2008 Garden!!!

OK, so I can't seem to post more than once in a great while. I am really hoping to change that now that we have our precious baby Emma home and I am feeling so much better. I won't get into the details of my labor and delivery, let's just say that it didn't go nearly as well as I had hoped. But, on the bright side, I now have this perfect little person at home with me who has brought so much joy to my life and Matt's life. We are extremely blessed!

Now onto my *container* garden for this year! Matt and I finally got everything into the pots this past weekend. I was getting worried that we wouldn't actually be able to plant all the seedlings, but alas, Nana was able to come and watch the little one for a couple hours while we worked outside. I ended up with 6 Brandywine tomato plants, 6 roma tomato plants, 6 basil, 3 cilantro, 2 sweet peppers, 1 jalapeno pepper, and either 3 cucumber plants or 2 cucumbers and a zucchinni. I swear that I bought a zuke plant, but for the life of me, I can't actually see where I put it or planted it. And I also can't remember if we ended up buying 2 or 3 cucumber plants this year. I have a feeling I lost the zucchini plant in transit, don't ask me how.

So here are some pictures of my beautiful garden space up on the high high deck, which, by the way, I am extremely happy we have now. My mom had a ton of herbs up on her deck in pots (she lives just down the street from us), and something got up on the deck and ate them all...along with most of her flowers. We are thinking woodchucks, but can they climb stairs? Never seen any rabbits around here...so we are at a loss...and my mom is seriously upset about it. I'm all for nature, but when something comes up on the deck and eats the plants...come on! That's why I'm happy that any animals that want to eat our plants have to climb up 20 steps to get to our deck ;-) Oh yeah...pictures :-)

I also wanted to talk about my CSA share. I meant to actually post a picture last week for our first share pickup, but in order to post the picture we actually would have needed to take a picture. So instead I will tell you what we got last week. In our 1st CSA share ever we received:

2 huge bags of spinach
5 baby beets and beet greens
3 bags of lettuce
1 bunch of scallions
1 bunch of radishes
2 chinese cabbage

It was a lot of food, and actually we still have a lot of it left over which is interesting. I thought for sure we would eat it all, but apparently I was wrong! Not that I mind having extra lettuce, might as well eat as many fresh salads as possible :-)

This week we received:

8 beets with beet greens (obsviously they come with the greens, but I find that is a whole other meal side)
1 bunch of carrots
2 bags of spinach that looks like baby beet greens (but the board at the farm assured me it was actually spinach, the type I can't remember at this point)
1 bag of lettuce

Now onto the pictures :-)

apple picking and other thoughts

I didn't realize how quickly September was going to fly by! This weekend is the last weekend in September, which means I need to go apple picking, something I wasn't actually planning on for this weekend. I am very much a planner, and now feel all discombobulated because I have to can instead of do other stuff...well...my goal is to can some applesauce and apple jelly. Actually, if you have read this blog recently, you may realize that I have intended to can a lot of things, and yet not one thing is canned in my house...except pints upon pints of strawberry jam :-)

The weather in Maine at the moment is absolutely beautiful. It has been in the 80's the past couple days, and it is supposed to hit 90 tomorrow...90! My pepper plants are all budding again, and I have a ton of green peppers that just came out of nowhere. Unfortunately I don't think my jalapenos are going to have enough time to mature before the frost comes...bummer. I'm definitely thinking that I will save some of the green pepper seeds though for next year. It will be my first attempt at seed saving...so I have no clue what I am supposed to do, but the fact that there isn't all the slimy stuff like in tomatoes, I think I will have a better time with it all :-)

The house is shaping up quite well. Matt has been painting the trim in the living room, and it looks great! One more window in there and then the door trim. I will be happy when all the painting is done...whenever that happens. Hopefully sooner rather then later. I also want to start cleaning up the upstairs. I need a room to put all of my craft stuff, and every single room upstairs is filled with construction stuff, empty cardboard boxes, boxes and boxes of books and other things we haven't unpacked. I am hopeful that I will have a craft room soon though, otherwise people will not be receiving Christmas presents this year :-P

Sorry for the randomness and timing of posts as of late...my mind has been quite jumbled for the past month or so. Hopefully soon I will be back on track!

it has happened...

Something is eating my tomatoes...my tomatoes that are on a second floor balcony 15 feet off the ground. What is it?! And not only are they eating my tomatoes, they are leaving their mark IN my pots...their mark? Yes, poop. I can't figure out what the heck it is. It must be squirrels, it definitely isn't mouse poop. So for the past two days I have been spending quite a bit of time on google searching for every animal I can think of, and not just looking up the animal, but looking up what the poop for these animals looks like. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything that looks like what I have seen. I thought about taking a picture and posting it here, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it...maybe that's why I can't find a picture of it online. Although, there are an awful lot of pictures of poop out there.

The good thing? They are only attacking 2 of my plants right now, the two furthest down on the steps. So, I am just leaving those plants there, and probably tonight and tomorrow I will pick all the other tomatoes I have, and ripen them inside. I hate to do that, but I don't want to lose the rest of my tomatoes! The bad thing? These were my two best tomato plants, producing perfect looking tomatoes and ripening to perfection. I knew it was only a matter of time...

Oh, and with this lovely bought of warm weather we have had recently, all of my pepper plants have decided to bud again and I have little peppers all over the place...would be nice if they could get to a normal size and then we can eat them. And I thought they were dead :-)

UPDATE:
So I asked my all knowing garden friend at work what might be causing this poop infestation around my tomato plants, and she promptly tells me that it is tomato horn worms. I look them up on google, and yup, that's definitely what the poop looked like. I proceed to call my mother to have her go look and see if she can see them, and she calls back "YES! THAT IS DEFINITELY IT!" Apparently these little guys, are not so little. My mom said she saw one that was at least 3 inches long and 1/2 inch in diameter. Pretty much I am so skived out right now, but at least it isn't some weird rodent crawling up my stairs!

busy/OLS weeks 8 & 9

I never realized how busy I get sometimes! But, here it is, a couple weeks after my last entry, and I don't even know where the time has gone! I have been crazy busy at work doing our physical inventory and valuation...fun stuff let me tell you. So, by the time I get home at night, I have no desire to even look at the computer, or do much else for that matter!

I haven't even had a chance to post last weeks OLS meal, which we had! I don't even know if I took pictures of it...I made pizza. I have never made pizza dough from scratch, but it was really easy. I think it was just flour water and yeast (the yeast was not local). I didn't have any pizza sauce, so I just sliced up some yummy tomatoes from the garden and put those on the pizza dough, with some olive oil and salt. I didn't have local cheese either, just your everyday shredded mozzarella...I still can't find milk that isn't "ultra-pasteurized", and am not sure I am ready for actual raw milk, is there something in the middle? Then on the cheese, green peppers from the garden, and also some shredded chicken that I had roasted up the day before. It was really really good. It also made more pizza then I knew what to do with. I think next time I will freeze half of the dough so that it is available to me later on for an easy pizza...I think I can freeze the dough, does anyone see a problem with that?

This week's local meal, also no pictures, I took all the many veggies I had in the fridge...ok so it was zukes, onion, peppers from the garden...not as much variety as I thought. Then I just put them on the grill. It was delicious, that's for sure. I have never had grilled zucchini, I have to say it really brought out some amazing flavor. Seasoned with just a bit of (non-local) olive oil and salt and pepper. Yum!

I'm hoping that I can get back on track with posting, although I don't know what I want to post about now. I am still concentrating a lot on getting the house finished, and just settling into a normal life...It's really nice to feel slightly settled.

I love my garden!!

I have been wanting to get these pictures up for a while now, but have been so busy! Life never slows down, that's for sure. We had our first tomato this past week! As you can see Matt had a lot of fun arranging our food to take a picture :-) And I have to say, it was the best tomato ever! Now if the other 100 or so would turn red, I would be happy! And my one cucumber plant is seriously producing a lot. Well, I have no idea how much a cucumber plant usually produces, but we are around 20 cukes from this one plant...I kept meaning to make pickles, but they disappear way too fast for me to do anything besides cut them up for sandwiches or just plain with a little salt...yum! I have been eating peppers and cukes for dinner most nights, so how much more local can I get?!

One Local Summer Week 7

This week I decided to try making tortillas. I had seen the recipe on Liz's site, and figured I would try it. I have been in a bit of a baking mood recently. It was actually really easy. Of course I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have. So I made the tortillas with King Arthur flour, non-local oil, and some local (tap) water :-) Can't really beat that!



I also decided to start picking the jalapeno peppers that are growing on my plant on the deck. I wanted to make pico de gallo, and of course wanted it super hot, but since Matt wasn't in the mood for hot, I made a nice mild pico de gallo (no seeds or ribs). I picked up some organic tomatoes and onions at the Farmers' Market (Hallowell, 6 miles) and used a bit of non-local lemon juice and some salt. Yum! I love to just put this over salad greens as well.




And for the filling, we scrambled up some free range eggs, also from the Farmers' market. This was the point at which we forgot to take pictures. Matt is almost finished with his here :-)




Mine were closer to being whole when I remembered to take the picture. All in all, really a great meal!




I hope to make these again soon, and the next time I think I will probably try and bake them to make nacho chips.

canning and furniture

Looking at the many green tomatoes I have, I realize that I need to start thinking about what to do with them after they turn red. Matt and I go through a lot of tomatoes in a week anyways. I cook with them so much. However, I have a strange suspicion that all of those lovely green tomatoes on the vines on my deck will turn red all at the same time. In which case, I need to figure out what to do with them.

At first I was thinking about buying a pressure canner. "It's the only safe way to can." However, I have decided that since all of the stuff I will be canning is tomato based, I think I can pass with just the old water bath method. Does anyone have any insight on this? I mean, I have never actually canned anything in my life, but have been the recipient of many a canned gift, all of which was done with a water bath, and I haven't died yet.

I really am just so excited about my container garden this year. I am already thinking ahead to next years garden and more veggies I want to plant. I like the container gardening, it is easy, there are no weeds, and they are all on a second floor deck, which means the nice woodchuck family that lives next door can't get at them. The problem? You may have noticed from previous pictures that my deck is completely full. I don't think that I can fit anything else up there. So what do I do?

I am too inexperienced to actually plant a real garden I feel. I don't think I could take it if I planned a great looking garden, took care of it, and then one day come home to no plants because the woodchucks ate them all, or I have some weird infestation of bugs that ruins everything. At the same time I think, people have been gardening forever, and they seem to do ok, so maybe I should just not worry about it.

In other news, our living room furniture arrived yesterday. I can't even describe how elated I am to have a place to sit now! We haven't had a place to sit in the living room since we moved in. It was nice to be able to sit down last night with a (local) beer and watch a movie. It is starting to feel like home! Now...if we can just get the dining room painted and a floor put in...all will be right with the world :-)

One Local Summer week 6

OK, so I feel really bad about not posting an OLS meal last week. We did eat some local food, but not primarily in a dinner, and I didn't have time to post or take pictures of anything not wedding related. So this week I would like to do two meals, but not promising that either. To start, we will have one, and see where it goes from here :-)

I was really in the mood to have pasta again. My last attempt...well it was less than stellar to say the least. Not that it didn't taste great, but I eat with my eyes first, and the strange pasta shapes I came up with...well not the best. So this time I borrowed my mom's rolling pin. I think I need to work in smaller sections though, because I ran out of space to roll on the counter, and ended up with thicker pasta again. It was still good though, and it actually resembled those wide noodles when you order drunken noodles at a thai restaurant...mmmm drunken noodles.


With the pasta I decided to make fresh sauce again from some Backyard Beauties. They really work quite well in the interim, and I find them to taste really good as well. I just chopped up the tomatoes, threw them in a pot with some olive oil and the rest of the garlic I had gotten at the Farmer's market. Add some oregano and salt and pepper...

And there you have it, fresh tomato sauce.



I thought I should also add something else to the sauce, so I chopped up the zucchini and squash that I had (from Waterville 32 miles), and sauteed them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper.



Here is the finished product. Yummy if I do say so myself. Matt really likes the homemade pasta as well. I think I would like to try making ravioli at some point...I don't think I can do a local one unless I don't use cheese. I haven't been able to bring myself to try making cheese yet. Well part of that is the fact that I can't find any non ultra-pasteurized milk...maybe someday :-) For now, I have to just try and buy cheese that is in my region. Does anyone have any idea on a New England ricotta?



I can't believe that OLS is almost done! Just a few more weeks. I just have to say that I am really thankful that I found Liz's website. She has really helped me look more closely at the food that I am eating, and where it comes from. Plus, it now gives me an excuse to spend hours in the kitchen, which to some may seem like a chore, but to me it is like heaven!

I'm back

Wow, what a wonderful vacation I had. I couldn't have asked for more relaxation or better weather. It was really lovely to just sit back and do nothing for a while...well nothing work related anyways. We were able to go hiking and work on the house, as well as prepare for my brother's wedding. It was an amazing time and I am so happy for him and his new bride.

I came home to a lot of cukes. When I left I swear that I only had a couple really small cucumbers on the vine, but when I came home 4 days later I had this:



I was so excited to actually get something from my garden! Granted, I have picked a couple peppers, but really they need to stay on the pepper plant a bit longer so they can thicken up a bit. I have a bunch more that need to be picked now, which will be perfect to continue my eating of cucumber and (local) tomato salad for my lunches, yum!

Also my tomato plants are really producing a large amount of green tomatoes....I am hoping they turn red at some point. Some of the tomatoes have split in half, no idea why that has happened, but I just pick them and throw them over the edge for the birds. And does anyone have a clue how large roma tomatoes get? I have never seen romas grown before, but comparing mine to the grocery store...well...mine are giants. I can't figure out how they have gotten so big, not that I am complaining of course...those romas will be lovely for sauce and maybe some salsa too :-)

Hopefully I will get some better posts up soon. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer as much as I!

garden update

My garden is doing so well! I am super excited about it. I can't wait to actually be able to pick more from my garden. I have been picking the herbs constantly, but no actual vegetables. Well...I did have that little green pepper that I just couldn't manage to wait to pick :-) I am so happy that nothing is dead yet though!

Friday I came home from work and looked up at the step and deck where all of my plants are, it looked a little different though, so I went around to the front of the steps to see properly. I looked up the steps, and there were my two cherry tomato plants, completely tipped over and out of their pots. I almost dropped at the foot of the stairs. I ran up to look at them, and most of the little tomatoes that had been on the plant had been snapped off.

Luckily I was able to get the whole plant back in the pot, and some of the tomatoes are still on there. I am just hoping that it doesn't die. I think the saving grace was that I had cages around those two plants, so when the wind blew them over, they kind of got stuck upside down on the step, and weren't able to go anywhere else. If they had completely fallen down all the steps...well it would have been all over.

Tomato cages...well...I only had 3 tomato cages, so most of my tomatoes seem to be growing like a forest currently. Is that bad? Are they not going to grow well? I can't imagine that is the case, because all of my tomato plants have tons of tomatoes on them. I planted 13 tomato plants so that in case I killed most of them, I would still be able to have a few tomatoes for salads and maybe to make a little sauce to throw in the freezer. How was I to know that my tomato plants would take off and I would have enough tomatoes to feed me for at least 2 years? Well here are my pictures then:

One Local Summer Week 3!

This week for our local meal I was finally able to take something from my garden. It was very satisfying to run up the stairs and pick my first green pepper! Of course, if I had left it on much longer obviously it would have been bigger, but I just couldn't wait anymore! I also used some of the basil. I have been picking basil about every couple of days off my little basil plant, it seems to enjoy growing, and I am certainly enjoying eating it!







What One Local Summer is allowing me to do is be more creative with my meals. I have said before that I love cooking, so to have to figure out what to make with what is available...well it is interesting to say the least. I have baked biscuits, bread, and a chicken. This week? I decided I would try my hand at making pasta. I mean, how hard can it be? Some flour, and some eggs, check and check. I had both of those local, eggs from Monmouth and flour from King Arthur in VT. I am still using up the last of my VT flour, and then will be buying the "Maine milled" flour that is at the health food store. I put the ingredients into my lovely green kitchen aid mixer (my favorite appliance by far, if only for the color) not quite sure what would come out.





I made the dough, and realized I now needed to roll it out with a rolling pin, or put it through the pasta attachment...it was at this point that I realized that I had neither...so what did I do? Well, being oh so creative, I just stretched and stretched the dough...yeah...and then I attempted to cut the dough with a butter knife...we are still unpacking the kitchen stuff :-P





The above is what I came up with for pasta...I named it heathernguine. Although from the picture it appears more like funnel cake with confectioners sugar...



I then let my heathernguine sit while I made sauce. I chopped up some local tomatoes, Backyard Beauties, and put them in a sauce pan with some non-local olive oil and garlic, let it cook down and simmer. While that was simmering, I browned my organic and local hot sausage from Snafu Acres with my fresh picked green pepper and some hot pepper flakes (non-local). Then I put the sausage mixture in with the tomatoes...it was at that point I realized even if the pasta sucked I could totally eat the tomatoes and sausage...yum!






The above is the final meal, with Gritty's to wash it down with :-) Overall it got the "my favorite meal ever" award from Matt, and that makes me happy. Now...the next time I make pasta...I will have a roller...or better yet...the kitchen aid pasta attachment :-)

updates

I can't believe it is actually July right now, I don't think I remember having June! Everything has been crazy busy around my house...and it is about to get crazier. I have weddings galore this month...including my baby brother's wedding...awwww :-) Matt and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary on the 2nd, and 8 years of being together on the 3rd...again...crazy.

Yesterday we managed to put in new flooring in the living room. Yay! That means I can walk from the front door of the house all the way to the back of the house in my bare feet now...no more carrying shoes from the entryway to the living room so we can get to the bedroom. Now, all I have to do is prime and paint the window/door trim. Pretty exciting stuff considering we expected to be DONE with the house May 1st :-)

I must confess, the only reason the living room was finished so quickly this past week is because Matt and I bought a new TV, and it is being picked up on Friday. Granted, we don't have cable, but since we watch so many movies, I figured it was worth it...plus I have this little Legend of Zelda addiction...but that is another story...So much for trying to reduce what we have. I am happy with the purchase, but still feel a tad bit of guilt.

My garden is doing amazingly well! I have little tomatoes all over my many many plants...and I have one mighty fine green pepper which appears to double in size everyday. I think this weekend I might pick it...Matt wants me to wait until it is "as big as the ones at the grocery store," but I don't know if I can wait that long. My other 2 pepper plants are not doing as well as the green pepper one. Neither of them have any fruit, but lot's of little flowers, so I am hopeful that something will come of it. I will have to take some more pictures...The upstairs deck is starting to get a little crowded...

Having the 4th on a Wednesday really through off my whole week! All day yesterday I thought it was Saturday, but now I have to go back to work for 2 more days...I can't wait for the end of the month when I can have an entire week of vacation...yay!