Garden Snippits

Last weekend we had our first fennel! It was ginormous!


I roasted it with some olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It was good, but a bit on the dry side. Next time I will try roasting it covered up.

This weekend we noticed that the persimmon has flowers! Lots of them, too! They are very pretty:


In addition, we transplanted the plants in the greenhouse. Unfortunately the artichokes did not survive the heat when we left the greenhouse closed during the day we went to Tempe about a month and a half ago. Some of the tomatoes were affected as well, as were the eggplants, but most of them seem to have recovered. Especially recovered are the tomato plants that got transplanted on the weekend of April 2nd.
We also planted some herbs (lemon verbena, mint in the backyard, rosemary in the front yard), cucumber seeds, melon seeds, and some sunflower seeds. The melons were planted where the peas used to be - I can't believe we still have some fresh peas! They don't taste quite as good as the earlier ones, and they are the last ones, but we have more that we froze.

Spring!

You can tell Spring is really here:


New leaves on the fig tree!


Our first fig!


New growth on the grapefruit tree!


Leaf buds on the persimmon tree!

This past weekend we almost finished preparing the summer garden for planting: dug another bed, for a total of three, and installed part of the irrigation. We also planted the thyme in a smaller bed, to which mint and lemon verbena will be added at a later date.

Finally, we planted some summer wildflower seeds in the front yard. Hopefully, we'll have a colorful summer!

Greenhouse Plants, Etc.

Last week, when I took these pictures (I know, I'm lazy), our garden turned 4 months old. It has provided us with many peas, arugula, mustard, and spinach. Actually, it was a lot more arugula and mustard than we could handle, so we took them out. Plus, they had tons of aphids. It was neat to see some biological control agents coming to the rescue - ladybugs, parasitoid wasps - but I took them all out. We really didn't know what to do with all that mustard, and the arugula, when not young and tender, is too strong for my taste. We also had arugula and mustard, as well as endive in the mesclun salad mix, so we took them all out, finding little lettuce plants struggling for some air and light. Well, they have plenty of both now!


The area between the struggling lettuce and the green onions, where the arugula and mustard were, now features little lettuce babies, planted 2 weeks earlier:


The greenhouse plants are doing pretty well too:

Four artichokes, 8 bell peppers, 2 eggplants, and the rest are various varieties of heirloom tomatoes.


Even though we didn't really have any below-freezing days since I built the greenhouse, I like to believe that the greenhouse helped these plants grow. As I mentioned before, these pictures were taken last week, and now they are even bigger. Plus, we also purchased another pepper plant and a thyme plant from the Tucson Organic Gardeners Sale last Sunday. As you can see, some of the seeds didn't sprout - 2 of our Taos tomatoes and 3 of the bell peppers. We resowed them yesterday. We also removed most of the doubles and triples to leave a single seedling. The recommendation is to transplant them sometime between mid to end March. I think we will wait until they're a bit bigger to do that, though 2 of their beds have been ready months ago.

Yesterday we dug another little bed for some more herbs we are planning to grow: mint, thyme, lemon verbena, and anything else that will strike out fancy.

If you are interested in spinach, parsley or cilantro, let me know - we have way too much!

Greenhousette

Yesterday, while Mark was fixing the skylights, I finished building - all by myself! - the little greenhouse we're going to use to grow seeds. I started last Sunday, when I built the frame, and yesterday I painted and attached the plastic sheet and the hinges:


I'm happy to report that the greenhousette passed its first rain test - it rained a lot this morning, and yet the greenhouse was unharmed (albeit very misty).

The longest dimension is about 2', and it's only meant for holding small pots with seedlings. I planted some today - artichokes and bell peppers. We're also supposed to get seeds of seven heirloom tomato varieties in the mail. I can't wait to taste them!

This is what it looks like open:


You can see how the sugar snap peas are going wild. Here's a picture of the main winter garden as it reaches the ripe old age of three months:

The empty-looking part in between the mustard greens and the fennels occupies the green onions and leeks. I sure hope they will grow some more...

And this is not all of the peas I could have picked (it was getting dark):

Peas Now! [snow peas on the left, sugar snap peas on the right]

Lots of Diggin' and A Compost Bin

The past week we spent the evenings digging till our backs broke and our arms would put Marge Simpson to shame.

Apparently, Marge was into body-building at some point (more specifically, during an episode called "Strong Arms of Ma").


This is not a WWI battlefield... it's our front yard, with the main water line exposed.

The reason we were digging so much is that our drain clogged. Since we'd have to bring a plumber to unclog it, we figured we might as well also prepare for the replacement of our old, rusty main water line.
We're having some trouble with the permit issuance for that, so we'll have to wait with this project a couple of days, but we did get our drain fixed. Lloyd came Thursday morning, in the pouring rain, and put his snakey machine through the hole in the drain, that we exposed the night before:


Unfortunately, the hole is right under our herb garden. Poor chives, they suffered the most, and they're still so young and tender, you can barely even see the ones that were spared. Yes, they're in between the parsley and cilantro (coriander).

And now for something completely different:


We started piling our kitchen and garden scraps back in December or late November. But the pile was getting so big, we had to do something to contain it. So we built this 3-faced compost bin out of wood and chicken wire. The extra green is from our mustard bed - it's been going wild, and so have the aphids, so thinning was unavoidable. Encouragingly enough, I did see a ladybug too, so there is at least some measure of biological control.

Plastering and Eating

Two weeks ago we started plastering the bricks on the closed window. Then we ran out of plaster. We had enough for 3 layers of plaster mixed with sand, but not enough for the last layer of pure plaster, for a smooth finish. So we finished that a week later. Now all we have to do is prime, paint, and put some shelves. We'll see how long that'll take...



The same day we finished the first few layers of plaster, Mark made this pizza:



He made this pizza many times before, and it's always delicious. But this time it was extra special, because he used spinach from our garden! And homemade yogurt! Yum!

And last week we had our first crop of snowpeas!



The yummy green pods went straight into our yakisoba! Yum!

Windows XP Removed

(XP stands for Extra-Professionally)

Our house didn't use to have a garage, but a carport. Sometime along the way the carport was converted to a garage, but the windows to the dining area and the bathroom remained. This is not up to code, according to our inspector, so we have to remove the windows and brick them up. We decided to do it now, because we are also getting new windows, and they will cost $450 less if we remove the old windows ourselves. The window that needs to be bricked, is therefore, the practice window -we can see how it goes, and decide whether we would like to pay someone else $450 for the pleasure or not. Turns out it's not so difficult! Sunday Mark removed the window in about 1 hour, and that included finding hidden nails, and dealing with the fact that the window didn't open all the way, because of the garage door tracks that run across it. Now that we know there are nails on both sides of the window, and as all other windows open all the way, it should take less time per window, we hope. The window person, who came to measure the windows, was very impressed!


Mark bangs on the sides of the window to loosen it up.


All the nails are out, and the window can finally be pulled out.

Next, we had to brick it up. But first we had to find bricks. We wanted to use burnt adobe bricks, to match the rest of the house. You'd think it would be easy to find in Tucson, but no. The new adobe bricks are made differently - they're more stable - and the one place that sells them, although they said they have bricks with a color that matches - was too busy to help us. We finally found a place that sells burnt adobe way out west - Walter's Wholesale Mesquite. They mostly sell firewood, but they also have adobe bricks of various sizes. We wanted 4" wide bricks, so that we can have a little niche for built-in shelves -- the house bricks are 8" wide. We got 50 of them and started laying them. Six hours later:



Mark reinforced the bricks with reinforcement bars drilled into the bordering walls. It was already 11 pm and we ran out of sand, so we had to close the rest of the window with some cardboard and continue the next day.

Monday, 8:30 pm, after acquiring more sand and cement, we started again. Five and half hours later (yes, it was 2 am when we were finally done!):


From the inside: the bricks will be painted, and shelves will be hung to show our smaller ceramic creations.


From the garage side: as you can see, the garage door tracks didn't make it any easier laying the bricks in the last couple of rows. Also, not that the new brick sizes are different - they are shorter both in length and height than the original bricks.

And on a different note: On Sunday our garden veggies turned 2 months old:

The snap peas are blooming!

Copious amounts of mustard, arugula and salad greens result in a lot of greenery ending up in our meals.