10/14 Harvest

 Haha, keep those volunteer potatoes coming! I love it!

A Gardening First: Sunchokes

 Earlier this year, Kate scored a few little sunchoke plants from her local buy-nothing group. We planted them in the west bed by the house, and throughout the summer we've been impressed by their vegetative growth. It was exciting to see what these plants would do, since neither of us had grown them before. We were hoping for flowers, but never got any. They just kept growing taller and taller. And I had no idea what I was going to find when it came time to harvest.

These things are wild! These oddly shaped root vegetables are in the sunflower family, and they have an earthy, nutty flavor that's reminiscent of sunflower seeds. We sliced them up and roasted them, and wow! I've got a new favorite root vegetable. I can't wait to make this a staple in my diet. Apparently they're low calorie, very nutritious, and high in fiber. Sounds like a win to me.

10/4 Harvest

 

9/28 Harvest

 These are the biggest pumpkins I've ever grown, so I'm feeling a little proud. Also got more acorn squash, zucchini, and cucumbers.

9/22 Harvest

 

8/27 Harvest

 

Dinner: Quinoa Veggie Vegan-Cheese Stuffed Squashes

 

8/22 Harvest

 

Lots of Culinary Adventures

Harvesting and cooking and preserving is what this season is all about. Here are tonight's adventures in cooking:

Tonight's Dinner: My Favorite Strawberries and Stir-fry

Have you ever tried pineapple strawberries? Tiny and yellowish-white, they could easily be dismissed as unripened fruits if you don't know what you're looking at. I've grown them in previous years, and I'm excited because I didn't realize I had any left. At least one specimen must have still been alive in my random assortment of potted purgatory plants, and now it's spread into a whole patch next to the porch. The flavor in these wee strawberries is incredible, and it tastes just like the name says. I've been picking little handfuls every time I come in from the garden.

In other news, I harvested some zucchini, green beans, scallions, and herbs today and turned it into a stir-fry.

Overwhelm, Serendipity, and Today's Harvest

This year is surreal, and infuriating in so many ways. Death and illness and cruelty abound, and I'm grasping for a rock to cling to in the storm. I'm grateful to have a wife and a partner, and to have a little space to garden. I'm also grateful for our cats, who live up to their role as emotional support animals, even while they've been unwell.

Kate and I work almost every day on the mandala, and we take daily walks down our suburbish rural road for exercise. I cook and take care of the household while Caera goes to work at the crisis center. I still help with landscape maintenance at a Bellevue account a few times a month. Telehealth therapy every week. I continue to meet virtually with Camp Quest NorthWest, Stronger Together, and Rooted NW, though I don't feel I've contributed much to any of these groups in my current mental state. 

Is this the best use of my time in quarantine? Who's to say? I'm tired, and doing what I can to stay engaged. I've let parts of the garden do their own thing while I've focused on construction and hand-watering the plants every day.

The tomatoes have become a monstrous mass without pruning or staking, and I've let it go. However, I've got hope for our short corn stalks after we attempted to increase pollination by hand. The squash section is doing well, and the sunflowers keep getting taller. I'm amused at how the marigolds have become a trellis for the cucumbers, which was completely unexpected. I like it so much that I'm tempted to replicate it in the future. I also harvested some potatoes recently and made hashbrowns. That's the best I can do for now.

Zucchini Harvest

 Why do I ever grow more than one plant? As usual, we're harvesting more than we can hope to use. :P

Thank You, Blueberry

Happy Lughnasadh, everyone. I wish I had more to show for my gardening efforts, but it's been another challenging year with my physical and mental health, and I haven't been able to make as much progress as I would have liked. However, I was pleased to see that my neglected Peach Sorbet blueberry bush was loaded with fruit. I brought this bush home from the nursery five years ago, and it's unfortunately stayed in plant purgatory that whole time, despite my desire to get in the ground. I thanked it and said some kind words, which is not something I normally do. It's times like these when I remember why I fell in love with edible gardening.

First Harvest Meal

You know me, y'all. As soon as the first tomatoes ripen, it's Caprese salad time. I look forward to this so hard. Tomatoes are my favorite homegrown ingredients.

I just harvested a bunch of squash at the community garden, so I turned a few into a tasty...thing. :)

Donated to the food bank:

First Completed Season at Red Barn Community Farm

As the days get shorter and the harvest peters out, I can look back at our first completed season at Red Barn Community Farm with pride, humility, and some exhaustion. Caera and I worked hard on our 40'x40' plot, building six 4'x16' beds out of cinder blocks and wood, starting a bed for the hoop house, completing an entirely enclosed 16'x16' space for our berry patch, hauling in soil (that was an adventure in and of itself), amending the soil with compost and a fertilizer blend we mixed based on Steve Solomon's recommendation from Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, and planting lots and lots of seeds and starts. Over the summer, we also acquired a 275-gallon water tote, which we elevated for future use in a drip irrigation system. We had wanted to fence off our entire plot, as the deer were a persistent problem, but we couldn't get the materials fast enough. Nonetheless, despite our battles with deer, bugs, supply transportation, materials cost, out-of-control weeds, a summer-long drought, and a brutal wind storm, we had quite an impressive harvest.

 Let's take a look:

Jami riding the tractor.

Working the soil was tough, but we had a good attitude.

After many ridiculous trips back and forth between our home and the plot with buckets full of soil stuffed into our sedans, a friend let us borrow his truck to finish the job.

We hauled a lot of soil. Here we're in the process of filling up the berry patch.

Making soil angels in a half-built raised bed.

Fours beds complete, and starting to fill them...

Beds are finished, and seeds and starts are in the ground.

That's the berry patch in the background, and this bed with tomato starts will eventually be inside a hoop house.

Finished berry patch with chicken wire fencing, bird netting, and a simple PVC pipe gate.

Why do we need so much fencing? This is why. Unfortunately we put the berry plants in the ground before the fence was finished. The deer ate the developing fruit and a lot of the branches. They don't even care about proper pruning technique!

This is my sweetie Caera. She's very happy after supporting the LWIT plant sale.

This is Caera's first large-scale attempt at growing food. We're stoked to be working on it together.

The start of our flower bed.

Our flower bed took off! The pollinators loved it, and we brought home so many bouquets of cut flowers.

Our kitchen alter to the Irish goddess Airmed, with flowers and food from the plot.

Strawflowers have become a staple in my flower gardens. Xerochrysum bracteatum for the win!

Well-used moving boxes from last year. I think their final destination is appropriate: suppressing weeds in between our raised beds, decomposing into the earth.

Gooseberries that became deer snacks.

I set up two propagation stations in the laundry room.

Emerging seedlings.

The house we're renting came with a greenhouse. A lot of these plants were are from last year, and were neglected a bit while I was moving all the time. To my surprise, a lot of stuff came back.

A nice little pot of yarrow came back.

I thought all my perennials were goners after last year's moving chaos, but the Pagan Purples Delphinium popped up in the spring. Love the color.

I grafted my first apple tree during my 2013 hort class. Since then it's sadly remained unpruned, a bit neglected, and moving around from place to place in a pot. This year it started to fruit, and I let it just for funzies.

My boss at Ironwood gave me some mystery daylilies in the spring. Score! Don't they look delicious? I mean pretty?

I brought home some columbine for my sweetie. We grew it in a pot that's visible from our bedroom window.

Backyard pots.

Since this isn't our own property, we aren't able to do much landscape design. Container gardening is our compromise.

Back at the plot, we upgraded our two 55-gallon rain barrels to one 275-gallon water tote elevated four feet above the ground. My intention next year is to hook up a drip irrigation system.

My tomato bed turned into a hedge. Once again, this is what happens when you don't prune or stake your tomatoes.

My magic beanstalk is working. Next stop: Coin Heaven!

Flower power! (Okay, I'll stop with the Super Mario Bros. references.)

Towers of quinoa. First time growing this crop.

We had lots of colorful harvests.

So much food. This makes me happy.

Proud mother of twins.

Tomatoes and basil. You know where this is going. I'm sorry, is my Italian showing? ;P

Well-pollinated corn. This is a first for me.

Gardening is more fun with loved ones.

Herb garden.