Garden Delight!

We enjoyed a romaine, spicy mesculan, easter egg radish, green onion salad. Why am I excited about a relatively mundane salad? All of the ingredients came from our garden!!! They wer the first harvest from our little plots of garden space. I am ridiculously excited as it is the FIRST time we have actually gotten a decent harvest from anything we have planted! In addition the potatoes that I planted are starting to pop up as are the spinache, chard, and corn. The sunflowers, chamomiel, dill, cilantro, are all doing great. They seem to like the weird weather. We now have space to plant more veggies and plan on planting more of the mesculan (its really good having a slightly nutty flavor to it), more radish, a different kind of lettuce and the herbs we haven't planted yet. It should be a great summer of harvesting veggies! Pictures to come.

Potato Baking Bag

A couple of years ago we were invited to dinner at a family members house. It was a spur of the moment thing. One of menu items were baked potato's. Short on time it was decided to microwave them. The family member proceeds to take 2 large bags out of a drawer and puts the potato's in them! Asking why she explained that they were potato bags and that even though the potato was microwaved it would taste like they were oven baked. You simply wash and dry the potato and put them in the bag to cook in the microwave. We were skepitcal, but it turned out that she was right! So here are the directions to making your very own potato bag.

2 pieces of cotton fabric 11″ x 22″ (cotton with no metallic)
1 piece of cotton batting11″ x 22″

Place the fabric right sides together and then put onto the batting.
Stitch across each short end using a 1/4″ seam. Trim seam.

Position the fabric you want to be the inside of the bag on the outside as you sew.
Fold the top edge down about 2-3 inches. fold the bottom up and overlap about 1″. Sew this seam at 1/2″

Sew both sides. Trim to 1/4″. Serge or zig zag these two sides.
Turn the bag right side out.

the and more

Paul and Ian and Max and Ian enjoying a sunny day

Garden Pictures and more

These are our garden areas. The flowers are cyclamen and the other plants sticking up are romaine.

Udate on Garden

It was a very busy weekend for us. We (Paul really) spent a good chunk of Friday rototilling 3 garden plots. He used a Mantis to break the grass and dirt up. We then went shopping for seeds. We ended up with a lot of seeds! Including a red sweet corn, red carrots, red sunflowers and Easter egg radish's. We also got romaine lettuce seedlings. Then on Saturday the work started on getting the plots ready to plant. This involved 2 trailer loads of really really nice soil. It has compost, potting soil and other goodies that plants like. Paul unloaded it and I spread it out in the plots. Then came the dog proofing. We put up a small garden fence around each of the 3 plots. The grass was mowed, grass was planted to fill in the bald spots, really interesting flowers were planted in one of the plots, and sunflowers were planted. Most of Saturday's work was done in rain. I have not been that wet, cold and dirty in a very long time and I loved it! So that brings us to Sunday. Thankfully the rain stayed away. That allowed me to get out there and plant some garden! I planted all of the romaine plants, French Marigolds (the petals are edible!), Nasturtium's (again the petals are edible), Anaheim pepper, spicy mescalin mix, Grand Rapids leave lettuce, Peas, some red corn, pickling cucumbers, dill, chamomile, carrots, walla walla onions, red carrots, Easter egg radish's, more cilantro, sweet basil. There is still come planting to do, bell peppers, chard, spinach, oregano, mint, garlic chives are all on the list. I also left enough space that once this crop pops up we can plant more to ensure a crop summer and fall. I will post some pics soon.

Ian

I took Ian to Coquille today to get neutered. Yes it is a little early at just barely 3 months old. Normally they are spayed/neutered is 6 months. He was a walking mass of hormones though, so we opted for sooner rather than later. I worried about him all day. I HATE when any of our kids goes under anesthesia. There is always a risk that they won't wake up. I was relieved when I finally saw him wagging his tail at me when we picked him up. Now the second part of the neuter comes into play; keeping him from running around like crazy and licking the sutures. He has already tried licking so we got him an e-collar. He HATES it! It didn't cost a lot to get him fixed, $56 with $50 off for his adoption fee. Not to bad. I am thankful for that program. They also have a program that you can volunteer and get your dog neutered for free. I like that idea as well. Ian is doing pretty good, sleeping peacefully. In two weeks his sutures come out and he returns to his normal puppy activities. He does start obediance on April 4 (10-12 under Coos Bay city hall). That will be good for him, to gain doggy social skills and reinforce his obediance. I have been a bit lax on his training.

Garden

This is the first year that we have been able to a decent sized garden. In fact when we are done planting we will have four! Three are containers. One container is planted with strawberries, this will make the third year for them. Hoping to get some nice ones this year. Another smaller container is planted (today!) with green onions and cilantro. Yummy! The last and biggest container (about the size of a small kitchen table) is freshly planted with yukon gold potatoes and roma tomatoes. Then we have a chunk of ground that will soon be rototilled and supplemented with a bag or two of potting soil and a bag or two of fresh horse poo for fertilzer. On the list to be planted here is: Corn, Peas, Carrots, Lettuce, Onions, Spinache and not sure what else.