Hello Again

We here at This Old Blog are about to boldly go where very few home owners in our neighborhood have gone before - to the land of no front lawn! The neighbors may hate us, but hopefully mother nature may love us more. Here we go!

Photo from a few months ago, when we tried to get someone else to take care of this huge problem!

Early Summer Garden Pictures

Young Master House standing amidst the various plants in the garden.  Foreground: Radishes and Onions, Background: Tomatoes, Tomatillos, peppers, sweet potatoes, melon, corn, zucchini, and one lonely bean plant.  The Tomatillos and most of the tomatoes are courtesy of Josh. The soil they came with was so black it almost made me cry to plant them in my grey clay soil.  They seem to be doing ok though.

The Radishes are doing quite well as you can see in this next picture:
 

 We also have a volunteer pumpkin plant, growing out of the side of the compost pile.  Correspondingly, the plant is huge and the three pumpkins are quite large. The one pictured is larger than my (large) head.

 Above are the many many sunflower plants, growing along our new garden wall. Note also the purslane, which apparently does not want to go away.  And yes, the caps on the wall are loose, they need to be re-mortared.

This one almost needs its own post.  Our white nectarine tree had a fairly heavy set this year, something on the order of 200 pieces.  After some weather and thinning, we had approximately 75.  A fake hawk watched the tree, and netting was deployed over the choicest fruit (the tree being too tall to net the whole thing).

This is the only piece of fruit that Mrs. House got to taste, a single cut from a bird downed fruit.  She was not happy, although she did declare it "the most delicious fruit ever" or some such.  Squirrels, birds, and at least one possum got the rest. Next year I think we are hiring some weasels to guard the tree.

Garden Update

 Just a quick post on the status of the garden.  We harvested our first radish yesterday, because it was starting to bolt.  About a dozen more to go, most fairly large, so we seem to have found something else that will grow in our soil.  The onions are also doing well.  Pretty much everything else we grew from seeds or planted as seeds has died, so it is off to the nursery soon for us.

Mrs. House spent some time juicing lemons yesterday, as you can see from the picture above.   She made about half a pitcher of pure lemon juice, which we will combine with simple syrup when needed to make lemonade. Grapefruit still available in substantial quantities to those interested...

Cuttings

One of the biggest issues with taking plant cuttings is disease.

This tip says to use cinnamon to alleviate the chances of getting fungal infections in your cutting, improving your chances of success.  Since I know that some of us are interested in rooting plants, it should be worth a try.

In other garden news, only our radishes and onions came up, all the other seeds planted in the garden were failures (save possibly a single nasturtium, but we will see with that one).  Next up is transplanting our seedlings from inside, which historically has had about a 20% success rate.  So we will see.

Spring Garden

Due to some landscaping reorganization and projects (the never ending masonry wall), our garden moved this year from its typical location to another one between the garage and the addition to our house.  This area is west facing, so it gets a LOT of afternoon sun, which may be good for tomatoes, and should extend the growing season into November.  Hopefully we will have a better growing year than last year.

A disadvantage of this location is that it has not been growing plants very long, so it had about 2 inches of top soil and pretty much pure clay below that.  I forked it over a few times, and added some lawn clippings, which should help a bit, and every plant will go in to either compost soil or river bottom soil from my parents' house, which ever bag is closer to hand at the time.

Here you can see young Master House and myself relaxing after planting.  (Please excuse the hat hair, tangled mess in the left foreground is the compost pile, and as always, click to enbiggen)

Seed row planted this weekend, which you can see below:

 From left to right we have: Dill, Basil, Cilantro, Radishes, Thyme, Lettuce, and a whole bunch of red onion sets that I let sit in the garage too long.  We will see what (if anything) comes up.

Onion sets:

We also have an array of seeds growing inside the house, which should give us our tomatoes, tomatillos and so on. (including sweet potato)  We have typically had about 60% of our seedlings die when we transplant.  Not sure if it is due to transplant shock, or too much sun or what.

In other home news, we finally broke down and got an electric lawn mower... more on that later.

Recycling

An unfortunate feature of having a house with a crawl space and county ordinances restricting the height of fences is that a fence is never tall enough to block the view of the neighbors.  Since we have little desire to increase our level of familiarity with the neighbors too far, we have been looking at ways to reduce visibility.

Planting trees in line with the neighbors' windows was the first step, and following a lucky find at Costco of all places, we now have three pink Jasmine plants in between them. Since Jasmine is a climber, the plants needed a trellis, and we quickly realized that we had something that might work; left over wrought iron fence pieces.

As you might recall, when we moved into the house over two years ago, the side yard had an iron fence, but we replaced that with a redwood one (with great labor).  The cut out pieces have been sitting on the side of our house ever since, waiting for an opportunity like this one.

Here is the result:

Since this picture was taken, we added cement blocks to the bottom of the fence to make it a bit taller and more sturdy, and took out the stick in the middle of the plant to let it spread out a bit more.  I expect that by this time next year, the whole of the iron fence will be covered with plant, and hopefully the neighbors will be that much harder to see.

On a side note, I cut down the last pieces of the fence this weekend, and let me tell you, there is nothing so fun as taking a Sawzall to metal fences.  Cut it like butter.

First harvest of the season

First harvest of the season.  In august.  The end of august. Whaa Whaa...

Name that weird thing!

They're here already! You're next! You're next, You're next...! 

I hate to spoil the yummyness that was the last post with this post, but I am having an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment here.  This morning, some strange things were found out in the garden by my dad's wife. She brought me outside to their garden area to show me. She that she had found several of these buried in the dirt, all along a 3 foot span. She thought they were insects and described it as looking like a "shrimp" inside. At first they look like mushrooms, with the outside having that same spongy leathery texture, but then you cut in to it and I am pretty sure this ain't no mushroom. Just inside the skin there is a layer of smiley substance,  then another white skin type layer. Inside that is more goo and then pink/brown little things. Please help me figure this out!

The mystery - intact w/ trowel for scale

Just inside the skin

Skin opened more

Layers

Inner

I thought it was maybe a snake egg. . . but the inside doesn't really seem like it. I hate to think of insects this big crawling around the garden. Please advise!!

***UPDATE  6/19***

SO! After much thought and poking and digging, we have turned up some additional whatevertheseare, and they look like the might be different sizes, even very small, and have roots??? Here are more pictures.

When life gives you lemons

Today we finally got around to juicing lemons from our lemon branch. That pitcher of lemon juice is straight juice. And there are still SO MANY MORE LEMONS. We are getting ready to post an offer on craigslist to try to get rid of some lemons and some grapefruit.

In any case I decided to make some simple syrup and make some fancy lemonade. I even mixed the juice, syrup and water in a cocktail shaker and poured it over ice. Delish! Now if I only had some vodka . . .

November

The month is half over already, and we have been busy! First, yes, this is a tomato flower, and in November! With the string of nearly 80 degree weather we have had, we may even get some more tomatoes.On Saturday I ripped out most of the garden, and planted some winter vegetables. We planted garlic, lettuce mix, beets, and snow peas, which were all the "winter" things we had. Still going strong are the tomatoes, sweet potato, and chives. We will see how they end up.

Other than garden work, and chasing around the offspring, we have been working on baseboards, and the tv/book storage solution. Expect more posts on those in the future! Anyone need a couple of old bookcases?

October Harvest

Backyard - early September 2010

First Harvest

We have been busy as ever at This Old Blog. Just wanted to update you on our first garden harvest. These cherry tomatoes are so delicious! I think it is especially true with tomatoes that nothing really beats the taste when they are home grown. They make store bought tomatoes taste like white bread.

Growing new things!

Today we put in our 2010 veggie garden. As usual we started by sprouting some seeds a few weeks back. To these plants we picked up a few additions from our neighborhood nursery Green Acres. Everyone and their mom were at the nursery today, I swear! Here is a shot of the contenders!

As you can see we have quite a boat load. Hopefully at least some of them will make it! Among the plants are cantaloupe, cucumber, honeydew melon, zucchini, spaghetti squash, cilantro, basil, bell pepper, cubanelle pepper, leeks, chives, corn, beans, acorn squash, two different kinds of tomatillos and four different kinds of tomato! Wow!

The garden area started out a dreadful mess, but Mr. House has been very busy working the ground and getting it ready for planting. This is what it looked like before we really dug in.

Mr. House expertly crafted nice rows and we laid out the plants to figure out where their new homes should be.

After more hard work we got them all in the ground and ready to provide us with a summer bounty!

As you can see from this final shot, fruits and veggies aren't the only things we are growing!! ;)

New additions

We bought some new fruit trees last week and got them in the ground.

Meet Mr. Bosc Pear

Hello Mr. Pear, pleased to meet you.

. . .

And here is Ms. Nubiana Plum

Why, it's pleasure to make your acquaintance Ms. Plum.

Portulaca Oleracea

Thanks to a very clever identification of our blurry weed picture by Josh, I have now determined that our main garden weed (aside from grass) is Portulaca Oleracea or Pursline. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portulaca_oleracea)

Unfortunately, wikipedia also indicates that it is edible! Not only edible, but nutritious, and a source of Omega 3 fatty acids.

So, I have inadvertently thrown out over 10 gallons of our most productive vegetable!

Well, something to keep in mind for next year.

Our first harvest!

Our garden has yeilded its first bit of bounty! This fig is our first harvest. It probably should have been picked sooner, as it was a bit wilted and overly ripe. We have three more growing on the tree, which may be the extent of what we get this year.

Also, an update on our garden. 90% of what we planted died the very next day. All the vines, peppers, fennel, and more, which we had grown from seed, died . Very sad.

Only the tomatoes, tomatillos, and basil survived. My dad brought over some spare tomatoes from his garden, and we added to what was left. Those plants are doing pretty well, and one of the tomatillos seems to be taking off, which is good. With 3-4 months left in the season, hopefully we will get something from this effort.

We have had very prolific growth of some sort of suculent weed in our garden. I weeded today, and got a full five gallon bucket of just this suculent weed. Not sure what it is, but I am fairly certain we can not eat it. Here is a blurry picture of a larger plant.
Any ideas what it is?

trees, glorious trees!

So Mr. House has a whole plan for our backyard landscaping. It was one of the first things that he thought about and planned. We have a very thorough plant blueprint drawn and ready to be put into action. The thing we started realizing was - plants are expensive and very time consuming - the type of project we don't really need more of right now. The problem is that our backyard is not exactly a private oasis. It will take much time to get it to where we want it to be.

So with all these factors in mind (plus the fact that the window for planting is beginning to close or so I am told) we went out and bought two fruit trees last weekend from Capital Nursery. We went out on a hot day and scoured their many rows and rows of plants. We ended up buying a White Nectarine and a Black Fig. The nectarine is about a 7 or 8 foot beauty with many fruits beginning to grow already (that sadly had to be picked off in order for it to take root). The fig was a hearty 4 feet with a few good looking leaves. Luckily for us we brought the van, otherwise I don't know how we would have gotten them home. Here is Mr. House with the tree stretching all the way from the back to the very front.

After we got home we took a look at our backyard and roughly decided where they should go. Here is a picture looking to the right and then the left from the back porch.

Now you know what we have to work with. I would love to post the plant map that Mr. House drew now, BUT we don't have our scanner up yet so that will have to wait. Next Mr. House dug a big hole while I attempted to pull weeds and hoe the ground in that back planting bed.

Mr. House worked hard diggin that hole! Here he is taking a much needed break sittin in his hole.

The reason why Mr. House dug the hole so deep and big was to A. add fortified dirt around the roots and B. implant a drainage pipe so as to better water the tree. We put the pipe in its place and then filled it with rocks from our front flower beds for drainage.

Here is Mr. House with the tree all ready to move into its new home!



After we filled in with dirt and mulch on top, Mr. House secured it to stakes with spare painters rags (hey it's what we have on hand!) and I supervised.


There was this cement strip that separates that far bed from the rest of the grass that was kind of awkward, so we decided to use those wavy brick trim pieces all along the cement and build up the bed by a few inches. We have a bunch of the brick things in the yard, I think enough to finish the whole span along the fence. I think it creates a much needed definition between the two spaces. So here is the finished product with just a part of what the new wall will look like.

It got dark before we had time to plant the fig so we planted that the next day. Now we need to find one more tree, perhaps a plum tree, to go along the back fence.