Bucket o' Spuds

 Last year, I planted red potatoes in the garden. We did not this year, but we have had several volunteers* and decided to leave them grow. We have four or five robust plants. Unfortunately, since we didn't actually plant them, they have come up in some not-necessarily-convenient locations. With the garden in full bloom, one can get a bit tired of having to step over the giant potato plant that happen to come up in the path. After the umpteenth time, my lack of patience gets the best of me and I pull them up. This picture is the bucket o' taters I reaped from one (yup one!) of the plants. The big one in the middle is probably over 4" long.



*I'm guessing the volunteers are from tiny taters I missed when digging out the potatoes last year. They got spread around when we turned the soil and added compost this spring.

More Bounty From The Garden

Well, the-world's-greatest-neighbors and I are just tickled pink at the produce the garden patch is pumping out this year. And to think it looked like this just a few months ago! Now it's bursting at the seams. Here are a few pics of the lovelies I have eaten this past week.

I do love me some artichoke! The most perfect vehicle for warm garlic butter. This is the first one of the season (more are on the way) and a right good size. Yum.












These were the main ingredients for a lovely cold zucchini soup I made. Wonderful onions, heaps of fresh mint and a zuke that measured in at 14"! We have had several of these monsters already and needed to come up with something - besides zucchini bread... - to not let them go to waste. With a little creativity you can use a mess o' zukes to make this soup. Very tasty and perfect on a hot summer day.

And last in this little photo tour is the sweet corn that we just started to harvest this week. I was so excited, I peeled it and started eating it while literally still standing in the garden. Couldn't resist! As delicious and juicy as it looks. Pretty thrilled that the corn matured properly this year as it was less-than-stellar last year.


I currently have red potatoes, eggplant and beans in the fridge waiting for my next culinary adventure.

Spring's On The Way

 

 A sure sign of spring at my house is planning for the garden. Last year was the first year that Karen and Chip - the world's greatest neighbors - and I planted this plot. It's my side yard and a fairly big area for people who don't really know a whole lot about gardening. We planted lots (post about it here) by guess and by golly, and we did OK, but not great. This was partly because of our never-ending cold and wet spring last year and partly because we didn't properly amend the soil before planting. Some things didn't grow, some grew weird and others did just fine through no fault of our own. We learned a lot. This year, we're using the whole plot, are planting less crops but more of what we liked, and have figured better placement for things (Karen's a great one for planning out everything). AND, last Saturday - when I was playing hooky from the opening day of the Saturday Market - we had 4 yards of a compost and sand (the soil is very clay-y) mix dumped in the driveway and the three of us spent four hours wheelbarrowing it from the drive and digging it into the soil. I'm still tired! We are very excited to get started. In the next couple of weeks we will begin plotting it out and planting the earlier crops. 

The twiggy things in the back corner are raspberry canes that are already starting to bud out. Since last year, I've also built and installed the two rainbarrels and put in the composter. Almost looks like a real garden!

Great Neighbors and a Growing Garden

When you buy a house, you can have inspections for almost all aspects of the property. The one thing that you can't account for and that's a total crapshoot are the neighbors. Well, I totally lucked out. I have great neighbors! This one will walk the dog, that one has power tools I can borrow, that one will bring in the garbage cans if I'm away and my best neighbor is Karen (and her husband Chip). Karen is the dream neighbor. She takes care of Koko while I'm at the Saturday Market (that's a whole other blog post!), always offers help with this or that, AND is gardening my side yard. Their yard is completely landscaped, so when I offered my yard for a veggie garden she thought it was a great idea. The two photos to the left are the before and current states of the side yard. It probably was always gardened, but hasn't been in several years. It was all grown over and weedy. Now it's alive with yumminess!

 

The photo above shows what we planted (I might have missed something or other). We went a bit nuts with all that we put in, but we are learning a lot. As very novice gardeners we are feeling our way along, it's been fun and we are starting to see the fruits - and veggies - of our labor.  Because of our cold wet spring, things have been slow to get started, but everything is showing itself and will hopefully take off now that the warm sunny weather is finally here.

Berry Berry Exciting

The woman whose house I bought was a canner. She had loads of raspberry bushes (and I'm told they are really good berries). Well, spring is springing and the berry bushes have started to bud.









There is also a currant bush that was way overgrown and had a lot of dead wood. I chopped it way back - almost to the ground - and it's come back with gusto.



I've since put in two blueberry bushes, because I love me some blueberries. I was told you need at least two bushes to cross pollinate. I got two different kinds, one that fruits mid-season, and one that fruits later. And in a strawberry pot... strawberries. As it's been so warm in Portland, all the plants are budding and flowering. I'm very excited about the potential bounty this summer!

Unexpected Bounty

Ok, maybe bounty is too broad a word for this...
Last spring I found this onion happily growing in my cabinet. --->
I thought two things: 1) I really should cook more often, and 2) if this onion is trying so hard to grow, I really should plant it. While I only cook a bit more than before, I did put the growing onion in a planter box I have. I live in an apartment, so this was as good as gardening was going to get for me. I even remembered to water it every now and again! It seemed to doing ok, but it wasn't really flourishing and after a fashion I gave up on/forgot about it. Yesterday I was poking around in the dirt and pulled out what I thought would be the shrived roots and found this! Guess I'm going to have to cook them this time.