HJ Waxing Moon

The garden is really making progress! I'm pretty excited about it. One of these is kale, the other is mustard greens. These and the lettuce below, I'm not sure at what point I start thinning and eating micro/baby greens. It took a while, but the dill decided to come out to play! Plus a volunteer oregano there at the bottom left corner. Marigolds! I'm pretty excited for these. When I was planting I was really disappointed in my lack of nasturtiums this year, but I've got more pots now! Hanging ones even. I don't think we get warm enough or enough sunlight around here for tomatoes, so maybe I will use my hanging pots for nasturtiums. The scallions are so much happier outside in dirt with some sun than they were on my counter with no sun in a glass of water that we rarely remembered to change. However, they grow more slowly out here which makes me a little sad.  My lavender did decide to grow back! Maybe I will cut off the silly stump now. I ...

Saturday I wanted nothing more than to dig in some dirt. After all the snow, wind, rain, and grey of winter, I just needed some sunshine and dirt time. So I spent a little time (only 20 minutes or so) prepping my containers for planting. Surprise surprise, I didn't get any "before" pictures of the cluttered balcony. This is a failing I'm certain we're all going to have to learn to accept.  This is the set-up we're hoping to use for our garden, though the cascading effect of the ones on the left means they may get less sun than if I cascade them out. Unfortunately it also means that would make the herbs less accessible for fast snipping while cooking. I might try working on a shelving mechanism to get maximum light and access.  Once I'd pulled out all the clover, and turned the dirt a bit, some delightful plants came into view. Like these darlings! To the left and right bottom corners you can see tiny springs of oregano that popped in for some reaso...

Funny garden update: We have a grey squirrel that invaded my sage today, and I scared Mr. Moon by opening the door and yelling, "EXCUSE YOU!" at it (he thought someone was invading the house!). I had seen some digging marks before, but hadn't had the motivation or time to deal with it whenever I noticed on my way in or out the door. I mixed up a little sriracha and garlic and water, dumped that around the plants, and am hoping that will keep the little bugger from digging up my sage again. There is plenty of dirt around here, he doesn't need to go digging in mine! We are so far REALLY enjoying this twice a week menu planning. Much easier to account for perishable foods this way! Wednesday Stuffed Peppers w/ gorgonzola & bacon Sides: Sautéed summer squash, steamed green beans Day off, lots of unpacking today! We kept pushing off the stuffed peppers because when we were thinking about dinner it was too late to take two hours to make it. So we roasted ...

I know I promised a garden update ages ago. I even took pictures! On June 22. Let's see what we have here... Yes, let's start with an epic fail. I have no idea what was supposed to be in this planter. Badly cropped in the original photo, you can see a scrap of the plastic wrap I put over these to try to get some greenhouse effect on my seeds. Fabulous! All nice and warm and cozy inside there. Problem is, there were apparently no drainage holes in these herb planters. Oops. So no drainage + no ability to evaporate + a gap for watering that allowed the rain in = SWAMP BUCKET! We since took a drill to the bottoms of these buckets and added a few drainage holes. Having mud fling out at you from the drill bit? Not as delicious as one might expect. Actually it probably is, if you expect it to be kind of gross. So here in this little failure, you can see again the swampiness, the label that is half washed off from the condensation of the greenhouse canopy, AND the scraggl...

I was toodling around on the internet one day and came across an offer for a free heirloom seeds catalog. Figured I might as well look through it, for entertainment value if nothing else. Well when it arrived and I finally had a chance to look through it, I discovered that the seed packets aren't significantly more expensive than buying GMO seeds from the local nurseries. And CERTAINLY less expensive than buying a garden's worth of starts!  I made myself a wish list in the catalog, starring everything I wanted. Then discovered that I could order online, so I went through and started adding things to my cart, paring down some of my selections as I went. $112!! Well that was a little more than I wanted to pay, and I'm still not sure how much space I'm even working with, so I pared it down a bit further. Removed some of the more exotic varieties, replaced some of them with slightly less expensive more familiar varieties, and tried to map out a bit in my head where I expe...

First let me start by saying: The lot this house was built on was the rock pit for the subdivision, and if you dig more than about 2 inches into the dirt, you get rocks. Solid rocks. There's not much dirt to speak of, and tilling the "earth" for planting is a pain in the--well, everything. Plus, when you add dirt, it just filters into the rocks further to fill them in. As you can imagine, the entire yard got VERY dry this past summer! So, raised beds are the way to go here. Combine this with the old lady with bionic joints, the younger lady (that'd be me) with old lady joints, and kneeling on the ground to plant a garden is simply out of the question. We need raised beds to be at least 18 inches tall (preferably closer to 2 ft) just to be able to reach them from a chair, which means extra wood and dirt expense to build the 4 ft x 48 ft raised garden we want in the side yard. I mean it's literally two to three times what we NEED, since we only NEED a raised bed t...

Mr. Moon and I finally got a break, and he had a day off at the same time as we had some decent weather. We got outside under a nice warm sun, got some "before" pictures of this year's garden and yard, and prepped the existing raised beds for spring gardening.  Before the 2013 season: To the right of the front door/front walk: blue bulby flowers (no idea what they're called, but currently they're the grassy stuff); irises that really needed splitting last fall; a volunteer rose bush that we keep cutting out; two hydrangea plants; and a yellow dahlia. TO DO: Rake out wood chips, chop back dahlias, rip out rosebush, split and spread the little blue flowers, and split the irises; maybe bring some lilies from elsewhere in the yard over here to be in with the irises. To the left of the front door: Our container bed. We've had swiss chard in these all winter, there's some geraniums that lasted, and something that we never got the name of in the back...

Five things we accomplished in September that are really kind of big: We got on a schedule of chores, and even managed to stick to it in this very busy week.  We had fun on some cheap dates, and got to spend more time with friends than we have any other time since we moved down here. We pinpointed some trouble areas with the housekeeping and started making strides to combat them in a manageable way.  We dove down the rabbit hole with gusto, starting on such projects are sourdough pancakes, waffles, yogurt, mozzarella, and possibly soon into sourdough bread. We managed to keep the sideboard in the dining room CLEAN and clear of clutter for the better part of a month, and still going!  It wasn't entirely intentional, but we spent the month working on building good housekeeping habits. If October has a theme project, I think it needs to be the garage. We got behind on cleaning that out and missed both of our self-imposed deadlines, or we will because the second o...

It's small, but it's a start. Top to bottom: Kale, Radishes, Broccoli Raab. These are the ones that demanded lots of sun on the package, but I admit I didn't plant in rows or pay attention to how far apart they should have been planted. Of course I saved the packages, and intend to thin out to the appropriate spacing and eat the micro/baby greens.  This is mustard. There are tiny beet sprouts, but the red against the dirt just isn't terribly visible with a camera. It just occurred to me that the mustard and broccoli had been attacked by aphids but are not near any protecting companions, so I'm going to either have to get some garlic into these beds STAT or be diligent with the garlic-pepper spray. I refuse to put mint into my raised beds, because then I'll never get rid of it! This is the mint we harvested from the mint garden, to make room for cauliflower and carrots. Since there is absolutely no way we were going to get ALL the mint out forever...

The last few weeks have been a chore. This was the beginning of the aphid infestation, around the beginning of July. It only got worse from here, as you will see. My one, lonely garlic scape. It was delicious! Mr. Moon would like you to know that the mint garden got as tall as his hip! It's started to die back in the heat since then, though.  Isn't it strange how our plum tree has purple sections and red sections? That's because of these new starts. All the new parts are green. I asked at the nursery and it was recommended that we cut all the new starts out--they will overgrow the older, likely hybridized tree that is actually giving us plums.  Sucker bugs! Why?! Took this picture for identification by the folks at the nursery, and they said it was likely the teenager stage of some sucker bugs. Best to get rid of them, suggested just using the garden spray I had tried for the aphids. Speaking of aphids... This is the garden as of August 3....