back to the tomato starts

I knick-named the runt Bueller.
Officially.


Not only is he smaller than all his buddies, he's totally confused. He can't even seem to figure out which direction the sunshine is located.
Poor dear.

snaps on saturday

My early morning:




Amended soil with worms, and a plate full of lovely things that were harvested just this morning....out of the gardeners belonging to the people that are teaching the gardening class we are taking. TheMostImportantGuy and I have signed up for a 9 months series of classes (one Saturday morning each month, January through September) that is all about vegetable gardening.

We have great hopes for all of the empty land at the new house, but since be both lack real talent in the garden, we aren't going to start there. We're going to start by using what's already in place at my existing place while it is still available to us. My place has 6 raised beds that I sort of just plop tomatoes in and maybe a few herbs and then I take what I can get. This is the year to learn some mad skillz. Then we'll consider applying what we are learning to the new digs.


My late afternoon:




Special dance class with live drummers, taught by one of the DancersAmeritus of our dance ensemble (ahhh, I got to be a student for awhile!). I went to the class even though I am under doctors orders to limit crutch use and not use my arm much, at least until the physical therapist looks me over on the 8th. I started off just be being the class photographer with everyone's cameras....but I eventually caved in a danced for just a few. My fellow dancers wagged their fingers at me and I was ashamed. Sort of. LOL

a few more additions

Getting things ready for the garden. Earlier this week I put in a few tomato plants and some rosemary. Going to get the Lacinato Kale in toot sweet, but might wait another week or two on the lettuce and less hardy herbs. We did have a heat wave here, but now it's gotten very cold again.

(PS I have no idea what I'm doing by the way...I make gardening up as I go, it would seem. I'm a bit of a hack that way. But I'm learning.)

snaps on saturday

~ persimmon~
~ from the garden ~ softball sized ~ one of many ~

from the garden

rainbow chard

* many more blogs read
* many many MANY middle school band uniforms laundered
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This photo was taken and this blogpost was typed up 9/17. It is 9/27 and I just found it sitting as an "edit" rather than as a "posted". GAH. So here it is, delayed.

snaps on saturday

From the garden:

sunflowers, tomatoes, squash, chive flowers, broccoli

I am very thankful that the zoom lens and the macro feature make it look like I have a lovely garden. What I really have is a friggin' jungle, and if I had a wide angle lens, you'd have a heart attack. I nearly do every time I go out there.

It's been hard for me to be out in the garden the past couple of weeks. It's either been too hot, or there is too much smoke in the air, or my back has been bothering me....but I am really enjoying being in the garden once I get out there, and the bounty is fantastic. I just need to get my butt out there early in the morning before the sun swings around, and take my time so I don't hurt myself.

One of the reasons why the garden is a jungle is because the planting itself was not done by me. It was done by some "experienced" people I hired. They took note of our likes and dislikes, and then planted away. I think they were going for productivity per square inch or something. There is wayyyyy too much stuff here. Too much to eat, too much for me to handle as a beginning gardener, and too much for the plants to be happy (I think. At least that's my hunch).

The good news? I am learning so much! It's pretty true that the plants talk to you. I can totally see what is happy growing where. I can see what mistakes the "experienced" people made in choosing locations for certain things, and I can see the mistakes I've made since they've been gone (ummm, like trying to cage an already overgrown tomato plant?? duh). I can also see what things I will actually make use of. I mean, they planted a whole row of shiso leaf. Neato, but wtf???!!! (hey, any ideas on that? Shiso Pesto or something?? I've only ever rolled it into sushi.)

Even though I plan on tinkering with a winter garden when the summer haul is over (I can hardly wait to try growing brussel sprouts!!), I think that it is next summer that I'll be having the real fun. Even though I'm dealing with the Attack of The Killer Tomatoes this year, these raised beds will be here for years to come, and I'm actually looking forward to it.

I am a bit worried about what the garden is going to look like when I come home after being gone for two weeks (in the peak of July, no less). It's on a drip system, so it should be okay waterwise, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the whole backside of my house is swallowed up by pole beans and zucchini.

snaps on saturday (and a couple other things)

The dark leafy greens in my garden are growing like mad!


The first of the harvesting. Kale, chards, and mustard.




My favorite quick meal with greens. Super simple, super easy.

I pop some of frozen "meatless" meatballs (yay, Trader Joe's) into the toaster oven. While those are warming, I thinly slice as much garlic as I can stand to peel (I think this was about 5 cloves...but sliced garlic is milder than chopped, kids) and I saute it in a tablespoon or so of olive oil. While that's going, I do a rough chop on the washed and slightly damp greens, then I add them to the pan with a little salt and black pepper. Sometimes I'll toss in some red chili flakes. After the leaves wilt for a minute or two, I pour in maybe 1/2 cup to 1 cup of veggie stock, depending on how many greens I am cooking up (no, I don't make my own stock--I'm a slacker, I reconstitute a teaspoon of this stuff in a cup of water). I only pour in enough stock to help the leaves steam. I'm not boiling them. The greens and the meatless balls get done about the same time, and then I combine them and allow the balls to soak up some of the liquid (which is good, because they are way too dry, imho). I add more liquid if necessary.

And there you have it.

This is my first meal from my first garden, and I am pretty darned excited about it. This morning MyFavoriteKid and I are picking some salad greens and cherries for him to bring to my folks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A couple of other little things.....

**I have been knitting more frequently, and it's feeling great! I have made some progress on some socks and on the little summer cardigan I had to rip back and reknit for a better fit, but I have also just completed a little test knit for a designer (more on that once she is ready to publish the pattern).

**I think I have also finally got myself back in gear with the comments on the blog here. I had sadly fallen into the mode of failing to reply to them. A few weeks ago, I finally got myself back into the habit of "my replying to your comments back in the comments". Hopefully I will stay current, although I expect time delays in summer. Over the summer there will be some pre-posting and then catching up and I go on and off the grid, I have a hunch.

**As of today, I am trying to think of myself as being in "training mode". In six weeks I will be going on tour with DandelionDancetheater for a run in Los Angeles. If I try to do this two week run of shows in the physical state I am presently in, I will probably hurt myself. I'm seriously out of shape, and carrying extra weight isn't helping any (you try gracefully launching yourself off the floor using only one leg AND having a sack of potatoes tied to your ass). Today I start doing a bit more yoga, doing a bit more strengthening of the core, and eating like someone who'd like to lose a couple of pounds (and be less ramped on sugar).


Have a great weekend, guys! I'm out today with TheMostImportant guy doing something nice with him for his birthday, which is tomorrow (but we're celebrating early because tomorrow I am doing something nice with MyFavorite kid).

snaps on saturday

From the garden, cherries and squash blossoms....

things around my house thursday

I am several weeks behind on things around my house Thursday, and at some point very soon I intend to catch up.

(insert here any one of many famous quotes about intentions an how you can't wipe yer arse with any of them)

I can show one thing new around the house today, though.
Well, outside the house.


Now excuse me while I go pick the dirt out from underneath my fingernails.

play more think less

Let me see if I can get some actual content out here, for crying out loud.

It's tough, because chattering away in the background of my mental landscape is the voice of my inner GrandListMaker. At present, she is chanting the To-Do list in a deep whisper. Usually putting pen to paper and writing the list down instead of trying to hold it all in my head will quiet the voice, but not so this time. I just returned from a trip, and there are a myriad of tasks that must be completed before I head out the door for the next trip at the end of the week. I also have a slew of appointments over the next four days.
My plan??
Stay up late every night this week getting it all done, and then pass out on the plane.


Meanwhile, here at the blog, I have a few important things I want to record, so I am just going to need to find the time. Let me start with an A-Ha!Moment I had yesterday.

Yesterday I went to "Get Growing: Gardening for Everyone," hosted by the Napa Valley Master Garderners. It was a day long event full of hands on demonstrations and classes, free to the public if you registered early (which I was somehow organized enough to do). I went by myself, and had signed up for classes about family vegetable gardening, sustainable weed management, and fruit trees.

Now, I am NOT a gardener. I would like to BE a gardener, but my current status is one of SheWhoOftenForgetsSheHasHousePlants. In my lifetime, I have even killed cacti. Plural.

But I want to grow food. I am a trained chef, and a Raw Living Foods enthusiast. I have deep appreciation for what comes out of the earth, and I would love nothing more to produce food from my own garden and eat it. Even though I have no idea how to do it.

I am about to install some food producing raised beds in the yard here in a couple of weeks. And I have no friggin' idea what I am doing. Seriously.

Anyhow, back to the A-Ha!Moment. So I went to this master gardening event yesterday, and I wasn't but two minutes past the registration table and into the quad area where the demos were being held, and I started hyperventilating. The more I walked around, the worse it got. In my own typical twisted way, I determined that nobody else there was a novice gardener. I tried to stop freaking out by reading a few of the presentation boards posted about and the gardening-speak made me feel like I was in a foreign land. I was pretty sure at that moment that I had made a huge mistake by being there, so I breezed past all of the demos and parked myself in a lecture hall to wait for the keynote speaker that was going to open the event.

The guy was totally cool. He talked about mystical moments as a child in a neighbor's garden, and while I didn't have stories of my own like that about gardens, I do have those about food, and I became a chef, in the same way this guy had come to make his passion his career. So there I was, breathing again and enjoying his speech, and then he said something about some seedlings he had planted a few weeks earlier. He watered them and came back the next day and they had gotten moldy, so he had to toss them and start over.

And my heart started pounding again, and it was beginning to feel a little warm. The more he talked the more I realized I was about to make a brain connection if I could just make it through the day.

After the keynote speech, I had a bit of time to kill before my first class, so I decided to try to brave one of the demo tables and maybe talk to someone. I went to learn about propogation, and besides still believing that a foreign language was being spoken, the demonstrator had a thick European accent. So now I was certain. Anyway, he was showing this little girl of about 9 years old and her mom how to snip a branch of sage and turn it into several tiny sage plants she could allow to grow roots and then plant in her own garden. I watched the whole thing over her shoulder. He snipped, they dipped it in some magical powder and potted it. The little girl was happy, and was about to walk away at that moment and the demonstrator say, "Oh no! We need to do more! For the failure! It will fail! You must take at least two. Better three or four."

Well.
This is where my head started to explode.
Failure. FAILURE.
My heart started racing again, I felt faint, and I actually wondered if I had packed any anti-anxiety meds along to a gardening event...and meanwhile the guy is saying the word failure over and over in his crazy accent....and I was trying to understand how anything could have a fifty-percent failure rate built into it and even be remotely enjoyable...and it was then that I had the A-Ha!Moment.

Dudes, I have been avoiding gardening my whole life because of my fear of failure.

I could write volumes about how fearing failure developed in me, and all of the wild places it has brought me in my 41 years, but that's not where I'm going here. I could write about how many things I have never tried to do because I knew I couldn't do it perfectly, also....but that's not where I'm going either.

So back to the event. I left that table to go find a corner to contemplate in, and almost ran over the keynote speaker trying to get there. So I talked to him. He was still totally cool, and for some reason I blurted out what I had just learned about myself. He chuckled a bit and talked to me about all of the things a garden would teach me. Then he said, "just get out there and muck it up."

I spent the rest of the day in between classes talking to experienced garden folk and asking them to play therapy session with me (not literally, but...ya' know). Every single one of them had a story about something that hadn't worked just recently. Every single one of them chalked it up to being part of the process, and I have to say....it's not a concept that sits well with my emotional and/or nervous systems...but I do understand it logically.
And I'm willing to give it a whirl.
I'm willing to just get in there and get dirty.
I'm willing to learn from my mistakes.
I'm willing to not be perfect.

I'd like to at least pull one edible salad out of my yard this year, though LOL.
But I am willing to screw up and not have it be anxiety producing.
This is a big deal.

Heres' the funny thing though. While I was busy finding people to talk with about garden failures, several other people came up to me to tell me that they liked my shirt:


Funny how I can apply that to other things in my life like dancing and kitchen experiments, but not to others. I really need to learn to spread it around ;-)