist in that world anymore.  Eventually, one of our cats got a hold of the bag and destroyed it. The little yellow...

We bought our house 12 years ago, and our backyard was filled with concrete and a giant pool. It lasted one year before we had it filled in because it was a pool, and we live in Maine. Our entire property is only .15 of an acre, and we've always wanted it to be a garden. You can see on this blog a few of the things we've tried with some success. Our first gardens were raised bed square foot gardens with the fluffiest soil we could put together. They looked cute, and they did alright. Those morphed as the wood we used to build the raised beds decayed like they were supposed to. For the past five years, we have had one long raised bed in the back yard. The first year it was full of vegetables, and it was insanely full. The following year we did the same, but weeds took over, and we ignored it. The next year we changed the raised bed into an herb garden, and it was perfect. We grew tomatoes in pots around the driveway and back porch, and the raised bed was full of mints, flower...

This is the first red bell pepper I have ever gotten from my garden! It may be a little green still but I did not want it to get hit by frost. 

It's starting to look like the colors of fall and late-summer, wild morning glories are climbing through the azalea bush looking beautiful first thing this morning.

One big sunflower that came up by surprise in the cucumbers... Cosmos mixed with the tomatoes.. Spearmint flowers  One big green pepper between the cabbage and the celery... Basil Flowers, it needs to be cut and stored before it goes totally to seed!

The garden bed this year is unruly but very bountiful were excited to see it working out so well!