The Garden, two months later

In March I wrote a post describing this year's garden.  Since then we've had some successes and some tragic losses.  Here's the update:

1. Cassie: She's actually producing!!!!! There were a lot of flowers that actually set, and we haven't lost any of them yet - as opposed to last year when there were tons of flowers, they all appeared to set, and then over a two week period, all dropped off. Last year's harvest was one sad and slightly deformed pomegranate.  Two of the three watermelons planted from seed in her base are still alive, but small.

2. Jill:  I don't know what's going on with her.  Some of her branches have lost all their leaves, but there is no evidence of leaf cutter ants.  The leaf cutters stripped half of Wendy the first year we had her, and since then we have vigilantly patrolled the yard with poison and torches.

3.  Peachy:  She's great, she's covered in small peaches.  The basil at her base is dead, possibly drowned.  Her strawberries produced about four fruits, all of which were consumed by our toddler, so I don't know how they tasted.  It looks like one of them is about to put out a few more flowers, so we may get more strawberries, but I doubt it.  This heat burns them.

4.  Quinto: She's heavily laden.  Actually, no, one grafted section is heavily laden.  The others have leaves, but didn't flower this year.  I don't know if any of the species are fall fruits or if we'll just get nothing from them.  The dwarf annas are almost ripe.  We've eaten about four half apples, because there were bird attacks, and we certainly weren't going to waste the non-pecked parts.  The damage to the apples all occurred while we were on vacation. We haven't had any new losses since Ryan hung his 'Shiny Flashy Bird Frightener Thingees' all over the place.

5. Wendy:  Covered in pomegranates and CD reflectors.  Even if we lose some to the birds, I don't care.  Last year she produced so many that we literally just finished them last week.  They keep really well in the refrigerator drawer.  So well, in fact, that it is possible to completely forget that they're there until your toddler opens the drawer, brings you one, and you have to think for a minute to figure out why she's carrying around a pomegranate in the middle of May.  Not that I've had that experience.  I'd post a picture, but for some reason when I sent Ryan to take updated garden pics, he failed to get Wendy. 

6.  The Moving Herb Garden:  It now consists of Rosemary.  That's it.  The dill went to seed, the cilantro and oregano just up and died.  The peppermint, that's a tragic story.  I recently discovered Watermelon Mojitos, which are fabulous refreshing drinks and an excellent use for garden peppermint.  However, when you go away for a week and ask your father-in-law to water the garden, it's entirely possible that if you don't point out the pot of peppermint in the shade of the tomatillo, he won't notice and you'll come back dreaming of Watermelon Mojitos (and the juice waiting in the freezer leftover from your last batch) only to discover that the peppermint leaves are dead and gone.  Well, not gone, but not good for anything but peppermint tea.  Ryan thinks it might come back, but I'm not so sure.  ETA: Also, toddlers love to eat dried peppermint leaves. So much that if you take them away, they'll scream.

7. Potato Bags: Another tragedy.  Maybe we planted too late in the season.  I just know that this happened:

8. Paulo's Circle: Holy crap, summer squash really produce.  So far we've had a couple of loaves of zucchini bread, Zucchini Quinoa Rice Enchilada Casserole, some kind of weird zucchini stew with pickles in it (Ryan made that one), and grilled zucchini.  Plus we've given some away, and we have more in the fridge and we'll be harvesting more tomorrow. The most recent picture is two weeks old - they've grown in the interim.  Note that we used bush varieties this year.  We didn't want to lose too much of the yard to vining squash like we did last year.

9. East Plot: This is another one that's really taken off.  We have Early Girl, Black Cherry, and Sungold Tomatoes.  On the center-left is a pretty large basil.  On the center-right is a nasturtium which we planted as aphid deterrent, but later found out that it is also edible.  In the front you can see two rows of carrots.  We planted a third row, but it never came up.  I don't know how to tell when carrots are ready, so I don't really know what to do with them now.

10. Central Plot: This is a mad jungle of tomatillos, which have taken over everything and produced exactly nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.  I don't think we'll be planting tomatillos again next year.  There's also a basil and nasturtium in there that are doing pretty well, and two pepper plants (my last garden update says three, but I can only find two. The other one must have been eaten by the tomatillos) that are being overwhelmed. 

11. West Plot: This has been a nice surprise - the Romas actually produced.  We've tried them a couple of times and have never had any luck.  Perhaps the difference this year is that this particular plant was a freebie, and we killed our only Roma seedling after we acquired it.  I can only assume that this Roma is now afraid, knows that we are ruthless tomato plant killers, and will keep producing fruits in the hopes of staving off its own death and destruction. 
     Note the absence of spinach: it is now too hot.  We'll have another crop this fall, but for now, it's gone (which sucks because we have so much basil and I have an awesome recipe for spinach-basil pesto orzo).  

Shiny Flashy Bird Frightener Thingees

OK, so we have a lot of things growing in our garden/yard that produce fruits of some sort or another, including tomatoes, strawberries, a peach tree, several pomegranates, and an apple tree that we planted last fall.  The apple is five different apples all grafted together, and one of them was apparently a spring bloomer, and has a fair number of apples on it.  We have lots of tomatoes and peaches as well.

Turns out, humans are not the only critters that like to eat fruit!  I know, right?  I'll wait patiently while you compose yourself.  We lost several of our Early Girl tomatoes and five or six apples to the depredations of those dastardly flying free-loaders known as birds.  Apparently the feral cats are now utterly without redeeming qualities and are now only good at crapping in my yard and pissing on my doors.  They'll get their turn on the vengeance rotisserie at another date.

After some research I determined that birds are afraid of two general categories of things:  things that might eat them and things that they think might eat them.   Surprisingly enough, they are apparently convinced that light might eat them, as they are apparently afraid of shiny flashy things (except ravens and crows, those curious crafty buggers).

Where to get shiny flashy things... where to get shiny flashy things... ah what's this I see before me?  Is that a giant box of CDs that Sara and I no longer want and not even Bookman's will take?  Sure looks to be.  Wait a minute... CDs are shiny on at least one side, and some are so hideous on the other that surely it will frighten even crows and ravens (those crafty buggers).

I have made several versions of shiny flashy bird frightener thingees (pat.pend and copyright) of increasing complexity and pleasing geometry.  The first was just a CD tied to a branch.  I chose the shiny-on-both-sides versions to increase effectiveness.  I figured the wind would blow them about and they would spin and shine and flash.  I did not include a picture here because it's pretty easy to imagine, unless you're a bird, in which case it would simply be a picture of <fly away fly away> and not very illuminating.

Second, I tried the basic tetrahedron, which is four identical equilateral triangles.  I dredged up my ancient geometry skills and used a compass and ruler to divide the perimeter of a CD into six equal pieces, and then chose three as the place where I would drill holes to attach them together.  But wait, you ask: a CD is a circle, not a triangle!  Correct.  The point where I drill the holes is equivalent to the line where the two triangles meet, and the vertices are imaginary (not mathematically, just physically).

Third, I tried an icosahedron (D&D fans know what this is), or a 20-sided polyhedron composed of 20 identical equilateral triangles. This was overly ambitious, so I knocked it back to an octahedron, which was very cool.  I have not calculated how big an icosahedron would be made of CDs would be, but impractically-gigantical-for-a-garden-shiny-flashy-bird-frightener-thingee springs to mind.

Last, I tried to make an off-set hexahedron.  Basically, the idea was to make two tetrahedrons and place them together so there were six sides, but instead of lining up the axes of the base triangles, I was going to twist them 60 degrees.  Turns out that's not really practical for a few reasons, but basically, I would have been better making a cube and hanging it from one point.  So, I made the regular hexahedron, and it works well as a shiny flashy thingee but it's not that aesthetically pleasing.

More cooking

I've been doing a lot of knitting and crocheting lately, but haven't had the chance to take pictures of the finished objects.  Ryan has completed another reflector for the garden, but I'm going to let him post about that. A lot of our current projects are hibernating right now, as we've been dealing with car repairs (Ryan usually does them himself, but lacks the time, space, and equipment to repair a leaking head gasket), plus we're getting ready for a vacation.  So why am I posting at all?  Just to give an update on some cooking successes and failures.

First, the failure.  It turns out that if you want to make black sugar to give sugar cookies a kind of goth look, you need a lot more food coloring (and a higher tolerance for the smell of food coloring) than I have.  So when I volunteered to bring dessert over to a friend's house for dinner, then didn't have time to make the Watermelon Mojito Sorbet, then decided to go for my fallback option of sugar cookies (dusted with homemade vanilla sugar), I probably shouldn't have attempted to dye that sugar black.  I made it to dark brown before giving up. The cookies now deceptively appear to have been coated in regular brown sugar rather than my fancy vanilla sugar.

Successes (there are two):

1.  Avocado cream sauce.  I had never heard of it, never thought of it, but I saw a recipe, decided it looked delicious, and was right.  We made homemade spaghetti noodles (I love my kitchenaid mixer), poached and shredded some chicken (again, love my kitchenaid mixer) and tossed it with avocado cream sauce.  Fantastic meal! Not a quick meal, since we made the pasta from scratch, but definitely worth the effort.

Here's how I made the sauce (I won't write this up as a recipe, because I can't be bothered to actually measure): Place the flesh of two ripe avocados, a couple of tablespoons of cream, a couple of tablespoons of lime juice, and a little bit of salt in a food processor.  Process till smooth.  That's it.

2. Zucchini Quinoa Rice Enchilada Casserole. This one was a little more complicated, but also involved using canned food, and was pretty fast to assemble. It involved corn torillas, refried beans (two cans, since in my four previous attempts at making them myself I discovered that it is damn near impossible to make them taste good and have a decent texture), rice, quinoa, zucchini, sour cream, cheddar cheese, enchilada sauce.

Without measurements, here are the steps:

1. Cook up a big pot of rice and quinoa.  They cook together really well, and cook exactly the same way.  If you've never tried it, next time you make white rice, replace about a quarter cup or so with the equivalent amount of quinoa.  We usually use about a 2:1 ratio.
2. Go out to the garden and harvest zucchini. I used two from a bush baby plant. Or you could just buy zucchini.  I just wanted to say that so I could link back to the post about the garden. Note to self: do another garden update before it becomes so hot all the plants die.
3. Shred zucchini and sautee with olive oil.  
4. Shred up a bunch of cheddar cheese (or whatever cheese you like).
5. When rice/quinoa is done, add the sauteed zucchini, cheddar cheese, and some sour cream.
6. Open a can of enchilada sauce, put some in the bottom of a baking dish.  
7. Layering time. Here's how I did it: Corn torillas, refried beans, rice mixture, enchilada sauce, corn tortillas, beans, rice mixture, corn totillas, enchilada sauce, more shredded cheese.
8. Bake at 375 for a half hour, or until it all looks really bubbly and you can't stand to wait anymore.

Purging the unnecessary

Several years ago, I can remember thinking that it wouldn't be too bad if my house burned down and I lost everything.  I'd be able to start over, and only acquire what I needed, meanwhile shedding all the excess crap that I can't ever seem to willingly part with.  Of course, I'm glad I've never actually had a house fire.  I think it was just something I was imagining because I couldn't imagine actually having the strength to really give up all the meaningless possessions that I've somehow become attached to.  Every so often, I go through a closet or a drawer or a room and pile up a stack of items which then get sold or donated.  And that's what we did this weekend (also, Ryan would like me to add that he re-coated the roof).

The first step was the bookshelves. We went through and cleared out all the books we were sure we wouldn't want to read again. There were some that I think we've been keeping as reminders of who we once were, like ten-year-old books from grad school, or travel guides that are nearly a decade out of date. We just don't need those anymore. We ended up with a pretty big stack of books, which won't be replaced anytime soon either - I've re-discovered the joy of the library, now that I go there 3-4 times a week for various story times.

Then we hit the three boxes of CDs that were in the storage shed.  Now, some of you may not be familiar with those.  It stands for 'compact disc,' and you should think of them as sort of a data storage device.  Back in college, they're what we used to use to listen to music.  I no longer have a CD player (besides the computer) and haven't for years.  So as you can imagine, those CDs no longer have much use to us.  We kept some, transferring them to a cd portfolio, which takes up a lot less space.  The remainder joined the books in a pile in the living room.

Next on the chopping block: DVDs.  We stream Netflix, so we haven't watched a DVD in months, except for Game of Thrones, which we have to watch on disc since we don't have HBO (I'm a huge fan of the books, I have them all in English and Spanish, and they survived the purge).  Almost all of the DVDs were added to the pile.  If there's something we desperately want to watch again, I'm sure we can find it on Netflix.

We ended up filling several boxes and bags, which we then took to Bookmans, which is an awesome used bookstore.  They took slightly more than half of what we brought in, and gave us over $200 in store credit for it.  Pretty good deal, though I'm pretty sure I heard the employees who were going through it mocking some of our music choices.  Ryan can't help loving Roxette.  It's embarrassing, but let's not judge him for it.

After the Bookman's trip, we went through the CDs one more time, this time to determine which of the remaining CDs had a chance at being useful as thrift store donations, and which ones would be better off as garden reflectors to protect the fruit trees.  It was about a 50/50 split. Once we get a working camera (note: Do not let toddler throw camera on tile floor), I'll post some pics of the new garden art/bird repellent.

Now the trunk of the car is full of the leftover books and discs, as well as a large portion of the contents of the front hall closet (another successful purge this weekend).  There is also a box of magnets left over from our photography business that I rediscovered recently.  We sold them for $3 each at shows, and sometimes they really made the difference between a horribly crappy show and just a mildly crappy show.  But now that we don't have a business, what the hell do we do with a couple hundred magnets?  Same as we're doing with everything else.  At some point tomorrow, I'm taking them to my favorite thrift store and saying good-bye.  It's going to feel so good!

I always love cleaning things out.  I love opening up the space, both physically and emotionally.  Too much clutter makes it hard for me to focus.

Painting and doors

Our latest big project: replacing all of the crappy 1970's scratched up fake wood closet doors with new, nicer ones.  I know we usually try to reuse and repair everything, but in this case, due to ugliness, we had to make an exception. Maybe we could have tolerated them longer, but when we built the Arizona room, we put nice six panel wooden doors on that closet.  The AZ room closet is about two feet away from the laundry closet, and being able to see the old and the new at the same time just highlighted how terrible the original doors were.

I know it may seem like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not.  These doors were so terrible that even the Habistore rejected them, and told us they don't accept those doors because nobody will buy them.  However, they did tell us to stack them outside by the dumpster and promised that someone would come along and take them eventually.  It felt a little weird abandoning the doors rather than donating them, but apparently that's what they do there (plus an employee told us that a couple of days earlier someone had picked up about 20 closet doors from that spot, so there is hope that they really will be taken and used).

The new doors are all six panel folding wooden doors that we purchased at Lowe's.  One for the pantry, two each for the laundry closet, back bedroom, and front bedroom/playroom.  They are now all painted and installed, except for the one in the playroom.  That one is installed but unpainted, because we're still debating repainting the walls.  It's amazing what a difference it makes - the rooms look so much lighter and brighter.

There was some difficulty with the paint, namely that we were out of the light blue kitchen wall paint that we needed for both the pantry and the laundry closet - and apparently that brand of paint no longer exists.  Well, maybe it exists, since it does still have a website, but the store locator on it tells me that no stores within a hundred miles carries it.  Furthermore, just for fun I checked and no stores within a hundred miles of Phoenix, Chicago, New York or Los Angeles carry it either.  Luckily, Ace Hardware has a color matching service - and it was almost perfect.  Plus, that allowed us to get the paint in the Benjamin Moore Natura that we used in the bedrooms (it's a no VOC paint that didn't exist when we painted the kitchen, so we used a different and apparently unsuccessful low-VOC brand from another store).

It's kind of amazing to me how one little change can make things look better - and highlight what still looks bad.  Here, the chain of events was getting nice closet doors in one room, leading to needing nice ones in the other rooms, which then led to the current project of painting the dark brown door that divided the kitchen and AZ room. We were able to live with that particular brand of ugliness for years, until we had nice closets on each side of it.  Once that's done, who knows? Perhaps we'll realize how ugly our countertops are and decide to replace those (just kidding, we already know they're ugly).

Non-accomplishments

A few weeks ago, I posted a list of my sewing projects and stated a goal of getting them done within two weeks.  Here's what actually happened:

1. Lining the baby blanket for J&H  Didn't happen.  Decided not to line it, because I didn't have the patience to hand stitch the lining.  Ryan convinced me lining wasn't necessary.  Here's what the blanket looks like: Star Illusion Blanket
2. A pillowcase for my toddler, so she stops stealing other people's pillows in the middle of the night. Done. Will do a post about it later.  Sadly, though, she won't sleep on it and still steals other people's pillows.
3. Finishing the hem on the last two bedroom curtains.Didn't happen. My excuse is that I couldn't remember the measurements on the hems of the other curtains, and every time I remembered to check, I couldn't do so because the toddler was sleeping, and if there's one thing I know not to do, it's interrupt her nap.
4. Fixing the unevenness of the living room curtains by adding an edging. Didn't happen. No excuses but laziness.
5. Making beanbags. Done! Though I don't know why I decided the toddler needed 14 beanbags.
6. Repairing some of Ryan's pants. Didn't happen. I blame Ryan.
7. Finally making babylegs out of the pair of socks that has been sitting on the shelf next to the sewing machine for months. Didn't happen. Probably because the weather warmed up and she doesn't need babylegs. Or because one of the socks fell down behind the shelf and I didn't feel like moving everything to get it out.  

So not the most successful task list.  However, other projects are in process, and will likely be successfully completed.  I'll update about them later.

Past Projects: Rope Rug

Ryan and I are both rock climbers (or at least we were pre-baby and hope to be again one day).  The ropes we use have a finite lifespan. Some people use their ropes until they snap and the climber falls to a tragic early death.  Others, like ourselves, know when to retire them (hint: it's before the tragic early death part).  And then what do you do with a retired rope?

Behold, the rope rug, made with Ryan's beloved 60m Sterling 10.2 and about $3 worth of caulk:

See that dirty spot? That's the halfway mark. So it's not really a dirty spot.
Quit judging my housekeeping skills.

This was a very simple project.

Step 1: Wash the rope.  We just soaked it in a bucket with detergent and hot water then rinsed it in the bath tub. You can skip this step if you don't mind a rope that's full of dirt and climber blood.

Step 2: Sewing.  In order to get the rug started, you have to sew the first few rounds together.  After that, it doesn't matter, you can lay the rug out and it will stay in place. It doesn't matter what color thread you use either, since when the rug is done you can just snip it off.

It's difficult to get a needle through the rope, and I actually had to use pliers to pull it through a couple of times.

Step 3: Lay the rug out on the floor, simply coiling it around itself in a circle (or you could do an oval, which is what I'm going to try with an old static rope that's been in our shed for awhile).  You really should put it on a dropcloth or tarp or something.  I didn't do that, which is why there's an arc of caulk still on the tile in the baby's playroom.  Learn from my mistake.

Step 4: Caulk it up.  We bought a bunch of caulk for $1 each at Habistore.  I don't think it really matters what kind you use or what color it is - it's just to hold the rug together and to keep it from sliding on the floor.  I just globbed a bunch on and spread it with a 6" taping knife.

Step 5: Let it dry.

That's it.  Pretty simple, and it makes a durable rug.