A garden update

So... Seattle has had record high temperatures this summer which means that our meager plantings that we showed you earlier in the spring have grown into quite a lush garden. While Jocelyn and I both have been very busy with classes, work, and student leadership, we have spent a good amount of time digging in the dirt, fighting off flea beetles, and munching on fresh veggie goodness. Without further ado, here are some pictures.

So this is what it looked like when we first got our plants in the ground. As you can see, our early crop of Potatoes was doing so well that we had to build up a little wall around it so we could keep piling up enough compost to keep up with it.
Before we knew it, those little chard sprouts in the front would have us inundated with colorful bouquets of heirloom rainbow chard that did not slow down until the temperature started reaching the 90's. I'm afraid that as it starts to cool off now, it is going to kick back into full production. As it is, we give bunches of chard away to strangers who happen to come by while we are picking it, and we have donated some to the local food bank!

Meanwhile the rest of the garden looked like this!
We were harvesting royal burgundy bush beans daily (they as so sweet, juicy, and crunchy that most of them get eating while we are working in the garden) as well as more lettuce than we could ever eat (we've sent more than 20 medium heads to the food bank) and a delicious spring crop of broccoli that was so lovely we decided to plant a fall crop as soon as we took the old plants out.
When our potatoes started to die back we got the joy of digging up potatoes. This was a first for both of us, and it truly feels like a miracle. You don't really believe that it's making those beautiful veggies beneath the soil until you start sticking your hands down into the ground and pulling out three or four nice sized spuds at a time. This crop yielded 5 lbs that were delicious, rich and creamy. We steamed up a bunch of them fresh and had them with just a touch of salt and butter. We'll finish the last of them this week, and we already have a late crop in the ground and it needs to be piled up this weekend, this time we are going for a small variety called buttercream.
Given last year's attempts at growing tomatoes in our partial sunlight window (yielding three tomatoes each smaller than an apricot), we have been delighted by the serendipitous weather that has made it the year for tomatoes in Seattle. Our little tomato starts that you saw us hardening off in the picture above started from seed and have now grown into a thick jungle of branches and vines full of now ripening tomatoes. The biggest producers are the Marmandes, which have large deeply ridged fruits. We have lost a few to mice that nibbled a few which then got infected with a dark mildew that caused a handful of fruit to rot, but we have since cleared out the problem fruit and will be spraying a nice pepper and garlic concoction over the plants to deter our little rodent friends. In the picture below you can see two of our first tomatoes along with some of our lovely carrots, deer tongue lettuce, and a few of our prolific cannonball zuccinnis (over 2o lbs already and they are still going strong, so strong that I had to cut out a whole plant the other day because it was trampling beyond its cage and smothering some nice little red onions that we hope to harvest in another month or so). This is just a small sampling of what is coming out of the garden this week.
As the heat has made the summer veggies flourish it has been great to see the squash, tomatoes, broccoli and brussels sprouts create a leaf canopy that has sheltered our carrots, onions, shallots, herbs and lettuces from the sun. By layering our plants through interplanting we have created a "living mulch" that retains a lot of soil moisture while letting the smaller and slower growing crops really get established. Now that we are beginning to pull out the broccoli and later the squash and tomatoes, we will begin putting in our fall and winter crops of parsnips, rutabagas, several cabbages, late broccoli, brussels sprouts, fall lettuces, and another round of carrots. We are also trying some new to us veg like kholrabi.
Also, an update on our CSA farm box that Jocelyn posted about. Here is a picture of one of our first boxes, all of it freshly picked from a local farm that practices organic methods. Our weekly boxes come with one or two bunches of beautiful flowers that often keep for a couple of weeks, so our apartment has been graced with fresh flowers for over a month now. We also have recieved large bags of fresh cherries and apricots that are heavenly. This means we are eating way more of fresh and healthy produce than we could have ever dreamed of affording to buy in a grocery and at the same time we are supporting a local farm that is employing local workers and responsibly caring for the land. That's what I call a win-win-win!And last (I know it's a long post!), I got new glasses after breaking my old frames. The new prescription is wonderful and I got the frames on Ebay and had a local shop fit the lenses. They are bamboo! Jocelyn got new glasses too, but you'll have to wait for more recent pictures to see them.Well that's all for now. Back to finishing up all my papers and tests from summer classes. I have one more week of writing papers, a week off, and then I'll be starting up the fall term and my internship. Crazy life. Joce is wrapping up her term this week too. Maybe we can enjoy a little Seattle sunshine in our week off.

A Lovely Song

I dreamed you were a cosmonaut
of the space between our chairs
And I was a cartographer
of the tangles in your hair

I sang the song that silence sings
It's the one that everybody knows, everybody knows
The song that silence sings
And this is how it goes

These looms that weave apocrypha
they're hanging from a strand
The dark and empty rooms were full
of incandescent hands

The awkward pause
The fatal flaw
Time, it's a crooked bow
Time is a crooked bow

In time you need to learn, to love
The ebb just like the flow.

from "Armchairs" by Andrew Bird

I wish I had a little more time to reflect on the loveliness of these last two years. These few moments are snatched from the two monstrous term papers that are vying for my attention and words just now. But life does not wait for term papers, and love, as inexorable as the tides, pulls me into today. Into tangled hair and whispered thoughts. And miraculous zucchini, bold shallots, and carrots that walk.

The Most Exciting Three Letters of the Day: C-S-A!

We've finally done it! After talking and researching and scoping out different farms at markets and online, we settled on the Boisefort Valley Farm as our CSA. For the uninitiated, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and it's basically a way for farmers to raise capital for the upcoming season and secure a market for all that produce once its ready to eat! You sign up at the beginning of the season to receive a weekly box of produce from your farm for a fee that usually works out to be between $30-$60 a week over the course of the whole season depending on your farm and the size of your share.

We're excited about this CSA in particular because
1) it's committed to local, sustainable agricultural practices (including being organic, but that's only one aspect of a pretty broad outlook)
2) the delivery site is at the Olympic Sculpture Park (not only beautiful, but closer to our apartment than any grocery store!)
3) they look like they have good variety and amounts of food for less on average than what we've been paying at the grocery store

It seems like a win-win for all of us. (Though Jocelyn's not sure what tune she'll be singing if it turns out that she doesn't like celery root no matter how craftily Daniel cooks it up. We'll just see how it goes.)
All things considered we're anticipating a wild ride on the local side of produce. Here's the website for the farm complete with gorgeous pictures and recipes (definitely counting on those to help out with the celery root experiments to come) : boistfortvalleyfarm.com.

Gardening

So the big news of our lives of late includes Jocelyn starting grad school at Seattle University, and us getting our garden plot in the Belltown P-Patch after a little over a year on the wait list. While Jocelyn being in grad school is huge, I will reserve that for another post where she can write about how that is going. for now I will just say "Yay!!!" and congratulate her for doing so well thus far.

Ah, but the garden, well that I have pictures for. So, the rest of this post will be dedicated to our garden.

First, the basic rundown is that we have about 95 sq. feet of gardening space in the community garden that is located on the block that lies between our apartment building and my school/work. When we got the plot it had been allowed to go over with weeds through the winter and so we began working to clear it of grass, invasive mint, wild fennel (very aggressive stuff), and other common weeds. As we cleared, we came across scattered bulbs that had been left in by the previous gardener. So we dug up and moved to one corner of the garden all of the daffodils, hyacinth, tulips, and a few other unidentified bulbs and a some sort of flowering rhizome that was growing on a large rock.

Since we wanted to do a vegetable garden, the flowers got booted into a tiny shallow corner of the bed that sits on to of some large rocks that make up the base of our rock wall. Sorry to the flower lovers out there, but we are kind of leaving these guys to fend for themselves. There are plenty of other flowers in the entire garden to keep us more than happy--we're in this thing for food.

We spent 3 weeks clearing the bed of grass roots and double digging the soil. This entailed digging up sections of the plot a foot deep, then using a garden fork to loosen the soil below that an additional foot deep.



So we ended up working the ground 2 feet deep over about 95 sq. ft. That comes out to be about 7 cubic yards of soil that we worked. Whew. But in the end, I think it will pay off. We rebuilt walls that had fallen down, got rid of grass and mint runners buried over a foot deep, dug out all of the deep fennel roots, broke up pockets of clay, got rid of 3+ buckets of rocks, worked in organic fertilizer, and have two feet of light, fluffy, loamy soil in which to plant some happy vegetables, particularly all of our root crops.

Meanwhile, we have been starting our heirloom tomato seeds inside under a compact florescent lightbulb in our oven hood. This entails having a large bucket with a box on top of it sitting on our stove with the light on about two inches above our emerging seedlings.

So far we have had four come up and the first two are alreading starting their first set of true leaves!
We also have one seedling each of cilantro and basil that have developed their true leaves. We had a few more of each but they seem to have failed due to damping off (weakening of stem at soil level due to moisture etc.). The rest we have planted directly now that it has warmed up enough.


Finally, we have our brussel sprouts going indoors, and they are almost ready to transplant. We also started our potatoes inside, but as you will see in the video, they are now in the ground.



Back out in the garden, last weekend was planting time. Last Thursday we sowed the upper bed (about 5 square feet that we recovered from rocks and clay by building up with extra soil from double digging) with arugula, deer tongue lettuce, and four seasons lettuce (a bibb type), which are all beginning to come up now. The rest we planted on Sunday and have been watering to keep the seeds moist while they germinate.

Here's the arugula coming up, followed by a shot of the entire plot (taken from the west side).


The following video walks you through our garden plot, what we have planted, and finally through a tour of about half of the P-Patch where our plot is located.




As you can tell, we are very excited and proud of our little venture thus far. We are trying an intensive gardening method that aims for the highest yeild per square foot of garden through loosening the soil, avoiding stepping on the soil to compact it, and innterplanting plants together based on soil, sun, water, height, growing season, and rate of growth. We will keep track with weekly pictures throughout the summer and try to post a few times so everyone can see our progress.

Below is a list of what all we are trying to grow in our little plot this year. We will see how it goes!

arugula
purple carrots
orange carrots
five color silverbeet chard
deer tongue lettuce
four seasons lettuce
royal burgundy bush beans
stupice tomatoes
marmande tomatoes
indian stripe tomatoes
cannonball round zuccini
delicata squash
red onions
shallots
potatoes- we don't know the variety, we just planted some organic baking poatoes that come from the Northwest
brussel sprouts
broccoli
rutabagas
parsnips
cilantro
basil
italian parsley*
mint*
spearamint*
strawberries*
*these were all freebies that were growing in the plot already when we got it. Also we already harvested a good bit of wild miner's lettuce as we were clearing the plot, plus one small red lettuce that had reseeded itself in the plot.

Feeling Like a Pioneer

It feels like Fall. Crisp, scented air and already anticipations of cosy nights and the bustle of the holidays. Jocelyn's been walking down to the Pike Market getting our produce fresh from local farmers who pile their veggies with an implicit pride, the outcome of careful work. The harvest.

We've made our year's supply of blackberry jam, packing it away as carefully as Laura Ingalls Wilder must have done. Daniel filled the coffee table with red, orange, yellow, and still green leaves gathered outside out apartment building. And just yesterday we transformed the left over wax from the stubs of old candles into some new ones. Here they are ready to light the long evenings to come! The red votives were a wedding present, so it was nice to be able to refill them.

Pictures--Yay!

A few updates after a long hiatus.

In February we made the move from Seatac to Seattle. We are actually living in the neighborhood of Belltown. These pictures are from the Northwest Folklife Festival at the Seattle Center. It was really cool to be able to go to such a great event in our own backyard.

We have been waiting a long time for summer to arrive and I think it finally has, as of July. That's right, we've actually reached temperatures in the 80's.

In other news, we've both been busy with work and school. Jocelyn is finishing her year with Americorps and she has started searching for a new job. Daniel has been doing a lot of intensive classes over the summer, with a few weeks of up to 50 hours in classes.

In our spare time Daniel has been experimenting with making African recipes. Here's a picture of a Berbere spice blend that we have tried that is delicious with red lentils, chicken, and vegetables.

We have also been growing a tomato plant in our window. It gets a couple of hours of direct sunlight and about ten hours of indirect light. It has kind of gone through growth spurts and dying spurts, but I am proud to say that it has finally put on blossoms and now has three growing tomatoes. Yay!

And most exciting, Jocelyn recently got a new haircut. She is really enjoying the new style and as you can see in the pictures, it looks really great on her.

















She donated what was cut off to "Locks of Love"--thus the ponytail in the last picture.

a long overdue update on life

So we have made it through the darkest part of the year. About a month ago the sun was setting about 4:20pm. But we are back up to 5 o'clock now, so things are looking up.

The Christmas break was good. Daniel worked full time over the holidays while school was out, and Jocelyn changed her schedule to work days while her office was on a break from regular classes which keep her busy in the evenings.

We managed to make it out to Georgia to see our families for the new year. It was nice to be back for a few days before shifting back into our regular routine.

As most of you should know, we have been living just south of Seattle in Seatac for the past six months. While it is not very far from the city, it takes Daniel over and hour to get to work or school, and Jocelyn closer to an hour and a half each way. Needless to say, adjusting to life lived by bus schedules has been quite a change for us.

But we have big news! We are moving in February to an apartment in the heart of Belltown, one of the neighborhoods in the center of Seattle. We will be one block from Daniel's school, eight blocks from his work, and a 10 minute bus ride to Jocelyn's work. Aside from regaining enough hours to add an extra day in the week, it will be nice to be closer in to the city where we can have a little more access to friends, grocery stores, etc.

We will post pictures as soon as we can.

Peace,
Daniel