through the tomatillo jungle... beyond the corn forest...

Bopping around the garden is my favorite way to end the day this time of year. The kids wiggle and play and dig, the grownups talk and unwind, we munch on whatever there is to munch on, and when we head inside for bed it's with a happy sigh. Notes from this week...

:: I want to grow these cabbages until the end of time. They are perfect, tiny little cabbages, just 1 lb each, good for a pot of soup or a batch of cole slaw without having a pesky half-head of cabbage leftover in the crisper, which you have to stare at guiltily every time you open the fridge because you just can't figure out what to do with it. Or maybe that's just me.

:: Ground cherries. GROUND CHERRIES. How have I never heard of these before?? They look like tomatillos, but smaller. The husks turn brown when they're ripe, and you can pop the fruit right into your mouth whenever the mood strikes... which is frequently. They're tart-sweet and wonderful. I'm dying to bake with some, but I only planted 3 bushes and that's turned out to be not enough just for garden munching. I read about them in Little Heathens and about jumped out of my pants when I saw them in the Baker Creek catalog. Next time, I'm thinking, like, a hedgerow.

:: We have harvested (and eaten) about half of our La Ratte potatoes. They are tiny and yummy and so so fun to dig up. Tonight we had a wonderful little vegetable soup that used up onion, garlic, thyme, cabbage, carrots, and potatoes from the garden. I love the thrill this time of year of running out to the garden with bare feet while the onions are sizzling in the pot to grab a fat onion or a handful of parsley.

:: Next time...no lawn between beds. R can't mow without hacking everything to pieces, so it's going to jungle in there. I have been loving The Vegetable Gardener's Guide to Permaculture lately and have all kinds of visions for next time, like mulched paths and keyhole beds.

The season is starting to wind down for us up north, but I am looking forward to keeping this little space going, hopefully until the ground freezes, with some more cool-weather crops.

garlic harvest

I didn't plan on harvesting garlic today, but, well, the baby was sleeping, the weather was good, and we all needed to get outside. Out came the gloves, out came the digging fork, and out came the garlic! The haul was not quite as good as I'd hoped for...I put off the planting for too long last year and ended up with some half-rotten seed/cloves at planting time. One variety didn't sprout at all in the spring, but most of the other two pulled through and turned into some beautiful, big, fat heads of gloriously stinky garlic. Now it is emitting all of its glorious stinkiness in our garage until it's done curing (4-6 weeks from now). I love growing garlic. It's really one of the easiest things you can grow...it just takes thinking ahead.

drying it up

The time has come, my dear Max. He's gonna be 1 (one!) next month, and the month after that my parents are coming for a visit. They asked if we'd want to go on vacation while they're here. You know, by ourselves. Without kids. ALONE.

YES!

So this kid's gotta wean. It's a new thing for me... Lizzy nursed for 6 weeks and Maren nursed for 10 months, and both were happy to stop without any fanfare whatsoever. This guy, though? It's gonna be rough.

In addition to cutting out some feedings, I've started drinking a hot cup of sage-parsley-yarrow tea three times daily. Those are the herbs that (are supposed to) dry up milk supply. To make it, I pick a fat bouquet of sage, parsley, and yarrow from the garden. The yarrow is optional; it would be perfectly fine with sage and parsley from the grocery store. I like to stick everything in my dehydrator for an hour or so just to wilt the herbs a bit, but it's not necessary. Alternatively, just leave the herbs on the counter for a few hours. (The reason for this step is that wilted or dried herbs make a more potent brew than just-picked herbs.)

After everything's nicely wilted, I chop it all up and put it in a saucepan with 6 cups of cold water. Cover, then bring it slowly to a boil over medium heat. Once it's boiling, turn off the stove and let it sit for a few hours. Strain and refrigerate. Three times a day, heat up a cup and sip away. I'm not gonna lie, it isn't tasty, but a little honey works wonders.

Anybody have any other awesome tips for weaning a baby?

in the garden

It's explosion time! We wait and wait and wait for the weather to get good, and boy howdy, when it's good, it's good. Everything is finally waking up...blossoming...setting fruit and flower...it's such a pretty thing.

I'm trying out straw as mulch on the potatoes this year. High hopes for a simplified harvest. I just noticed today that the peas are coming in. Glory be! The herb bed is my favorite spot by far. I have dreams of a someday-garden with giant swaths of chamomile and lemon balm and all the zillions of different kinds of basils. The carrots are coming in nicely, right along with the weeds (hagulp). The three plants behind the carrots are ground cherries, which I have read about but never tasted. Here's hoping. I got the broccoli and cabbage seedlings mixed up, so I haven't known which was which until now -- little heads starting to form on each, finally revealing their true factions (ha! I just finished reading Divergent). I'm a first-time corn grower this year. Looking forward to some stalk-to-pot sprints later in the summer. Maren's marigolds are getting ready to blossom. We grew them from seed -- her special choice from the seed catalog this year -- and she is going to hit the moon when it happens. The zucchini are getting ready to flower, too. I know I'll shake my head at their abundance before long. 

And flowers. Never enough flowers.

may day

Flower crowns, fairy houses, maypole dances, and perfect weather. Score!

We used this tutorial for our flower crowns, only I didn't use any wire, just floral tape, and it worked just fine. One girl wanted lots of flowers, and one girl wanted only one. I may or may not have sort of snorted at the lots-of-flowers crown until I went to make my own, and then I couldn't stop myself. My crown ended up being the gaudiest of all. We watched this lovely video to show the girls a pretty maypole dance.

I love how fast spring happens here. You can see in the first picture that the branches were basically bare... today, just 2 days later, new leaves are exploding on every tree, all over town! I'm digging like a gopher in my backyard, trying to dig a few more beds for the garden so I can go to the nursery and get everything planted next week. I direct-sowed a few things last week... the arugula was first to pop up, and now the chard and beets are started to show their heads, too. Summer tastiness is on its way, peeps.

spring cleanup, day one

Today was our first real day in the garden. It was just a little cleanup -- clearing away some leaves, turning the compost, chatting with a neighbor -- but I am amazed at how much it invigorated my soul. I feel alive again in a way I didn't know I was missing. And so much is already growing -- rhubarb, garlic, chamomile, chives, lemon balm, catmint, and horehound -- the early spring troopers, so it would seem. The girls dug for worms for a while, then one scampered off to play with friends at the park while the other settled in for a nap in the sunshine. Now that's an after-garden activity I can get behind.

starting time

I get kinda jealous when I think about all the people who have their gardens in the ground already, while up in the North we are just starting our coldest of the cold-weather seeds. Still, it's a joyful beginning, and we are so excited about this year's garden. We have plans to make it quite a lot bigger than last year's 8x10 plot, with hopes of producing enough veggies to freeze and can for the winter. Last year I froze a few tomatoes, some zucchini, a few peppers, and a whole lot of kale, and it was a veritable gold mine for cold-weather eating. I mean, how cool is it to eat a soup you made from your garden in February? There's a rare sort of satisfaction in that.

garlicking

I've majorly neglected the garden since Max was born, but not enough that I'm throwing in the towel completely. These bags of beauties arrived in the mail the other day: heirloom organic garlic, three different varieties, all ready to plant as soon as we have a little frost action, which should be soon. Garlic is usually planted in the autumn, overwintered in the ground, and is ready to harvest mid-summer. Yum.

garden :: grow

We spent last week in Indiana, visiting family. It was a beautiful visit + I have lots of pictures to show off, but first, I'm gonna show off this garden of ours. I can't believe how much it grew while we were gone! Upstate New York is incredible for gardening, a veritable Eden, and all these plants are thriving in spite of me, not because of me. Some decisions: someday I will have a gigantic herb garden. It will be planted in a circle. With a brick path around it. And a fountain in the middle. Also, oriental poppies are my new favorite flower. Sigh.