The Dirt

I got caught up in my garden this morning.
I mean, I didn't have time for it - that's for sure.
My back is barking at me for bending over so long.
My nail beds are caked with black dirt.

And it was wonderful.

There isn't much going on in my garden right now. I haven't had time to invest in it since I started school. I have some fall tomatoes going because I'm dying to see if they work better than the spring ones. I also have sweet potatoes everywhere - everywhere - and one surviving bell pepper plant. The peppers are purple. I love them. The sweet potatoes didn't have a stellar season this year. I kept the vines under control, but they were simply overrun with weeds. That's hard to do to sweet potatoes because they grow like weeds here in the south, so I'm chalking it up to the hot, dry summer we had. Nonetheless, there are definitely little orange taters poking their heads up out of the sand. Suddenly, I'm very excited to see just how many there are down there! I'll pull them up in a couple of weeks, just in time to serve some on Thanksgiving. I tried several experiments to see which growing method works best for me, and I can't wait to see the results.

I can't wait!

Yum-O-Rama

So, I had this really great sandwich on Friday from my favorite little lunch spot in the town where I work. And then the sandwich was gone and I still wanted more, so I decided to try my hand at making it for dinner tonight. It was so tasty, I thought I'd share:

Sweet Potato Sandwich:
Ciabatta Bread
Cooked, sliced sweet potato
Sliced tomato
Thinly-sliced red/purple onion
Spinach leaves
Feta Cheese
Red wine vinegar

I'm not going to include quantities here - you can figure that out. It's a sandwich. You just put however much of it you want on the bread.
But I would recommend you make sure the sweet potatoes are warm and the bread is toasted. That way, the feta melts a little bit. Oh - and the vinegar is to sprinkle on the bread before you close up the top of the sandwich.

I'd like to point out that we used sweet potatoes that we grew in our back yard! Note to my readers that live in the south: There is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be growing sweet potatoes. Seriously. They took little to no care and, bam!, sandwich fixin's right there in the dirt. I won't bother to link to articles here, you can just Google "how to grow sweet potatoes" and find plenty of good information. The only things I'd suggest (that we learned this year) are to start your slips with an organic sweet potato and to plant your slips in mounds of dirt rather than level with the ground. We really had to dig for ours. I know there are more taters in the ground in my back yard, but I really don't want to keep looking for them!

Little Things

Posting has been less-than-inspired lately, hasn't it? Well, at least I think it has been. I feel like there have hardly been any good stories at all. So, I decided to pick up my camera and seek out something interesting and I hope to make it a daily habit. Of course, in picking it up and trying to learn more about it, I was messing with my ISO settings yesterday and forgot to re-set them today. I took lots of pictures today and was disappointed to find them all rather grainy. Terribly sorry. But, still, here are some small things that made my day more interesting:

This Little Miss Spider lives at my place of employment. My friend Katelyn and I were very impressed with her eye-catching web stitchery and we have researched and determined that she must be a St. Andrew's Cross spider. I sat down with her this morning for a little chat on the sidewalk. It's a good thing nobody saw me, I guess. I don't know anybody else that talks to spiders.


Driving home from work, I got stuck behind this guy:

I suppose I shouldn't have photographed while driving, but it was so great, so perfectly indicative of the local culture that it could not be helped. I was on a mission to find interesting things and I thought this was interesting. I was actually thinking about that tire on there and how, next time I buy a watermelon, I'm going to wash it really well before I cut it. Also, I was listening to Van Morrison, which made me think of Mary, who had that most famous song of his played at her wedding. That was also great.

We spent quite a bit of time outside, trying to clean up the garden spaces. Our inexperience and yesterday's storms had left quite a mess. Our squash are being ravaged by squash bugs (they already took out my jack-be-little pumpkin and possibly my watermelon and cucumbers), which are awfully hard to get with pesticides once they have already bored into your vines, so we were hunting them manually, the kids and I, while Chris stirred the compost pile (ew!) and planted a second grouping of sweet potato slips.
After we were all itchy, all the way through, from various bugs and grasses, I sent Emma in to shower first, since she is still recovering from her fever (it's a little better, thank you). As I waited around for Chris to grab the post-hole digger, kind of toeing around in the dirt, and I found a little treasure:

Now, there is knitting ahead of me this evening, and online entertainment courtesy of a friend who heard my plea (we still haven't picked up that TV converter box...)and sent me some very nice links to some favorite shows and stuff. But before I go, I must brag a bit. One other not-so-very-small thing came my way today. A picture of my brother's table. Gaze upon it in wonder and astonishment,

for he made it himself, in all of its modern-yet-warm, sleek-yet-home-y, design-perfection glory. My middle brother made this with his own two hands. It is so very nice to know that I'm not the only one in the family that makes things. I am so impressed - I begged him to let me blog about it.
And he said yes.
So I did.

Daily Bliss: dirt under my fingernails and a few more fresh tomatoes
Wake-up Playlist: Wheat, Some Days

At Least It's Something

You are looking at what is sure to be the bulk of our tomato harvest for this season.
I know. Sad, but true.

Apparently, I went all-out with tiny tomato varieties. What we have here are a few Super Sweets, Jelly Beans, Green Grapes and a Chocolate Cherry. The Chocolate Cherry one? Yum.

They're all pretty tasty, actually. I'll probably skip the green one next time around just because it's tough to tell when it's ripe, you know? It's green all the time.
We've had weird weather. The spring was super-dry and very hot and then, when the sky decided to let us have a bit of rain, it just let loose the heavens and poured and poured. So, we had trouble keeping everything from withering in the beginning and then we were beset with mold and mildew and stem rot and blights of all nature. I have read other experienced gardeners are having tomato trouble this year too, so that makes me feel a little bit better. All in all, we've had several good handfulls of tasty little tomatoes for munching and, well, it could be worse. We mightn't have had any. I don't exactly have a green thumb.
All is not lost. We have learned a lot this time around. We have a couple of summer veggies growing. The black-eyed peas are going gangbusters, but they're covered with aphids, I think. I'll have to address that this weekend. And we have a couple varieties of squash that are supposed to do well here in the summer and even a couple of supposedly warm-weather-friendly tomatoes. We shall see. But, come September, we will go for tomatoes again. And maybe, maybe, maybe we'll do better. Maybe we will have a bumper crop and I will make roasted tomatoes and dried tomatoes and spaghetti sauce and bruschetta and...
I'm probably getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that.

Hubby is out of town for the rest of the week. So, I have poured myself a crisp, sweet glass of Riesling to match my crisp, sweet new nightie. The nightie and I will be filling a brand new notebook full of thoughts in order to empty out my head.

Daily Bliss: knocking one more little sewing project off my list - a long-overdue birthday present

Blackout Night: Finally

I called for a Blackout Night last night. We haven't done one in a while. It's not like we had time on our hands or something crazy like that, it's just that we really needed to shut out the world and focus inward for a bit.
My sister-in-law, Sarah, had given me these pretty black lanterns when she and Jon moved to a new house. I had secretly coveted them ever since she bought them. So, you know, that was awfully nice of her. See my silly poodle behind them? She's sniffing around, trying to decide what we're all doing.

My thought was that I'd clean them up and light them to use inside while all the lights were out. But once they were wiped down and lit, the oil smelled really strong and we decided not to bring them inside.

But that's okay, because most of this Blackout Night was spent outside. I won't say that the kids were filled with glee. My children, like most modern children, would much prefer to be inside, curled up with a video game, a movie or a book. Outside, it is already summery and sweaty around here. Nobody likes to sweat. Well, at least none of us do.
We took a walk to the park and did some work in our garden.

We ate a lovely salad, full of pretty tomatoes (not our tomatoes just yet...but soon!) and garden-fresh squash (thanks again, Jeffries family!). Chris and Andrew tossed around a football and Emma generally pretended things around the yard while I fussed over the southern blight that seems to be infecting some of our plants. And by the time we noticed the misty moon high above the trees,

it was too late to even bother going inside to read.
We sent the kids to the showers and lingered outside just a little longer in the twilight, drinking in the evening breeze that's still hanging around since it's still spring.


DAILY BLISS: My baby nephew, Maximus, will be born today! Wahoo! This is the second little fella for Chris' brother and his wife, and we couldn't be happier for them!

Beets!

We pulled up our beet harvest today - our weensy beet harvest.
Granted, we planted them a bit late in the season, and the small hands that planted them put them in the dirt in a slightly crowded jumble.
But there are nearly enough greens to serve with some corn bread and black eyed peas for a dinner and there are nearly enough stunted, tiny beets for a colorful, roasted-root-veggie side dish to accompany some chicken or something equally nice.
And that's enough.
I'm not ready for Big Harvests and Adventures in Canning.
This is how little girls harvest beets - delicately and gently, caring for each wispy root as though it were still needed:

And this is how boys harvest beets - efficiently and in large, muddy clumps, never caring whether a tender leaf is bruised or torn:

These are among the first edible fruits of our gardening. Though it's a only small bit of food, it's exciting - even for 11-year-old boys who try very hard not to be genuinely excited about much. We are learning something nearly every day and now, as our tomatoes and peppers and beans, peas and cucumbers grow and bloom. I can hardly wait for August and September to get here. That's the next shot I get at really planting some stuff! From now until then, it's mostly okra, black eyed peas and squash, from what I understand (which I did go ahead and plant this weekend).


DAILY BLISS: evening coffee & the fun possibilities of paint chips

Hope

All sorts of things are starting to come to life in my garden.

I'm really new at this whole gardening thing. My mom was always pretty bad at it, and as I tend to kill house plants, I always figured I'd be bad at gardening too. And I live in a pretty hostile environment for the kind of gardening I grew up with. When I was a kid, my mom and dad tilled up a square of rich, black soil in our Minnesota backyard. They grew squash and zucchini and things like that. Once, my mom ordered strawberry plants to try. She planted them upside down. It didn't work out.

(These are German Strawberry tomatoes - an heirloom variety. I bought the plant already situated upside down in a hanging pot, so we could get some immediate and encouraging results)

When we moved to Florida, it seemed that the sandy, acidic soil and constant presence of bugs and other pests turned the practicality of a backyard garden into an expensive hobby for people who liked to experiment with extreme techniques.

(My pink lemon tree finally has a few blossoms. It dropped all its buds last year when we put it in the ground. That's to be expected, I guess. But it sure took forever to bloom and we thought that it might not make it.)

And I pretty much never gave it another thought. My mom was bad at it, the conditions were stacked against me, I don't like to get dirty or sweat...my list of reasons to avoid gardening went on forever. But Andrew's science class planted gardens this year. He came home one day carrying one extra, orphaned jalapeno plant and a handful of beet and radish seeds. We let him de-grass a small square of our yard (ha! as if we had any grass in the sandbox we call our "back yard") and plunk his treasures into the ground.
The weirdest thing happened. They bloomed.

They sprouted little baby peppers. They survived two freezes and continued to bloom. I made some salsa with them. We ate the radishes up in a salad. It was very satisfying. And we really hadn't done much "special" work with them. And I started to think, "I can do this."

So, I spent some time reading about small-space gardening and stumbled into some interesting concepts. Square Foot Gardening and growing upside-down vegetables and using trellises in unthinkable ways (cantaloupes and pumpkins!) and urban homesteading and...and...and...I think I stumbled into something I love.

(The lettuce is almost ready for our first salad)

(baby beets - isn't that red just beautiful?)

And I think I love it because it isn't just another hobby for me to do alone, curled up and lost inside my own head.

Because I knew why my mom wasn't a good gardener, I knew why I wouldn't be a good gardener. She's not patient, and neither am I. I give up too easily sometimes. I lose interest when I don't see results. I get tired of the drudgery, the sameness of watering and weeding. Some people find beauty in routine. I do not. So, I asked my husband to help me. My patient, rock-steady husband. He was born, I think, to bring balance to the universe as a counterpoint to me.
We are complete opposites, and to say we have few common interests is an understatement. That isn't usually a problem - we get along just fine. (Have you seen how hot he is? Dang.)
But sometimes, a girl aches to feel like she has a partner in something.
I have tried to pull him alongside me on many adventures. After a while, I just get tired of tugging and go my own way while he shakes his head at me and smiles a bit. But this time? He said yes. He's been out in the yard building supports for me to hang my upside-down veggie pots. He's remembered to water when I would have forgotten. He even held my hand across the dinner table on Saturday when we didn't make it to the nursery to finish buying plants.
I cried.
I cried because I'd had some money for it on Saturday and knew I wouldn't have money for it next Saturday. And then it'd be weeks before we had a free Saturday for plant-buying and then it would be too late in the season.
He held my hand and he told me it was okay - that doing this as a family was important to him too. That we could go Sunday instead, even though we really didn't have time. We would make time. And that meant so much.
My Left Brain says that these are just some plants and I will probably kill some of them and be very frustrated with the process of growing food sometimes. But my Right Brain says this is connection and independence and life.

And we did go Sunday. I bought two fig trees and a whole lot more tomatoes. We will be swimming in tomatoes. And all the buds and blooms and tiny veggies that are filling up my pots and making my neighbor's bees very happy give me an odd sense of hope. I'm not a natural optimist. I have to work really hard at it. But I think I understand now why people who garden are really crazy about it.
(Thank you, Susan, for pointing me to that wonderful little nursery. I could spend hours browsing his 200 varieties of tomatoes! And it was such perfect timing that he has been growing his veggies exactly how I wanted to grow mine - upside down - and could hand me all the advice I needed to get started!)