Shopping in My Own Backyard

The other night I made jambalaya. I had the shrimp, chicken, good sausage, rice, and stewed tomatoes bought from the store. Of course I used my homemade hot sauce. For the veggies, I was able to pick peppers, parsley, garlic, and Swiss chard right out of the garden. It felt a little like a natural shopping trip. Everything was awesome, fresh and tasted wonderful.

Shhh...Don't tell about them Swiss chard. I sneak it into spaghetti sauce, jambalaya, and chili. No one has ever caught me. We grow this plant year round and it is really nutritious. It has vitamins A, C, E, and K as well as a lot of minerals. It is also a cut and come again crop. We just cut off the leaves we need for that days meals and the plant grows back. Remember how big they got last spring?

About the onions. My bulb onions are long gone. I harvest them in mid spring. I have not been able to grow enough to last more than a few months. I will try to grow more this year. Anyway, the onions I use right now are oriental bunching onions. They grow in clumps and you just pull up what you need to use for the day. Another cut and come again plant. The tops are excellent as green onions. The bulbs are rather small, but there are so many of them it does not matter.

I usually only plant half of the garden for fall. Not this year. This year the whole garden will be in onions, broccoli, cabbages, beets, collards, lettuce, and carrots. Not going to waste a single inch. We should be shopping in the backyard all winter.

Peaceful Easy Weeding

It is the end of the summer. School starts on Monday. Like many parents, I am ready for the boys to go back to school. I spent the last week buying supplies, meeting teachers, buying shoes, picking up schedules, taking monkeys to get haircuts, and answering about a million cell phone calls from one monkey or the other wanting something or to go somewhere. Parenting has become quite irritating for me and Manly Man. We are all ready for a change. Today everyone was aggravated. I tried to smooth things over and make happy, but no dice. I finally gave up, grabbed a cold drink, and went out in the garden. It has rained almost every day for the last week. So this evening was the perfect time to pull up my little stool and start weeding. The temperature was cool and the weeds came up easy. The ground was moist, but not muddy. It smelled good. There were crickets chirping and birds calling. No one came outside to talk to me. We all need a little time apart. As it got to dark to tell the weeds from the plants, I came inside. I found everyone nice and quiet watching movies or reading. Everything changes on Monday. I think we are ready.

How I made a Mosquito Habitat and Another Use for Monkeys

I put an umbrella sedge in a large low bucket of water to get it ready to plant in the bog garden. It has rained a lot lately and there is standing water in the bucket. I took a look at it today and the water was full of mosquito larvae. I have mosquitofish (Gambusia Affinis) in my little water garden. I started with three and now have too many. So I stand over the little water garden with a cup trying to catch a few mosquitofish to put into the other container.

Middle Monkey asks, "What are you doing?".

Me, "Trying to catch a mosquitofish."

Him, "Move over I can do it for you."

Me, "Have you done this before?"

Him,"Yep, whenever you're not looking."

So he caught me a couple of mosquitofish and put them in the other container. They went right to work eating the mosquito larvae. These little fish should not be set free in streams or ponds, as they will out compete native fish. They breed fast. For my little water garden, they do a great job. They are supposed to be able to survive low oxygen saturation and high salinity. Pretty interesting critter.

If you ever need a critter caught, get a 10-year-old boy. They have amazing patience.

We Have a Real Survivor

Nature seems to be able to recover from anything.

This is a picture of my first ox blood lily (Rhodophiala bifida).

A few weeks ago, our neighbors had an old alleyway between our homes cleaned out. It had to be done. I allowed them to start halfway down my fence line beyond my passion vine. There were dead hack berry trees, one of which had fallen on the next door neighbors' fence. There are wild figs, which were saved. The entire length of the alleyway was covered in junk saplings and poison ivy.

The landscape crew cleaned it all out and then sprayed everything with Roundup. What is left is scorched earth. It will take a long time for this area to recover, yet the little oxblood lilies are coming right up as if nothing happened. Nature is amazing.

The Saddest Thing I've Ever Seen

I am a bad gardener, very very bad. I dug up this plant from a fellow gardeners plot and planted it up in a container. I thought it was a coleus. It seemed to hate the sun so I moved it to the shade.

It turned yellow and became infested with mealy bugs.

Today, I was at the Xeric Garden in Forney and there was my plant, three and a half feet tall and a beautiful purple. It is a Parilla. It needs to be in full sun and is absolutely too big to be grown in the container I put it in. Why in the world didn't I just ask what the heck it was and learn how to take care of it. My friend had gotten her plant when it reseeded itself at the Xeric Garden. Right now my poor little plant is sitting in the sink. I had to give it a shower to get rid of the mealy bugs. It is going in the ground in the front flowerbed this evening. It will get full on sun until about 2:oo pm and then afternoon shade.

Murphy's Law for Gardeners

Over the last year I have had a few encounters with Murphy's law. Here are just a few.

1. No matter how much stuff you put in the compost pile, there will never be enough compost.

2. Spring weather will be warm and sunny and then temperature will drop into the 40's the week you put out your tomato seedlings

3. As soon as you make the perfect, nice, fluffy garden plot, the dog will decide it is a perfect doggie bed.

4. It will rain on the days you take off work to get the garden started in the spring.

5. Your puppy will think your veggie garden is a perfect place to jump up and down.

6. Your cat will believe the garden is a litter box and butterflies are toys.

7. The minute you set up your new rain barrel, the rain will stop.

8. Your non-gardening spouse will give erroneous gardening advice to the neighbors

9. You will try to grow a plant that has died on you year after year because 'This will be the year." Then you will be surprised when it dies yet again.

10. You will have a surprise encounter with a slug, toad, or some other critter that makes you run and scream.

Do y'all have any Murphy's law observations?

Here is a flower bed I had to fix after the clients dog decided to use it for a bed. I really like the little black fence.

This is a pretty bed, but all the roses are sick because of yo-yo rain and drought.

Another Way to Cook Zucchini

I know a lot of vegetable gardeners end up with too much zucchini or have family members who won't eat it. My boys will eat it stir fried with carrots and sprinkled with season salt. The whole family will eat coated in spicy cornmeal and fried. That is about the extent of their zucchini love.

Tonight I baked some pork chops with mushrooms, onions, olive oil, a little beef broth, and pepper. I had one good sized rhonde de nice zucchini. I sliced it really thin and added it to the pork chop bake for the last ten minutes in the oven. It was wonderful. I could make a meal of just the mushrooms and zucchini.