Spring!

Even after the most annoying winter, spring comes at last, in some form.  Unless the earth stops tilting on its axis, the sun eventually crosses over whichever latitude line it is for the equinox and our days get longer and at least a bit warmer. 

 

For us in Denver, that finally started happening yesterday.  Despite a blizzard a week ago and another midweek last week, the sun was out in full force yesterday melting the last dregs of snow off the garden boxes and I could finally get plants in the ground.  I've rejiggered two of my three boxes already - the bottom one will now be a home to perennial crops, and I pulled off the corn fence and put stakes for peas on the middle box.  That latter change may be somewhat temporary - the peas are there in rotation to replenish the nitrogen that the corn sucks up, so after a couple of years, I'll probably put corn in again - although with some sort of protection scheme to allow us to eat it, instead of the squirrels, next time.

 

We now have in the ground:

8 asparagus crowns (2 year old plants, so we can eat next year)

8 brussels sprouts (4 squares of seeds - no guidance as to spacing in the new SFG book, so I guessed at 2 per square)

1 leftover square of rainbow chard that did not die over the winter

3 squares of onions that volunteered from one I apparently let go to seed 2 years ago (some may be garlic; I just moved everything in together)

14 squares of shell peas

4 squares of lettuce - 3 of Bibb and 1 of leaf

 

In the process of cleaning up, I found a bunch of carrots that had wintered over just fine and brought them in.  I know from poking at it a few weeks ago that the soil was frozen at least once during the winter, so I'm surprised they're in such good shape, but they are absolutely fine.

 

The perennial box is exciting for me - asparagus, strawberries, and (probably) some thornless raspberries or blackberries.  I've had strawberries in various locations over the years, and none of them worked all that well.  The bed in the back yard turned out to be the dog's absolute favorite nap spot, the strawberry jar dried out, and I only got about 3 berries from the window box (and I don't think - for sure, anyway - that those plants survived the winter).  So creating a permanent bed away from the dogs may just give us a chance at a real crop - I hope so, anyway.  And I've been wanting raspberries or blackberries for a while, but have never tried them before.

 

We're also looking at a couple of half barrels for blueberry bushes.  They won't grow in our soil - it's way too alkaline for them - so we have to plant them in a peat-based soil in containers.  But if they work, they'll be my first semi-official edible landscape plants - they're going in a (to be built) bed in the front yard that will probably include lavender and jupiter's beard and russian blue sage and other flowers.

 

I bought some new tomato supports recently, too.  They arrived Saturday, and are in boxes taller than I am (I haven't had the nerve to open one yet).  If our tomatoes grow anywhere near that tall, it should be a good year.  There are 6 of them; I'm planning on putting 2 out for eggplant (no expectations of 6-foot eggplant plants, but who knows?)

 

In order to get that nitrogen replenishment going strong, I used pea inoculant on the peas.  Lots of warning labels on that stuff - eye protection, protective gloves, ventilation...  I get that they're bacteria, but are they really that dangerous?

 

There's a lot still to do in the garden.  My top box needs to be emptied and lined with weed-barrier to keep the dirt from leaking out.  I have plans to put down some mulch between boxes (weed barrier has been reasonably effective, but it's ugly and I keep tripping on the seams).  And we've planted no warm-weather crops yet, so I've only partly finished planting my middle box.  And besides all that, I have to wait on the asparagus to grow out of its first 3 inches of dirt so I can put the rest of the dirt back over the trenches - and that's holding up planting any of the rest of that box (the dirt had to go somewhere, after all).  I really need to turn the compost and see if there's ANYTHING usable at the bottom of the pile.  And we need to reprogram the drip timers and get them going.  And put up the wires on the pea stakes to support the vines once they sprout.  And, and, and...

 

I love planning for summer - and I mostly love executing those plans, time permitting.  That whole being-gainfully-employed thing gets in the way, but we have our well-lit evenings back and can get things done at the end of the day as well as on weekends.  Now if the snow will just make up its mind that winter is over!

Candles

I like candles.  Tapers or pillars, or even in a jar, with real flames.  I think they add a comfortable note to a quiet evening at home, even with lights on.  There's just something about the uneven, flickering light they give, that feels homier than a bulb - even though the bulb is, I must admit, of far more use when reading.

Candles have been taking a hit recently, on several fronts.  They are fire hazards; have you read the warning labels on them?  According to the labels, there's more peril to be had in leaving a lit candle alone in a room for five minutes than in leaving an inquisitive 10-month old in the same room with a bunch of uncapped poison bottles.  It's quite amazing that any of the churches offering votives has survived.  It's bosh, of course.  While one shouldn't leave lit candles for long periods, as long as they are not directly under flammable fabrics or paper and are set in fireproof saucers of some sort (plastic margarine-tub lids are NOT a good idea), they're really fairly safe.

Another recent charge leveled at candles are that they are polluters.  On some micro-scale, I suppose they might be considered an issue of a sort.  But they aren't in enough use - even with all of them out there - to really make a significant difference.  And there are much bigger issues to worry about on earth than the incremental increase in pollution provided by a lit candle.

Light the candles in your house.  Enjoy them.  Have candles on the table at dinner.  Turn off a few lights and sit in the comfortable, flickering, darkness for a while.  It's very soothing to the soul.

A Tidy House

Part of living the Good Life is living in a house that is homey.  I think there are a lot of factors that contribute to hominess - warmth, comfortable chairs, good lamps, fires, houseplants, the smell of something good being cooked, hospitality (ooh, more topics!) - but if the house isn't tidy, the residents trip over the comfortable chairs and the lampcords, the something good being cooked includes some unwelcome ingredients like dust and germs, and nobody wants to enjoy the hospitality.  It's chaos, not comfort.

We need to keep the place picked up.  And we need to keep it clean.  They aren't the same thing.  I suppose it's possible to live in a clean house that is cluttered; that is, it's healthy and germ-free in its essentials, but the family's possessions are strewn about and occupy all the free space.  Possible, perhaps, but hard!  To clean, each strewn item would have to be moved and replaced in its random location.  Why would anyone do that?  Better to keep the clutter down to start with, and to clean the uncluttered house.

There have been a lot of programs on TV - and self-help books - recently about helping unorganized people improve their habits.  They all seem to start in the same place: get rid of unused possessions.  Americans just have too much stuff.  I look around the room I'm in, and I see the following: several old (not antique) stand-type cigarette lighters, a plastic streetcar replica that came with a box of chocolates, 6 teapots, a nutdish/nutcracker set with nuts from last year, brochures from the Queen Mary 2, several partly-burned candles in jars, a broken clock, and a bunch of games.  I'll skip the 5 bookcases of books - books contribute to hominess as long as they're maintained neatly in bookcases.  But a lot of the other stuff can and should go.

My view of the Good Life is definitely well-endowed with nostalgia - for an era when we were not as rich and could not afford to have so much stuff.  But that aside, I find a lot of value in going through my possessions and deciding which are truly "keepers" - it forces me to decide what's important.  The rest goes to charity, so I hope the exercise is of value to someone else, too.

Keep the house tidy - and weed out the unimportant things in life.  It's important.

Home Cooked Meals

We eat out a lot.  It's a side-effect of Mom and Dad both working full-time and beyond; when quittin' time finally arrives each day, the last thing we want to do is work on dinner.  It's not a good thing to do this all the time, or even most of the time.  Restaurant meals are expensive for the value, oversized, and full of mystery commercial cooking ingredients that we might not eat if we knew what they were.  And calorie-dense.  But beyond that, I think we're missing out on something key to the Good Life.

You can't have good conversation in a restaurant.  Never mind that the waiter has been carefully trained to arrive at the worst possible moment; that's only part of it.  You're in public!  That rules out energetic ranting, revealing your innermost thoughts, and laughing until milk comes out your nose.  And if you use the time for advanced instruction in civilized behavior, the possibility exists that the people at the next table will disagree with either the style or substance of your comments, and join the discussion.

You also can't have wonderful smells wafting through your house as dinner cooks, if you eat in a restaurant.  And while some of them claim to offer comfort food of one sort or another these days, who wants their child growing up with fond memories of "meatloaf just the way Denny's used to make it"?

We need more home cooked meals.  Lots more.

Fall - and switching to thoughts of the "Good Life"

It's snowing - big, fluffy flakes that are starting to pile up.  I guess Summer's over now - for real, this time.  The tomatoes gave up the ghost about 2 weeks ago, when the temperature dipped well into the twenties and I mistakenly thought that covering them with a tarp would be enough.  About 20 pounds of tomatoes, frozen solid and weeping on my counter, convinced me I'd been too late.  A sad sight - the more so because we never got that many ripe tomatoes during Summer proper; it just never got that hot this year. 

I want to change my focus in this blog - to thoughts on the "Good Life".  I don't mean what used to be called "Keeping up with the Joneses"; rather the opposite, in a way.  Skipping over the material possessions aspect altogether; what elements are required to make life worthwhile?   You see, I work for a living - have since I got out of school.  And nearly all that time, I've been wondering why it doesn't feel natural.  I know that a lot of women fought for the right to do what I do, and I don't want to seem ungrateful that they gave me the freedom to work, but the fact is, they seem - for me, at least - to have eliminated the freedom to stay home and make a life for my family.  As a result, we basically haven't had one, and that seems egregiously wrong to me, and kind of always has.  For some reason, I am freshly struck by these thoughts every fall; there must be something about the cooler temperatures and shorter days that make me wish that home was, well, homier.

So here are some of the things that, brainstorming, would come under the heading of a "Good Life".  I think they'll make topics or groups of topics to explore.

• Home-cooked meals with everyone around the table
• A tidy house
• Comfort over high style
• Traditions
• Evenings at home with friends and extended family
• Seasonal entertainment
• Seasonality in general
• The "Sunday roast"
  
• Home canning and preserving
• Hot apple cider and cold lemonade
• Fireplaces with fires in them
• And something near and dear to my heart - civilized behavior
  

Don't know how it will work out, but I think it's worth a start, anyway.

Early Strawberries and General Progress

About the middle of last week, I picked and ate the first strawberry of the season from the plants in the window box.  They seem pretty happy there - fruiting like crazy (although with only 4 plants, I don't see getting enough at one time to make even a "shortcake for one").  The first strawberry was amazing - you get so used to eating the giant, sort of bland examples that show up at the grocery store that, at first, one fresh off the vine doesn't seem to taste quite right, it's so intense.  A few more, and I'll probably never go back.

On other fronts, the spinach has joined the bok choi in growing leggy and producing flowers, so I guess it's done for the summer.  We didn't get much before it bolted, and I'm not sure if I'll bother with spring spinach again.  I might try it in September and see if that works any better.  Neither it nor the bok choi makes sense to me - it's been kind of a cold spring so far, by comparison with last year.

The lettuce is still going strong, and 4 square feet seems to be just about the right amount.  We're staying on top of it, and eating what we pick, rather than wasting it.  As a result, I think we're eating more salads.

The peas are starting to flower; they've grown to within a foot or so of the top of the supports I'm using, and are very lush.  Barring anything weird, we should have enough to freeze and to support healthy snacks (4 square feet of sugar-snap peas - yum!).  And the potatoes in the top box are huge - well the tops are, anyway.  In the middle box, they're about half the size, even though I planted them all at the same time.  Go figure.

I'm not at all sure what to make of the Swiss Chard.  The seedlings sprouted maybe 3 weeks ago, but to look at them, you'd think it was yesterday.  They seem to be in a holding pattern, but I'm not sure what they're waiting for.  In the meantime, they're being outstripped by the carrots, the purple beans, cucumbers, canteloupe, zucchini (which I planted less than a week ago!) and the corn.  I'd put it down to location - they're in the same box with the potatoes that are behind - but so are the carrots and corn and cucumbers and beans and canteloupe.

Now that two of the boxes are in their second year, the soil is hosting some fauna - specifically, roly-poly bugs (I suppose they have a "real" name, but that's the only one I've ever known).  I understand that insects generally mean that the soil is healthy, which is a good thing, but they're eating leaves and in some cases, stems.  Cucumbers, canteloupe, and purple beans are the current victims, although they also seemed to enjoy the bok choi (at least someone got some benefit from it).  The level of damage is marginally acceptable so far, but I think I'll start picking them off and putting them in the driveway to work on weed control there.

On the tomato front, the red mulch seems to be doing well - the plants have all grown from 4" tall to over a foot, and seem to be doing quite well.  The one in the topsy-turvy container also seems undisturbed by having its roots in the air.  It's not as large as the others, but in its defense, it was planted about a month later while we waited for the last frost date to pass.

Another Spring... more veggies

I think I learned a few things from last year, so back in February, I pulled the square-foot wire grids off the beds and made sure we were ready to plant once the various mystic and symbolic planting dates arrived.  Found some more carrots too - we hadn't quite finished them all.  And a lone garlic plant, re-sprouting (I left it - maybe garlic takes 2 years to produce a head?). 

Then, in whichever weekend in March was nearest to St. Patrick's day this year, I began the planting work.  Twelve squares of peas (three different varieties).  Four of lettuce and four of spinach.  Sixteen squares of regular potatoes (I had parts of 2 five-pound bags in the pantry, all sprouting merrily, so in they went), and one square of sweet potato (ditto - but only one specimen to plant). 

Since then, I've added rainbow chard (2 squares, strictly experimental - we have never tried to eat this), broccoli (6 squares - from seedlings), bok choi (3 squares - from seedlings), carrots (2 squares), cucumbers (1 square from seed and 1 from seedling), canteloupe (1 square from seed and 1 from seedling), purple beans (3 squares so far - more to come), corn (8 squares), and eggplant (1 square, again, experimental).

If you add it all up, there are more than 64 squares there - and that's because we have a third box set up, this one 3' x 8'.  Just filled it with soil last weekend, so it only has the seedlings of canteloupe and cucumber and eggplant in it so far.

Another rather interesting surprise this year was that at least one of the onions set seed all over the top box.  I wasn't sure just what was sprouting at first and started pulling them everywhere they showed up.  And then I finally looked them up online and once I realized what they were, I left them alone - if we end up with a bonus crop of scallions this summer, it's all good.  I didn't replant onions this year - in the end, I couldn't get them to last the winter - they kept either shriveling up or getting moldy.

Everything that I've put in so far has sprouted (or it started that way), and we have the corn enclosed in the hardware cloth fence again.  I'm really hoping we get a bit more edible corn this year than last.  We took the few semi-seeded ears we got and stripped the corn off (love that Kuhn-Rikon corn zipper!) and froze it.  When we ate it over the winter, it was like August all over again - really amazingly good stuff.  So I'm hoping we get more than just one vacuum bag of frozen corn this year.

We are still eating the purple beans from last summer.  Getting close to the end of them, but they lasted the entire year. 

We also planted 5 tomatoes - 4 in the barrels from last year, one in one of those upside-down bag thingies, hanging from the pergola.  And I put red mulch under all of them that I could, after hearing from our neighbor next door that she saw amazing results from using it last year.  Oh, and 4 strawberries in the window box - it seems like the best place to keep the squirrels out of them, so I might get to eat one or two.  We'll see.  There are some pretty nice looking berries forming already.

We're already getting lettuce and spinach to eat - my parents were amazed that I was already picking food from the garden in May.  About a salad's worth each evening or so, which is absolutely perfect for us.

I'm going to train all of the vining plants up frames or cages or trellises this year - cucumbers, canteloupe, zucchini, etc.  The seeds for the canteloupe and cukes went in right next to the corn cage and will use that.

Our daughter came back from her first year of college with a small pot full of sprouting seeds this spring - supposedly the 4" pot has sunflowers, bell peppers, and strawberries in it.  I'm giving her some space in the third box to let them spread out a bit - well, the strawberries will probably go in a spot I don't intend to dig up at the end of the season.

Lots of planting to come this weekend - more purple beans, and 1 (ONLY 1) zucchini.  Spring is the best!

Fall - Garden wrap-up

I have to say that my fears of running out of storage space for all the veg were a trifle overstated.  We did okay, but in the end, we're not being crowded out of the house by food.  Here's a run-down:

• Corn: I think we got two meals of corn-on-the-cob, and one meal's worth of frozen kernels out of it.  Planted (the successful crop, that is) just too late to work properly.  It tasted good, though, and since we have the fenced-in area built, I'll probably do it again.
• Pumpkins: got two small ones - maybe 6" in diameter each.  From the weight, I think they'd be good for cooking, but my daughter has dibs on them for jack-o-lanterns.
• Canteloupe: another victim of the late start, I think.  We had two melons start; both of them made it to about 2" in diameter before they just sort of collapsed on themselves.
• Cucumbers: got 3-4, total.  They've done better in the past, so next year I'll do them again, but put something in place for them to climb.
• Peas: 1 meal, maybe, at most?  Need to start these WAY earlier in the year.  They were still fruiting in August, though.
• Potatoes: a fabulous surprise.  Planting two sprouted potatoes and sort of ignoring them resulted in a harvest around 5-6 pounds.  We're still eating them - and maybe this is a side-effect of growing up in the suburban 20th century, but I'm pleased and a little surprised to find that they taste just like the ones you buy in the store.
• Onions: these did pretty well - in fact, I'm wondering if we'll actually eat them all before next spring.  The ones that I've harvested so far (based on the stalks wilting and going brown) didn't get all that big, but they're bigger than when we started.  I even tried braiding them, and while the result wasn't aesthetically pleasing, it seems to be holding.  Some of them have not yet wilted, so I'm leaving them in the ground for now.
• Carrots: boy, do we have carrots!  They were very happy, and even without thinning, grew fat and prolifically.  Most of them are still in the ground and will stay that way over winter - supposedly they do just fine that way.
• Garlic: I think it's doing okay - it's still in the ground, and the foliage is still mostly green.  Again, assuming that what's in the ground represents heads of garlic, we'll have plenty.  I may try braiding it as well.
• Peppers: nearly a complete wash.  We planted 2 plants; one with a pepper on it, the other without.  The one pepper got marginally larger, so we picked it.  That was the crop.
• Dried beans: I had high hopes for these.  The plants were lush and the pods plentiful.  But when they came into the kitchen and we removed the beans, we got less than 1/2 cup of each type.  Unless the world experiences a huge dried bean shortage and our only other option for protein is to resort to cannibalism, I probably won't bother again.
• Lettuce: way too much to eat; most of it bolted when we were on the cruise.  We just don't eat enough salad to do more than a single square of lettuce, I think.
• Spinach: same deal.  I may try it again next year, since we started too late this year, with the idea of freezing it.
• Green beans: the true green beans did okay, but yield was underwhelming.
• Purple beans: star of the garden.  I pulled the plants up yesterday after a frost hit, and still got 2-3 meals' worth.  Next year, I'll put more plants in earlier, but these are keepers.  And they taste good, too.
• Tomatoes: we had an awful time keeping the water right in the barrels, so our Romas kept getting blossom-end rot.  Nonetheless, we've been eating them fairly steadily for the last month, and I've got 3 packages frozen.
• Grapes: the squirrels got most of the white grapes, before they really got sweet.  I picked some and brought them in the house; made raisins out of some and ate the others.  The raisins were pretty good - if I try them again, though, I think I'll get an electric food dryer.  The Concords were very prolific, to say the least.  Even with the squirrels, I got a couple of gallons worth of juice out of them.  Made half into jelly and froze the rest.  Unfortunately, the jelly did not jel.  The rescue pectin did not make it jel.  I used to be really good at making grape jelly, but it is just not working for me these days.  Now, I'm looking for recipes where I can substitute what's basically grape "molasses".  Because it keeps falling off the toast and making a huge mess.

Next year, I think we'll alter the crop mix, plant some things earlier, cut way back on others (even the purple beans, a bit).  But I'll do potatoes again, for sure, and we'll get the watering adjusted for the tomatoes.  I approached the whole raised-bed square foot gardening thing this year as a bit of an experiment, and I'd say it was, on the whole, very successful.

And what are we going to do with it all?

It occurred to me yesterday that fresh veg doesn't "keep" all by itself - it's not like I'm growing potato chips or saltine crackers or cans of anything out in the garden.  Each item has a sort of window of usefulness, and if we don't do something (like consumption or storage) with it during that window, it will end up as compost (that is, assuming I resurrect the compost bin).  So I started doing a little planning.

All told, we have the following edible stuff growing around the yard somewhere:

• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Carrots
• Onions
• Potatoes
• Dried Beans
• Garlic
• Cucumbers
• Cantaloupe
• Pumpkins
• Shallots
• Snap Peas
• Regular Peas
• Green Beans (and purple green beans)
• Corn
• Tomatoes
• Grapes
• Rhubarb
• Herbs

And in general, we've under-utilized our garden produce in years past.  For example, the rhubarb has been there for about 6 years now; it takes over an entire corner of our backyard garden, and we've never once eaten any of it.  Partly that has to do with the fact that it has never once turned red, so I assumed we were doing something wrong and it wasn't edible yet.  This morning, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I found out that some rhubarb is just green and supposed to be that way, so I'm going to be brave and cook some.  If I never post here again, you'll know what happened.

Anyway, I'd like to avoid wasting much of what we're growing, if I can, so I'm looking into ways to preserve and store this stuff.  And finding out lots of useful information.  Like, I could have been freezing all the basil, mint, and tarragon that is taking over the back yard, instead of letting it die back every winter.  Or, I could invest about $70 in a food dehydrator and dry herbs as well as tomatoes.  But I probably won't.  I can count the number of times I've cooked with dried tomatoes on my thumbs; it will be much more useful if we peel-and-freeze them in various forms.

However, if the corn does actually produce more food than we can keep up with, I will probably buy one of those corn-cob razors that remove kernels easily - standing a cob on end and trying to slice them off with a knife just looks to me like a subtle but effective way to perform self-amputation.

The truly interesting storage challenges are the onions, garlic, shallots, and potatoes.  All of them need a cool, dry place to hang out over the winter - and the potatoes also need it to be dark.  I'd say that the back screen porch is a candidate for most of them - but we'll need some sort of light-blocking bin for the potatoes (if there are any).

Nearly everything else can be frozen, or simply cannot be stored.  I'm fairly certain that the lettuce is an "eat it or waste it" proposition, as are the cantaloupes.  And I can't quite see myself making pickles, so we will have to eat the cukes, too.  Julia Child's books include recipes for cooked cucumbers and cooked lettuce; I doubt they could be altered to accommodate frozen ones, always assuming that I could find anyone to eat either dish (my brother was once asked on a Biology test to define life, and responded, "Anything the French will eat", but cooked lettuce?  Cooked cucumbers?  Blecch!)

Anyway, harvest time, except for the lettuce and spinach, is a while out, so it's all just planning for now.  I guess by fall we'll all know a lot more about it.

Knee-high by the 4th... of June?

Hardware cloth keeps out pests.  The corn is thriving, and looks set to continue, as long as the clouds I can see from the office don't presage a hailstorm.  In fact, we'll have to remove the cover here soon, since it's getting close to that tall.  Let's hope that the original corn predators can't climb fences, since they've proven not to have opposable thumbs.

Everything looks to be doing really well.  We did our cruise - got back Sunday - and the sprinklers obviously kept working while we were gone.  The spinach and lettuce is harvestable, and we actually had some in a salad last night.  Tasted pretty darn good.  The peas and beans are blossoming and the potato plants are huge.  No guarantee that there will be potatoes as a result, since the original potatoes came from the grocery store, but I just keep telling myself that they're an experiment, so any result is good.

With the food prices likely to rise all summer and the recent tomato crisis, I'm very glad we did all the work needed to set up the garden.  In fact, I'm starting to wonder what else we could plant and eat, either as we harvest the lettuce or in the remaining empty square feet.  Maybe more green beans - I think they can still be planted this late.

I've already learned some things for next year, though.  We need to group plants by type - all the lettuce/spinach together, where I could put shade covers over it.  Tall stuff in the middle, including pea vines that need supports, so we won't find ourselves having to reach over it to get to some shorter plants.

And I think I'm going to start working on the composter again.  It exists, and there's some antique plant material in it, but I never did much with it, and at some point, it became a great place for wasps to build nests, so I started avoiding it.  But as we thin things, we should be composting the discarded stuff.  And our lawn guy is putting clippings in the trash each week, and I ought to be grabbing those too.  The square-foot rules include adding compost each time we harvest, and that will be my easiest source of it, if I just get it going again.

Winter storage is another thing to start figuring out.  The onions are doing beautifully, and I think I'll have something like 3 dozen of them, all told.  We won't be eating them all that fast, so they need a dry-and-cool spot to hang out in.  Carrots could be the same deal.  And if I don't find a place for them, it will guarantee a bumper potato crop.

I'm already thinking we should build another box for next summer.  This is just working altogether too well.  For a change!

Phew - Ow!

Graduation - and the party - went off without a hitch, from where I sat.  My daughter, whose digestive system has been one of our main areas of interest over the past year and a half, woke up with butterflies and apparently spent some of the pre-graduation moments throwing up from nerves, so I guess she'd call that a hitch.  But if she hadn't told us, we wouldn't have known.

Too much food at the party, though.  I need to go to Caterer's school or something, because 18 pounds of meat was just way too much for 50 people, apparently.  My mom thinks we had 80 over the course of the party - I'm not so sure about that.  People seemed to have a good time, and didn't seem to mind or notice that I mostly stayed in the background making sure we didn't run out of meat in the dining room.

For what it's worth, packages of barbecue pork and turkey contain an awful lot of liquid, and when it leaks all over the bottom of the oven without anyone noticing, you get a lot of smoke two days later when you preheat it to cook something.  We found that out last night, so I thought I'd share.

And the family is all scattered back to their homes or vacation destinations and out of our hair, thank goodness.  Poor things, though - we didn't plan for altitude sickness when we scheduled things to do with all of them, and making them climb up to the top seats in the baseball field, or drive to the top of a mountain pass for breakfast, maybe wasn't such a good idea.

Our last family event was on Memorial day itself - dinner with the sister-in-law-from-hell, her husband and son.  It was all about them.  The son (age 5, and basically undisciplined) wanted a cinnamon roll for dinner - at a Mexican restaurant.  When told they didn't have cinnamon rolls, he announced that he would have chips.  So when the chips (complimentary appetizers - standard Mexican restaurant practice) arrived, he grabbed them, because obviously, they were "his".  His parents then ordered him a child's burrito for dinner.  And when it arrived, he declared indignantly to the waitress, "That's NOT what I ordered!". 

Who taught him that one?  Creepy little twerp.  We had to keep the training collar on Anneke all night, to keep her out of his reach, because he had been observed earlier in the weekend smacking her in the face.  She was good; she didn't bite him.  And if I'd seen him at it, I'd have done it for her.

But they're all gone now, and our planning is now focused on getting on the ship for the cruise.

That, and finishing up (over the past 2 days), my slightly oversized Indy 500 project.  Yikes - when I decided to tape-and-mud the new wall separating our bedroom from the closet we had built last fall, I think I must have blotted out the memory of how much pain it produces.  And how bloody hard it is to do a good job at it.  The corner finishing tool kept digging trenches in the mud laid down where we'd had to patch the wallboard after removing the old wall (it moved back about a foot).  All of it overhead, all of it (for neatness sake) with my right arm.  It still moves, but movement is now accompanied by sound effects (groans, mostly).  Last night was sanding and painting night.  And I'm getting pretty good at flat surfaces - after painting, there's only a slight clue that anything happened.  But the trenches were awful - I resorted to using a sponge to soften their edges, but was unable to eradicate them. 

Who looks at ceilings anyway?  Not me.

And the family begins to descend upon us...

The thing I didn't mention yesterday was that, at the end of the banquet, my husband and I went home to sleep, and my daughter went off with friends to the midnight premiere of the new Indiana Jones movie.

And got home at 3 am. 

It wasn't a school night, and she is 18.  It was, however, a work night, and yesterday just hurt.  Fortunately, I didn't have a lot of demands on my mental prowess at work, since I hadn't brought any with me.  Unfortunately, it was another long day. 

My husband took off a little early, and he and our daughter finished up the shopping for the party (ice and perishable stuff), before he came back downtown to pick me up.  And then he and I stopped at two additional stores (looking for wrapping paper - there's been a run on it around here), met the kid for dinner, and then we finally got to go home while she headed to the airport to pick up her sister, the sister's boyfriend, and my husband's ex-wife, who flew in from Seattle.  They're staying with us (the kids) and my parents (the ex-wife).  Their 3:30 flight out got delayed by our nasty, national-news-worthy tornadoes (don't be silly, they don't have tornadoes in Colorado, everyone knows that!), and they got to the house about 10:15.  At which point we did hugs all around and said, "We're going to bed and will see you tomorrow."  And about time, too.

The rest of the family arrives throughout the day today.  Two of them are flying with FedEx.  My first thought was that they'd be arriving with the packages around 4 am and having to find their way to our house from the sorting facility in Commerce City, but apparently, that's not quite the case, and they're not here yet, although enroute.  Others are flying in on regular airlines (so they won't require a tracking bar-code), and driving.  So by the time I get home from work, our house should be full of hungry in-laws, ready to go to the ballpark. 

I've made maps - well, I've printed out Google Maps directions from either our house or their hotel to all the places I know we've planned to be over the weekend, as well as several local attractions (like the mountains, although it's snowing up there right now, which certainly wouldn't attract me).  But I know how it will be - caravan city, all weekend.  Nothing but mobs.  My husband will be in his element.

If I'm able to post at all next Tuesday, it will probably be gibberish.

Let the games begin.

Graduation Weekend kickoff

Slight digression from my recent gardening obsession for a few days, to write about our daughter's high school graduation, which takes place Saturday morning.

We all attended the Senior Banquet last night, along with what appeared to be her entire class and their parents, and all the teachers from the school.  Because, six years ago, we "forced" her to attend an academically rigorous, liberal-arts focused Junior-Senior high school that required winning a lottery to attend and which only admitted 250 students per class, the entire crowd was able to fit into a hotel ballroom - we didn't need the local football stadium that would have been required for my graduating class of 610.  My husband's class was three times the size of mine - they might not have been able to pull it off anywhere at all.

By senior year, the academic rigor had reduced the 250 to 127 (or possibly 128 - one of her friends, characterized during the banquet as the student whose absence would likely cause the school to crumble into ruins, wasn't sure of the exact number).  Most of them by now have taken one or more AP (advanced placement) classes, or classes offered by one of the local university campuses, as part of their high school program, and will start college next year with credits under their belts.  Really, an amazing group of kids.

The speakers were all confident and articulate, the musical performers were equally skilled, and the night wound up with a presentation of the "Senior Video" (produced by the same friend who had the class list memorized), which showed some real talent and promise.  It was obvious throughout the evening that there was an amazing bond between the students and the teachers and administrators, all of whom had known each other for 6 years.  A very good event.

Six years ago, when I heard that we had won that lottery and got her into that school, I joked that I'd never win the PowerBall, that this was my one instance of luck.  At the end of the six years, I know I was right - and I know I wouldn't trade it for a PowerBall jackpot.

And fortunately, after six hard years, she admits that it was a good thing, too.

... the Corn and Canteloupes (in) play

The corn has sprouted (again). Now we will see if the hardware cloth can act as a preventative against whatever it is that likes the corn so much.

And I'm happy to report, that with water and sunlight and heat, my 8-year-old Canteloupe seeds have sprouted. Nothing had been happening with them, and I had actually gone out and bought a new package of seeds, thinking that they were pretty much dead. But when I went to plant the new seeds, in the same spot the original seeds had been planted, I found roots and sprouts in progress, so I covered them back up and tiptoed away. And last evening, each of them had produced a pair of tiny leaflets. So we're in business.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit this - it seems like something I should have just known - but I got online this morning to find out what I need to do to ensure that the produce from my dried bean plants ends up as dried beans. I guess it's a symptom of growing up in the suburbs - up until this summer, my dried beans arrived at my house in a plastic bag, and I really wasn't exactly sure what transformative steps had to occur between the plant and the bag.

In case you're wondering, you leave the pods on the plant until they dry out, and then you remove them and knead the beans out of them. Doesn't sound like rocket science to me. Like I said, it seems like something I should have known.

Plans for the graduation party are pretty much in train. We need to buy beer and ice and perishable food, but I think everything else is under control. A little scary, really.

Rice Paddy irrigation without any rice

We had the sprinkler system guy out last week to give everything a tune up and help get the yard looking a little less like a toxic waste dump site (well, the back yard kind of looks that way). And he left a message with my husband that he thought we might have a leak near the cutoff valve for the whole system, but that he didn't have time (he's very popular and in-demand) to dig it up and investigate during that visit. So we've left the system turned off - an easy decision with the rains we had all last week - until Sunday

He was right, and it might just explain the mystery $900 water bill we had last summer. The area surrounding the cutoff valve, after about 6 hours, turned into a tiny swamp. A little digging (my husband did all of it, and I don't think he'd like that adjective all that well), revealed that the joint between a PVC elbow and a straight piece of PVC pipe, had come unglued. So the cutoff valve remains off until the sprinkler guy can come out and glue things back together.

I shouldn't be sore from that - my role was pretty much that of cheerleader, with occasional forays into gopher. I certainly dug no mucky clay out of the hole. But I'm really stiff and sore this morning, for apparently no reason.

Maybe I could call it sympathy pains.

Keeping 47 balls in the air without that third arm

I think I maligned the rabbits the other day. When I looked things over last night, I didn't see any evidence of missing lettuce seedlings. So maybe I was just imagining it - either that, or they've gotten very good at covering their tracks...

But I don't want to write about rabbits today. I want to talk about lists.

I am a list-maker. It's how I get things done. Lists keep me on track, and I find it satisfying to check things off as they get finished. But maybe (not for certain, just considering the possibility here), I've gone a bit overboard recently.

We have a few things going on right now. Getting the vegetable garden started was one. The daughter's graduation and associated party was another. I have a job. And we're leaving on a cruise in about 3 weeks. So I really think I have an excuse. But judge for yourself. Here is my list (well, what would you call it?) of lists:

Graduation party catering order
College survival kit gift item list
Cruise packing list
Graduation weekend planning list
Shopping list by date (for graduation party stuff)
Giant list (anything crossing or not captured in other lists)
Graduation weekend attendees list (combined for the ceremony, the ballgame on Friday, the party, and the Sunday morning breakfast in the mountains)
Tourism suggestions list (for out-of-town graduation people)
iTunes movies I might want to buy for my iPod before the cruise

Okay, yeah. That is rather a lot.

Not Romaine, Spinach

I am no horticulturist.

Just to make things clear, before I go into any details, I'm a computer geek. Growing vegetables is in support of a hobby of eating them. So I think I'm going to give up trying to identify anything I've planted until it matures a bit.

When things were starting to sprout, I'd identified a bunch of seedlings with a pair of pointy leaves as carrots. Then, when the real carrots started to sprout (pointy leaves, yes, but much smaller ones), I decided that the "carrot 1.0" sprouts were actually romaine lettuce - the pointy leaves would obviously grow into big vertical leaves on a vertical head of romaine, right?

As I've been planting, I've gotten a bit more careful about putting labels in each square foot - for no other reason than to identify which ones have been planted and which ones are still available - and I think (but am not sure, since that was a recent practice) there are still areas available. When I added spinach and carrots to my second bed, I labeled them.

And one of them started sprouting yesterday. From the back of the label, I thought it was carrots - two pointy leaves and all - and everyone knows that spinach is oval leaves on sticks. So I walked around to the front to confirm, and of course, it was spinach. I went back and looked at the original bed, and between the pointy leaves that first emerged are newer leaves - oval, on sticks.

As for deciding which of the squares of lettuce is romaine, which is leaf, and which is bibb - I am not going to make a call right now. They'll have to get bigger - or else, I'll just ask the rabbits, because some of them are not getting bigger, they're disappearing.

Maybe my new hobby will be eating rabbits. I'm pretty sure Julia Child has some good recipes...

Rain, rain, go...on about your business. No, really.

About midnight last night, I heard, through my sleep, the sound of rain falling into the gutters and washing down the downspouts around the house. A very soothing sound to hear when you're in bed and (according to my husband) hogging all the blankets. And in a dry climate, such as ours, we should really be rejoicing over moisture falling from the sky, in whatever form it chooses to take, but I am really only mustering happiness over the fact that it hasn't snowed - yet, at least.

The anti-vermin cage appears (from a drive-by) to be undisturbed for a second night, although I guess you could put that down to the rain as well. We got the wall-o-waters back in place around the tomatoes, in case this does turn colder. And the shallots I planted a week ago seem to be very well content - the one that had sprouts when I planted it seems to have doubled the size and number of them. I hope that means bulblets, or whatever shallots do to produce more shallots. Garlic sprouts are starting to appear, too.

I think we're in an enforced wait-and-see mode now. Seeds in place, with protection as appears necessary, and it just remains for water and sun to do their work. The green and purple beans are starting to pop up, but we haven't seen signs of the dried beans yet. I hope they're just slow, and not some weird hybrid intended only for eating (I bought them from the bulk bins at Whole Foods, since I didn't want a lot and not all of them came in seed packets). Nor have the second lot of spinach or carrots surfaced yet - I would expect them to show up pretty soon.

Nice thing about natural irrigation, though. It waters between the lines of leaky hose, and helps sprout those seeds not directly beneath the drip. So I'll try to do a bit more rejoicing, even though rain and cloudiness seem very unnatural around here, and hard to take in the spring when I want it to be warm.

Take that, you nibbling little fiends!

Yesterday, probably under the heading of "It's Mother's day, let her do what she wants," my husband helped me build an enclosure for the corn part of the raised beds. It encircles the outer walls and rises 2 feet above the bed boxes, all in 1/2" hardware fabric. It has a removable top, also of hardware fabric, to allow me to get in and harvest purple bush beans (they happened to have been planted in line with the corn, and are now enclosed) and generally tend to the plants as necessary, and I think it will also form a handy support for the cornstalks as they grow.

If, after all this pain and effort - and the pain was real: my husband managed to attack the webbing of his thumb with the cordless screwdriver blade and I have several scratches from handling the hardware fabric - those little fiends manage to get into the corn, I will give up on it.

And I guess it's possible that they'll manage it - according to our neighbor, it might be raccoons - and from everything I've read, they can pick locks, just about. A lift-off top made of hardware fabric ought to be child's play to them.

But we shall see. I replanted corn seeds (again!) yesterday after we finished - I can reach, just barely - so the next week or so should be the real test.

It's supposed to snow this afternoon. A bit hard to believe at the moment, since from where I sit, the only clouds in the sky are on the other side of the mountains (and that won't cause us snow) and the air is fairly warm. It smelled fabulous outside this morning - very green. But we have one wine barrel of tomatoes where the wall-o-waters collapsed yesterday, and we didn't get them refilled. So we threw a sheet over them before leaving for work, just in case.

On other fronts, we are now within 2 weeks of my daughter's high school graduation and the associated partying with a whole boatload of extended family. For her sake, I'm very glad everyone's coming. For my sake, I hope they'll leave me a closet to hide in when the press of humanity grows too much.

We're throwing a 4+ hour party in our front yard after the ceremony itself. Barbecue (from a local restaurant) for 50. And that has meant a lot of frenzied weeding over the past couple of weeks - culminating yesterday morning with a bout of thistle-removal on my part, and Round-upping on my husband's. He had the gravel drive, which is a royal pain to do (although we will appreciate it on the day, since it parks 8 when properly organized). We're still not done, and thistles are very persistent, so I imagine I'll get to revisit my work at least one more time.

Other events for the weekend (which also happens to be Memorial day weekend) include:
- Group attendance at the Rockies game for most of the out-of-town visitors
- Some sort of caravan to the graduation itself, since many of the attendees have spent minimal time in Denver
- Sunday breakfast in the mountains

Once all that's done, I know most of them leave to catch planes - and I'm hoping to salvage part of Sunday for my annual Indianapolis 500 home improvement project. Although, to be honest, we're doing so much improvement getting ready for the party, I'm not exactly sure what will be left.

Tiny Leaky Hose

We ran into a pretty cool product this year, while working on the drip irrigation - 1/4" leaky hose. We'd used normal sized leaky hoses before in the garden back during the weeds-as-mulch years, and it did a really good job of keeping the plants we wanted alive while not watering plants we were not all that keen on (unfortunately, they're all native, which means that water is poison to them, I think).

We have the tiny leaky hose in the raised beds (which are sprouting in tidy little square-foot patterns all over the joint and look so....like I know what I'm doing!), and last night, I replaced a bunch of point drip nozzles in our containers with loops of the stuff. I think it's going to work much better - the point nozzles had a nasty tendency to drill out parts of the dirt unless we set the hose pressure at practically nothing, and even then, they would periodically work their way out of the pot and start watering useful spots like the sidewalk or driveway. One of them was so energetic that last night we spent time looking for a non-existent leak in an unrelated hose nearby, due to the puddles that had appeared.

The pansies are all flourishing and it hasn't got hot enough yet for them to bolt or start putting out wussy looking little flowers. Hopefully they'll keep that going for another 2 weeks or so, just until the graduation party.

For the first time ever, I have masses of bearded iris (blossoms, that is) in my garden. I had truly become convinced, after about 5 years of thriving leaves, that I'd screwed up the planting depth, but this year, they decided to stop messing with my head, I guess. Since there are only three drifts of them, they're not as spectacular as last year's snapdragons, but gratifying all the same - and they do seem to be spreading, which I'm all for.

Oh - and there are 3 or 4 corn plants that seem to have evaded the attack of the alien rabbitgophersquirrelrats and have achieved heights of 1" and more. I'm not relaxing yet, but we may get something there after all.