SURPRISE!

I made a discovery yesterday while I was watering. I just happened to glance down at my flowerbed (the landscaping the builders installed that I've hardly messed with) and noticed a beautiful green plant growing. We have a fair amount of clover, dandelions, and miscellaneous weeds growing all over our yard, and this didn't look anything like them.  So I did a double take, then leaned over for a closer look. Finally this morning, I rinsed off a leaf and tasted it.  ARUGULA! 

The biggest arugula I've ever grown and it was a complete accident, growing in compacted, clay soil that I assumed wouldn't grow anything worth a lick.  The powdery stuff around it is a mix of cornmeal and diatomaceous earth that I poured over some anthills.

This is the arugula bed that I planted on purpose in between my dormant raspberry and blackberry bushes.  It's doing beautifully (though now that I've seen how monstrous arugula can get, my opinion of this bed is tempered slightly), and I pick leaves and whole plants on an almost daily basis to add to pizza, eggs, and salads.

When planting, I've often dusted my hands off over the flowerbed, wondering absently if any random seeds would take hold.  But I've never gone to the trouble to check.  After taste-testing my surprise arugula  (with Evan watching me doubtfully), I went back out to the flowerbed to scan for other lettuce-type leavings. 

I should say that none of my lettuce is growing well in containers or in my backyard bed.  I'm beginning to pinpoint the mistakes that I've made.  And now I'm wondering if I should just broadcast seeds in my front flowerbeds, careful planting and soil preparation be hanged.  There are three plants here that I'm pretty sure are some kind of mesclun.  They look similar to dandelion leaves, until you put them side by side.  I ate one a small leaf (with Evan still looking highly skeptical), and it tasted fine - really mild with not even a hint of bitterness.  After a little more research, we might have some free. yummy salads for dinner... assuming I can talk my husband into some entry level foraging.

Put to Good Use

My new compost crock...

is actually my mother's old bean pot, which I've always loved.  My mom used it to hold sausage balls for community meals, and that's all I've ever done with it, too.  Until this morning, I had it sitting on top of my cabinets next to a ceramic rooster and an old oyster tin for decoration.  

For five years, I've been re-purposing plastic containers (usually margarine tubs or milk jugs) to hold my veggie scraps.  Not the most aesthetically pleasing choice, but being free and reused counts for a lot in my book.  However, I'd finally decided I could justify buying a more attractive container as a permanent fixture next to my sink.  It only occurred to me yesterday that I had the perfect crock right under my nose!

Hunting for Inspiration

I see yards and landscapes differently now as I drive around.  Wide open lawns just seem like wasted spaces where neighborhoods could grow so much food!  And beautifully, too!  As much as I love my gardening books, I love seeing the way "real" people garden next door and down the street.  It inspires me to see what is possible, what can be grown successfully in my climate, how small and odd spaces can be used.  This weekend, I drove around to some points of inspiration in my neighborhood.

This entire carport is so beautiful! Proof that small and odd spaces can be transformed, giving people without gobs of land a way to grow food.

There wasn't much growing here at this point in the year, but the remnants are still inspiring. This twisty raised bed is in the middle of a typical Fort Worth front yard.

 My picture does not do this yard justice. This home is on our trick-or-treating path, and is the real-life yard-garden that finally made Evan a believer in beautiful, edible front-yard landscaping.

 

I have a lot of work ahead of me and a long way to go in re-imagining and re-purposing our yard into a productive, edible space.  My two current gardening book favorites are "Edible Landscaping" by Rosalind Creasy and "The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden" by Ivette Soler.  And I'll keep hunting for more local inspiration.

Silly me

I was under the laughable impression that colder weather would mean I didn't have to battle pests for a little while.

 

This morning I decided to take a close look at my backyard pea plants. I'd noticed some yellowing around the base of the plant, which was the beginning of the end for my peas last year. So I perched on the edge of my raised bed in a very unladylike squat and began peering through the leaves.

Aaaargh! The dreaded discovery of pest leavings!

I plucked off the worst bitten leaves to take a closer look... flipped one over... Can you see that tiny little green worm?

Hello, who do we have here?

I take great, and I suppose sadistic, pleasure in disposing of bad bugs. I have not arrived at the point where I can smile benevolently at these pests and acknowledge their place in the world. No sirree. We squish bugs at our house with fervor.

I'm still figuring out what I'm dealing with - cabbage worms, cutworms, or something like. In the meantime, I've sprayed Neem as thoroughly as I can, I'm going to go handpick bugs off of every leaf during the baby's nap, and then I'm going to consider cornmeal traps, DE and an investment in nematodes or something.

Let the battle begin!

In happier news, my broccoli plant is growing.  I'm determined to learn to grow things from seed, and so far most of the things I direct sow grow at a miserably slow pace.  But I can actually see progress in the broccoli and it makes me happy.

Tree Trimming

We have a small backyard.  I'm actually love it, because it's so much easier to manage than our former backyard.  To be so small though, we have quite a lot of trees. The men in the family tackled the overgrown beast in the corner last week, turning our backyard into a temporary jungle.

My fledgling hydrangeas got a bit trampled in the process, but at least the tree is under control.



And it's amazing how much that corner of the yard has opened up.  We still have 7 hackberry (I think) trees to trim, thus the dappled shade you see here.

Sometimes I think the way I talk about our landscape makes it sound way more glamorous than it is.  I guess that's because it feels glamorous to me.  I find so much peace sitting on our porches, or toodling around the yard watching my plants grow by miniscule degrees, or watching the kids play.  Especially as I think about all the people on the East Coast today struggling to piece their lives back together after that horrible storm, I'm very grateful for my little peaceful patch of land.

Winter is coming

It's been a busy few weeks for me, both in the garden and in our house.  At the moment, we're enjoying a true day of rest.  I'm sitting on our porch swing listening to the breezes and reveling in the chillier weather.  I love colder weather, so the larger part of me is rejoicing.  But the other part is glancing around worriedly at my plants wondering what will survive the coming winter months.  I've heard rumors that our complete lack of winter last year is leading towards an especially icy one this year.  I'll believe it when I see it.

I had a friend over to watch one of the presidential debates last week.  We ended up drinking a bottle of wine and talking permaculture, which was so much better than talking politics.  We stood around my yard long after the debate was over, tossing around ideas for my land.  As in most things, a fresh set of eyes is so helpful.  She glanced over at the retaining wall dividing our house from the neighbors' and suggested that I try putting tomatoes beside it.  In the spring. 

I was too excited at the idea of another edible-friendly growing place in my limited landscape to wait for spring.  So I went out the next day and bought a raspberry and a blackberry bush at a 75% discount and made a berry bed.  I told my friend later that I felt like she'd told me where to dig for gold.  The grass hadn't grown well in that particular spot, which made me so happy.  The fewer battles I have to fight with bermuda the better.  Instead, the ground was covered with a natural layer of leafy mulch and clover, and the soil was full of earthworms. 

I've always wanted to grow berries, and I didn't think I'd ever have a place for them on my own land.  And let's be honest, they still might not grow.  We have several beautiful (and annoying) crepe myrtles that provide so much wonderful (and super annoying) shade.  The unfortunate placement of a sprinkler head forced me to move the bed down further into the occasional shade of the house.  And on top of all that, I have no experience growing berries, and they may not survive my learning curve.  But it makes me happy that I have a place to try.

I removed what ground cover was there, put down a good bit of peat moss, mushroom compost and regular compost.  I mulched around the plants and watered in some liquid humus in an attempt to further improve the soil. (As good as it was in comparison to the rest of my soil, it still needs some help.)  Then I decided to plant some arugula and lettuce in the wide open spaces around the berries.  Gideon helped me plant this arugula (in a very haphazard fashion), and it's required a lot of thinning.  I took some bites of the seed leaves during thinning... mmm, spicy and delicious.  There's really nothing like eating what you've grown yourself, even if it's barely a mouthful.

I dug up these two huge rocks while I was preparing the bed.  I'm not sure what Gideon and his stick were trying to accomplish with them, but he was working hard and happy.

Pea planting

I'm really focusing on peas these days. They're supposed to be easy to grow, and it's the season for them. So I'm shamelessly trying to boost my gardening ego with a bumper crop of snow peas and shell peas. In the meantime, I'm thoroughly enjoying the look of the bamboo tepees in our flower beds. Thank you Garden ridge clearance.

Ants are still fighting to occupy my east-side porch planter. I planted in spite of them and managed to avoid any bites. I'm trying cornmeal again as an organic control, but my confidence is shaky that it will work. I've heard coffee grounds, baby powder and diatomaceous earth are also effective ant controls, all of which I have easy access to. We have a pretty huge ant problem throughout our landscape, so I may have robust organic experiment on my hands.

Daily tasks

I try not to think about all the things I want to accomplish with our landscape too often. It's overwhelming. Instead, I try to do one, maybe two things everyday toward those goals. And it might be something as little as cleaning out one container, thinning out seedlings, or succession planting one pot. Gardening is such a constant and evolving process, but I still think I take more steps forward than back.  

Gideon is my gardening buddy. As long as he can carry a shovel, he's ready to go. Today, he helped me say goodbye to my brandywine tomato vine. I had high hopes for it, which didn't pan out. In spite of how pitiful it looks now, especially after an incredibly hot summer of neglect, it represents my first season as a gardener.  Call me cheesy, but I'll always remember it with special fondness.  I harvested the remainders of basil and emptied out the pot completely. Now to decide what to grow next...

My peas are coming up beautifully. The growth from one day to the next is amazing to watch. Mulching them is on my to do list for the next day or two. 

Wednesday

Sunday

The carrots that I'm still pretty sure I'm growing out of season and in too much shade, all came up.  They need to be thinned out, which is a quick task. I'm hoping if I keep Gideon involved in their progress, he'll want to eat them. Assuming they grow to an edible size.

The lettuce patch looks pathetic. Here I'm trying to grow Black Seeded Simpson, loose leaf lettuce and bib lettuce... and swiss chard, kale and broccoli.  It may be hard to see, but all the seeds came up except for one planting. So I get to sow more seeds - score.  :) I love planting. In the grand scheme of gardening, planting seeds is such a small task and also one of my favorites. Nothing happens without the actual planting! I'm really hoping I'll have an amazing progress picture in a few weeks to remind me not to give up on the little things.

This is the only tomato vine that I actively kept alive through the summer (see Shady Seconds). And it still has a handful of tomatoes growing and ripening. I'm going to enlist the husband in moving this whole wonky arrangement to the front yard where a little more sun might help the harvest.  He just loves it when I say, "I need your help with something..."  It almost always means heavy or awkward lifting of some kind, and three times more time commitment than I originally guarantee.  Because once he helps me with this, there's always something else to do.  :)

And the best task of all for today, harvesting something we can actually eat! Everyone's been waiting for me to finish blogging so that I can fix breakfast.  Arugula, I'm coming to get you.
 

Harvestable size. And succession planting success! If you look really close.

Here goes nothin!

I have planted a lot of seeds! My peas are already peeking out, and I'm crossing my fingers that I start seeing kale, spinach and lettuce in the next day or two. And I'll be honest, I planted several things that may be totally out of season, and I just decided what the heck. Let's find for ourselves why you don't plant carrots and sunflowers in the fall.

I'm checking out gardening and landscape books from the library again by the score. I see these beautiful containers overflowing with colorful veggies and herbs, and it's hard to imagine I could ever produce something like that.

One step at a time. Today my only steps:

1) trying to eradicate fire ants from our flower beds and the big container I want to put more snow peas in.

2) finding a way to raise my other large container off the ground so that it might actually drain.

Return to the dirt

After harvesting the remains of my first container garden (garlic, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce), I pretty much abandoned all thoughts of gardening for the rest of the summer. It was just so hot. Like 105 degrees and up hot. For days and weeks on end.

I can still hardly believe the cooler temperatures and the rain we're getting. After three days in the low 90's in mid-September, I looked at my husband and announced that fall had finally come and I was ready to plant arugula. For my part, I was so relieved to find that my love for this whole gardening thing had only been hibernating. My husband on the other hand... well, his eyes kind of glazed over. Just like when I bring up scrapbooking. When I start pulling out all my papers, pictures, tools and stickers, he takes a deep breath and just tries to stay out of my way.  The albums themselves are great, but he has no interest in the creative chaos that creates them. He tolerates my gardening hobby much the same way. I guess I'm the little red hen, only I don't mind sharing the fruits of my labor with the dog, the cat and the duck. 

So, I ended up planting two containers each of arugula and mesclun lettuce, and one large container of black-seeded simpson leaf lettuce.  I wanted to plant two of these leaf lettuce containers, but I discovered that an ant invasion had overtaken my other one.  I'm still figuring out what to do there.  Stupid ants.

I'm much more willing to experiment, and potentially fail, this time around.  Last season I read books, blogs and iPhone apps at every step of establishing my garden. Before planting each seed, I consulted at least three sources on spacing, companion plants, watering and potential problems. I wanted to be successful, and and that meant doing it perfectly. No mistakes, no dead plants, bountiful harvest.

Fortunately, I failed a lot. I made plenty of mistakes, and I had a very modest harvest. Now maybe I can just garden and enjoy the lessons, failures and successes along the way.

Figuring out what to do with the pre-existing dirt in my containers has been interesting. Here's arugula I planted in a mix of about 1/3 old dirt and 2/3 new dirt.  I don't even remember the exact blend of compost, blood & bone, mushroom compost, vermiculite and perlite I used.  See, I'm loosening up a little.  And chalking up my first failure of the season.  Each seedling is gradually shriveling up and dying.  I probably should have dumped out the whole pot, rinsed it with some kind of vinegar solution and started fresh.  But when you're working around a baby's nap of unpredictable length and you just wanted to get something planted, well, you just do the best you can with what you have.

I planted this arugula at the same time in a new, never-been-used pot with a fresh soil mix, and it's doing beautifully.  Every once in awhile when I'm watering, I catch the spicy scent of arugula, and I almost swoon.  Success!  I'm watering 2 or 3 times throughout the day, trying to keep the soil moist and bitterness out of the harvest.  At some point, I'll have budgeted and planned enough to invest in self-watering containers, since the DIY self-watering water bottles of last year didn't work so well. I've closed off 5 out of 6 drainage holes in these containers with duct tape this time around, and I collect the water from the remaining drainage hole in an old sour cream container.

In spite of the lack of recommended sunlight, I'm attempting a raised bed/lasagna garden in the backyard with cinder blocks I had on hand. I used the same spot my kids' first garden had been occupying; the weed cloth had kept out most of the bermuda, so it seemed a good place to start. My three year-old and I layered earthworms, thick layers of cardboard, veggie-scraps, mushroom compost, and two bags of soil mix. When October's budget roles around (hallelujah, that's tomorrow), I'm going to get 20 more blocks and some bags of organic soil mix.

We're planting snow peas.  And hopefully lots of other things, but peas are the priority. 

 

Apparently, earthworms like living under cinder blocks. My three year-old and I dug up a bucketful to transplant from the old resting places of these blocks. Frankly, this was a fun afternoon project even if the earthworms don't survive the transition. Digging in the dirt with this little guy was a blast.

Shady Seconds

At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to migrate my cherry tomato vines to the shade of the backyard.  They'd stopped setting fruit because of the heat, and I was complaining about how much we miss our front porch cherry tomato pickings.  My friend said that if I could keep the vines alive through the summer, they'd bear fruit again in the fall.  As hard as I worked to grow the things from seed in the first place, I would love to milk them for all their worth!  After evaluating my vines, two of the four seemed too diseased to bother with, and the remaining hanging bag tomato was happy and shady enough.  I decided to re-pot the only other candidate. 

Lo and behold, she might set fruit in a few weeks!  Right now the pot is getting only a few hours of morning sun, but the vine is a beautiful, happy green with new growth!

I've also been thrilled too see one of my sweet pepper plants battling back.  I'm sure I'm showing my rookie stripes, but I was under the impression that my harvest there was done.  I pulled up all the garlic I was growing around the perimeter of my pepper boxes weeks ago, and pretty well quit watering the poor little plants!  When my husband told me there were a handful of new pepper blossoms on the porch, I didn't believe him.  Shows how much I know.

I went to the lovely community garden today to check on our plots, where I haven't been able to invest nearly the time and energy I would like.  But I was able to pick some beautiful, deep orange sun sugar tomatoes and pull up one square foot batch of garlic.  I planted a lot of garlic this year.  I love the stuff.  The garlic in my container garden stayed pretty small, but the garlic in our raised beds did pretty well... at least in comparison.  :) 

Our community garden is seriously awesome.  It even has chickens now!  Which means I can't stop at the garden anymore with the kiddos unless I'm ready to spend at least 5 minutes in the chicken coop.

Check out this sunflower.  It's 12 feet tall or I'm smurf.  I've heard that sunflowers draw up toxins from the soil, besides just providing yummy seeds.  But nothing is more impressive to me than the insane heights they reach. 

And here's the sad reality that is my watermelon vine... it had some blossoms last week, but I'm not holding out much hope at this point for fruit.  I just haven't been able to keep up with watering it.  I weeded last week with a vengeance, but they're all creeping back.  I'm wondering if it's too late to put down some newspaper and mulch...  my efforts at the community garden this year are rocky combination of honest, rookie effort and over-extended-mommy-doing-the-bare-minimum-to-grow-something.  Which means I probably won't make it over there with newspaper.  Or harvest a melon this year.  Did I mention that it was 110 degrees today?

Speaking of which, I'm going to try growing melons in the areas of my backyard where I had deemed the hours of sun inadequate.  In north Texas heat, a little shade (and backyard access for consistent watering's sake) might be just what the doctor ordered.

Poor little plant...

Ripening

Watching my tomatoes and peppers turn colors has been enthralling.... it's miraculous in a way.  The next time I need a miracle, maybe I'll just walk around a farm.  This is the first day I saw my brandywine tomato start to turn.  I can hardly wait to eat it.

Follow the Instructions

This is good advice actually.  How often do you hear people talking about how great it was when they DIDN'T follow instructions.  Let's be honest, usually it's the opposite, which is why spouses tell stories for years on each other for how catastrophically wrong things once went as a result of NOT following (or even) reading instructions.

Which is what I did (or didn't do...?) with our live beneficial nematode treatment and ladybugs.  Sigh.  To be fair, the ladybugs that I ordered on Amazon didn't even come with instructions.  So I should have looked some up!  As should anyone who wants live insect organic treatments for their gardens to actually set up shop and work.

Release them AFTER watering in the early morning or late at night.  And DON'T release them in the heat of the day.  I think those are the highlights.  Oh, and 10 or 11 am is NOT early morning.  Having a 2 month old baby who is actually letting you sleep in, is the best excuse I've ever had for not following these instructions... but I wasted about $60 total.  That's some expensive sleep time. 

 

I bought my nematodes at a fantastic local shop in Fort Worth called Elisabeth Anna's Old World Garden, who gave me great instructions, which I followed very poorly.  Wherever you get your nematodes, the instructions are the same.  Live beneficial insects are supposed to be an amazing help to organic gardening... hopefully, I'll be able to speak from experience on this next time I give them a whirl.  In the meantime, I'm an growing expert on what NOT to do.