Picture Update - May!

The last time I did a big picture update was almost two months ago. I have a lot to catch up on! Here we go---

Now that the days are getting longer and the temperatures getting warmer (barely), the growth is taking off! Take a look!

I've thinned a bit of the kale so far and the remaining ones are really getting big. We have had a lot of heavy wind the last few weeks though, and a lot of them are slanted and now growing sideways. Whatever. They're still growing, right? They just aren't quite as pretty and uniform.

The spinach is awesome. I realize now that I did not allot enough space for spinach in the garden this year, and I will give it more room next year. I love spinach because you can use it in just about any style of food; Italian, Indian, Mexican, American, Greek, and on and on. Plus, it's great as a fresh salad, on a sandwich or wilted by itself or in a dish.

Spinach and onions, living happily together.

And, yes, this is ONE spinach plant.

The lettuces are coming in pretty well now. I impulse bought a third lettuce variety at the store the other day, which I'm going to squeeze in somewhere. It's a fast-maturing miniature butterhead. I'm pretty excited about that one.

I have also realized that I've been keeping to my garden calendar a little too closely. Every two weeks I have a note to do the next sowing of lettuce or chard or carrots, but I am trying to listen to the garden a little more than my calendar now, as I realize I'm going to have way too much lettuce all at one time and I should really space it out some more.

The chard is starting to get it's true leaves. Yeah!

The broccoli finally took and it is getting big! It's also been a victim of the wind, however, and they are all kind of growing sideways.

This must a sign that summer is fast approaching, as today was the day to transplant my zucchini starts. I put three in the ground and I may regret this. They tend to grow to gigantic proportions.

The pear tree is starting to grow pears!! Apparently we are going to have red pears instead of green. What a nice surprise!

As for my $3.99 roses; they are on the verge of blooming. You can see some of the rose inside this bud ready to burst forth.

And Lemon in the window.

We had our BBQ last weekend and it went really well. I made buns and veggie patties from scratch and they were good. Although, I'm going to have to work on this hamburger/sausage bun thing. They didn't rise nearly enough, so I had to improvise and pretend I meant to make sliders instead. But, they are pretty darn cute.

Going into the oven.

Done!

For my birthday Mike got me garden/rain boots! I've been wanting some, especially when I do my volunteer work at the Food Bank garden. It's a sloshy mess when it rains, which is most of the time, and my pants and meager hiking shoes get pretty covered by the time I'm done. Now I'm set!

Mike also really seems to like worms. This is why he is generally in charge of the worm compost bin. The other night he was outside and discovered the creepy-crawlies doing their thing in full-swing in the garden. He took some pictures. He brought a worm inside on his hand to show me. I screamed like a little girl and ran into the bedroom. Gross.

And, lastly, these pictures are mostly for my mom. I painted my living room! It's espresso brown, and I think it really ties things together. I (mistakenly) painted my kitchen some shade of chartreuse and the deep brown finally makes it look like I did it on purpose (pardon my mess).

On the last day of March.

It was surprisingly sunny today. After several days of downpours of rain and cold temperatures, there was a break today and I got my gardening for the week done. I harvested the rest of the first batch of radishes, which will be turned into dinner tonight (one more day without the grocery store!).

I re-sowed radish seeds to replace the ones I harvested. I sowed some more onions and our first outdoor lettuce seeds as well as chard, carrot and broccoli seeds. And, I transplanted my broccoli starters into the garden. This one was pretty exciting. I was so proud of my little guys. I raised them from seed in the safety and warmth of the living room, and now they are outside in the big, bad world of the front yard. Good luck, little broccolis, I hope you fare well.

And, lastly, I'm starting my pepper seeds inside. These will probably be a colossal failure as I just read about how large varieties don't do well in our climate and the two varieties I bought have the words “Giant” and “Grande” in their names. Oops. That's what I get for impulse buying seeds.

The fruit trees are doing their thing. The plum tree has lost it's flowers and is in leaf stage now, but the cherry tree is in full bloom.

And so is the pear tree in the front yard. This one is my favorite; maybe it's because it's at eye level, but I think the blooms are just beautiful.

Although the don't smell very good.

And the sad little apple tree, whose prune job makes you want to cut it down and start over, is starting to bloom too. I'm hoping with a few years of loving pruning we can get this guy back on track.

Trees that make food.

Last summer I started volunteering for the Oregon Food Bank in their Learning Garden. They have two gardens where they grow fresh fruit and vegetables (and have chickens for eggs) to give to the Food Bank. I volunteered several times last year and learned a lot about gardening in the process. I got to mulch, plant watermelon starters, pick all varieties of beans, harvest Chard, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and feed chickens. I'm really looking forward to when the garden reopens this spring for the volunteers. But, this weekend they are hosting a fruit tree pruning workshop, which Mike and I are attending.

The last place I lived I learned what happens when you let a fruit tree go wild. My house becamse dubbed “Pearhouse”. In the backyard there was a pear tree, maybe 30 feet high. There was no way to get to the fruit that was growing and apparently if you let a fruit tree get that large it bitters the fruit. And also apparently when full grown pears drop from 30 feet they are scary!! It literally got to the point that I would put on my bicycle helmet if I had to do something in the yard. A couple pears grazed me and hit my side, but I thankfully never had a direct hit. Every few days I would go into the yard and load up all the fallen pears into baskets and throw them over the fence into the empty lot next door. It was ridiculous the amount of pears that would fall. And I would have to try and pressure wash the deck with the garden hose to get the pear guts off and the wasps away. It has a headache! And the worst part was I never got to eat one of the pears. They were too bitter and would pretty much explode when they hit the ground anyway.

One of the many selling points of my house now was that it already had four fruit trees on the property (and apparently my neighbor has a walnut tree that drops half in my yard). In the back yard there is a cherry tree (right) and an apple tree (left). They are both pretty large, but not so large that they can't be riegned in. In the front yard there is a small pear tree and a small apple tree and these are just the perfect size. The problem is none of these trees have been pruned well. They all need some love and some guidence, and the ones in the back do not need to get any bigger or else we'll have another “Pearhouse” on our hands.

So, I am really looking forward to heading over to the OFB Garden tomorrow morning to not only help them prune their trees in the little mini-orchard, but also to learn how to keep my trees in check so that next fall I can take all the fruits and use them and preserve them and get the most out of the food that my land is already producing for me.