Curve Balls

Well, in case you’ve been wondering where I am, I’m here. Life has been crazy recently. My boss at the day job has been on a two week vacation (must be nice), Little Man has finally cut his first tooth (which I’m excited about, but I also feel bad for him since it’s obviously painful), and to put the icing on the cake – I’M SICK. I’m not talking allergies or a little cold, I’m talking down and out sick. Terribly sore throat, whole body aches, raging fever, chills – the whole nine yards. It started Thursday afternoon and by Friday morning I was more or less delirious with fever and barely able to get out of bed.

I’m hoping the worst has past. I still feel completely terrible, but now I can sit upright for more than twenty minutes at a stretch and even swallow food (somewhat – and it hurts like hell). Little Man has been sounding a little hoarse, so I’m seriously hoping I didn’t pass it along to him.  He’s got enough drama with the teething.

So, there was a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted to do (and thus post about) this weekend, but at this point I’m just hoping to be able to feel okay enough to walk to the farmer’s market down the block tomorrow to pick up some fresh veg and our seedling order. And that’s pretty much it, since the most important thing is to be well enough to go back into the office on Monday and make some monies. As they say, money makes the world go around. Though I’d like to meet the guy whole invented capitalism and clock him in the face… but that’s another story for another time.

Before I digress too much into working-for-the-man bitterness, I’ll give you a little preview of what’s in store here at Apartment Farm.

- We lost another battle with the squirrels (hint – we had sunflowers for 29 hours). But we think we’ve found a way to win the war.

- We bought home brewing equipment at long last. We will make beer!

- We stocked up on wood chips for the grill, so we’re going to be doing some good eating.

- I made a taggie blanket for Little Man. If you don’t know what that is, feel free to disregard. If you do know what that is, I can show you how to make one in five minutes!

- The deck veggies are coming along nicely. It’s high time for an update.

So see, Apartment Farming continues. Or it will, after I’m over these sickies. I’ll be back!

Sunday Market Score

For once, we remembered when the Glenwood Sunday Market was holding a winter market – the last one of the year. Though with temps nearing 80 today, saying we were going to a winter market was a little weird. And it certainly wasn’t austere – the place was jam-packed and we came home with a nice haul – a pint of field-ripened strawberries (it’s true!) from Hardin Farm, fresh garlic from Montalbano, an entire bag of red potatoes from King’s Hill, and mushrooms from River Valley Mushrooms.We also picked up a breakfast treat from Bennison’s – two chocolate croissants for me and two chocolate doughnuts for husband. And last but not least, we got some lettuce and plant starts from our favorite market vendor, Midnight Sun – a Patio Star summer squash, a couple of Italian parsley and four miniature sunflowers.

It was great to dig in the dirt this morning planting. I put the four sunflowers in our window box on the deck railing, and they look gorgeous. Once the three morning glories get a bit bigger, I’ll plant them in front so they can cascade down to the patio. It’ll look great. The parsley went into our blue glazed planter, and the squash went into one of the mid-sized planters on the patio so it can get plenty of sun. I didn’t go hog wild at the market today with plants because Becky let me know that their seedling list is up on their website and that she’d be happy to put together an order for me to pick up the first outdoor market in a few weeks. So of course the first thing I did when I got home was email over my order -

1 dill

1 lavender

4 Improved Rainbow Swiss chard

2 Lacinato kale

1 Roma tomato

1 Sungold tomato

3 of the container tomatoes we asked you to grow (I am having a brain freeze on the name at the moment)

2 Jimmy Nardello sweet peppers

Other than forgetting the name of the tomato I specifically asked for last fall and that they obligingly agreed to grow out this season, I think I’m pretty well set on plants now. We’ve got our four types of hot peppers that are doing fairly well along with a few basil starts that are looking good. We need to restart our edamame and peas – I know it’s kind of late for peas since it’s getting hot already, but I’m going to try a couple anyway and see what we get.

And of course, despite my best laid plans for what I planned to grow, my list is always a bit different once I start to get things in the dirt. But that’s what I like about gardening – you can always mix it up and see get a lot of good stuff! It’s too bad we don’t have any batteries for the camera today (need to put that on my next shopping list) or I’d take a picture and show it all off. Good thing we’ve got the whole season ahead of – you’ll be able to see the garden in it’s full glory soon enough.

Spring Stockpiling

Seeds are germinating, so it’s the time of year when I start getting really anxious about pots. I never seem to have enough. If you recall, last season I was really excited to acquire six 14-inch planters (we only used four) at the dollar store for $7.00 a piece. We definitely plan to use all six of them this season, and then some. I’ve been watching the dollar store for a few weeks now for this season’s gardening supplies, and today I finally hit gold. I popped in to check out the situation on my way to the grocer for the week’s meat and veg and lo and behold – two aisles of garden supplies. After grocery shopping, I returned to purchase what I’m estimating we’ll need for this season. I know from experience that the dollar store is going to sell out of the planters fast – they went like hotcakes last year.

I thought about getting two more of the largest planters so we’d have a total of eight, but the real estate on the common patio is getting kind of tight. There’s a communal table and chairs (that no one uses ever, so it’s kind of annoying that it’s taking up space) out there, and I know a couple more grills in addition to ours are going to make an appearance as the weather gets warmer. And that’s okay, it is a shared space. So instead of the largest planters, I decided to expand our growing space with a collection of smaller pots, that can be easily moved around and tucked into small spots.

I purchased four 12-inch pots at $5.00 each, four 10-inch pots at $2.00 each and two 6-inch pots for $1.00 each. I also picked up two 3-packs of plastic drainage pans for the smaller pots at $1.00 each. I figure the 10- and 6-inch pots will be good for the assortment of herbs we’re growing this year, and will be much easier to bring indoors in the fall for overwintering. So for $32.00 I think I got a pretty good deal. We also acquired a blue glazed pot (I think it’s around 12 inches) last fall when we received some planted mums as a gift.

So the total inventory of plant pots currently is -

6 14-inch pots

4 12-inch pots (new)

4 12-inch hanging baskets

4 10-inch pots (new)

2 6-inch pots (new)

1 12-inch glazed pot (new)

1 10-inch (I think) glazed pot (permanent home for the hops)

1 8-inch glazed pot

1 6-inch glazed pot (permanent home for the bamboo)

2 square glazed pots (permanent homes for the bay tree and oregano)

1 strawberry pot

1 window box

1 freestanding window box shelf with Earthbox “insert” (permanent home for the dwarf junipers)

 

Think it will be enough? Likely not, but at least we’re closer! And it’s a good thing, because we have dichondra, jalapeno and cayenne peppers sprouted, as well as some herbs. Which herbs, we don’t know yet. The mini greenhouse had a little accident on the patio on a windy day recently, so things got a bit mixed up. I think basil and thyme, but we’ll find out for sure once the seedlings get a little bigger and put out more true leaves. And this weekend we’re going to do some more planting – more peppers (the germination rate wasn’t too great – I got the seeds in trade, so you can never be sure of the quality), peas, chard, more herbs – lots of other stuff. My planting list and schedule have gone out the window… but that’s okay. My husband is really involved this year so I’m excited about that. So if he says he wants to plant something, we just do it. So we may need to go buy more pots yet!

In the Works

Believe it or not, I’ve got projects going on! Our rental apple tree from Earth First Farms came in this past weekend, so I’ve got two bushels of Rome apples to attend to ASAP. If you’ve never seen two bushels of apples, think of two large moving boxes. Full. Of. Apples. Since we got everything off one tree we got a mixed bag, so lots of different apples for different uses. About a third of ours are pristine enough for long term storage for fresh eating. Being in an apartment without a root cellar for storage, I had to do something drastic and clear out our entire vegetable crisper bin in the refrigerator. They just fit! But now we have fresh apples for eating whenever we want, and these are tasty. As I always say, I’ll take food in the pantry over money in the bank any day.

As for the other two thirds… Saturday is the big preservation day here. I plan to do 14 quarts of apples canned in water so we have some plain fruit on hand that can be later used for savory dishes (apples ‘n’ onions, apples with roast pork, etc.) or turned into apple sauce, or even made into pie filling. If our filling supply runs out, because that’s what I’m doing with the rest of them – cooking them down into my apple pie filling for the freezer. Apple pies whenever we want them! Sounds like heaven to me.  It’s likely going to be a little more work than I had hoped – I waited to long to try to buy the apple peeler I wanted and it was on backorder for awhile. Now that it’s back in stock, I don’t have the time to wait for it to be shipped or the inclination or funds to pay for express shipping… so I’ll have to attack them with the hand peeler. But they don’t need to look pretty, so I think a quick hack job will be fine to get the work done. I did buy a new apple corer/slicer with ergonomic handles for five dollars, so that will make the bulk of that part go a lot quicker. It’s always the prep work that’s so time consuming. But now that I’m back on both feet and not pregnant, I think I can get through the entire endeavor without too much trouble. And it will be worth it!

In other news, we were able to clean up the garden the other week, as we intended. We took out the pepper plants and moved the thyme and oregano in those pots to move indoors once it starts to get really cold. I need to start keeping an eye on the forecast since we’re liable to get a frost any day now, and I don’t want the plants damaged. We left the chard in since it’s still growing a little bit and we want to wait until the last minute to take the last harvest from it. And we also left the tomatoes in since they had about half a dozen green ones hanging on, but I think this weekend I’ll just pick whatever (if anything) the squirrels have deigned to leave us and just do up some fried green tomatoes for lunch one day. With some black eyes peas and cornbread, it’ll be a tasty simple meal. And we left the cabbages in because husband thought they’re looking cool as they start to flower. May as well have a little plant decoration for a little while. And we buttoned down the hatches putting away all of the summer stuff, like the candles and pillows as well. It’s looking tidy and ready for winter. We do need to pull down the lanterns and get them under cover too. A mini project for husband this weekend? And the mum that we were given in the new blue pot is in full flower and looking spectacular. I just love mums in the fall. And I actually did remember to take pictures of the deck in it’s cleaned up state, but they got downloaded to husband’s computer so I’ll have to post them up a bit later when I can get them transferred to my laptop. Proof that things are happening over here!

Garden Triage

I hobbled out to the deck this afternoon to get my hands in a little dirt. While husband was firing up the grill to make burgers for dinner, I decided it was high time to do something about our long suffering false spiria. It was in the window box planter with the two dwarf junipers, and all them were worse for wear because of it. They were just not compatible in the same growing space for some reason.

I’m a little short on planters at this point in the season, so the only thing I had available was a small milk glass planter, that was previously corralling electronic gear in the living room. I trimmed all the dead stuff off of the plant, and trimmed it’s roots back by about half. This will either kill it, or encourage it to rebound.  This is what it looks like post surgery -

If it survives and makes it through the winter, we’ll need to repot it into a planter at least twice as large in the spring, so that it’s got the best shot at survival and producing more of those gorgeous pink-purple flowers it has. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, the dwarf junipers are also displaying some dying back, mostly in the undergrowth. The are still a decently vibrant green overall, with a bit of new growth at the tips. Now that they’re back to themselves in the planter, I hope they rebound all the way. I trimmed off as much of the brown branches as I could get at -

Now we have a big ugly empty spot. We’re thinking the sensible thing to do is just get another dwarf juniper to plop in there. We know we can grow them with reasonable success in this setup, and we don’t have to worry about whether other plants will be compatible with them. It’s nice to have a decorative shot of natural green out there anyway, especially over the winter months. And it’s super easy to dress this planter up over the holidays with some red winterberry stems and white lights, which is the plan for this year.

And in related news, the tomatoes are on the rebound too. We lost one plant out of four. The remaining three are green and growing once more. They all have a least a few flowers on them, and one even has a small green tomato! But shhh, we’re not going to talk about that anymore. I don’t want to jinx it!

The State of The Garden

Well, it’s time to take stock of the wins and losses in the garden this year. It’s been a mixed bag.

Wins

- The herbs are doing great. We have enough bay, thyme, rosemary, oregano and basil to use freely. In a few weeks, I’m going to harvest everything off the basil and make up a sizeable batch of pesto. In the fall, we’ll try our hand at overwintering the thyme and rosemary and maybe the oregano along with the bay indoors.

- The hops is a beauty to look at it. We’re still waiting to see if it actually produces any cones though.

- The hot peppers did amazingly well. We’ve eaten a few, and the squirrels have eaten a few, but overall they’ve done great.

- The sweet peppers did pretty good too, even though a few have gone to the squirrels.

- I’m not sure which category to put the chard in. We ate two good harvests, then we had the spider mite situation. Somehow we’ve managed to eradicate the spider mites, and while it’s putting out new growth, none of it’s big enough to eat yet. I think I’m counting it as a win, because I feel fairly confident we can get another few meals out of it.

- The cabbages are a win so far. They’re doing great and heading out nicely. They’ll be ready to harvest at the end of the month I think. Will I try my hand at home made sauerkraut with them? I think I might.

The Losses

- The tomatoes. They’re a real sore spot for us. We harvested a total of three tomatoes off of four plants. They were luscious and wonderful with such a profusion of fruit… then they got waterlogged, and then they got scorched and just when we thought we had them on the rebound the squirrels made a massive attack and ate every last one. And what kills us is the fact that the squirrels are so wasteful! A bite or two out of each one, then onto another. Sad.

- Cucumbers. Way back when at the beginning of the season, you might remember that I planted a couple pickling cucumbers in the window box, and those didn’t even make it a month before mysteriously dying off.

- Green garlic. I had a couple bowls of garlic planted at the beginning of the season and promptly lost that due to mold. It just rotted in the soil. This season has been oddly wet. After how many years of drought? Go figure.

- The strawberries were a loss. The foliage looks good, but we got a grand total of two ripe berries that we didn’t even get to taste, thanks to the squirrels. I’m not sure if we’ll do them again next year.

- Squirrels. We have a squirrel problem. In addition to decimating the tomatoes, as I mentioned above they’ve also had their grimey little hands on our hot and sweet peppers. This is why we can’t have nice things!

 

So I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do differently next year. We’ll definitely grow another four tomato plants, but those babies will be caged for sure. I’ve already been browsing designs online and thinking it over. And I think we’ll try cherry tomatoes instead of regular tomatoes. If we can keep the blasted squirrels off of them, we might get more bang for our buck.

I want to do chard again next season too, but I want to get it out of the window box and into a few larger containers so we can get bigger leaves. And it’ll be easier to isolate should we run into spider mites again next season.

I’m sticking with herbs, but going back to putting them into individual pots so we don’t have to transplant them for overwintering. As for what will go into the window box next season, I’m not sure yet. I have a lot of flower seeds that didn’t make it into rotation this year, so maybe I’ll do a box full of dwarf snapdragons, with a couple of morning glories to trail down the front. The would look pretty sharp and give us a nice shot of color out there.

I’m undecided on the cabbage being a repeat or not – we’ll see what happens with that when I harvest.

I’d like to add in a couple of edamame, because I just love that stuff for snacks. And next year I actually want to do the potatos in a trash can. I never did get those in and I ended up losing my seed potatoes to rot (techinically another loss I suppose). We’ll bring back the hot peppers, but probably not the sweet. I’m okay with buying sweet peppers, full sized tomatoes and maybe even cabbage at the farmer’s markets. And I’m on the fence about Lacinato kale – I might do a fall crop of that. And that’s something I want to start practicing at – succession crops and intercropping.

As far as hardscaping, I think we’re pretty well set. We’ve got a nice complement of patio furniture and planters. I’d like to get a couple more of the large plastic pots, so I have a total of eight. Maybe when I’m back on my feet, I can see if the dollar store has any left on sale. Probably not, since they were already starting to add in back to school stuff when I was in there a month ago, but it’ll be worth a look if I’m back on my feet anytime soon. And I’d like to get a little something for flowers to hang on the wall above the chairs, like some terra cotta wall pots. I actually found some made from plastic, which fits our budget these days a little better than the real deal -

So maybe we’ll get a pair of those. Or maybe I’ll do something upcycled on the wall, which we can do for free. These coffee can planters are a great idea, and we could spray paint them in any color we want -

I’d also like to add some type of small water feature, like a miniature table top fountain. Gurgling water is such a relaxing sound. I haven’t even begun to browse options for that yet, but I like the idea of making my own (of course) rather than buying something prefab. And it would be really cool to try to have it just large enough to hold a few small water plants, like dwarf papyrus.

So there you have it. Wins, losses and grand plans. The season is nowhere near over yet but it’s always good to take stock of things and see where you’re at. And if all else fails, there’s always next year. That’s the great thing about gardening.

They’re Gone. All Gone.

The squirrels. The tomatoes. I’ll let you guess what happened.

 

Red, Ripe Tomatoes!

It’s been kind of touch and go with the tomatoes lately. They were gorgeous – bushy, bright green plants with an abundance of green tomatoes on them. But we’ve been having some strange weather over the last few weeks. It’s been excessively hot with extremely high humidity (often around 80%!) and a lot of thunderstorms. We’ve gotten a lot of rain at weird times, so the soil just wasn’t drying out in between storms. The fact that the tomatoes are in pots only compounded the problem – the poor things easily became water logged. We didn’t even want to photograph them, they looked that sad. All wilty and half dead looking, and then the heat started to scorch the leaves…

But, we moved them under cover for a few days to keep the excess rain off them, and husband checked them twice a day to pour off excess water. And we even drilled extra drainage holes around the perimeter of each pot to further along the drying out process. They’re looking pretty rough for wear still, but I think they’ll survive. We only lost a few of the green tomatoes to blossom end rot. We think we’ll actually need to water them purposefully tomorrow actually, since the soil is about normal again.

I told husband that in the worst case scenario, we could harvest the green tomatoes and make up a batch of fried green tomatoes for lunch one day. No great loss without some small gain. But lo and behold, despite all the stress, these tough little plants managed to do a little something for us -

Two perfectly red, ripe tomatoes! Now, we did have to cheat a bit to get them- at the first blush of pink, husband picked them and brought them in to ripen on the counter. Amazing how tomatoes can do that, huh? Sure, they won’t be quite as luscious as the vine ripened variety, but we had to be on the offensive. After that marauding squirrel stole our only two ripe strawberries this year, we weren’t about to take chances on the tomatoes. On a related note, the little bugger pilfered one of our sweet peppers, took a bite out of it, and promptly abandoned the rest of it on top of the gate on his way to back to his tree. I really hate that squirrel, but I’ll save my squirrel rage for another day. After all, we beat him to the tomatoes! I’m thinking we’ll have them as they deserve to be eaten in the summer – sliced and lightly salted. A perfect afternoon snack.

A Profusion of Peppers!

This heat wave we’ve been having lately is having a mixed effect on the garden. The peppers and tomatoes are loving the heat, the herbs are tolerating it, and the chard is just suffering. The cabbages seem to be more or less indifferent. At the end of Week One of Bedrest (yes – the verdict is not the worst case scenario on my ankle, but not the best – I’ll be in a cast for the next six weeks, which is basically the rest of my pregnancy) I sent husband out back with the camera for a progress report.

As you can see from the photos above, we really do have a profusion of peppers! The green ones are the hot peppers, and the yellow ones are the sweet peppers. And most of them are still setting flowers, so there will certainly be more to come.

You’ll also notice that the chard is looking a little rough for wear. We think we’ve got the spider mite attack under control as we haven’t seen much further evidence of them on the plants, but they’re slow to rebound. This killer heat just isn’t helping either – with intermittent thunderstorms all the time, it’s hard to know when to water and to stay on top of it.

We also let the oregano go to flower. It’s slightly more bitter now that it’s flowering, but not so much that I think it’s inedible. Oregano is a favorite of bees, so I wanted it to flower to be sure to attract enough pollinators for the peppers and tomatoes. Seems the plan is working!

 Check out that hops plant! It’s well over six feet tall now, and husband has really had to scramble to keep up with it with the makeshift trellis. And it’s grown to that height in the shade! They really prefer to be in full sun, so I can hardly imagine how tall it would be if we had it down on the patio. It doesn’t seem to producing any hops cones yet, so we’ll see if it does. We don’t really know at what stage of it’s growth cycle it’s supposed to, so we need to read up on that a bit.

The bay tree is robust and still outgrowing it’s pot. I hope Gethsemane has another sale on their pots this fall, because we’re going to need a much bigger one to move it into this year. It’s a proper tree now.

And we had to give the rosemary a haircut. With all this wet, humid weather it was starting to get affected by powdery mildew. Husband tries to move it down to the patio every few days so that it gets full sunlight and better air circulation, but that’s a heavy pot and we have a lot of plants to keep on the move in the quest for better sunlight. We are definitely investing in wheeled plant coasters for next season. The powdery mildew was really at the tips of the branches, so we just lopped them off with the garden shears. Hopefully that will eradicate the problem once and for all. And honestly, I kind of like the more manicured look it has now. It’s got a topiary feel to it.

And last but not least, the cabbages and tomatoes. The cabbages are just fine and are continuing to head up. We’ve had no problems with bugs or disease with them thus far, so hopefully they continue on in good health through the summer.

And check out those lovely green tomatoes! There are some big ones hiding in there too. We had a few that succumbed to blossom end rot (I blame this ridiculous weather for that) but for the most part they’re all healthy and robust. None of them are starting to pink up yet, but hopefully any day now. We’ve got to be on squirrel patrol big time – one of the neighbors said she had some tomatoes just starting to turn red, and the little bugger took a bite out of them! So she’s watching hers carefully and snatching them off the plant at the first sign of red and letting them ripen on the counter. So we may not get vine-ripened tomatoes around here, but we WILL get them!

The Fruits of Our Labor

We got back from our suburban family wedding travel close to noon today, so we’ve had a little weekend left to spare. We set up my sewing table that the in-laws refinished (complete with patterned paper drawer inserts and new drawer pulls!) and installed some fabric blinds that my mother in law sewed to replace the crappy broken plastic ones in our bedroom (picture updates of those to come; I’m all camera’d out for today). Then we threw some Milwaukee Iron burgers on the grill and had those for lunch on the deck with potato salad and baked beans. So a low-key 4th of July thus far. We also scored a deal on charcoal on our way back to the city - Home Depot has a 2 for $9 special this week on Kingsford charcoal, so we got four bags since husband’s mom drove us back to the city. That’ll last us maybe a month, we’re hoping.

What I really wanted to share with you all though is the fact that our veggie plants are finally fruiting! Check out some of these tomatoes -

And both the sweet and hot peppers have started to develop as well -

And our swiss chard is putting out new growth after our first harvest. I’m looking forward to harvesting another batch at the end of this week.

Everything is looking really good. We’ve got to keep close watch now since that squirrel is still lurking about, but I’m ready to spring into action with impromptu cages if that’s what it takes.

As for the rest of our holiday weekend – we’ll probably do something low-key for dinner, like pasta salad or white bean and broccoli pasta since we did our big grilling for lunch today. I’m going to get a pie crust mixed up shortly to chill in the fridge and use the last little bit of the frozen berries in the freezer to make a pie for dessert – high time to make way for this year’s bounty. And later, just relaxing on the back deck with our books and good conversation likely. Maybe a card or board game too.

I hope everyone has enjoyed the 4th of July weekend like we have (and maybe snuck in a couple of projects too). Happy 4th!