4 posts tagged “garden”
Tony is sick, which is always a joy. Every ten minutes he wants me to verify that he is running a temperature. I didn't get much done this weekend, too much time spent watching the French Open. I'm still stunned at Rafa's loss. Just goes to show, we all have our off days! I've been meaning to start a whole bunch of seed blocks for the last several weekends and did not get around to it AGAIN! My goal of best vegetable year ever is slipping away. The tomatoes, beans and peas are doing great, but I've used up all my radishes and have not replanted those. My carrots and beets did not take at all. The komatsuna mom gave me grew like gangbusters - I've used a lot of it in salads and stir fries and even made a pesto sauce for Saturday night's halibut, but it just grew faster than I could use it and I had to pull it all out yesterday because it was bolting. The green chard is doing well. I must seed block this weekend!!!!!
I made Tyler Florence's Ultimate Teriyaki Chicken last night and it was delicious. Also made a vegan Southern Style Smothered Cabbage recipe that I pulled out of the chronicle a few weeks ago and it was fabulous. I've really been into sauteed cabbage lately. Cheap, plentiful, easy and tasty!
I always love the way the house looks from the back. You'd never guess from back here that this was in the Oakland neighborhood that it's in. So peaceful back there, especially in the early evening.
I pulled my first veggies from this year's garden, the radishes. They had incredible radish flavor but were a bit on the dry side. I'll up the watering of the remaining rows. I used them to make a chopped salad (white onion, tomatoes, radishes, jalapeno, cilantro and lime juice) to put in last night's fish tacos. Very tasty.
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I was feeling very anxious about this year's tomatoes. After many years of mixed results starting my tomatoes from seeds, in recent years I started purchasing tomato seedlings at Berkeley Horticultural up by my beloved tennis courts. I usually have them in the ground by the second week in April, at the latest. This year my mom told me she was starting seedlings for the two of us and not to buy any. But the weeks have been ticking by and I check with mom every week to see if the seedlings are ready and every week she says she wants to give them another week. Then we hit May and I am starting to get worried. Well, Saturday night mom called to say I could come over and pick up my seedlings! They are huge! They look great. She had transplanted them to 1 gallon pots, so they have great roots developed. I'm hoping this is going to be a successful tomato year. I also followed a new "technique" mom had read about. I dug each tomato hole very deep and put several big handfuls of stinky kitchen vegetable and fruit scraps my mom had been saving. She had a big bucket of them for me. A big stinky, decomposing bucket. So I took a bit of compost out of my composter and mixed it in with the scraps. Then I put handfuls of the mixture in the bottom of the holes, covered it with a thin layer of soil, then planted the tomotoes on top of that. The theory is, as the scrpas compost beneath the tomato roots, they generate a lot of heat that heats the tomato plant from below ground, in addition to the heat from the sun above ground, making the plant grow faster and stronger and making for sweeter and fuller tomatoes. It seems to make sense and I'll let you know what happens. You can see my Scarlet Runner Beans coming in behind the tomatoes. They are thriving this year. Beans are amazing. They grow somewhat slowly until the point where they start wrapping themselves around the trellis, then I swear from that point on they grow at least 6 inches a day.
My grandfather gave me this cactus the last time I saw him (ever). Every year when it blooms it amazes me. It's pretty ugly the rest of the year, but for a few weeks in spring it is beautiful. And the flowers only open up in the evening, stay open all night, and then close up when the sun hits them in them morning. I wish it would bloom all year.
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