trying to be patient.

i still have lots of work to do.

but.

is it spring yet?

i just harvested the last of my large dino kale and decided to make dino kale au gratin (yum).

& my one large cabbage head went into the sauerkraut. i've become obsessed with fermenting & microcultures overnight.

my fall garden wasn't big enough.

i still have some guys hanging on, waiting on the right weather to produce, and i think they will. broccoli, brussel sprouts, kohlrabi, rat tail radish, cabbage. though i'm not sure why i'm complaining since i've been harvesting lettuce, turnips, green onions and arugula weekly. and luffa, oh lord the luffa. from three vines grew a monster. i'm still messing with it (and i've started bathing with it too. it's fantastic!). i was warned not to cut the gourds off the vine until the stem at least, had turned brown. in the spirit of experimentation i cut a few (like 25) off too early and they have pretty much rotted. i did leave the rest on and have been harvesting them as they dry on the vine and they are perfect. i've sent a few to friends, and i've saved enough seeds to fit in a quart jar (maybe more), plus threw a few in the woods just for the heck of it. i want to try a different gourd next year but i'm having problems deciding which one....bushel basket, dipper, apple...baker creek seeds has "Bali Sugar Trough Gourd: 20" long and 8" in diameter" are you kidding me? i think we have a winner.

i have a few seed orders in, but i'm not done. yep, always getting ahead of myself.

so, i've been a bit distracted from the garden and my attention has been needed in the kitchen. my husband has had ongoing health problems and we recently learned of his allergies: wheat, soy, sesame, peanuts & scallops. this leaves the packaged foods on the shelves (where they belong anyway) and my butt in the kitchen (where i belong any.....just joking). i've been scrambling to bake the perfect wheat-free bread (doesn't really exist), and why they hell do they put soy in EVERYTHING? he also has high levels of aluminum...heavy metal poisoning....bye bye to my maw maw's magnalites, hello "i have no cookware." and on top of that, sally fannon's nourishing traditions has come into my life and smacked me upside the head. so while i adjust in the kitchen, the garden suffers a bit.

i have managed to set up those shipping crates and a perimeter, creating a path and all with bamboo stakes and butcher twine. my friends said it looked like i was doing voodoo out there. i've added a bit of organic material here and there, collected cardboard boxes and newspaper like a mad woman hellbent on never lifting a hoe. but i'm not where i wanted to be right now. i don't have a genius diy cold frame. i don't have my amendments. i only put in three new trees this past fall (tea tree in the ground! loquat #2 in the ground & mulberry was welcomed to the neighborhood). hopefully what i do have, is enough time (yes, that was a joke).

busy, busy.

this is the most exciting time of the year....getting ready for spring.



i do have some fall and winter crops growing, but the idea of NEW planting space is just too stimulating for this plant nerd. i actually got the husband out the otherday to help me cut trails. we did pretty good considering our meager tools. i'd like to cut out some clearings and cultivate mushrooms, but that's a long way down the road.



my best friend's dad works at a large construction equipment rental place. he has access to these shipping crates that they just....throw away. now this wood is not treated, and will not last forever, but they have hinges and they are stackable. he brought me some for my birthday. i'm still playing with them.....a kid with lincon logs.



i'll be spending all winter filling them up with organic matter so come spring, they'll be ready to plant in.



i did manage to get a mirliton in the ground and a few groundnut (apios americana) tubers too! yes....finally...groundnuts. i'm not sure if i'm going to build a trellis, or let them climb jerusalem artichokes. i figure i have a few months to decide :)

mirliton

the northeast of my "informal edible garden" is bordered with these beautiful blue crates. i am planning on filling most, if not all of the rest in this photo with asparagus crowns this spring.

malabar spinach

cold weather is greens weather

the first of many trails

oak leaf lettuce

annnd. all along the west wall, sugar cane grows. why don't more people do this?


moringa tree

a little clearing, under an ironwood tree, found in the back woods

FUN STUFF!

gardening tests your patience, nurtures your imagination, and rewards you based on hard work. i know there's so much more, but that's why i love it so. it's august time in louisiana. seeds reluctantly germinate, if at all. the lady flowers refuse to come out. it's cabin fever time, comparable to february in minnesota and my patience is being tested.

july update

well, let's see. I've started a few seeds in cups: purple broccoli and brussel sprouts. some cilantro and cape gooseberry too. Otherwise I've been tending to what I have and waiting patiently for fall!

I found a new use for an old frame.

My one pumpkin. I've seen two other female flowers and they both fell off. I'm just hoping it's the heat and as it cools a bit I'll have more fruit setting.

These cosmos attract the bumblebees like crazy!

new life for an old set of steps. they make a great plant stand...

and shelter for starting seeds.

i'm so glad i put in a couple of beds this summer, the backyard garden is really starting to get some depth to it.

fifi wanted a porch for her house. I put down newspaper, a piece of lattice, soil and white dutch clover seed.

ma'am peeking out through the basil.

early morning mantra

My daughter left to go out of town with her grandmother at five a.m. I decided to take advantage of the cool morning air (and the morning mosquitoes) and have a sit in the garden. I went empty handed, not even a camera followed, and just watched the sun turn on the lights in the sky, inch by inch. It wasn’t long, perhaps fifteen minutes passed, that I found myself thinking about how nice it was, to sit out in the garden and relax, without my camera. And of course, after that light bulb went off, all I could do was obsess over having my camera…. that and my kitchen twine and scissors. This gets me every time. I’ve been searching for an old mailbox to set up in my garden. I’d like to keep my kitchen twine, and scissors, and trowel and maybe some wire in it for close reach. No gloves though, because I’m terrified of black widows.

So, of course I get the camera. And of course, I forget the twine and scissors. After I took a few shots, I decided to take care of my luffa vine. I’ve never grown luffa. It’s one of those gourds I’ve always wanted to plant, but I never really had the gumption or the space while I was surrounded by the bounty of nursery retail goods. So I planted three. I mean literally, three seeds. No double dropping of the seed or any of that mess. Those three seeds came up with no problem, even the one I experimented with in the cinderblock hole (this is an on-going experiment, soon I’ll have a database file of all the plants that do well or fail in cinder block holes) looks exactly like the other two in the larger bed. Two of these guys have begun busting out of the seams of my humble 6 or 7 foot trellis fence. So, in comes the kitchen twine. Oh, how I love kitchen twine. I’ve used other tying elements in the garden, shoe laces, torn shirts, wire, jute, that expensive green twine you can buy in the nursery…but I’ve finally narrowed my favorite down to plain ol’ “stuff a chicken” kitchen twine. It’s cheap (family dollar, can ya holla), it’s biodegradable, and it expands with water and dangles in the breeze. I love cutting liberal amounts and just letting them hang like they are on some sort of veggie Mardi gras float. And they will just melt into my garden on their own time, like everything else is allowed to do.

luffa gone wild.

Once I get the luffa some extended horizontal space via the kitchen twine (I have no idea if they will take to the horizontal twinning, but I’m willing to aggressively help them reach their destination). I…take more pictures, and sit just a bit more until the humidity starts making it a little uncomfortable.

strawberry

pennyroyal & horseradish

watermelon flowers....i think i'm in trouble.

spearmint bloom

tea tree

Last year I allowed some of my tomatoes to mold and rot in the beds and I had a couple of volunteers come October. So when we had that uncharacteristically cold winter, they had no chance. This year, I’m going to try and allow some volunteers some room, and if they feel the need to grow, I’ll help them out a little with some sort of hothouse/cold frame set up. The thought of having fresh tomatoes in the winter is just too exciting. Plus, these guys look like some sort of jim Henson muppet, I can’t help but think they are cute.

her name is cherry

wolf berry

a very happy fig tree

best seat in the house

i wonder...

This bean teepee has been a wonderful tool as far as being a visual guide in the planning of paths and borders of my backyard garden, which I plan on filling up one step at a time. I have decided the placement of a garden gate/arbor/fence/path based on the teepee. It’s also helped concrete plans for a new pecan tree to center my two apples that need to go in the ground this fall. This will be west of the area and will add a little shade and texture to the edible landscape.

I recently read a blog post regarding garden plants you can buy at the grocery store. The two main plants mentioned were pineapple and ginger. I have wondered for years what type of ginger plant we get our yummy grocery ginger from. It’s been hard to find any information online, it seems like the butterfly ginger might be it, but I’m just not sure. I thought the best way to be sure would be to buy the rhizomes from the grocery store and plant them and see what happens. I extended the bean tee pee a bit today and did just that. I added a bit of white dutch clover seed in the bed. I started wondering, why everywhere I go that has been a long-time established yard has the clover it in, but my “yard,” that was cleared about 25 years ago and used as a cow pasture until about 5 or 10 years ago, had none. I started researching the white dutch clover and found out it’s a nitrogen fixing cover crop and some folks even have it as a lawn! I can’t imagine summers spent not making daisy chains from these flowers so I went online and purchased a large batch of the seed. I’ll plant a little patch here and there and hopefully it will establish itself well enough to stick around, like it seems to do everywhere else.

The sunflowers I planted have made quite a nice little stand next to the strawberry planter. I plan on painting the cinder block with a little moss/buttermilk mixture. It might only grow moss on the shady parts, but it will still be a project for my husband to laugh at!

Still, this little area has sparked my imagination a bit and I thought I’d place little objects my daughter could find, and be curious about. I found this little chair at a garage sale this week and thought it’d work great in the garden someplace incase a gnome needed a rest…. dill grows in this blue container and I planted rudbeckia seeds in the tool bucket I found at the same garage sale. The cardboard is in place until I can get out in the heat again and fit some corsican mint in the mix.

i planted these coreposis from seed this spring, and they are finally blooming. I love coreopsis ALMOST as much as the bees & butterflies do.

for some reason, i thought it would be a GREAT idea to plant pumpkin and watermelon seeds together. never again, for the pumpkin is outgrowing the watermelon by leaps and bounds, spreading and crawling everywhere it can. good thing the leaves are absolutely gorgeous!

but i think the watermelon are still giving it a strong go.