Savoring the ... leaves ... of our labor!

I finally got to make my first dinner using something from our garden! It was pretty exciting, although unfortunately the only things ready to eat right now are our herbs. Both of our basil plants were starting to get pretty big, so I attacked them with a pair of clippers and came up with 5 large sprigs.

The question was, what to do with that much fresh basil? Green curry, of course! YUMMMM!

I stole this picture from somebody's food blog, because I never remember to take pictures of anything I cook- partly because Frank attacks it the minute it's finished and there just isn't time to set up the perfect presentation! But you get the idea. Green curry paste, coconut milk, a bunch of veggies, some stir fried chicken tossed in and a heap of fresh basil. Very tasty!

Looking forward to more fresh goodies coming out of that garden. The tomatoes continue to sprout and grow, and we should have plenty ready to pick within the next month. My two roma plants have really exploded in the last week and there are easily a dozen baby tomatoes growing on each- which means I need to start looking up tomato sauce recipes! I have never made a pasta sauce from scratch and am excited to try.

Cicada invasion!

About a week ago I started to notice a strange, high-pitched sound emanating from the woods behind our home. My first thought was that it was some sort of power equipment- perhaps the neighborhood behind ours was doing some repaving? But the sound was persistent, and after two days of listening to it I broached the subject with my husband. He was equally clueless, so we set out into the backyard in search of the source.

It definitely seemed to be coming from the wooded area. Upon closer inspection, we saw them- hordes of bugs flying around up in the trees!

I'd never seen such things before, and neither had Frank. So I put out a plea to the "experts" (ie my Facebook friends) and they concluded that these are cicadas. Just my luck that the first time in 13 years they appear in the South is the year I plant my first garden!

Fortunately they seem content with the trees, so far... I really hope it stays that way. I found one in a tomato plant this afternoon and promptly shooed it off. Fingers crossed they don't trash my plants. :(

Impending doom aside, my garden seems to be doing quite well! Here's an updated shot:

 Check out my formerly teeny tomatillo plant! Unfortunately it hasn't started fruiting yet, and neither has my coveted Mr. Stripey. But everything else has tiny tomatoes starting to appear!

 My container plants were the first to start fruiting. The potted Early Girl is still ahead of the game, as her name implies:

 These are my biggest babies so far, approximately golf ball sized.

A few more sproutlings. Lovely!

My Roma plants are the most recent to take fruit, with tiny beginnings starting to pop in the last 24 hours. Very cool, though.

Puppy update

Just a quick update on our foster puppies - all of which are doing great! They're now about 3 weeks old, have opened their eyes and are turning into fat little goobers.

Here's an updated shot of the little brindle boy I posted earlier. I've taken to calling him Bear for obvious reasons.

Frank's been a champ helping me out with this bunch. He's definitely not one for getting up for 4am feedings, but thankfully they're old enough to sleep through the night now.

I anticipate we'll have them another week and a half to two weeks, by which time they'll be off the bottle and can go finish up their foster period with another family before going up for adoption. As much as I'd like to keep them for the duration, there are just too many parts of our house that are "off limits" due to a parvo exposure we had a few months ago with some previous fosters.

Small, growing things.

Well, the garden seems to have bounced back nicely after that hail storm a week and a half ago. We've since had a pretty nasty wind storm as well (strong enough to rip a piece of our siding trim off the front of the house and throw it into the back yard!) but the plants don't seem to have been bothered.

This past weekend Frank helped me get the rest of the tomato cages painted and put out. The tomato plants in the raised bed are still smaller than those in the containers, but considering they were planted two weeks later and took a beating in the hail storm, I'm not particularly surprised. As you can see, the rest of our veggies are starting to sprout nicely!

The last thing we needed was more tomato plants, but I caught sight of this little beauty at Home Depot and couldn't resist- it's a tomatillo plant! Tasty little green tomatoes that are great for Mexican sauces. Mmm mmmm! Seems to like its new pot, I swear it's doubled in size in just a few days.

More good news post-hail: My cilantro livesssss! This one is snapping back nicely after nearly getting obliterated by the hail. The second cilantro plant is still looking a little sad, but I'm hopeful it'll recover as this one did.

More tomato plants, my little jalapeno plant, a few small rows of carrots, yellow bush bean plants and lots of onion sprigs poking through!

Updated shot of my container tomatoes. Check out the difference compared to my earlier photo!

This Early Girl plant is the biggest of our tomato plants so far. I noticed today that it even has its first little yellow flower!

Even my teeny-tiny Roma plants are starting to take off!

In addition to all the green stuff, I've also got some furry babies I'm taking care of. We do foster care for the local Humane Society, and sometimes I get teeny babies that need bottle feeding. These guys are around a week old, and I've got 3 of them- two boys and a girl. Two more boys are with another foster and 3 from the litter unfortunately didn't make it.. they were found abandoned in a box inside a public restroom. :(

This is the larger of the two boys, and has a brindle coat pattern. The other boy and girl are light tan with a black mask. It's really too early to tell what mix they might be, exactly, but I'm guessing shepherd/pit.

Hail Fail

Last night Charlotte got hit with a pretty nasty hail storm out of nowhere. The weather all day was great- warm and sunny. Next thing you know, quarter to baseball sized hail! Very glad our cars were parked in the garage. I have a feeling a lot of people are calling their insurance companies today.

Our raised garden bed took a real beating. Most of my poor tomato plants are missing branches this morning. We hadn't even put the cages on yet, so there was nothing to deflect the hailstones.

The basil got smacked around pretty good, but not as bad as our cilantro- which pretty much got pounded into oblivion. :(

More tomato carnage. Thankfully the container-planted tomatoes were virtually unscathed. Frank moved them next to the fence yesterday afternoon while he was mowing, so the fence and two trees above them deflected most of the hail. There were tons of leaves and twigs in the containers this morning from their tree-shield, but other than that they seemed unaffected.

Gardening news was not all bad this morning though, as I noticed while plucking debris from the raised bed that our onions have started sprouting! Yay! I adore red onions. My favorite vegetable, hands down. If I get one edible tomato and one edible onion out of this garden, I'll consider it a success.

Sewing projects continue. Icarus is trying to help. Post-storm it's very cold and gray outside today, so I have a feeling I'll have ye olde sewing machine cranking much of the afternoon. I may make a run out to the fabric store later to see if I can get any good clearance scraps.

Sewing Projects: The Resurrection

Terrible sci-fi'esque title aside, I finally purchased a new sewing machine earlier this week and have been getting acquainted with it over the last few days. I dug up a huge stash of fabric I purchased for a quilting project I started almost 8 years ago and set about finally finishing the darned thing.

 Behold, the resulting carnage that was once our dining table. Although, to be fair, we never actually eat on it anyway- so I don't feel too guilty about claiming it as my new crafting territory.

My new machine is a Singer Esteem II. Pretty cheap and simple, but more than enough for my purposes.

My first assembled quilt chunk- yay! Really, I know little to nothing about quilting so I just made up the pattern based on the number of cloth types I had. This block will be alternated with another in the same pattern but with different color placement, and I'll have a border of some sort to add in later. I'm aiming for Queen size as that's the size of the batting roll I purchased originally, but we'll see.

I'm also attempting to make a new set of place-mats for the table we never eat on. I originally bought a pretty expensive set, only to have half of them ruined by an accidental bleaching (thanks Frank!). This is a rough draft, as I need to clean up the stitching.

Carpenters and farmers

This year my husband and I decided to start our first backyard veggie garden.

I should start by pointing out I have no talent for green things outside of killing them. My husband had a house plant for 5 years before we met, and within two I'd offed it.

Naturally, I'm starting big. I couldn't decide which way I wanted to go, so ultimately I ended up with both a container garden and an in-ground raised bed.

I'm primarily growing tomatoes. I don't even eat tomatoes but from what I've read, they're reasonably easy to deal with- so hopefully they'll prove resistant to my efforts of veggicide. Keeping with the grand scale of my project, I selected not one or two, but SIX varieties of tomato plant- the classic Big Boy, Early Girl, Roma, Celebrity, Lemon Boy and my favorite based on its name alone: Mr. Stripey.

I recycled some old buckets that originally stored cat litter into planting containers. They got a thorough scrub, a new paint job, a dozen or so holes drilled in the bottom of each and a chunk of landscaping fabric in the bottom to keep the soil from leaking out through said holes.

Here's a few filled, mulched and planted. I'm mostly sticking with determinant varieties in these containers, as supposedly they grow smaller and more "bush-like" rather than tall and viney. Even so, I painted some tomato cages bright white and added those to the containers as well to provide support.

This is the raised bed we constructed. It's approximately 10'x4'x14" and made from untreated 2x4s of some cheap Home Depot mystery wood. Again, I lined it with landscaping fabric on the sides and bottom to stop soil leakage and weed intrusion.

Nyxie's enjoying our new gardening kick. She's an indoor cat, but I've been taking her outside with me when I work in the yard and she seems to enjoy it.

The finished raised bed, filled and planted. We did a row of tomatoes in the back (left) and herbs at each end (basil and cilantro). Up front I have a lonely jalapeno pepper plant, and the rest of the space is filled with a hodgepodge of red onions, garlic, carrots, yellow bush beans and snow peas. I figured I'd just go the trial and error route with what I plant.. we'll see what actually grows and adjust accordingly next year.