gardening

Inspiration for Dinner

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-03-16-33-01“What’s for dinner?”

The daily question I ask my self, and am asked by my kids.

Sometimes I know the answer ahead of time.

Sometimes I have no idea. Maybe I’ve eaten an afternoon snack and am not hungry enough to think about dinner. Maybe I’ve been running around all day and haven’t had a chance to consider what I’m going to make. Maybe I simply don’t feel like cooking. The afternoon wears on, and still I don’t know what’s for dinner.

I don’t panic. At five o’clock, I take a colander and a knife to the garden. I stroll among the plants. What looks good? What needs to be picked? What’s newly ready to harvest?

By the time I return to the kitchen, the colander is stuffed with vegetables, and my mind is full of inspiration.

What’s for dinner?

I don’t know. Let’s cook up some fresh inspiration from the garden!

End of the Pickle Drought

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2017-01-02-08-03-25-smI grow pickling cucumbers every other year, in order to avoid becoming the Pickle Lady. Last year’s crop, however, was killed by frost, and we’ve been out of pickles for some time.

This year, the stars have aligned, and I have a beautiful crop of cucumbers coming on. As a bonus, the dill didn’t get completely wiped out by aphids (as it often does), so it’s perfectly timed with the cucumbers. There will be plenty of dill seed heads to flavour the pickles this year.

So it was with joy that I picked the first cucumbers yesterday. There weren’t enough to make a proper batch of pickles—there’s no point in heating up the canner unless I can fill it at least once—but I was fine with that. In fact, I was quite pleased there weren’t more. It meant I could make a batch of fresh pickles to put in the fridge and eat right away. After a long pickle drought, they’re going to taste fabulous!

New Life for an Old Rug

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments
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A new garden area with freshly laid rug weed-block. Disguised with wood chips, no one will ever know it’s there.

Nothing lasts forever. Even well-made items eventually come to the end of their useful life.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful…in a different way.

Rugs get hard use in our house—there’s an awful lot of traffic in a small space. Add a dose of wool moths and high UV radiation, and it’s no wonder our rugs eventually start falling apart.

But tatty wool rugs don’t need to end up in the landfill. They can serve as excellent weed-blocking mulch in the garden. They last for years and eventually simply rot away. So much nicer than the plastic weed-block that eventually breaks up and stops working, but still needs to be removed and disposed of.

And as an added bonus, out here where there is no rubbish collection, it means we don’t need to haul the old carpet to the tip.

Cabbage Overload

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

img_2762When my husband and I lived in Panama, we made the trek to the provincial capital, Penonomé, every week or two. The trip involved half an hour of walking to the closest bus stop, then a bumpy forty-five minute ride down the mountain in the back of a pick-up truck. It wasn’t something to do daily.

In town, we would pick up our mail, phone home, and do some shopping. In our village, we could buy rice, beans, and a few other necessities in small quantities from the little tiendas, but we could only get vegetables from town (we were nowhere close to self-sufficient in vegetables there).

With no refrigeration, and tropical heat, fresh vegetables didn’t last long. We ate well for a few days after a shopping run, but by the end of the week, we were usually down to plain rice.

The most long-lasting vegetable we had was cabbage. A cabbage might last an entire week before it was too wilted or rotted to eat. So every trip to town, we bought a cabbage, and for at least two meals a week, we ate cabbage and rice.

At that rate, in our two years of Peace Corps service, we ate about a hundred cabbages. By the time we left, we couldn’t bear to even look at a cabbage. It was several years before we considered eating one again.

Today, we enjoy about a dozen cabbages a year, most in the form of sauerkraut or coleslaw. The idea of cooking up a pot of cabbage and rice is still repulsive, but with cabbage being a year-round crop here, it’s good to be able to make use of it.

When is a zucchini not a zucchini?

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img_2757The zucchinis (courgettes) started producing over a week ago, so I’ve been spending more time among the plants. I noticed that one of the varieties was behaving in a very un-zucchini-like fashion—sending rambling vines out in all directions and forming round fruits. I checked the tag and noted the variety, then looked it up in the seed catalogue. Maybe it was a weird variety I was trying out—I’ve been known to buy some strange plants.

I didn’t find the variety among the zucchinis in the catalogue, and it didn’t take long to realise what I’d done. “Squash” can be winter or summer squash, and when it came time to planting out, “Squash—Jade” sounded like a summer squash. It’s actually a huge sprawling winter squash that replaced my favourite, Kurinishiki, in the seed catalogue this year.

I don’t know whether to be thrilled or annoyed. Winter squash germination was awful this spring, and then the plants got hit by frost. But the summer squash bed escaped the frost. So instead of having none of my favourite pumpkins, I have half a dozen healthy plants. And it also means I have six fewer zucchini plants, which is most definitely a bonus, because I always plant too many zucchinis.

The problem is, they’re growing in the middle of the zucchinis, and I’m going to be tripping over the vines all summer.

*sigh*

The only sensible thing to do is laugh at myself and make the best of it…and write a note on the seed packet, so I don’t make the same mistake next year.

Christmas Aspirations

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2016-12-25-17-10-50-smAnother Christmas down. Another Christmas in which I feel like I received far better than I gave.

It’s a double-edged sword, at this time of year, to have a husband who is so good at gifts. He puts me to shame every year.

This year it was the two hand-made wooden vegetable baskets (the ones he whipped out in the last couple of days since he finished work for the year) that made me feel wholly inadequate as a gift giver. Add to that the lovely and thoughtful garden tools and kitchen equipment he bought, and I feel like I need to go back and try again on my gifts for him.

I’m not really complaining—how could I possibly complain about a husband who makes gorgeous baskets for me? But I think I need to start preparing for Christmas a whole lot earlier in order to even come close to matching his gift-giving. It is truly something to aspire to.

Christmas eve eve…

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

img_2742Surprisingly, a day of calm. It was overcast and rainy. The garden is reasonably well weeded. The berries and peas were picked yesterday.

Tomorrow I will clean the house (because Santa doesn’t visit dirty houses—I’m sure my mother taught me that one), and the peas and berries will need to be picked again, but today there was remarkably little on the to-do list. I’m not sure what happened, because usually the lead up to Christmas is a frenzy, just so I can feel free to take the whole of Christmas day off.

So, I gave myself an early gift—a day of sewing. I managed two new desperately needed t-shirts for myself, and did the finishing by hand while listening to a recording of my far-away family reading A Christmas Carol. Then I picked roses, and played a game with my daughter.

Such a lovely, relaxing day, I hardly need Christmas at all…

Through Fresh Eyes

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_2137-smAll week I weeded and tidied the yard in preparation for a pizza party on Friday night. I tried to make the sad, tired parts of the yard look less decrepit and free the nicer spots from their mantle of early summer weeds.

It’s a Sisyphean task—by Friday, the spots I had weeded on Monday were already sporting fresh weed growth.

So as the first guests arrived, I fretted over the shabby state of the yard and garden. As I looked around, I saw weeds, flowers that needed deadheading, outdoor furniture that should have been hosed off…

But no one noticed my weeds, aside from those guests studying particular ones (it was a party of ecologists, after all, and they were thrilled to find their research subjects ‘in the wild’).

Instead, they saw the musical instruments, the blooming flowers, the fish in the pond, the cat playing with a grass stalk, the places for playing and relaxing. They saw all the things we love about the yard, and never noticed the twitch sprouting in the paths and the flecks of bird poo on the deck chairs.

“This is awesome!” cried one guest as he beat out a rhythm on the outdoor drum set.

“It all looks so fresh…like it’s all new,” said another.

Throughout the evening kids and adults alike wandered around, feeding goats, playing outdoor instruments, grazing on raspberries, sitting on the benches tucked here and there, climbing trees, playing lawn games, and feasting on produce from the garden, baked in the new bread oven. Everyone smiled. Everyone relaxed.

It was good to see the property through their eyes for the evening. I focus so closely on the work that needs to be done, that sometimes I forget that, even with weeds or grass that needs mowing, the place is a haven. Sometimes I forget to put away the to-do list and just enjoy the place. I struggle to stop and smell the roses without also noticing they need to be pruned.

So thank you to all the guests who joined us Friday night. You gave me a fresh perspective and gave me permission to slack off a little this weekend—to just be here.

You have got to be kidding me…

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2016-12-16-15-35-55It frosted Saturday morning. Yeah. It was 30C Friday afternoon, and by Saturday morning it was 2C. It was back up to 30 degrees by Saturday afternoon, and today we went to the pool.

I didn’t even think to check the garden Saturday morning. It never frosts this late in the year. That’s the seasonal equivalent of frost on June 16th, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere. Even in St. Paul, Minnesota, it never frosted that late. It was a rude surprise when I went out to the garden in the afternoon to pick some vegetables and found the pumpkins and beans blackened.

The plants will survive—it was a light frost and the growing tips of the plants weren’t hit—but it will knock the pumpkins back significantly. They were already behind, because the first planting didn’t germinate, and these plants were my second try at them this year. A frost this late might be the difference between mature pumpkins when the first autumn frost hits or pumpkins that still need a few weeks of growth to reach the right stage for storage.

Unfortunately, the only thing to do at this point is shrug and be thankful the other frost-tender crops weren’t damaged…after the obligatory grumpy farmer complaints are through.

I’d Rather Be Weeding

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

dandelion-smWhen I tell people we grow almost all our own vegetables, I get a lot of comments like, “Wow! That’s impressive!”

I shrug—I think if they really knew, they wouldn’t be impressed.

Truth is, I think I grow so many vegetables because I’m just not cut out for the modern world.

I drove into town today for groceries and to finish (do) my Christmas shopping. I had already put the job off for several days while I found other, more important things to do in the garden. Then I timed my arrival in town with the opening of the shops, so the crowds would be less. I came armed with multiple lists—a list of destinations, and a list of items to be purchased at each location. I ticked them off, one by one, feeling the stress level mount as the morning wore on.

Noon came and went, and I was still working through my lists. The crowds grew. I got stuck in traffic. I didn’t stop for anything to eat or drink, lest the whole trip take longer.

I finally made it home just before 2 pm, exhausted, irritable, and completely stressed.

A little lunch and an hour of hard physical labour in the garden restored me.

Growing our food means I don’t have to go for groceries as frequently. I don’t have to deal with parking, stores, financial transactions, deciding what to buy of the endless array of products on the shelf. Sure, it may take four months to get a tomato, but at least I don’t have to go to the store to get it.