August Garden Progress

After a fairly rainy July, it's been hot and dry so far this August. In addition to using the drip sprinklers, I've been going out with the hose in the evenings to make sure the veggies get enough water -- and a chance to cool down after the very hot days!

I wouldn't say this is the most productive garden I've had, since our balcony container gardens were always extremely productive per square foot. But I've had a steep learning curve with gardening in CO, plus far more inconsistent weather patterns! We have had some gorgeous tomatoes though, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else is a success in the garden this year.

Melons on the outside of the breakfast nook. We've had lots of little flowers, but I can't tell if any melons are actually growing yet.

Corn and pumpkins growing along the back fence. I tried beans too, but so far they've all fried in the hot afternoon sun.

Baby pumpkin!

One set of potted tomatoes and marigolds. The marigolds help attract pollinators and make it pretty!

I had a bunch of volunteer sunflowers in one corner of the yard.

Our row of marigolds, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants along the side fence.

Black tomatoes

The eggplants had a very slow start, but suddenly they're growing and some have these little purple flowers. Maybe I'll have some successful eggplants after all?

I don't know what this perennial bush is, but it attracts a lot of bees so I like it!

We had some volunteer plants in the sandbox, and it turns out they're tomatillos! Since my current plan is to turn the sandbox into a raised bed anyway, I'm letting them grow where they are. We'll see if they're any good.

That's where we are with our garden. If you garden, what's growing well for you? And if any readers have advice for gardening on the Front Range I'd love to hear it!

June Garden Progress

I know I keep talking about the adjustments in moving from California to Colorado, but wow it's been different learning to garden here! Sean and I used to have a fairly productive patio container garden that would last from early spring (March) to late fall (sometimes into November). Well, here it is totally different!

Our neighbors keep saying that the weather this year has been unusually wet and cold. We don't have anything to compare it to, but the average last frost date is around Memorial Day which seemed late to me! And this May was one of the wettest on record for our area, so between the cold, damp and potential for hail we didn't get a chance to get much planting done until the first weekend of June. And even so we lost some tomato starts, so I replaced them with sturdier starts from the local nursery. Here are some images of what we have growing in the garden:

The raspberry canes we put in this spring are leafing out. From what I've read we probably won't have a big raspberry harvest this year, but it should be better next year.

I think I've finally found a fence that deters the bunnies from chomping on my strawberries, but that I can still step over in order to get in there to weed and harvest! In this patch we have strawberry plants, spinach, and sugar snap peas up against the fence.

I have one hot serrano pepper in a pot.

This is the old raised bed from the previous owners. Next year I want to tear it out and replace it with an herb spiral that will look beautiful even in the winter. For now though, it is overgrown with mint!

I planted alternating tomatoes, bell peppers and eggplants along the fence line, with marigolds in between to attract pollinators and provide some beauty. The bunnies also seem to prefer the marigolds over the tomatoes, so I guess that's good?

Foxglove against the trellis hiding my compost bin -- more on that project tomorrow!

The perennial bushes are actually prettier than I was expecting!

The roses against the garage started growing again after a very violent pruning on my part.

The perennial beds in the front yard attract lots of bees!

We placed some terra cotta pots with rosemary on either side of the front porch. An attractive way to sneak edibles into the front yard!

That's the current state of our yard. I'm looking forward to all of the vegetables and herbs really starting to grow and fill out. All that plain mulch has gotten pretty boring, I'm ready for a lush, edible landscape!

Street Market Finds

This last Saturday, Sean and I went to a street market held at one of the local shopping centers. It was a mix of antique fair, flea market and craft fair all rolled into one. We came away with some pretty cool pieces.

An antique mirror for the front entry. I love that the silver backing on the mirror is wearing away in a few places, so it has that great antique mirror feel while still giving a useful reflection.

A cool washboard. I've never seen one with both copper and aluminum before. The dealer also said it was a rare find. I've been wanting some interesting things for the laundry room, so this was a great score.

Hundred year old sheet music. What am I going to do with it? I don't know yet. But I couldn't resist $4 sheet music dated from the 1910s. (One of them has pencil markings from 1913!)

Old flight map of Panama. Very cool. This will probably get framed in the guest room, along with an antique map of France that I found on one of our trips to Golden.

It was a fun morning, and I'm looking forward to finding the perfect places in the house for each of these very cool finds!

Sketch a State: Maryland/DC

While staying in Maryland, we spend an afternoon in DC. Sean, Laurel and I went to the Smithsonian Botanical Gardens together and then had lunch. After we ate, we split up: Laurel went to the Museum of Natural History; Sean went to the Air and Space Museum; and I went to the National Gallery.

I love being in art museums alone. It gives me time to decompress and appreciate the things I find beautiful. I spent a bit of time sketching different paintings I loved, and then I sketched a woman who was copying one of the paintings.

Sketch a State: Pennsylvania

We left New York joined by my sister Laurel, and drove down to the DC area to visit my great-uncle and great-aunt. We only stopped in Pennsylvania to eat lunch and get gas, and didn't even leave the toll road to do that, so I was only able to get a sketch of some of the scenery:

Sketch a State: New York

One of our big stops along our road trip was in Westfield, New York, where my mom's family lives. We had a wonderful visit, and I loved showing Sean around as he experienced western New York for the first time.

Because so much of our time was spent with family, I didn't get my Westfield sketch in until we were getting gas on our way out of town:

Sketch a State: Ohio

Ohio was another state we passed through, but didn't get to really stop and experience. So, another day of sketching while Sean drove:

Sketch a State: Indiana

In Indiana we stayed very close to the Notre Dame campus. We had dinner at Legends, the sports bar near their stadium, and then took a nice walk around campus. It's very beautiful, and we saw a lot of bunnies, ducks and fireflies. I sat and sketched a building that intrigued me: it had a Renaissance revival dome on top, but the bulk of the building itself looked like a typical Victorian Gothic revival brick classroom building. The mix-up of styles, plus batting away mosquitoes, made it hard to get the right proportions in the ribbed dome but I think it still captures my mental image of the building.

Sketch a State: Illinois

After leaving Iowa, we drove through Illinois. We didn't have time for a long stop, so I experimented with sketching while Sean drove.

Sketching while moving past the scenery at highway speeds is not easy, but you can get a feel for some of the barns we drove past that day. And of course, since Sean was mostly stationary, I sketched a quick profile of him.

Sketch a State: Nebraska

It's been a few weeks since I've posted on the blog, but I'm back to my state sketches from our July road trip. Today: Nebraska.

We drove through the entire state of Nebraska in one day, waking up in Cheyenne, Wyoming and going to bed in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a very long day of driving, but we took a nice break at Mormon Island Recreation Area to walk, sketch, swing and see chipmunks.

Sketch a State: Wyoming

After leaving Salt Lake City, we drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming. We had a delicious steak dinner, since Wyoming is beef country. Then we went to the Cheyenne Botanical Gardens to walk around and spend some time in nature after all those hours in the car.

While sitting and trying to sketch the geese (animals are a constant challenge for me because they move so much!) we met a woman and her two year old daughter. We started chatting, and the little girl wanted to help me draw. At first I tried to get her to draw on the blank back of the page before this goose, but naturally the pencil wandered. I figured it wasn't a very good goose anyway, and the memory that this page brings is better than if she hadn't helped!

Sketch a State: Utah

Our second stop on our road trip was Salt Lake City, Utah.

We stayed with cousins for two nights, and spent a full day exploring Salt Lake City on our own. We walked around Temple Square, and took tours of the Beehive House, 26th floor observation deck of the LDS office building and of the LDS Conference Center. We had lunch in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, and I sat and sketched in the (air conditioned) lobby while Sean took care of some calls.

Sketch a State: Nevada

These past few weeks, Sean and I have been on an amazing cross country road trip! Over the next few weeks I'll be blogging about some of the different parts of this trip.

One of my goals for this trip was to stop and take a moment to sketch in every state we visited. It's all part of our all-in-one travel journal, which I'll explain in a bit more detail in another post. Today, I want to start off what I'm calling my "Sketch a State" series with our first stop, Nevada!

The first night of our trip, we stayed in a little ghost town called Unionville. A sweet old lady and her son run a bed and breakfast there, and it was a fun adventure to start off our cross country trip. We took my Civic up a tiny gravel and dust road (poor car was so dusty, you could barely see that it's blue!) and had a wonderful night away from modern civilization.

The sketch above is from our first cabin, overlooking the empty desert valley. Not long after I did this sketch, the well pump bound up and we weren't able to get water in the cabin anymore. We moved to a guest room in the owner's sister's house, and had a different but wonderful evening. The B&B really was astounding in its hospitality.

Apricots Again

This past weekend we were back out in the orchards with Village Harvest. I wrote about the apricot harvest we did with them last year here. This year Sean and I went to a different apricot orchard than the one we went to last year; this one was actually inside an old cemetery! It was beautiful, and the trees were really bountiful. I didn't catch the exact amount of apricots that we sent to the local food bank, but I think we were well over 1000!

And, as usual, Sean and I came home with about 30 pounds of apricots ourselves. Unlike most harvests, where we come home with imperfect fruit that is either bird-pecked, over ripe or under ripe, this time we came home with a lot of absolutely perfect fruit. The trees had dropped a lot over the last week, and due to various levels of liability, "ground fruit" cannot be donated. But as long as you give it a good washing, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

I didn't take as many pictures of what we did with our apricots this year, because a picture of apricot jam is a picture of apricot jam. But here's a list of what we made this year:

• apricot turnovers
• apricot jam (12 half-pint jars)
• apricots in spiced syrup (6 pint-and-a-half jars & 4 pint jars)
• dried apricots

these were some of our apricot creations last year

We still have a mixing bowl of apricots in the fridge too, waiting for me to come up with a use for them. I could run them through the dehydrator after the current batch of dried apricots is finished, I could make more jam, I could freeze them, add them to smoothies...

What are your favorite ways to use apricots? Share them in the comments!

We Have Compost! Worm Update

I think it's time for an update on our super cheap DIY worm bin, don't you?

Despite some hiccups as we got the hang of maintaining the correct moisture level in the bins, we have had success! A couple months ago the first bin was getting pretty full, so we decided to rest it (that's when you stop adding new material so you force the worms to finish off everything that is in there and turn it into nice compost). I made a second worm bin (same method as my first) and transferred about two dozen worms in there so that we could keep composting our kitchen scraps while the first bin rested. I continued to turn the compost so that it didn't get too damp or packed down, but otherwise tried to leave the resting bin alone. And this past weekend, it looked done!

To sort out the useable compost and get the worms back into a worm bin to do more composting for us, I dumped the finished bucket into a large empty planter pot. Then, handful by handful, I put good stuff into another pot, things that need more time back into a worm bin, apricot pits that somehow made it in went to another pail (the worms can't eat them so they just take up space) and worms themselves got tossed back into the two worm bins.

Here's a nice fat worm:

And here is some good compost being sorted:

Now we're letting the second bin rest, while we continue to feed worms in the first once again. 

I'm very happy with how this experiment has been working out. I wish we had room for a larger worm bin, since especially on big canning days the worms can't handle all of our scraps. But it's certainly better than nothing, and these little guys divert the majority of our kitchen waste from the garbage, instead turning it into wonderful food for our veggie plants. And on a normal (non-canning) week, we really only need to take the kitchen garbage out if there's packaging from raw meat in there! I think this means that when either our complex gets green waste pickup, or we get a house with large compost capabilities, we will definitely be able to bring kitchen waste close to zero. Yay!

I'd love to hear from anyone who has experience with worm bins -- any great advice or stories? Please share!

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Recap: Summer 2013

It's the end of summer break. Sean is back at school tomorrow, and I start again on Monday. Although summer was a bit anticlimactic since he has a regular job and I had a fairly regular internship, it's still a bit sad to get "back to the grind" and a bit scary to think that soon we'll be dealing with proposing and doing our master's theses! But before real life takes over again I thought I'd take some time to reflect on how much fun we did have this summer despite "grown up" work schedules.

We volunteered with Village Harvest, picking oranges, apricots, apples and more. We made jams, preserves, applesauce; baked bread, turnovers, cake and cookies. As Sean's interest in where food comes from grew, so did his confidence in the kitchen. After years of having a hard time cooking together, we truly enjoyed cooking and baking together this summer!

Our balcony garden was fairly successful, giving us beautiful plants and a decent amount of food.

We spent time in beautiful Monterey...

...and celebrated our first anniversary under the gorgeous redwoods of Felton (in the Santa Cruz mountains).

We went on lots of hikes, and checked off a few state parks on our list. (On our honeymoon we made a goal of visiting each of California's state parks together while married. At our current rate, we'll finish around our 40th anniversary.)

We spent time with friends, hosting dinners and attending dinner parties. We went to a play, the aquarium, and our own local parks. We spent some great time with both families, everything from my sister's graduation in June to relaxing pool time with Sean's sisters.

It was a wonderful summer. Here's to an equally amazing fall!

And Then We Made Applesauce...

We had another great harvest with Village Harvest last weekend. If you remember from my post about apricots, Village Harvest is a nonprofit that harvests food that would otherwise go to waste, and donates it to community food banks and shelters.

Sunday morning, a group of about a dozen volunteers picked Gravenstein apples at the Phleger Estate (part of the Golden Gate Parks system). According to our great liaison with the park system, these Gravenstein apple trees were planted in the 1930's. There were only six Gravenstein trees, but old trees are huge and produce lots of fruit. Five of us worked on the biggest tree for nearly the entire 3 hour picking time. And all told, 975 pounds of Gravenstein apples were donated to a local food bank. Wow!

 these buckets just hold the "volunteer fruit" rejects - we were so busy loading the good fruit into the van that we missed the chance to take a picture of what 975lbs looks like

The rest of the orchard is full of other apple varieties, most of which will ripen in the fall. I can't wait to go back to this beautiful park later this year.

Gravenstein apples are one of those varieties you never really see in stores. They bruise incredibly easily, so make shipping difficult. They also mature mid to late summer, rather than during the fall harvest. They are a good apple for baking and making applesauce.

Because of how easily the Gravensteins bruise, there were a lot of "volunteer fruit." That means anything that might still be useful, but is unsuitable to send to the food bank. We were sent home with 32 pounds of apples -- and just like those apricots from last month, they all had to be processed immediately. What better way to preserve imperfect apples than by making applesauce?

 32 pounds of apples

First we had to wash all these apples, many of which had fallen on the ground at the orchard (which is open to redwoods and home to deer and other wildlife). Best way to wash pound after pound of apple? Fill the sink with water and a little white vinegar, dump them in and start scrubbing!

It took the rest of the day for Sean and me to peel, chop, and process all of the apples into applesauce and spiced apple preserves. We ended up with 11 pints of applesauce, 12 half-pints of spiced apple preserves, and a few tiny cans of applesauce that are perfect for lunches. Not pictured below are some more tupperware containers full of applesauce that went straight into the fridge -- we actually ran out of empty canning jars on this one!

In addition to applesauce and preserves, Sean decided to make an apple pie. He used Martha Stewart's recipe, and it was delicious! He sure does spoil me with his new found baking obsession!

We were so eager to eat the pie that we forgot to take a picture of it after baking. Trust me, it was delicious!

What are your favorite ways to cook with apples? Please share any great ideas, as we head into the fall apple season!

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