Eating from the porch

I'm having a hard time finding time to blog.  Too busy living life and all.  :)  BUT we are finally enjoying the fruits of our labor in a literal way.  Tonight's supper was black beans, feta, lime and basmati rice wrapped in fulka roti, plus homegrown tomatoes and onions and garlic from the community garden.

I'm officially a fan of the upside-down tomato growers.  I have two hosting cherry-sized tomato plants, and the one on the shadier side of the porch is producing like gangbusters.  The one in the sun has been battling blight (I think), but is still providing a small handful of ripe tomatoes every day.

If we had to live off our harvest, obviously we'd starve.  We have the luxury of gardening simply for the joy of it.  And I've been enthralled with every ounce of our homegrown produce.  We've had good luck with mesclun and romaine lettuce, a total of four sweet peppers, handfuls of cherry and sun sugar tomatoes, and herbs (basil is my herbal obsession this year).  I'm still waiting to harvest the garlic, though I suppose I could pull it up in a pinch.

My pride and joy of the garden is my only surviving heirloom tomato... To anyone else I know the plant is spindly and pathetic, but I see honest effort, both on my part and that of the plant.  It's survived me, cutworms, slugs, flea beetles, inadvertant overwatering, and crazy Texas weather ... I will definitely save the seeds.

First Fruits!

I came back from a 4-day vacation last night and could hardly believe my eyes!  Two peppers have somehow evaded cutworm execution and the perils of my inexperience, and are truly growing.  Maybe when I'm a more seasoned gardener I'll be disappointed with the potential harvest of only two peppers, but right now I'm ecstatic.

My cornmeal bait traps (an idea I got from Good Bug, Bad Bug - see previous post) are somewhat effective... probably better than nothing.  Supposedly the cutworms are attracted to and eat the cornmeal, but are unable to digest it.  This is supposed to kill them.  But I'm unclear about how long it takes, and if it kills them before or after they move on to eat more of my plants.  I catch anywhere from one to four cutworms each day in each trap (I have three traps in various places at the moment), but still find a few cutworms on or around the plant as well.  My little trowel is bloodied with the green guts of countless cutworms.  In fact, you can see one on the underside of the leaf of garlic directly above the trap, which I didn't notice until I posted this picture.  Hilarious. 

My first tomato!  It'll be a red, cherry tomato before too long.

Early Indoctrination

I'm slowly working my way through every last gardening book at the library (or so my husband thinks), and a few weeks ago I picked up a great book by Jessica Walliser: "Good Bug, Bad Bug: Who's Who, What They Do, and How to Manage Them Organically in Your Garden."  My 2 year-old decided the book was awesome, too, and every day he looks at the pictures and asks questions.  He's become truly helpful outside, eagerly identifying aphids and cutworms so that he can dispatch them. 


Yesterday, I managed captured one of those moments that I delight in as a mom.  Gideon wanted to read to his baby sister.  And not just any book.  The "bug book."  He might not have all of his facts straight yet, but it was pretty sweet.  (Ignore my messy house.  I've been recovering from a tonsillectomy this week, so I was glad to simply have everyone occupied, fed and happy.)

Compost & Fruit Flies

I started composting 5 years ago, and every spring since then fruit flies have managed to find their way to my kitchen.  They irritate me the fire out of me.  I keep my kitchen clean (okay fine, as clean as I can with 3 kids adding to the messes as fast as I can deal with them), I carry the fruit and veggie scraps to the compost bin daily, I add more "brown" to the pile outside, etc.  It doesn't matter.  The fruit flies never totally go away.  

A few weeks ago, I saw an advertisement in my Gardener's Supply Company magazine for a $20 fruit fly trap.  The colorful pear shape is definitely an attractive solution to a nasty problem, but I'd rather spend that money on seeds, plants or tools.  So I poked around online and spent 2 minutes throwing together a trap that has worked amazingly well.  And didn't cost me a dime.

I used an old sparkling grape juice bottle, some apple cider vinegar, and a small paper funnel held together with one little piece of tape.  The funnel being small was key for me.  I jammed it into the bottle securely enough that it didn't require a seal of any kind.  My original funnel was made from an uncut 8x13 piece of paper, and it was apparently too tall for fruit flies to bother exploring.  I cut the funnel down to about 3 inches and started catching flies immediately.  It's been sitting innocently beside my sink for weeks now, has no odors like I was afraid it might, and is the ONLY place I find fruit flies in my entire house.  

Bright Spots

Look at those beautiful (almost) tomatoes! Seeing this one flower today, clustered with so many other tiny promises filled me with joy, wonder and hope I just can't describe.

Sweet Pepper Blossoms

Oh My!!  So that's what you look like little peppers!  Another explosion of wonder for Amy.  :)

This is my heirloom Brandywine tomato vine.  Just the name of this tomato makes my mouth water.  I've guarded and hoped for this plant more than any of the other 30+ seedlings I grew.  I'm beside myself with hope that I might actually see a tomato from it...

Poor little peppers...

The good news is, I'm now pretty positive that blossom end rot is NOT the thing nabbing my baby peppers.  (Have just looked up lifecycle of a pepper plant to confirm this; there's a great picture on this ehow link shows a new flower, old flower, and burgeoning fruit.)  Being my first season to watch food grow, it makes sense that I wouldn't know the difference between a blossom doing its job and a blossom meeting an untimely end on the vine.  The bad news, it is STILL those freaking cutworms.  This is what I picked up out of the dirt this morning.

Beautiful baby peppers.  GRR.  For every five cutworms I kill on an average outdoor smooshing escapade, I'm clearly missing twice as many.  These tiny peppers actually smelled like bell peppers, too.  What did I expect, right?  But I couldn't stop sticking my nose against the little things and inhaling the smell of food.  I never do that with food I buy at the grocery store.  But having nurtured these from a little plant, I was amazed by them. 

Eve and I have been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books together for several weeks now.  It was a perfect day for us to get to the "The Glittering Cloud" chapter of "On the Banks of Plum Creek."  I still remembered reading this chapter as a little girl and the devastation Pa felt at seeing his entire wheat croup devoured by grasshoppers with NOTHING he could do about it.  Today it provided a dramatic adjustment for my perspective about my garden on which our lives do NOT depend.  Having a (fledgling container) garden is a luxury for me, a hobby even.  I want it to thrive, and I would love to decrease our need for grocery story trips, even a little bit.  But we're a long way from that happening, and we're not going to starve or struggle in the meantime.  Here's to not taking food for granted!

Learning to flex

My grand ideas for growing vegetables at home came very close to never becoming any kind of reality.  After reading, researching, taking notes and making plans for months, I walked outside in January with a shovel and a game plan.  Because I'm the kind of person who generally likes to bite off way more than I can chew, I really was trying not to go overboard for our first season.   I was combining ideas from Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening," lasagna gardening, and "Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens" by Barbara Pleasant.  I had every intention of ripping out small sections of our brand-new bermuda sod while it was still mostly dormant, and laying out the beginnings of an edible back-yard wonderland.

And I quickly realized that the sun wasn't shining where I was going to start our garden.  And it was barely after noon.  No where in the backyard were we getting the minimum 6 hours of sunlight.  The phrase "my heart sank" comes to mind, but isn't quite dramatic enough to describe my sadness and disappointment.  I was completely crushed. And 8 months pregnant, which made it even worse.  Some good friends reminded me that the sun would fall differently in the spring, and that the crazy baby-making hormones might be affecting my judgment and magnifying my emotions.  

So I took a deep breath and started coming up with a Plan B. 

Solution #1
The front yard!  It gets plenty of sunshine, but there are several things to consider.  It's small, sloping, visible to neighborhood, and has problematic soil.  Raised beds are not an option.  In the long run, I'm still holding out for an edible front yard (I highly recommend the book "The Edible Front Yard" by Ivette Soler by the way) with revitalized soil, revamped landscaping and delicious flowerbeds.  But in the short term, I've thrown myself into container gardening.  I'm learning a lot.

Solution #2
The community garden.  This just makes me smile.  We have a beautiful community garden about one mile from our home, and my church reserved 3 plots this year.  For the fruits and vegetables I truly don't have room for yet, this has been the perfect solution.  The kids and I planted sets of 1015Y Texas Sweet Onions and garlic in January, and most recently a watermelon plant.  Having a 2-month old means I can't get over there very much to dig around and plant.  But this is the stage of life we're in!  We'll just do what we can.