Strawberries!

One of my favorite summer memories from when I was a kid was driving out to a pick-your-own orchard with my mom, sister, and aunt to pick strawberries. We'd pick enough to cart home and spend the rest of the day making strawberry jelly. Well, my mom and aunt would make jelly; my sister and I would mostly wander off with a handful of strawberries and whine until someone took us to the pool.

But the picking was fun and so when I saw that a producer in my food co-op sold live strawberry plants, I jumped on it.

These plants arrived on Thursday and the late blizzard was due to arrive on Friday night. I read somewhere that strawberry plants that have had some exposure to freezing temperatures actually produce better tasting berries in the summer. True? Maybe not, but I thought that these would fare better in the warm raised beds covered with straw than they would in my garage for several days, so I opted to plant them.

I'm trying the everbearing Ozark Beauty and June-bearing Albion varieties. These plants will produce berries for at least 3 years, so I wanted to give them a somewhat permanent location. 

In order to help the plants establish a strong root system which will result in a good yield, I will be pinching off the blooms until July for the Ozarks, and all summer for the Albions (which won't produce berries until next year). 

Right now these plants are covered with several inches of hay and a fabric row cover until the temps come back from below freezing. I hope they make it!

It's About to Get Ugly

I'm in a HORRIBLE mood right now. Why? This:

It's currently a sunny 70 DEGREES RIGHT NOW, PEOPLE! All of my blooming plants that have been stretching out and getting pretty are going to FREAK OUT tonight and probably croak. To make matters worse, my backup plan of covering everything with straw has backfired BIG TIME and I have about 40 new transplants in the ground for a variety of plant-them-now-or-they-will-die reasons.

I'm running around now cloching what I can and taking pictures of the blossoms that will most certainly be dead and brown in the morning. Chance of me getting out of bed tomorrow? 20% or less.

Could It Bee?

I was just taking a break from my pile of work (which is what has been keeping me from blogging...money) and I took a quick stroll around the grounds to check on the crops. I found 2 surprises that I was definitely NOT expecting to find. The first was this:

Last summer I bought a few bags of bareroot peony plants from Lowes on a whim and then left them to bake in the garage for a few weeks. Not smart. If there was such a thing as Child Services for plants, I'd have been hauled away long ago for neglect and abuse.

Anyway, we finally got around to planting them sometime in late June or so, I think, which with our heat was WAY too late. Live and learn. I thought for sure they'd just decompose in the ground and we'd start over someday with new peony plants and actual forethought and information. I was stunned to see these little peony shoots popping out of the front flower bed. Maybe they'll be fluffy pink flowers for us to enjoy this summer, after all!

The next surprise, and by far the most thrilling (in my opinion) was this little guy:

Now, I'm no insect expert, but I think that's a bee. Albeit a skinny and slow-moving bee, but what can one expect in mid-March? Here he is hanging out on my pear tree buds, and I found another hanging out in the blueberry patch. YES! THAT IS EXACTLY WHERE I WANT YOU! I'm nervous for the little buggers, considering we may get another dose of the white stuff this weekend. But I've learned that bees in the garden can only mean good things. I just hope they stick around.

Gardening readers, please feel free to weigh in on my mystery visitors to confirm or correct me.

Quad 2: Only Time Will Tell

Last week we tilled up the rows for Quad 2 in our four-quad garden scheme. We've only planted out some of it, but this is what the plan is:

The rows are 4 feet across in this quad, instead of 3 feet like Quad 1. We did that because it's a bit of a balancing act to walk between the 3-foot rows, and because there is a bunch of interplanting going on here. Not included in this plant is the fact that at the last minute we cut the last 4 feet from the Swiss Chard area to plant some leftover potatoes in a square trench. We'll let them grow close together so we can harvest small new potatoes while waiting for the others to mature. Here's how it looks on the ground:

See the difference? We lose some planting space, but gain some breathing room to move in between. I'm not convinced I'll keep it this way for the rest of the quads, but we'll see.

As for the actual planting activities, there are currently potatoes, onions and swiss chard in the ground. This is a shot of us digging trenches for the potatoes:

And then a few short days later, the square trench looked more like an in-ground pool:

Gotta love torrential spring rains. Let's just hope the seed potatoes didn't rot in the ground, though I'm not going to keep my hopes up about this little experiment.

Quad 1 Update

Our plans for Quad 1 changed slightly, but not as much as I thought they would. The original layout included 4 rows of peas, which stayed, and a row each of lettuces and spinach. We cut the lettuce row short and planted onions at the end:

It turns out that I might have more onion sets than I could ever hope to plant. I've planted out another 2 rows in Quad 2 and will probably add some to Quad 3, though I don't know if that will be pushing it in terms of proper planting times for these.

It's nice to know that we will eventually be eating snow peas:

This row is chock full of sprouting Oregon Snow Pod 2 plants. I just hope that they truely do have a bush habit, instead of vining, so we don't have to put up a trellis for this row since we'll be building 3 other trellises. I think they are doing so well because a) the temperatures have been perfect for pea-growing and b) we used Joe food to fertilize them:

I really don't know how this cheerio got all the way out there by the peas, but there it was. Cheerios appear in the most RANDOM places here at the WatRanch.

Other Quad 1 news is that we will soon be attempting to transplant the lettuces that we sowed in milk jugs. I'm not seeing a lot of germination in the planted rows, so it's reassuring that the wintersown seeds are doing so well:

These are the "Flame" seedlings that will grow into pretty red leaves. I can't wait for the first salad!

Tweet Tweet

Hi out there. I'm writing this blog to tell you that I'm not really in the mood for blogging today. Not that I'm trying to be cute, but I usually put some time and effort into my posts, and while I have many posts "in process," I'm in more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, can't-focus-on-a-single-thought kind of mood.

Hence, the tweeting. I've been BLOWING UP my twitter feed because it's the perfect, schizo medium for my thoughts today.  I'm also buckling down on actual, paying work, which let's face it, comes before narcissistic, introspective monoblogs.

A brief update on the goings-on of the household:
*Hokie is pretty depressed about her boyfriend leaving. Boston is gleeful and practically crawls in our laps with gratitude.
*We've planted out Quad 2 in the garden, but due to retaining water (the garden, not me...this time) we might have to scrap it and start over. You'll get grids and pictures and more info than you wanted soon.
*I've been focused on cooking really healthy, really balanced meals this last week, which means fish. Those of you who know me know how much concentration and gag-reflex-suppression that requires. So far, lots of success.
*I'M WORKING OUT! A LOT! So far this week I've kept up 2-3 exercise sessions per day, which usually entails elliptical machine+half an episode of The Wire in the morning, the Biggest Loser "Last Chance Workout" DVD in the afternoon, and a long walk or bike ride in the evening with the boys. I feel good, but not like blogging.

There. I'm not going to promise a giant photo-filled post tonight or tomorrow or whenever, but you know you'll get one eventually. Geez, now I'm being kind of rude. Sorry, you didn't ask for that. Back to work and my less-offensive tweets.

Jello Playdough

One of my absolute favorite playthings as a kid was playdough. Who didn't love that stuff, right? I'm a purist, so I liked to take time to really enjoy popping open a fresh tube of dough and admiring the smoothness of it before mashing it into an unrecognizable blob. I was never really a fan of the colors, though, because it was IMPOSSIBLE to make a realistic looking playdough hamburger or playdough cherry pie using neon pinks and florescent greens. (Yes, I was one of those kids who made playdough food. Sue me. I was no good at making animals because I could never get uniform legs). 

Anyways, my babysitter reminded me a few months ago that now would be a great time to get Joe playing with playdough as a tactile activity, and I wanted something to break the monotony of the large plastic toys and educational videos. I found this recipe online (recopied below) for non-toxic dough made from Jello, and since it was imperative for me that it wouldn't stain hands, clothes, carpet, tile, I gave it a shot. Plus, I already had all of the ingredients in the pantry. Bonus!

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour
1/2 cup salt
2 T. cream of tartar
2 T. Vegetable oil
1 c. warm water
1 three oz. pkg. jello (any flavor)

Directions:

Combine ingredients and cook over medium heat until it thickens and pulls away from the sides of pot and becomes dull. * Note: it burns easily so don't put over too high a heat and keep stirring. Mold and knead until cool enough to touch. Store in a closed plastic bag.

  

The kneading part was, of course, my favorite even though it can be pretty hot right out of the pot. I had to work fast to get it to cool down because I had a hooting and hollering little boy aching to get his hands on the stuff.

You'll find that it makes about 2 cups per color, so be sure to share with a friend! We spent this past rainy Monday whipping up a batch for our neighbor up the street as a birthday present. The colors aren't as neon as the store-bought stuff, but it will smell like the Jello flavor the first several times you play with it. It's not really edible, unless you have a serious sodium deficiency, but it's non-toxic for sure.