Carrots, carrots and more carrots

October 2, 2010 at 10:53 pm (Lazy Gardening, Vegetables)

It looks like we will be having carrots tonight. Also fresh carrots and dip for Emily’s birthday party tomorrow.

All in all, we harvested about three pounds of carrots. Not bad when you consider I didn’t go out of my way to plant carrots. Just a few seeds here and there in two of the raised beds.

We also found three small potatoes and one onion. Check out Dave’s pockets…

You can’t beat deep pockets like that. Who needs a basket when Dave’s shorts are around?!

And the complete haul for twenty minutes of work (ten minutes planting in the spring and ten minutes of digging today)…

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The Great Grape Harvest of 2010

August 17, 2010 at 12:39 am (Fruits, Kids and Gardens, Lazy Gardening)

We just harvested our first official grape harvest. Boy oh boy are we proud! As you can see the darling little things fill a dinner plate. With luck, we might get a half cup of juice out of them!

All kidding aside, I was still pleased as punch over the grapes, considering they were volunteers. Yes, they are full of seeds and yes, they are tiny, but we have great hopes for their future.

Honestly, I don’t know a thing about grapes and what to do to make them…ahem…bigger. But I have a few months to figure that out. Meanwhile we have also planted two seedless Pink Reliant varieties in the same area. The seeded grapes were an accidental purchase at HyVee from about four years ago. I saw these enormous dark purple grapes and bought them, not realizing they had seeds. This is why we have grapes in our yard, since half of that bag of grapes remained uneaten and eventually ended up in the compost!

Now if we can increase the grape size, we could then consider making the grapes into jelly,  juice, or even wine or mead at some point in the future. Until then, well, I’ll just enjoy these tiny little grapes. The Princess has been eating away at them, wincing at their sourness, spitting out the seeds, rinse and repeat.


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Caterpillars and Noodle Beans

July 3, 2010 at 1:08 am (Kids and Gardens, Lazy Gardening)

Wow, it will be the 4th of July in just a couple of days! Most of the corn we planted is shoulder high and producing ears. I’m hoping we will get a few good niblets this year from them.

After two, no three, full weeks without rain it has been looking rather dry. If I haven’t mentioned that I’m a lazy gardener yet, I will now. I really do need to improve at watering. My idea of watering inside my house is when my peace lily lays down. At that point, it’s darned near dead, or at least it has me convinced. I pull out the watering can and douse it and a few hours later it looks happy and lively again. Well, the outside isn’t that much different. When things start to bow over, I finally notice.

Sorry, oregano and lavender and basil and mint. Really, I am. I don’t mean to be so neglectful.

In any case, out came the hose and I watered all of the raised beds, pulled weeds, and gathered the garden bounty. One lone zucchini – the plants succumbed to squash bugs AGAIN this year. The companion plants I set out as seeds never came up, and so the squash bugs destroyed my precious zucchini plants once again. Next year I’m determined to grow  yellow squash in the front and zucchini in the back yard and damn it, if I have to use pesticides, I will. I WANT my SQUASH!

As I watered I spotted a lovely caterpillar – swallowtails are quite common in our garden and I think the caterpillars are absolutely stunning. Emily was quite enamored with it and wanted to carry it with her everywhere.

In the last bed I watered I was delighted to find these little treasures…Chinese Noodle Beans. Unfortunately they had been hidden behind some lettuce. I think they have passed their best eating stage, so I may save the seeds and try again next year. As you can see from the ruler, they can grow up to 18″ in length. Amazing!

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Strawberries!!!!

May 18, 2010 at 11:09 pm (Fruits, Lazy Gardening)

Wow. I just did the first run through of strawberries. The yield? THREE POUNDS. I figure we have another twelve still on the vine that will mature in the next few days. I guess I’ll be making jam soon.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it…but I will…in the past hour the three of us have managed to consume about 2/3 of them. Dipped in ultra-fine baker’s sugar and…[long luxurious sigh] dipped in milk chocolate. I’m in strawberry heaven!

Last July I woke up with a start and realized I knew exactly how to get out of weed whacking. As soon as it was light out (yes, I get up at insanely early hours) I got to work pulling out all of the grass along the border of a walkway…20 feet in length.

I then took all of the strawberry plants I had propagated from the runners that escaped the raised strawberry bed and planted them along the walkway.

The plants have taken off. They now look like this…

Gorgeous! And full of fruit.

We held our second annual garden party this past Saturday. The weather wasn’t very conducive – it rained and was in the 40’s. Brrrr! One of our guests pointed to the border of strawberries and asked, “How do you keep them from going into the grass?”

“Oh, I hope they do,” I replied, “They can take over the lawn with my blessing. What good is grass anyway? It isn’t as if you can eat it!”

In a couple of years we will have at least one hundred more feet of border consisting of strawberries. Imagine what my daily strawberry yields will be then!

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Lazy…Works

April 29, 2010 at 1:47 pm (Lazy Gardening, Recipes)

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a lazy gardener.

  • I plant perennial whenever possible.
  • I planted a twenty foot line (and growing) of strawberries along a walkway just so I wouldn’t have to weed whack it.
  • I’ll start with a plant rather than from seed so I don’t have to transplant.
  • When I do use seeds I just sprinkle them casually about, dust off my hands and walk away. Is it any wonder I have trouble remembering what and where I planted?

Last year my mom kept asking me, “Do you want these day-lilies in my yard?”

“Oh, yes, I would love them!” I said several times and always found reasons why that particular weekend would not work. I really wanted the day-lilies, but I didn’t particularly feel like doing a lot of digging. I guess I kind of hoped she would dig them up and bring them down to me. Then at least I would be under the obligation of planting them, but I wouldn’t have spent all my energy getting them out of the ground and down south.

I think she finally caught on. She came down on a Saturday afternoon and picked my daughter up for an overnight visit. This ensured that I would be coming up north (she lives up near the airport, about 45 minutes away from me) the next day to pick the kiddo up. And since we keep the car seat in the van, there would be plenty of room for boxes and BOXES of daylilies.

When I arrived on Sunday morning she asked me what my plans were for the day. “Nothing much,” I replied.

And that’s when she pounced, “Great! We can dig up all the day-lilies!” What followed was two straight hours of sweating and digging as I fought with the roots of an overhead tree to extract the daylilies from their grasp. In all, I ended up with EIGHT boxes full of day-lilies before I completely rebelled.

“But there’s still some left!” my mother had a gloating grin on her face. Small wonder, she was imagining how long it would take me to plant all of the darned things.

“I don’t have room for any more. That’s it!” Ten minutes later a ninth box was squished into the van in the front passenger seat. Ugh, so much work to do!

Unfortunately, I only managed to plant half of the boxes over the next two months before winter set in. The rest migrated to a spot in the garage where they sat until this morning. I noticed that some had begun to sprout, undeterred by my harsh, neglectful treatment.

Little did they know that more would be in store for them! This morning I spied the boxes and realized I really needed to get them out of the garage. They made a wall of ugly and the cardboard boxes were beginning to buckle and disintegrate.

One box near the lemon balm

So…I dumped them out in strategic locations throughout my yard. By the weekend I will have some dirt over them, although, really, day-lilies are so hardy they will root into and through the grass on their own.

Obviously this isn’t the best solution.It will take a couple of years before the day-lilies really look good. When that happens, look out, there will be gorgeous red and red-orange flowers popping up in all corners!

You see, sometimes, it’s okay to be lazy in your garden. Sometimes lazy just works.

p.s. And if you want to try a little adventure…or re-visit your ancestral roots, try the following recipe. Day-lilies were brought to the U.S. by colonists as a food source. So…they look pretty AND you can eat them too. How cool is that?

Here is the link to a bunch of great day-lily recipes: http://www.poppainc.org/pdfs/Daylily_recipes.pdf

And another cool link on eating day-lilies: http://articles.sfgate.com/2005-04-09/home-and-garden/17368884_1_daylily-blossoms-soups-harvest

Enjoy!

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