Little Acorn

My First Crop of the Season

Urban farming has CHALLENGES, not the least of which is an army of cats that have discovered my nice soft raised beds and have been...welll...you know...DIGGING in them. Okay, not just digging. We know what I'm talking about right and I don't have to come right out and SAY it? My poor garlic sprouts were constantly being jostled and the thought of the rain washing through...what the cats leave...and getting into my soil was EXTREMELY icky to me, so I needed a solution. There are commercial "cat scarers" you can buy and other things like cayenne or chemicals that you can spread in the garden, but I LIKE cats and wouldn't want to hurt them. They just MUST! STOP! POOPING! (They made me say it!). My Mom's friend Sandra had a brilliant idea and now my garden is unique looking, but the cats have stopped visiting...

Yep. A couple of boxes of plastic forks have solved my problem. Once the plants fill in and I don't have bare dirt the cats won't find it appealing anymore and I can remove the forks, but until then it's a cheap, unfriendly-but-not-hurtful solution.

I have to kind of laugh every time I see them out there - especially at night when they kind of glow in the moonlight. It might not be the picture-perfect kitchen garden of my dreams right now, but anything to keep my veggies safe!

And in other great news - spring really is coming!!! Adeline and I played outside with NO COATS on one morning and it really and truly felt like spring! I'm soooooooo ready for it this year!

Fig

Fig. Singluar. Yes, my fig tree had ONE fig this year, but since it's the first fig ever I was VERY excited about it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I looked out the window at that fig every single day to check that it was still hanging in there, and today it was ripe and ready and I finally got to eat it.

Beautiful.

And delicious.

Exciting Times...

We've been slowly transforming our yard from a muddy dog run with thickets of noxious weeds to a lovely green oasis with smaller patches of still noxious weeds. We brought the grass back to life, planted trees and shrubs and perennials that have all had time to settle in and spread out and we were really happy with large portions of our garden. But there was the back corner...Known as "the pile" which was about a 16 by 12 by 3 foot tall hump of earth and rocks and giant roots covered in vigorous and invasive weeds. Also in that area was some patchy grass, some broken concrete sidewalks and my raised beds. And of course that is the area my kitchen window overlooks, so every day I could look out there and wish it different. David and I were smart enough to know that our marriage couldn't withstand the weeks of digging it would take to get rid of the pile, take up the sod, build planting beds and lay down gravel so finally after begging for years some gentle hints, David decided that my present of the year (for ALL the occasions) would be to hire someone to do this huge job for us. Here is a during and an almost-there picture. I'm still searching for a before picture although it's not an area I tended to photograph very much. Hopefully the after picture will be in mid-September and then I can have the fun of deciding what to plant in my new beds. My first instinct is a herb garden, an asparagus bed and veggies, but then I remember that while there is a lot to love about feeding your family from the garden, the stores and markets are full of delicious food, and the joy of having a bouquet of fresh, fragrant flowers in the house all through the year might be even better. I will go and buy myself huge bunches of fresh asparagus in the spring, but I would never ever buy myself a bouquet of flowers as it just seems too decadent. So I'm thinking disease resistant and fragrant climbing and shrub roses, more peonies because they're my favourite, and an array of beautiful and nose-pleasing flowers that bloom over a long season - a cutting garden. I'm up for any suggestions! There's also room at the back for a play structure for Adeline. I'd love a sweet playhouse that I could decorate, but our active girl would probably get more pleasure from somewhere she could climb and swing and slide. Then when Adeline outgrows that we could put in a trampoline (because I looooooooove to jump on a trampoline and Adeline would probably like it too) or I could just take up the gravel and have more room to plant things. I'm soooooooo excited about this project - it's been a long time coming.

Perfect Peonies

Peonies are wihtout a doubt my favourite flower and when they are blooming in my garden it's the most beautiful place in the world to me. They usually bloom here around my birthday at the end of May, but this year it was close to July before they put on their big show. This dark and chilly spring and summer have been ABYSMAL for the garden. Many of my shrubs just aren't going to bloom this year and everything just looks sun-starved out there, but the peonies were really exceptional this year with more and bigger blooms than ever. I had bouquets in the house for a couple of weeks and still had lots of blooms out in the garden. A peony flower or two or three makes a beautful bouquet all by itself, but every single year at peony time I think to myself that my garden needs roses.

 

Happy Birthday to Mylan

A lot of Adeline's little friends have either just turned two or will be two by the summer, and this week it was time for her friend Mylan to have her big day. Her Mom knows I'm handy with a sewing machine so she asked me to make a banner to celebrate the day and to be used for years to come. I can't say this was my favourite project (it was easy, but repetitive,and took way way longer than I thought it would, especially since I decided that the letters had to be hand sewn) but it was a labour of love, so I didn't mind.

I think the banner looks lovely in our side garden and I'm thinking I definitely have to make one for Adeline now. I should start soon though as with all the other things I've got going on in the next couple of months I know I'll be scrambling at the end to get things ready for my girls big birthday!

And doesn't my garden look good in this picture? It's cropped strategically so you can't see the really weedy patch to the left, and my prized peonies aren't blooming yet, but I'm really pleased that a full season of neglect last year hasn't seemed to have done any harm. This year much more is already being done in the garden as Adeline loves being out there and helping is her favourite thing. She's decided that when she helps outside she's a "Helper Robot" or a "Garden Robot" and it's sweet to hear her proclaim "Helper Robot did it!!!" every time she adds something to the compost bucket or pulls a weed.

The garden is being invaded...

...by plastic.

I knew it was inevitable and oh my, does Adeline have big FUN on this hand-me-down little climber and slide. She likes to climb up there and jump, sing and dance, dance, dance. It's a ton of fun for me to watch and of course, a great photo opportunity in the lovely golden light of autumn.

Is there any way to keep children this natural while they're having their picture taken or is it inevitable that someday she'll get awkward and fake in photos and stop just being her amazing and expressive self?

So far she just does her always fabulous thing and I take photos.

Someday though will she "get it" and put on that cheesy plastic fake grin that all children seem to learn? We never encourage Adeline to smile for photos, we always stop when she's had enough and picture taking is a nearly daily occurance around here, so maybe she will never know that she's expected to sit still and pretend to smile when the camera is out.

August

 
I'm going to blame it on the end of summer lethargy, but I just haven't been able to post lately. I think about it every day and feel guilty, but always find something else to do. Not that there's nothing going on around here - we've had lots of company, the weather is hot again, we've been eating zucchini every single night because it's the one thing in my garden that is thriving on my neglect, we're going to a birthday party this weekend and will be celebrating David's birthday (with sliders and cupcakes) tomorrow. Adeline is growing and changing before our very eyes and we're just enjoying her so much. I knew I would like being a Mom, I knew I would love my baby and I knew I would be good at the job, but I never expected how very much I would LIKE my daughter. I just love hanging out with her. She makes me laugh every day, I'm amazed by her ability to take in new things and learn from them and she's just so happy and full of life. Of course there are hard days and hard times (right now I'm listening to a very over tired and over hot baby giving her Daddy a hard time as he tries to put her to bed...) Did I mention how smart our girl is? David and I were going through and counting up all the words she knows. I might be wrong, but I think it's a pretty impressive vocabulary for a 12 month old and she is adding new words all the time. Some of the words have interesting pronunciations, but she knows exactly what she is saying.

- up (her first and favourite word)

- belly button ("bell-butt") - her new favourite word and she likes to find her belly button and the belly button of everyone around her, even if you're out in public

- hat - her other favourite word and her big joke. She puts things on your head, says "hat" and then shakes her head no and laughs.

- cheese

- eye

- ears ("eese")

- piggies ("peezees" - her toes which she picked up from "This Little Piggie")

- hi and hiya

- bye-bye

- pat pat pat - to go along with hugging

- kitty - one day she was calling her best friend Zephyr by name ("Pepper") but then she stopped

- bear

- bird ("bir")

- ball

- bottle ("bawel")

- baby

- book (I can't even type how she says this, but it's definitely book)

- Mama  (still no Daddy or Dada, David is the other Mama)

- Nana

- plane ("pane")

- flower ("lowah") - she is obsessed with pointing out flowers, both real and in pictures. I don't know how she can do it, but she knows that everything from a dandelion to a hydrangea to rose to a stylized line drawing to a tiny floral print is a flower, and she finds them every time.

- please ("peese" and she uses the sign too)

- thank you ("ah-oo")

- uh-oh

- hiding - we have a lift the flap book that says over and over again "Who's hiding" so she says this when we're reading it or if she wants me to find that one. 

- and she know a few more animal noises - fish, bird, lamb, cow, tiger, lion and monkey

There are other words she's said once or a few times, but I'm only counting the ones she uses every day. Maybe when the weather cools down a bit my posting mojo will come back. This weekend is supposed to be a crazy hot one so I think we're going to be all about the makeshift pool in the back yard, smoothies and trying to stay cool.

The Garden

This was going to be a baby-free post, but then I was distracted by my sweet little garden sprite in that first picture, so first we'll all oooh and awwww over how darling my girl is and then we can get on with things...

So...the garden... Sadly, sadly neglected this year. It's a "survival of the fittest" kind of summer as watering is sporadic at best, pruning isn't happening, I didn't divide perennials this spring or plant much. My borders are looking crispy but I think I've only lost one plant to my neglectful ways and because I have so many plants the weeds are pretty well kept at bay. Next year will be different. Adeline already really likes helping in the garden, but right now she needs constant vigilance as she likes to pull up plants and she puts EVERYTHING in her mouth. We did plant our two raised veggie beds with our summer favourites of tomatoes, salad greens and lettuces, herbs and zucchini. We also have a whole bed of volunteer potato plants as I guess we weren't as vigilant as we could have been when we dug them up last year.  Adeline likes to stand at the edge of the raised bed and dig in the soil and she really enjoys when I point out weeds for her to pull.  On Saturday Adeline supervised while we harvested a lot of fist sized and very aromatic garlic bulbs. Yum.

 

We'll end off with a beauty shot of a zucchini blossom. Just because.

 

Look at that! Gardening content and come back for some actual honest-to-goodness craft content next week! Maybe the baby haze is starting to lift a bit and life is starting to come back into balance a little.

Heat Wave

We're coping with the heat by spending our afternoons in our shady back garden playing with the sprinkler and hanging out in our impromptu pool. Adeline is definitely a landlocked mermaid just like her Mama!

Now if only we could find a way to make our upstairs bedrooms a little more bearable. Almost no one here on the west coast has air conditioning as it rarely gets hot enough to need it, but at bedtime each night I've wished that I could crank it up and crawl under the covers instead of laying there in a pool of my own sweat, tossing and turning and trying to ignore how hot I am so I can sleep. We're all kind of cranky after not getting a great sleep in a few days, but things should get back to normal soon. The weather is supposed to cool off to our normal summer temperatures next week, and I can't wait!

Putting the Garden to Bed

It finally stopped raining long enough to dry things out so that I could get out into the garden and give the grass one last mow, plant some bulbs, mulch the vegetable beds and do one final organization of the tool shed before this gardening season is declared done. It seemed to become Autumn really quickly after the Thanksgiving weekend and I was worried that the rain wouldn't stop long enough for me to get my projects done, but today was a picture-perfect beautiful day. Autumn is my favourite season and today it was at it's best - sunny but crisp and cool, with colour everywhere and that very particular smell of Fall in the air. As I was mowing, it suddenly washed over me that I had a daughter and that she'd be here soon. The next time I mow the lawn, she'll be here. When the daffodils that I planted today bloom, she'll be here. I've been working on the garden since we moved to this house in 2005. Back then it was nothing but a muddy dog run, with amazingly vigorous weeds of all sorts and a few shrubs planted in all the wrong places (including the poor little palm tree I found languishing in the deep shade back in the far corner), but over the years the garden has been transformed and now there are flowers to smell almost year round and grass to lay on while you cloud gaze and places to grow vegetables and herbs. One of my favourite spots is a tiny secret garden just right for reading books in the shade in the summertime while the honeysuckle blooms overhead and the birds watch from the tree tops. I always knew I wasn't just making this garden for myself, but for my family and I can't wait until we can explore it together.

Slow Roasted Tomatoes

This summer there was heat a'plenty and almost no rain (both highly unusual for us here on the west coast) so I had a bumper crop of tomatoes. Red ones. Yellow ones. Paste tomatoes. Huge beefsteaks. Little green stripy ones. There are still a LOT of tomatoes finishing up their ripening down in the laundry room. We've been eating a lot of fresh salsa, bacon and tomato sandwiches and caprese salad, but we just couldn't keep up and I needed a way to store some of this deliciousness for the cold and drizzly days of winter. When I found this recipe for slow roasted tomatoes, I just knew that I'd found the way, so yesterday I was up early to get a pan in the oven by 8 because they take a full 12 hours to roast. Of course at a bleary 7 a.m. I didn't actually look at the recipe and just went by memory so I did remove the stem socket even though it told me not to. Didn't seem to matter, as after 12 hours at 200 degrees the skins just slipped off.I decided to give this batch a whiz in the food processor before bagging it for the freezer. Next time I think I'll roast just red or just yellow, as the orangey colour it ended up is not as appetizing as it could be. It doesn't really matter what it looks like, because it tastes amazing. It's so very rich and savoury, with a concentrated but mellow tomato flavour and I know it's going to bring a sparkle to lots of dinners this winter. Did I tell you we're getting a freezer? It's the kind that is almost as tall as me and looks like a refrigerator. It's very odd, but it's the freezer entering this house that seems to be the biggest symbol for me of a shift in our lives. Sure, we've got a crib box and mattress hanging around in our dining room and there are some meltingly tiny clothes on suitably tiny hangers in the closet, but it's the acquisition of this freezer that is really making me feel like a grown up.

Tomatoes Before Their 12 Hour Roast:
Tomatoes After Their 12 Hour Roast (please imagine amazing smell):

Slow Roasted Tomato Puree:

In the garden

With all the excitement over the small person, I've neglected to show you how my potager has been feeding the two of us for months now. Salad fixings started being picked back in June and we've had a pretty steady supply of butter lettuces of many colours, mesclun and mache all summer, later joined by carrots, scallions, herbs and just lately, shallots. We pulled the first of the potatoes in July and have been eating delish russian banana fingerlings in all sorts of ways (but just boiled and buttered is still my favourite). The other potatoes will come up out of the ground soon and those will be our keeper potatoes. There's nothing like a homegrown potato. So creamy textured and flavourful and digging them up was like a treasure hunt.The zucchini continue to produce like they're on a mission to take over the world and so far we haven't grown to resent them. My almost-famous zucchini frittata (which isn't really a frittata but that's what it's always been called so I'm not changing it now even though it's more of a cross between a crustless quiche and a savoury cake) has been a staple this summer. The herbs are great this year, with the basil being the star as always and I can't wait for the tomatoes to ripen so that we can start eating basil + tomato + cheese in various yummy forms almost every night - salad, sandwiches, pizza, pasta - all good. We had that intense heat in July which was bad for me, but good for the garden. Now we seem to be swinging back and forth between summer and fall, so hopefully everything has a chance to ripen before the autumn truly arrives. I just put in some leeks and other fall crops, so hopefully we'll be continuing to eat from the garden even once the rains are here to stay.

Oh. The flowers are nice too. But this is my first year growing food and I'm still pretty awed by the whole thing.

Pride

I know I shouldn't really by as proud of growing zucchini as I am. Bragging about growing zucchini is kind of like bragging about growing dandelions, but I have to admit that I'm excited about my zucchini. This heat wave we've been suffering through has been heaven for the kitchen garden and the zucchini are inflating almost before my eyes. I've heard all the jokes about zucchini and how ridiculously easy it is to grow and I know that it's considered pretty idiot-proof - but this idiot grew zucchini this year for the first time and I'm so very proud. I'm picking them small so that hopefully this warm and fuzzy feeling towards my zucchini doesn't fade. Isn't it so very pretty ? So pretty that instead of dicing it up immediately for veggie patties like I planned I instead took it out to the yard to take arty photos of it.

Anticipation

Is there ever such a thing as too many tomatoes? I don't think so. It's my first year growing more than just a cherry tomato in a pot on my deck and I decided to stop myself at five different kinds (which was probably prudent) They're all really getting down to the business of getting huge. On of them is taller than me already! What we can't manage to eat fresh will get stored away for the winter when the tomatoes in the store are all pink and gritty and even a frozen batch of summer-made tomato sauce will be heavenly. None of them are quite ready yet...but every single day I go out there and visit them all, just to see how they're coming and for some aromatherapy. Am I the only person in the world who lists "tomato plants" as their favourite smell? You can keep your roses, fresh baked bread, clean laundry, bonfires and apple pie. They're all good smells, but nothing pushes my olfactory buttons the way tomato plants do. If they made a tomato plant perfume I would totally wear it. Very sexy, in a grinning, lecherous way, I think. Soon there will be MANY tomatoes, and I'll get to enjoy more than just the smell. Every one of the plants is setting a LOT of fruit right now. The anticipation is killing me. Nothing like the first homegrown tomato of the summer. I think I'll eat it right out there in the garden, with the sun shining and the juice dripping down my chin.

This Post Rated X

There's a lot of romance out in the garden lately. The birds and the bees, you know. But when I came across this display of raw animal invertebrate passion, I just had to go in for the camera. Yes, that's right - I caught snails doing it. I admit it - I was fascinated. The snail population in my yard is a little...dense...for my liking, but I just couldn't break these two lovers up. Oh, the slithery embrace. Oh, the slime.
I watched for a really long time...