Peppers!

Peppers 8 days post sowing

The Songs Have Started

There is a boggy area in my backyard right next to my garden. Every year, winter snow and rain fills the bog. In the spring, toads frolic to my backyard to make lots of wee toad babies. (Did you know that about 80% of male toads return to the place where they were spawned during mating season?) Their croaking starts gently, and by the time spring is in full swing, it's incredibly loud. 

Toad hanging out in my garden.

Bog

When the songs start, I know spring is coming. I took said songs as a sign to build a row cover / small hoop house. It's covered in 6 mil plastic for now, and when it heats up outside the plastic will be replaced with tulle.

I bought an outdoor thermometer to monitor the temperature, and it was 80*F under the cover. Our 10 day forecast is pretty mild, so I decided to take a chance and planted my swiss chard today. It has been hardening off for a little over 2 weeks.

5.5 week old swiss chard ready for the garden

The row cover - PVC frame covered in 6 mil plastic sheeting

One of the really cool things about chard is that the roots are the same color as the leaves.

Yellow swiss chard

My goal this year is to grow 500 pounds of food for my family. So far, I'm at 4 ounces (I harvested my basil plants for a lasagna). I have 16 chard plants under the row cover, and sowed spinach, arugula, and radishes.

Swiss chard planted

Do you like swiss chard? Is the weather hospitable enough for you to get gardening?

                                     

Thanks, Phil!

Phil the Groundhog did not see his shadow this morning, which supposedly means that spring is going to be early this year. I'm going to ignore the fact that Phil has been wrong 61% of the time. I'm beyond ready for spring to get here. I'm longing to get my hands dirty and to eat my first tomato of the season.

Today also happens to be Imbolc, which is the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. So to celebrate, I started sweet potato slips.

This is the first year I'm trying sweet potatoes. I discovered a fantastic tutorial on starting them (as well as an overall awesome blog) called Outlaw Garden. We're practically neighbors, though she is in zone 7a and I'm in zone 7b. I feel the same way about my HOA that she does about hers. One of the covenants out here says you can't plant more than 10% of your property with edible food. I'll plant what I darn well please, thankyouverymuch. I'm a firm believer that our lives (as a whole) would be much better if we went back to the days of the Victory Garden. 

I purchased a bag of organic sweet potatoes before Christmas for Christmas dinner. I didn't use all of them, and they've just been hanging out in my pantry. When I read on her blog that I didn't need anything fancy to start sweet potato slips, I decided to give it a try.

Per the instructions, I cut the healthiest looking one in half and put it in a glass dish, cut side down.

After a few weeks, these will supposedly start growing slips. In the meantime, I roasted a couple out of the bag for lunch. Topped with butter, salt and pepper = nom.

In other gardening news, the broccoli is doing really well. It's about 2 weeks old, and will be going into the garden in another couple weeks.

I have a gardening complex that removes any and all patience. So I poke my seeds a lot to see if they've germinated, and today (2 days post sowing) I noticed my giant marconi pepper seeds are starting to sprout. Because I'm aware that normal people don't poke their seeds a billion times, I've put a green arrow pointing at the beginning of the sprout. Then I tucked the seed back in.

I saved the sad news for last. My peas didn't make it. *cries* I put them in during a pretty warm spell, and then we got the coldest temperatures we've had over the past several years. Down into the very low teens, which they just didn't like. So note to self - don't plant peas in January. (I'm sure I'll forget all about that next year, and plant them anyway.) I'll drop some more seed in the next week or two.

Don't forget to stop by the shop - I'm having a 20% off sale for Easter! Use code EASTER13 for 20% off all orders.

The Flu Sucks

Title says it all. A couple of days ago my throat felt scratchy, and I decided that I was NOT about to get sick and willed it away. That didn't work so well. Baby girl and I spent the day on the couch yesterday, where I had the pleasure of watching the entire first season of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Good times.

I was jonesing for a pot of chicken noodle soup. My husband, God love him, is better at preparing breakfast foods and boxed items. (Me? I set boxed food on fire. I'll save that story for another time.) Short of calling my mom and begging her to come make me some soup (and she would have, but then she would have caught the flu, and it would have settled in her lungs and she'd have to go to the hospital and I would feel horrible). Thus, I knew I had to do it myself.

So I got up this morning at 0-dark-30 with the kids and started working on the soup. (Scroll to the bottom for the recipe. Sorry, no pics.)

Now I'm floating on a "I've eaten my body weight in chicken noodle soup and Naproxen" high. (Naproxen is a pain killer / fever reducer. These body aches are making me very sad.)

I did stop by and check on my seedlings. Watching them almost makes me forget I'm sick. Almost.

A few days ago, I started my broccoli seeds. 

I used a pencil eraser to poke holes in the dirt:

Broccoli seeds are very wee.

I put one seed in each hole, because thinning them makes me sad.

A day and a half later, I found this little guy peeking out at me. 

Then today, amid the sniffles and the sneezing, I found these! Hello, baby broccoli. Welcome to the world. I will eat you one day.

One of my basil plants just turned 3 weeks old. It's working on its 4th set of true leaves.

3 week old swiss chard. 

Without further ado, here's my personal recipe for chicken noodle soup:

Ingredients

1 whole chicken

1 onion

5 cloves of garlic

4-5 stalks celery

4-5 carrots (or two big handfuls baby carrots)

bunch of fresh parsley

fresh rosemary

olive oil

salt and pepper

red pepper flakes

chicken stock (either stuff you made, canned / boxed. You can also use water. I used 5 cans.)

1 box of noodles (I used spaghetti, because it's all I had.)

Method of Preparation

Get out a stock pot or soup pot or whatever good size pot you have. Take your olive oil and drizzle it in the bottom, going around 3 or so times. Turn the heat on around medium high.

While your pot is heating up, dice your onion into bite sized pieces. Mince your garlic. (Bonus points for putting the onion skins and garlic peels in a bucket for your compost pile.)

Toss the diced onion and minced garlic into the pot and saute it. While it's cooking, roughly chop your carrots and celery. Toss that in the pot too.

Cook all of it together until it smells awesome and has some color. You're not going for burnt here - you want it GBD - golden brown and delicious.

When it's done, time to deglaze your pot. Mmmm. Deglazing is just taking the cooked on bits at the bottom of the pot, and making them not stuck to the bottom anymore. Don't worry, they're delicious. To deglaze your pot, just pour your chicken broth / water in the pot. You can even use white wine. (Everything is better with wine, I say.) Like I said above, I used about 5 cans of chicken broth. Well no, I DID use 5 cans of chicken broth. Anyway.

Now it is time for the chicken. If you're like me, you pulled your chicken out of the freezer the night before you wanted to use it. Being the food safe person you are, you attempted to defrost it in the fridge. When you pulled it out of the fridge to make soup out of it, it was still as hard as a rock, and you couldn't get the heart and kidneys out of the middle. Oh well. At least get the plastic wrapper off of the chicken. Now toss (or gently place, so you don't wind up wearing your soup base) the chicken in the pot.

Add more chicken broth / stock / water if necessary, depending on the size of the bird. You want the chicken covered. Add a couple stalks of fresh rosemary and red pepper flakes. Cover it with a lid, turn it down to low, and wait a few hours.

When the chicken is cooked, it'll start falling apart in the pot. This is a good time to remove the chicken, very carefully. You'll need 2 forks and an arsenal of swear words. You will inevitably burn yourself. Consider yourself warned.

Add your noodles. I broke a bunch of spaghetti into 3rds and used that. 

Remove the skin, and bones. Basically, just go to town on that bad boy removing any and all meat, hacking it into somewhat bite sized pieces along the way. Add it back to the broth. Stir it all up and season to taste with salt and pepper. Add a handful of parsley. Pat yourself gently on the back, because you have body aches and doing it harder would hurt more.

Nom nom nom.

Whoa Nelly!

So far, this winter has been comparable to last winter in my area. It's been very mild and temps hover right around freezing at night, but warm into the 50s during the day. 

I went to water my snow peas this morning, and found this -

Whoa nelly! The long roots are already growing through the bottom of the seed starting trays, so I figured it was time to get them in the ground.

Now, I'm very well aware that I'm a couple weeks early for pea planting. I'm very well aware that I'm very impatient. I'm also aware that impatience has consequences, like having to put your peas outside too early and having to gamble with their survival.

So we'll call this an experiment. Last year I put my peas in too late and fought with a ground hog over them. I harvested a quart to keep, and maybe a couple more quarts for fresh eating. And did a lot of swearing at the groundhog and the weather.

I went out to the garden and planted the peas along the chicken wire that prevents any more groundhogs from having a snack at the expense of my plants. Temps are supposed to be rather mild for the next week at least, and then it may get colder at night.

Cross your fingers that they make it! It would be pretty awesome if they did, and I got an early harvest out of them. If they kick the bucket, I'm only out a pack of seeds and 4 days of my time.

What's a gardening no-no you've done? Did it work out in the end for you?

Ohhhh SNAP!

Clever title for a blog entry about peas, eh?

I'm an impatient gardener. I believe I've mentioned that before. Why yes, I have - here. 

Last year was a bad year for peas and I. Not only do I feel that I put them in later than I should have, I also battled a groundhog. I noticed it in the boggy area in my backyard, and then she moved into the garden. She ate all of my pea plants to the ground, and all of my green bean plants.

I convinced my husband to put up chicken wire around the interior of the garden fence. One day Ms. Groundhog pushed through the chicken wire (he hadn't yet buried it) and was happily mowing down my snow peas. Trouble for her is, I didn't know she was out there when I let my dogs outside. She couldn't get out of the garden because of the chicken wire, and my dogs solved the ground hog problem. 

After that, the snow peas flourished, but it was also quite late in the season so the yield wasn't amazing.

So this year I decided to try to start things earlier. I started 80+ peas inside (*gasp* naughty gardener that I am. Peas are supposed to be direct sow). I soaked them in water overnight to make germination faster.

Then prepared the seed starter. This one came with a bunch of discs you just add water to.

After adding the water, just wait for the mix to grow.

I went through the peas, choosing ones like the one on the left, instead of the one on the right.

3 days later, they're starting to sprout! I'll transplant them outside to the garden in the next 2-3 weeks, weather depending.

Do you follow the "rules" of gardening? Or do you kind of fly by the seat of your pants like me?

Yes, These Are Happening

Absolutely.

All of my plants could die in the garden, and I'd still call this season a win just because of these boots.