Gardening

I've been feeling quite a bit better the last few days--it's so nice to have a bit of energy again, and not have to crash early in the day.

The garden has been completely overgrown with weeds. I've been wroking gradually on it over the last week or so, and had cleared out one of the raised beds. Yesterday while the kids played outside, I pulled weeds and put them in a 5-gallon bucket to carry to the compost pile/brush heap. I pulled 20 gallons of buttercups and at least 10 gallons of other assorted weeds.

Now about 1/3 of the garden is clear for planting. I may or may not clear out any more . . . it's a bit late in the season for planting, anyway. I'm going to go and buy some soil amendments and plant starts today. I'm not even sure what's appropriate for planting in mid-July.

Gardening Questions

Okay, so I planted my first garden this year. I bought compost to mix in, and some organic fertilizer, and followed the directions on the packages about how much to add. I'm wondering if I should have tested the soil PH or added something else like dolomite, lime, rock dust or epsom salts. But I really don't know what I'm doing.

Some things seem to be doing really well, others aren't, and others I just don't know what to do with.

###################

My cauliflower and swiss chard took off and were doing really well at first, but now the edges of the leaves are curling up and the chard has quite a few brown spots and some of the leaves are dying.

I planted quite a few root vegetables (carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, radishes), and they all seem to have huge tops but not much going on in the root department. Some of them are bolting, but still have teeny tiny, thin roots--we're talking inches of roots and feet of tops. Does that mean there's too much nitrogen in the soil? Is the temperature wrong? Or do I just need to wait for them to grow more?

My daikon radishes all bolted, and the itty bitty roots were completely infested with little white worms that look a lot like maggots. Even if they had been big enough to eat, they wouldn't have been edible--they were all tunneled through and crawling with grubs. The red radishes a few feet away are much less affected by the worms, and the carrots and parsnips inches away seem to be untouched. The spinach and bok choy are thickly coated with aphids in spots.

I planted several different varieties of cauliflower and broccoli. One kind came up much more profusely than the rest, and the leaves look very different--more similar to my oriental greens or to some of my weeds (lol) than to the rest of the cruciferous vegetables. They never got a head that looked at all like broccoli, and before I knew it they were all rocketing up into stalks of yellow flowers. Now I'm wondering if I labeled it wrong on my chart, and maybe that plot isn't actually broccoli at all? The rest of the broccoli aren't even close to blooming yet.

I have a lot of dumb questions. For instance:

Which plants do you eat what part of, and how do you know when they're ready? For example, can I eat the leaves of the broccoli and cauliflower plants? How about parsnips, radishes, and rutabaga? I know turnip, kohlrabi and beet greens can be eaten. What about the outer leaves on the cabbage plants? And how do I know when to harvest the heads?

I planted Brussels sprouts, six starts I bought. Will I get more than one sprout off each plant, or just one per plant? How do I know when to harvest them?

What about when things bolt? My bok choy and spinach are bolting, and so is the Swiss Chard, but the lettuce hasn't started bolting yet. What exactly does bolting do to the plant. It doesn't make it so it's bad to eat, does it? Is it okay to eat the blossoms?

Since some of the things I planted didn't come up, and I pulled up all the daikon radishes, I have some empty space. Is there something that's good to plant in July and August (I'm in the Pacific NW)?

My zucchini are doing fabulously. I picked 3 good-sized green zucchini and 2 small yellow ones today, and have at least a dozen more of each color coming on. The cucumbers aren't blooming yet, but the pumpkins and watermelon are.

The tomatoes and peppers seem to be quite prolific--none are ripe yet, but there are lots of little green fruits growing. The kohlrabi are doing well (wow, are they good cooked fresh from the garden!). The potatoes seem to be going to town with lots of foliage, and they're blooming, but I can't tell whether they're actually growing potatoes. I haven't added more soil on top--is it too late to do that since they're already blooming now?

My bunching onions are doing okay, but the rest of them only a very few came up and they're looking really piddly.

At this point, mainly I'm just watering and trying to catch up on weeding, pinching off the heads of things to try to keep them from bolting (not keeping up on that very well) and trying to figure out how to use up this stuff.

What else should I be doing?

May Flowers

The roses are in full bloom in our yard. This is the best year we've had so far. The bushes are loaded with large, beautiful, fragrant blossoms. This week we picked huge bouquets of roses, with blooms from the herb plants blended in.



(More photos below the fold--click on any photo to enlarge it)


#######################

M&M and Baby E picking sage and chive blossoms:




M&M and AJ examining a rose nearly as big as their heads:



Trying to take a bouquet to our friends across the cul-de-sac (they weren't home):



"Smelling" the flowers arranged in a vase:

Going Up

I finally feel like I'm really on the mend today. We had a nice day of homeschooling. We're really settling into our routine, and it's getting easier each day.

Tonight I attempted to loosen more soil in the garden with the shovel. Eventually, though, I gave up.

A large section of ground was difficult because apparently it was used as a landfill at some point. About 6 inches under, it's nearly a solid layer of concrete pieces, old bricks, rotting logs, pieces of plywood, disconnected sections of pipe and wire, plastic, bits of glass and who knows what else. It's too much stuff to dig out.

I ended up taking out a few things that were buried more shallowly than the rest, and just tilling up the 6-8 inches of soil over the top of the rest. I have no idea what it will do to the garden, but I certainly can't grow anything deep like potatoes there.

The rest of the digging was difficult just because the ground is very hard, with lots of rocks and clay. I kept thinking, as I jumped and stomped on the shovel trying to get it more than 3-4 inches deep, that this would probably be a lot easier if I weighed more than 106 lbs.

############################

Yes, I've managed to gain another pound--woohoo. One more pound and I'll have gained 10 lbs! I still need to gain 10 or 15 lbs to reach my normal "healthy" weight, but I feel so much better being less underweight. I'm actually on the low end of the charts for a normal BMI now, and I'm not quite so pale and gaunt-looking.

Ironically, someone at church last Sunday said to me, "You look great--have you lost weight?" I chuckled and told her that, no, actually I look so much better because I've gained weight.

Of course, the predictable response is always "I wish I had that problem" or "I'll give you some of my extra weight."

But I really don't think, if people understood what it was like, that anyone would really choose to be 20 lbs. underweight. It's at least as unhealthy to be underweight as overweight, if not more unhealthy. Calculating over or under in equal number of pounds or BMI points, I think being underweight will debilitate or kill you faster than being overweight will.

Not that it makes sense to compare, and I completely sympathize with people who struggle with maintaining a healthy weight and lifestyle, no matter which direction they lean. But the myth that being underweight is desirable drives me crazy. I wouldn't wish that kind of severe fatigue, dizzy spells, heart palpitations and general unwellness on anyone. I hope to never drop below 100 lbs again. It's miserable.

Even though my weight struggles are from a different cause, I really feel for anyone struggling with body image and eating disorders. I'm here to tell you--you will be SO much healthier and feel so much better if you pursue a realistic, healthy body rather than trying to be super-skinny.

Being too thin is not a good thing, no matter what our culture tries to tell us. It's not worth making yourself sick or killing yourself to look like a Barbie doll or like those airbrushed, photo-edited fashion models. It's just not. Healthy is so much more beautiful.

I'm just glad to be on the way up again.

Growing Sourdough and Tilling the Soil

My sourdough experiment is turning out to be great fun.

I started a batch at the beginning of the week using 3/8 cup whole rye flour and 1/4 cup bottled spring water, and after the first couple of feedings it smelled absolutely terrible--spoiled rather than yeasty. It did look a bit fluffy and had small bubbles distributed throughout the dough, though.

I started a new batch with rye flour, but rather than throw the first batch away I halved it and fed it with whole wheat flour. By the third day it smelled and looked much more like I expected.

#######################

Now my whole wheat starter is beautifully yeasty and bubbly. It's growing so quickly I'm having a bit of trouble keeping up with it. I made muffins out of it yesterday morning. They were quite good. The sourdough starter provided just enough acid to interact with the baking soda. That made a quick bread that was fluffy without added rising time.

Now I have two loaves of bread rising, and a sponge proofing to make cookies and/or another batch of muffins.

As I fine-tune the recipes I'll be posting some of them on Restricted Gourmet. For now I'm just doing lots of experimenting as I'm learning to work with this new medium. So far I'm liking it a lot.

My second batch of rye starter went through the stinky fast-growing stage too. It didn't smell as bad the first day, perhaps because I kept it warmer at the beginning (I put it in the oven with just the light turned on), but it still wasn't a proper sourdough at first.

Today it settled down and didn't seem very active. Unless I accidentally got it too warm and killed the good bugs, I expect it to be moving into the active more yeasty stage tomorrow. If that's the case I'll try baking some bread with the light rye flour I bought this week.

I read that sometimes when a starter seems to take off very quickly but smells bad, it's having an initial growth of organisms besides the desirable yeasts and lactobacillus. As you continue feeding it, the desirable organisms create enough acid to kill off the bad bacteria and the starter becomes usable in a few days. That seems to be what happened with mine.

Yesterday I bought enough green douglas fir to build one raised bed 6 feet long and 4 feet wide for the garden. The fir won't last as long as treated or hard wood, but it's a fraction of the price, it won't put chemicals into my garden and it will hold for a few years.

I can always reinforce the box with cedar later. Since my garden spot doesn't get much sun, I don't want to invest too much in building raised beds and buying topsoil before I know whether anything will actually grow there or not.

So far I have one layer of the 2" x 6" boards screwed together to make a box. I bought two 2" x 6" x 12' boards and two 2" x 6" x 8' boards and cut each board in half with a handsaw. With two boards per side, the planting box will be 12" deep. I cut 2" x 2" stakes angled at one end to drive into the ground inside the corners. When attached to the sides of the box, they should help stabilize the sides.

This afternoon after church, the kids and I went out in the sunshine and I turned up the ground with a shovel and then used a claw-type tool to till the soil. Tomorrow I'll rake the weeds and rocks out to make the soil smooth and fine for planting.

I tilled an area a little larger than 4' x 6' today. Tomorrow I hope to extend it so the ground is worked up in an area about 7' x 12'. I'll dig out the area for my raised bed a few feet away, finish building the frame, and fill it with a mixture of peat moss, compost and the soil I dug out for the play structure base.

It will be interesting to see whether there's much difference in ease of care, growth and yield between the flat tilled soil and the raised bed. I also plan to plant some vegetables that really need more sun in some large flowerpots on the porch, and will plant a few things in my parents' much sunnier garden also. Between all the different options, we should get enough usable produce for the summer, I think.

With all my projects this week, the only high-tech modern equipment I used was a battery-powered drill and the oven. Growing my own sourdough with no commercial yeast, cutting wood with a hand saw, and tilling my garden with hand tools gave me a sense of timelessness and wonder.

Somehow, I feel so connected across time and distance with all the generations and cultures around the world who have done things by hand in almost the same ways I am doing them now. It's all so simple, yet so miraculous.

Mid-March Weekend

It's been a good weekend. I got to go to a mini prayer retreat on Saturday, and we had a baptism service at church today.

The girls and I did some work on the yard this weekend. The weather has been beautiful, and unseasonably warm and sunny.

We're planning to have a garden this year, and the warm weather makes me want to get started on it now. The danger of frost isn't past (we still had ice in shady areas just a couple of days ago), but I think there are some things I could start doing now, if I could just figure out what they were and how to do them. Many flowers are blooming, and my herbs are beginning to renew themselves.

#################################

I've never had a vegetable garden of my own before. Realizing this weekend that a good-sized spaghetti squash ends up costing close to $10 (even at a fairly low price per pound) has strengthened my resolve to plant one. Now that we have to buy almost everything fresh and organic, produce is by far the largest portion of our grocery bill. Having readily available fruits and vegetables that we know are safe and haven't been treated with corn or soy derivatives would be really wonderful for us.

This week I hope to cover the area where we plan to plant the garden with visquine and/or cardboard to kill the weeds. I've been told that should be my first step, anyway . . . but I'm wondering if I should do something to the weeds or the soil first.

I did start a compost pile a few weeks ago, but I'm not really sure how to best care for it so it will turn into good fertilizer as quickly as possible. For now I'm just feeding it all the fruit and vegetable scraps, and the dumpings from cleaning out the hamster cage.

Soon the girls and I will start some seeds indoors. They are so excited about the idea of a garden. Today they helped me cut the dead stems off some of the flowers in the front yard.

Baby E enjoyed being outside, too, and wanted to help with what we were doing. She is picking up a handful of new words every day. Some of her recent aquisitions include "please", "I do!", "don't" and "amen."