You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2009.
Alas! With our wedding a mere 17 days away, I haven’t had the time to post as much as I’d like. No worries though, I have a bunch more things planned (solar cooker, mini-greenhouse, and upside-down planting, oh my!), and I’ll be back to regular posts starting the beginning of August when we get back from our honeymoon!
In the meanwhile, our suburban sustainability has begun to really pay off.
We get fresh quail eggs every day.
Fry them in a pan with a little bit of season salt...and they make amazing appetizers!
My fiance’s jalapeno plant is growing more peppers than I though possible for such a small bit of greenery. We’re contemplating how to use them all. Ideas?
He likes to surreptitiously slip these into stir fry.
This was our first zucchini. We’ve got a couple more that are almost ready, and more that will be ready in the next weeks. We chopped it up, fried it, seasoned it with soy paste, and it was DELICIOUS! Best zucchini I’ve ever had.
And our thirteen tomato plants are all growing a ton of tomatoes. I can tell we’ll be making a lot of gazpacho, tomato sauce, salads, and salsa.
These are the "Extreme Bush" variety. So far I'd recommend - very hardy, lots and lots of tomatoes, minimal staking required. Let's see how they taste!
Here’s what our garden looks like now.
Mostly tomatoes on the right, eggplants, sunflowers, squashes, and cucumbers on the left.
VEGGIE GARDEN’S DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-3 minutes. We’ve set up an automatic sprinkling system with different sprinkler heads for the different plants. I just go out there to do some sporadic weeding, fertilize once every week or two, and to check what veggies are ready for picking. Easier than going to the grocery store.
In other news, my mom gave me a few hanging flower baskets. They look lovely. I water them twice a day. A couple of times while watering them, a little finch flew out of one of the baskets. “How strange,” I thought. The third time it happened, I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. I brought a chair over, and peered inside.
The bird had built a nest in there! Here I was, unknowingly watering her eggs. From that point on, I watered really carefully around the nest.
Yesterday morning, they hatched.
The lovely basket my mom gave to me.
And inside…
Tired babies!
Be back soon!
Our vegetable garden is thriving! I can’t believe sometimes that we grew all these plants from seeds. We have a couple of fails. There’s the bok choy – which my mom pointed out were a similar vegetable but not exactly bok choy. And there’s the watermelon – which is small but may yet thrive in the coming months.
Cucumber, on the other hand, is amazing! We’ve got sooo many cucumbers growing on our plants.
Veggie Garden view from the gate.
We have a couple of pots of herbs on our deck.
Tarragon and Thyme
Basil
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE: Research your herbs before you plant them in pots. I planted the Thyme and Tarragon together. Obviously, from the photo, they do not make good bedfellows! The Tarragon’s space has been invaded by the Thyme. They started out the same size. I’m going to have to move it to its own individual pot and hope it survives the stress.
This is the grapevine we're training to grow over our deck for shade. We have two of these, actually.
These are the eggplants we're growing on the deck. We ran out of room in the garden!
Back to the veggie garden!
Our tomatoes just started flowering. Can't wait for tomatoes! See the image at the top of this page for how they looked as seedlings.
One of our many cucumbers growing. See, there's another one in the background!
Our veggie garden from the other end.
And that’s that!
Just a head’s up, I’m getting married in a little over a month, so don’t expect too many posts between now and then. No worries though, we’ve got a LOT more planned for our sustainability projects. Expect posting to return to a regular schedule come August!
I’ll be doing posts on individual plant care – for those plants of ours that do well. How often to fertilize, what fertilizer to use, where to plant them, what the soil should be like, etc.
