Lil' Busy These Days

Sorry for the break in posts but it's been a jungle out there! I hunted a groundhog Caddyshack style (also to no avail), burned hundreds of caterpillars with a lighter (don't judge me, they had it coming) and would have maimed a rogue squirrel if my bb gun hadn't jammed (I suspect the squirrel jammed it). Yes squirrels are adorable but this one pushed me to the edge! I even forced Louis to do his homework in his car under a tree so he could stake-out the groundhog and squirrel. Nothing. They love to mess with me.

Despite the rodent's master plant to destroy the garden, it's been amazing. I didn't get to plant a lot of stuff I'd planned on but the corn, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, squash and melons have been awesome. the tomatoes are out of control.

Everyday for the past month and a half I've gone out there to find 3 or more cups of ripe cherry tomatoes plus huge heirlooms, romas, orange medium sized ones and smaller Early Girls.

I fill containers, my pockets, stuff them in my garden gloves and make a kangaroo pouch with my shirt to get them all inside. I end up feeling like Lucy at the chocolate factory. 

I've given a bunch to my nice neighbors but I think they're sick of them too, they didn't answer my call today to offer them more. I tried to control the desperation in my voice when I left a message. 

I've made gazpacho, tomato sandwiches, salsa (which was, to put it mildly, da bomb) and fancy grilled cheeses...a.k.a. grilled cheese with tomato. 

Gazpacho courtesy of a recipe by Alice Waters. We're tight like that/she posted it on Facebook. Tomorrow I'm going to invent a recipe for orange tomato and watermelon gazpacho.  I have a ton of orange tomatoes and the watermelon are starting to ripen. THAT I'd love to can for a summer memory during winter.  Alice's was traditional and delicious and is included below for you to try. Just FYI, I do not have a mortar and pestle. I winged it. 

Alice Water's Gazpacho Recipe:

Next up I made Grilled eggplant with my heirloom 'Mortgage Lifters'. It's just lightly fried eggplant topped with gruyere, my lemon basil and avocado. Lemon basil is my new obsession. I'm putting it on everything. 

I am generally not an eggplant fan but preparing it this way is insanely delicious. I watched a chef do it once. All you do is cut thin eggplant disks, I remove the skin, and fry them in a skillet until light brown with a little oil after coating them in simple eggwash and "spiced up" flour which is just garlic powder, pepper and salt in the flour.  :) The cheese melts on the hot eggplant and the cool tomato slice along with the avocado and basil is a mind blowing combo.

It'd be nice to can the masses of cherry tomatoes I have but it's a no go. Their small size makes dealing with the skin a losing battle. 

Here are some pictures of what I recently brought in. 

The fresh corn was delicious. The spaghetti squash are all growing and the beans just keep coming. Our favorite beans so far are 'Royal Burgundy'. They grow a vibrant purple and turn green when you boil them, letting you know when they're ready. They are by far the best green beans I've ever had. Next year I'm planting a ton. 

 

When I was planting watermelon this spring I mixed up the seedlings and lost track of what survived and what didn't and what I planted where. SO I knew the watermelons were going to be wild cards. When one was ready this week I cut it open to find this-

A 'White Wonder'! My good friend Erika loves this kind and told me they're $7 each for chemical-free ones at her McLean farmer's market...sooo, I'll be planting a lot of these next year too! It's super delicious and there's melon all the way to the green, no rind! I saved a bunch of the seeds. This is the melon I'm using for the watermelon gazpacho tomorrow. Some of the orange tomatoes are below.  

I forget what they're called but the orange ones are second only to the cherry tomatoes in production value. They just keep coming.  

The cantaloupe is also ripening up. This is from the 'Ambrosia' plant that's producing two right now and starting on a third. 

I had cantaloupe salsa earlier this year when Louis hired a chef to make us dinner in St. John. I'd never even thought of melon salsa, it blew my mind. I convinced him to give me the recipe and I'll be canning that too! Excuse the rind in the picture but I had to do a quality test!

The sunflowers are starting to bloom. I've never grown sunflowers so their height is still crazy to me. Some are two to three feet taller than me. It's like a forest!

Two weeks ago the pear trees were FULL of pears. Hundreds of them as you can see in the picture below. 

I noticed they were starting to ripen before I left town for a good friend's wedding and when I got back, the trees were bare! The packs of crows, squirrels and deer had cleaned us out. AND all under Louis' nose apparently. There were only a few pears left at the very top so we got a ladder and grabbed the measly remnants. 

It's such a shame because I have no idea what kind of pears they are but they are DElicious. Seeing the tree bare was like the part in A Christmas Story where the dogs eat their turkey. No canned pears, pear butter, apple and pear pie, pear tarts, pear sorbet. Gone. All gone! I just have to remember next year that when I see one ripening, it's time to pick the tree before nature gets to it. 

My dahlias are FINALLY starting to bloom. It's a direct result of mulching them last month. This summer was just too dry, the mulch kept them from drying out. I ordered almost 30 bulbs for every color and size and they should have bloomed last month. I'm really excited that they're doing so well now.  This one is called Walter Hardisty.

It's a "dinner plate" dahlia that will be 14-16 inches in diameter and look like this when it's done-

 

The best thing about dahlias is that one bulb grows into multiples by fall so every one plant I bought this year will be 3-4 plants next season. I'll be sure to take pictures as they bloom. I didn't plant any other flowers this year so I'm looking forward to these!

I'm about to plant my last crop before fall. Carrots, lettuces, broccolli, spinach and rutabaga all do well in the fall. I can't wait to plant garlic when it gets chilly. Each clove is a seed! All you do is plant the cloves pointy end up two inches down, cover them with leaves for overwintering and you'll have heads of garlic in the spring! 

SO easy! They can even grow in containers yet 78% of garlic in grocery stores is from China, insane. When they all pop up you harvest them, the outer skin will dry a bit, then keep them in a cool place and use them all year!  

Here's a picture of bunches at someone's farm-

Another cool thing I learned recently is about green onions. I'm about to plant green onions and scallions but an easy trick to staying stocked is to not throw away the root of a green onion after you use it. Instead, put it in a little water and watch a whole new scallion grow. Change the water like you would flowers and in a few days you'll have more! Each root will do this 3-4 times. 

I'm ending this post with a pretty sunset picture. There's no commentary about house progress because we're still painting. Still. 

Jihad on Groundhogs

The other day I went out into the garden around 11am to check on some seeds and as I was walking up I saw a fat groundhog strolling through the watermelon patch! About a month ago I noticed that a few of the watermelon vines were chewed off and I thought it was a rabbit....but we haven't seen any rabbits around because there are so many foxes. NOW I know...it was a groundhog! I yelled and started running towards him picking up a shovel along the way, he freaked and tried to run as fast as his tiny legs and huge body could. We've blocked most of the garden with rocks at the base of the fence so he had to run a while before finding an opening. I got about 4 feet away before he squeezed out, ran a few feet, looked back and then gave me the finger. I swear.

While in the garden he chewed on 8 tomatoes, squash leaves and bean plants. The most irritating part is that he didn't even eat anything, he just chewed on it or sunk his teeth in and left tomatoes all over the ground. What a dick! At least the deer eat stuff! Groundhogs are just vandals. Keying cars and ruining tomatoes for the hell of it.

Then today I was in the kitchen when I looked up and saw his chubby self chilling under the apple tree. I busted outside and the wind was blowing so hard he didn't even notice I was blazing toward him (again, no plan, just running to scare him and honestly just to see if I could catch up) but when he did notice he booked it down the driveway with me behind him. I definitely run faster which is good to know. Faster than a groundhog, slower than a cheetah. He took cover in the brush across the street and looked back when he realized I wasn't chasing him anymore. Then he gave me the finger, I swear.

May the blood of the groundhog infidels run through the streets! Just kidding, I'm going to trap it and release it somewhere else. They only come out during the day so it's not as bad as worrying about deer. I came home after dark the other day to discover a motley crew of them peeping into the garden. They shrugged me off when I flashed my brights so I decided that speeding through the yard after them while honking my horn was necessary. I can't speak for them but I had a great time.

We put cages up around all of the tomatoes, it didn't stop the groundhog from having his way but hopefully the plants will grow taller than his height inside them.

He knocked off a bunch of cherry tomatoes and didn't even touch them! Ugh, such a waste!

Louis finished his screen door project and it has made a world of difference on the porch! No more wasps, flies and butterflies buzzing around in there. 

The door is really pretty, I'm glad we refinished an old one instead of buying new. 

Some neighbors stopped by on Sunday to introduce themselves and bring us canned gifts from their garden! I can't WAIT to try them! They've lived in the house next to us for almost 30 years and have an amazing garden.

A few of our other neighbors who ride horses every evening asked to ride around on our property. I said yes so now I get to look out of the kitchen window and see this when I'm making dinner-

The floor people came and applied the last coat of laquer and added the final trim around the edges.

It looks pretty in the kitchen-

I'm going to paint it to match the white trim around the house. 

In painting news, I picked a color and hated it on the walls. It looked greyer and darker on the swatch but screamed "baby boy blue" on the walls. 

No thanks. I'm going back to HD later for a re-do. 

In garden news, things are growing very well now that we've started to get rain. The corn hits me at chest height now and the sad half row of soy beans is almost all the way back. 

We're seeing how big this zucchini can get before we pick it. I'm aiming for toddler size just to see if it can be done. 

The lima beans I planted last week are sprouting. They look like aliens.

The yellow squash is just now starting to come around.

I kept noticing this HUGE flying bug in the garden that seemed to be landing and crawling into the ground. It's really loud and looks like a giant, elephantitis wasp. I researched it and discovered that it's a "Cicada Killer". They're about 3 inches long, they live in burrows in the ground and they paralyze cicadas and feast on them down there! 

They scare the crap out of me, I could barely look at that picture long enough to upload it.  One has burrowed under a watermelon plant. I tapped at the weird mound of dirt with a rake and it came crawling out all pissed. I ran closer to cheetah speed back to the porch. 

Despite crazy bugs, groundhogs and deer peeping Toms, the watermelons are growing bigger everyday. 

The cantaloupe is also coming in and the sunflowers are shin high. Not bad for being planted last month. 

I've gotta run and finish painting, hopefully I'll find the right shade of blue this time!

4th of July- Fireworks, Funnel Cake and Fixin' Stuff!

This year for 4th of July I'm hoping for fireworks of a different kind...I'm hoping to singe some deer hairs on my new solar powered electric fence. Farmer John got busy bailing hay and couldn't come out to hook up the system the day after we discovered the deer had jumped the 7foot fence and ate:

-half a row of soy beans

-4 corn stalks

-10 almost ripe roma tomatoes and stems

-4 early girl ripe tomatoes 

-stalks of 3 cherry tomato plants

SO- I stayed up late and ran out into the darkness a few times and no deer came back that night. HOWEVER, the following night we got hit hard. I woke up to discover that the rest of the row of soy beans was demolished, 4 more corn stalks were gone and multiple branches of tomatoes were eaten. That's when it happened. That's when I stopped liking deer. 

I realize I don't really "own" this land and if anyone does, they have more of a right to it than I do. I realize they are just being deer and following their instincts and it's me, the person growing food in a field, that doesn't fit in this picture BUT it's my edamame or them and I choose my edamame over tick infested, disease carrying, insatiable creatures with no natural predator. That deer who keeps coming back to the pear tree stays there for long periods of time, takes poops under the tree and makes herself at home. 

The comedian Louis CK has a really funny view on deer, like us, he used to think they were amazing when he lived in the city and rarely saw them but now that he lives in the country and has to deal with them he's changed his tune. *WARNING MOM: there's profanity, un-pc messaging and sexual gestures in this video (which is why I laughed so hard watching it).*

Here's the link in case the video doesn't play-  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-iqVd2llrc

Farmer John added another row of fencing above what we already had and electrified the top portion. I haven't seen any tracks or had any missing crops since. We also bought an amazingly powerful spotlight at HD and have big plans to keep the yard deer free with it.

So far today we've been celebrating our independence from England by doing manual labor. Hooray! We replaced the disgusting, dilapidated, rusty, wobbly, yucky mailbox and splinter ridden post with brand new ones. I painted the mailbox a robin's egg blue. It was a dull grey and who needs dull grey in their life? I'm hoping the country teens high on meth or grandma's prescriptions decide to spare it should they get the late night bashing itch.

Next on the list- fix up that old screen door I found for $35 at the antique place. Louis removed the old screen, sanded it and cut an inch off the bottom with his new circular saw. Then I painted it and it's looking pretty good!

I kind of liked the old chipping look but bright white matches the rest of the porch. 

BY THE WAY- our horrid plumbing situation is all fixed. A plumber came out and snaked the line with bigger and better equipment than the contractors used and told us it was just gunk buildup from construction and time. All bathrooms are in working order and the laundry room floor smells like bleach.

Early this morning I went out into the garden and dug up all the beans that hadn't germinated in over two weeks. I finally realized that because it hasn't rained in a month, the beans were too dry, despite my nightly watering. The soil was kinda dry when I planted them so I should have done two things differently- 1. Pre-soak the beans overnight and 2. soak the hell out of the dirt before planting.

I'm doing a massive bean planting and re-planting this weekend so I'm soaking all kinds of beans. We'll see if my results this time are any better.

The great thing about no rain is no humidity which means no mosquitos! It's felt a lot like a California summer so far and I'm fine with that. Now that we have the well water hooked up for the garden I don't mind how much watering it needs. 

The corn is thigh high this 4th of July, booyah! 

I didn't plant them until the last week in May so I wasn't sure how long it'd take them to grow but the little rows are coming along nicely!

I've still got squash blossoms everywhere and as you can see, zucchini is doing very well! 

That little watermelon is growing more everyday and it has a bunch of friends now. We're putting straw under them so they don't get too wet or attacked by slugs. 

Our fantastic neighbors took us out to dinner last weekend and when they heard that we didn't have a table to use they insisted on loaning us one along with a few collapsable chairs. They changed our lives. We use that table daily. This is the home office for the moment!

Our little town is having a fireworks display tonight along with a big outdoor barbeque and Louis' favorite, funnel cake. We're going to go check it out since neither of us wanted to risk burning the field and potentially the house by lighting fireworks on our crispy yellow grass. Hopefully the parking will be nothing like going to an event in DC!

Happy 4th!