Orders For Next Year's Garden

It's about to be a new year, and it's time for a fresh start!  I do so love fresh starts.  :)

Here's what I ordered from Baker Creek, and why...

• pepper:  caribbean red habanero
• why:  my husband requested it, he loves habaneros and this one is twice as hot as the regular orange type
• bean:  chinese red noodle  
• it has the longest most beautiful beans I've ever seen, and I am particularly excited about this one! These are more for stir-fries or steaming than for eating raw.
• cucumber:  dragon's egg
•  terribly adorable
• melon:  rich sweetness 132
• a high producer of small melons, produces throughout the whole season, and the melons have amazing red and orange stripes
• summer squash:  lemon
• supposed to be one of the highest squash producers out there, and I go through a lot of squash!  Has the best insect resistance for squash, which is great since the earwigs loved my zucchini.
• swiss chard:  perpetual spinach
• it is less chard-like in bitterness, more spinach-like... which is good because I would like to eat it raw, and I found that just 2 large leaves of raw chard at a time gave me a sore throat (probably from the oxalic acid).
• miner's lettuce
• this is something I nibble all the time at my parents' house where it grows wild... a taste of home!  If I'm lucky, I can get it to grow "wild" under most of the existing plants as a groundcover.
• herb:  chervil
•  we had it for the first time on our honeymoon (in Ireland, though the herb is french), have been looking for it ever since... it was delicious enough that I had to ask the chef what it was!
• lettuce mix:  siamese dragon
•  a mix of asian greens... I miss living right next to an asian market
• radish:  purple plum 
• has a milder bite, matures in just 4 weeks, and is purple
• tomato:  riesentraube
•  red, makes a ton of tomatoes, is smaller and good in hanging planters, has hearty flavor that is great as oven-dried tomatoes
• tomato:  black cherry
•  purple, delicious, "wildly" prolific in rainy cool or hot summers (our odd summer weather last year was responsible for everyone's bad tomato season, I hear)... so I'll be planting extras of these to make sure I actually get tomatoes this time around!
• tomato:  sungold
•  orange/red/yellow depending on the plant, very prolific, mild flavor... I tried a sungold hybrid last year, and it had the most potential, so I figured this time I'll try an heirloom sungold.
• tomato:  egg yolk
•  yellow, supposedly outproduces everything, and I hear rumors that it does very well in the Bay Area, plus it's cute as heck!

When I tallied up my original seed bill, it came out to over $50, and Baker Creek is cheap!  I opted to drop dragon's tongue beans, wild strawberries, zucchino, black prince snapdragon, bells of ireland, chocolate bell pepper, cilantro slo-bolt, moonlight nasturtium, oregon sugar pod pea, pepper cress, italiko dandelion, sleeping beauty melon, and 2 other larger purple tomatoes.  'Cause if I'm honest with myself, my garden is SMALL, can I even crowd it that much??  I am writing it here though, so that I will remember these for next year.  Zucchino rampicante had the best reviews I've ever seen for a vegetable... it was hard to let that one go, but there wouldn't truly be space for it!

I also ordered "Clyde's planner" from Baker Creek, since it came so highly recommended... it's like a quick cheat sheet for when to germinate, transplant, and harvest different types of plants, based on your particular frost dates.  A major mistake in last year's garden was not starting seeds indoors, and not starting early enough because we moved to the new house too late in the season.  This year I have the opportunity to do it by the book!  And/or by the planner, as the case may be.  I can also plan out some successive plantings.


The last thing to order is some codling moth traps from Territorial Seed, since I'm not willing to spray pesticides.  The codling moth worms just decimated the apples last year, but they plant eggs while the tree is flowering, so by the time I saw worms it was far too late to do anything about it.  The traps are sticky and filled with codling moth hormones to trap the males... hopefully it will allow me to have edible apples!  The tree did make a ton of apples last year, which were good to average in flavor.

Can't wait for my orders to arrive, for when the real planning will begin.  <3

May your new year of 2011 be full of joy, laughter, and gardeny growth!

Catching Up

Just a quick note... I added in all 15 of the missing "wordless wednesday" photos, from Sept 22nd 'till now.  Whew!

Bye Bye Bonsai

A Blogging "Vacation" is Hopefully Ending

Hello folks... yes, I'm still alive!  And so's the garden.  :)  Well, mostly... the chard and bull's blood beets are still hanging in there through our crazy winter rains, and I keep picking off a leaf or two for delicious salad accents.  And the pearl onions have recently reseeded themselves like grass, so we keep nibbling those baby greens as well.  The nasturtiums were going amazingly strong and started to wrap around the house, but I opted to get rid of them to reduce the aphid population in next year's crops.

Happiest. Aphids. Ever.

I haven't been doing so well with the journal lately, as you have probably noticed.  The reality is that my job/location changes a year ago have left me with 2.5 hours or less of free time per weeknight, which are usually spent either with my husband or blankly staring into space in a failed attempt to reboot my brain.  The result is that I end up doing all of the journal writing and picture-taking (because who wants weekday garden photos taken in the dark like the above photo?) and garden/house maintenance on weekends.

Strangely, in the holiday/anniversary/birthday season of the last 3 months, I have not had a single free weekend day to do this!  As naturally unsocial as I am, I'm not sure how this is even possible.  Anyway, life became far too busy, and two things had to go:  blogging and my sanity.  Blogging minus the sanity would have just been "raving," and nobody likes to hear that.  Or do they?  Next journal idea:  Voices In My Hair.

I am expecting to get back into the swing of blogging soon, in the new year when weekends will be my own again.  The prospect of having time to do all the menial accumulating tasks like laundry and deep-cleaning and responding to emails and getting my hands dirty in the garden... it fills my heart with song!  In all honesty, I crave being a productive science-minded mom running her own home more than the current reality of being a harried grumpy sleep-deprived scientist running an understaffed lab.  Someday I'll make this happen with a home business... someday.

Someone made this 2.5' pumpkin by engraving it when it was young, and then they gave it to my brother-in-law who teaches grade-school science.  Science DOES indeed rock!  I totally want to do this project.

There are lots of photos of the garden's progress since October, so I will fill in the gaps in the blog as well.  Boy, are there stories to tell!  I was just going through the Baker Creek heirloom seed catalog this morning, and I'm about to order some new and strange seeds... the theme for next year's garden appears to be "purple" and "dragon."  You'd think that since my ultimate goal is to actually have food to eat from such small garden space, the theme would be "tried & true" plants, but noooooo, I just have to be weird and go for the Dragon's Egg cucumber.  I suppose the biggest goal is really just to have fun and get a little better at growing things each year.  :)
I do need to get some good producers in the garden this year though...

So my question to you is:
What is your most productive garden plant?

Aphids On Nasturtium

Still Flowering, Somehow

Time To Tear It Down

Nasturtium Invasion, Part II