Meet the Cats

There are now two cats living full time in my detached garage. Spot, a female, was named last year before I could get close enough to tell her gender. Spot has had her shots and is spayed. Jorge was more luckily named. His dramatic yellow eyes in a black face are always a bit startling, like someone opening a door to a bright room in a dark hall. You wonder what he thinks about.
They shelter in the garage and get two small meals a day, plus all the birds and rodents they can eat. No more mice or rats around here. Yes, I feed the birds, too. The bird feeder is out of the cats' reach, so I enjoy the sparrows, cardinals, mockingbirds, blue jays, doves, and others that stop by. Without the cats, we were getting mobbed by pigeons every day. The cats keep the ground-feeding pigeons nervous enough to allow the smaller, more diverse birds a chance. And small birds can get away.
The birds eat the bugs in my garden (along with birdseed), and the cats keep the birds from overpopulating. Balance is good.

Calico Lima beans

Remember the pretty Calico/Christmas limas on the cover of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? I grew some of them this year. Maybe I overcooked them or something, but those pretty red and white beans wound up looking something like chicken gizzards. They were still good beans, though not as flavorful as the Lady Cream Peas last night. I still like their looks, pre-cooking, and the plants I gave plenty of room are producing prolifically.
Oh, the joy of ending today's work at the school, rushing home, feeding the cats, and picking beans in the cool of the evening! It is a great way to relax while doing a few slow leg exercises to get down and look under the exuberant foliage. No pictures today- a bit of a cold has me tired. Must sleep.

Soup of the Week

Here's what I take to work for lunch every week:
1. Consider what was too wonderful to miss at the farmer's market (freshly-shelled beans or peas, veggies).
2. What is in the fridge threatening to grow mold?
3. What did you just bring in from the backyard garden?
4. Do those tomatoes on the windowsill need eating NOW, but you're sliced-tomatoed out?
5. Saute an onion in your Dutch oven or soup pot with lid. Add carrots, celery, or potatoes here, when onion is soft.
6. Pour in a box of broth of your choice (or use veggie juice or water with more spices).
7. Add the beans and cook until almost done. then add tomatoes, squash, eggplant, etc.
8. Add veggies as needed by cooking time. Leaves, like spinach, go in a few minutes before serving.
9. Add spice blends (Julie Sahni has some awesome ones in her cookbooks) at the appropriate time (some can be cooked a long time, others lose their flavor as volatile oils evaporate) and herbs at the very end.
10. Salt as you will once the beans are done. Adding water may be necessary if they need to cook for a long time.
This isn't a recipe. It's a way of life. You learn what smells good to you by practice, trial, and error. If you use fresh ingredients, it's really hard to go wrong. You can make a stew so thick you could eat it with a fork, or a smooth soup if you puree part or all of it. What goes in is up to you.

Still Plugging Along

Today was Saturday. That's farmer's market day for all the stuff I can't grow. I like buying direct from the farmer. I got extra green beans to freeze and some lady cream peas (related to black-eyed peas) to try. You can't leave them in the zipper bags in which the freshly-shelled peas come. They'll grow fungus. I dump them out in a single layer on cheesecloth to stay dry until I can cook them (hopefully tomorrow). I also got peaches (last week for those), apples, and pears. I like the orchard stand. They had a really good year this year. A late frost last year almost wiped them out, but this year the fruit was abundant. I really like walking up to a table and seeing an older man with white hair and calloused hands carefully laying out the fruits of his labor. I'll buy extra from those guys. You would, too. Today's tomato:

In the Genes

My grandfather and his 2 brothers were farmers. Not necessarily happily (one uncle wanted to be a radio broadcaster. Another should have been an accountant. My grandpa was a natural veterinarian.), but the Great Depression and family tragedy interfered to cancel schooling for all. They did what they needed to do to survive. My grandpa ate the whole apple- including the core- until his death. No waste. Every week-end of my young childhood, from infancy until my grandpa died when I was 7, I stayed with my grandparents. They let me pick up eggs in the chicken house (after shooing out the chickens for feeding and for my safety, and so they could clean the place), pick strawberries, plant peas, and feed lambs. I loved it.
But the farm was dying. My Dad and his sister were the only children, and not interested in carrying it onward. Many years the brothers were only able to pay the interest on the loan their father had used to buy the place (but in the Depression, a bank was happy to get that much), so Dad grew up hearing and seeing all the reasons not to own a small truck farm. It was sold for (and by God's grace provided) money to pay medical bills and nursing home care.
Million dollar homes sit on what was once pasture and peach orchards.
So now I'm getting a Ph.D. I bought an older home to be close to work and saw a half-size chest freezer in the garage. And it all came flooding back. I have planted and harvested in a tiny backyard. I have put up produce and plan to do more. I remember the two full-sized freezers at my grandparent's house. I remember the pantry full of home-canned produce. And some deep desire has been activated to fill my own pantry and freezer, to prepare. As talk of economic hard times spreads, the ant in me beats out the grasshopper. Winter is coming. We'll see what we can do.

Whole lot of Vining Going On

Here's a recent picture. A lot of vining, with the tomatoes and limas and sweet potatoes doing quite well. We still have probably a good month to six weeks before everything dies. The city is a heat island. My parents a few hundred miles east and a bit north get frost a good 2-3 weeks before we do. The highs here are about 6 degrees hotter. That makes a big difference.
You can see the wall and the poor abused green beans in the back. I hope I can find something to plant back there to take the heat next year.

What did I grow?

I tried lots of veggies and edible plants this year. Here's a list:
sugar snap peas - good peas, but they wither when temps get above 85, even with partial shade.
carrots- good, but small (I was impatient)
radishes (mix)- good, but not when weather got warm- too hot!
beets (Detroit Red)- did not grow
red cabbage- really good, but cabbage worms are a pain to keep picking off. And if I'm eating the leaves, I'm not spraying them.
broccoli- did pretty well. Had to yank it out in late May due to heat, so I did not get too many side shoots.
leaf lettuce mix (bolt resistant) was good until early June- planted in dappled shade
nasturtiums- good, but got really "peppery" as weather warmed, then died in hot weather. They're coming up again now.
Early Bantam corn- did much better than last year. Dense planting is good for pollination, but probably needed more fertilizer. Matured in mid-July.
Cucumber- succumbed to powdery mildew when I could not find the sulfur spray in the store. Must get some Bordeaux mixture. Bordeaux mixture (copper sulfate is the active ingredient) is mentioned in gardening manuals from 100 years ago. That was the active ingredient in the "organic" sulfur spray, so it should work.
Green beans and yellow wax beans (Kentucky wonder)- wall planting was bad. Next year they'll get more shade and plenty of vertical space.
Limas- just now really starting to produce. More verticality next year will be good for these guys, too.
Malabar spinach isn't really spinach. It starts growing when the other greens give up. It has dark green leaves on purple vine that feels like a plastic- insulated electric wire! It tastes good, but must be cooked. It is a bit mucilaginous (though less so than okra), and is good in rice dishes. Tastes like spinach and never gets bitter. It just doesn't like cool weather, so it covers for times when other greens will not grow. Tropical plant from India.
Rosemary bush is doing OK. Needs more sun.
Banana and jalapeno peppers were planted in pots. They thrived and produced well. Cilantro planted with them went to seed fast, leaving them room to grow. Bell peppers in ground were disappointing.
Mint in pots did OK- needed bigger pots with better drainage, but you can't beat free. I picked the pots up from a discarded pile.
Dill- swallowtail butterfly caterpillars love it. They were so pretty I let them have it.
Arkansas travelers are awesome tomatoes. Not too big, and prolific enough to feed you (and a neighbor or two in the first rush of production) without being overwhelming.
In the late spring, I was coming home, picking a huge salad, and eating well. It was wonderful. It is still wonderful to pick tomatoes and beans and a few jalapenos. Life is good.

You've Got What You Need

This is most of the area I have for my vegetable garden, as it looked in early April. I basically have a 20 by 10 ft patch of backyard (used as a dump in the 30s or 40s-pieces of construction debris and broken glass were buried in the soil) and a yard later (someone buried several glass marbles) plus 2 10-ft by 3-ft flower beds edged by brick. I dug 8 holly bushes out of the bed at the back of the picture last winter. At the back is a south-facing brick wall, but in Zone 7 that's not necessarily a good thing. Gets too hot too fast around here. I planted green beans next to it, figuring the plants would get big enough to shade the wall. Didn't work. One plant grew up a nearby tree and is doing well. The rest are badly heat stressed, even after the heat broke. I planted the limas differently and they are doing well. Better luck next year.
That's another thing I like about gardening. It appeals to the scientist in me, taking notes, looking at what works and what doesn't for THIS garden, which might be different from the one down the street. You can spend years studying it and trying new varieties, honing your skills, stretching your problem-solving abilities. It helps to keep the mind and body engaged.

What I Will Miss Most About Summer

The picture says it all. This is the reason to grow your own. No orange cubes come from an Arkansas Traveler.

Backyard Gardening as Joyful Exercise

I love my garden, even when I find bugs I don't recognize. I used the wonders of Google to learn that this was one of the first instars (larval forms) of a green stink bug. They suck plant juices with a long tongue. Not a friend, but according to county extension office info, not worth spraying for.
My garden is my refuge, the place to go when things are not going well elsewhere, where I can lose myself looking for tomatoes or trying to get a good photo of a baby praying mantis. And if I want to work really hard, I can dig, weed, hoe, mulch, and water my way into a happily exhausted night of oblivion. I'm physically stronger than ever, and without the expense of a gym! Even when I go out fretting over some (usually silly) event of the day, I can return calmed and humbled by the ability of a small yard to produce such delicious abundance.
I've "tamed" a few semi-wild cats from the neighborhood, and the first one shyly came up behind me while I was weeding. The quiet, often rhythmic work of gardening fascinates the cats; they can watch me work for hours.

This will be my place to post pictures of the garden and the creatures in it, as well as information about the plants that do well (or not) for my own future reference. Maybe someone else will find it helpful, too.