Fresh produce and a house torn down

Where did the house go?

No, we didn't tear our house down. :) But the house across the street is gone. From our window well in the basement, this was the old view. Looks alright, but it was falling apart. The tractor moved in for the first day of demolition the week before the 4th of July.

This was the same day that the energy company came and picked up our fridge. In the picture to the left, you can see that they tore the street up. I guess the gas for the entire street had to be shut off for the time of the tear-down, and the gas was buried in the street a ways down. This is the view from our front porch. (Which, man, if you could see the plans I have for my front porch, you'd be amazed, but that's another post for another time)

Demolition is underway! And what a glorious sight it was, too! That house had been falling apart and looked bad for a long time. Then again, most of the houses in our quirky little neighborhood have some, um, character to them. But it's fun to have the immediate vicinity fixing up. When this neighbor told us he wanted to tear down his house and rebuild, he said he felt bad for us for having to look at his house all this time. He feels like we have a really pretty house and wants to fix his up to the same caliber. I didn't tell him that we have a LONG ways to go before this place feels done. It made my day to hear he thinks we have a pretty house!

Look at that thing tearing the house down! I got a pretty huge kick out of this. I ended up standing on my front porch taking videos and pictures for a little while until the guy running the backhoe looked a bit uncomfortable about it.

I wanted to look him in the face and say, "Hey, look, it's not every day that you get to see a house torn down, and it's not every day that house is literally across the street from you!" But I didn't do that. I just went inside and gawked over the pictures in the comfort and privacy of my home. And then I watched from a window.

Here's the "house" today. Pretty amazing. Taken from the same vantage point as the other photos. Just a backhoe left. Not even a lawn remains. Pretty amazing. I can't wait to see the new place go up. The guy who owns this spot says it'll be done in September or October. So we expect to wait until December or January. No biggie. A few months is nothing in the scheme of things. To the left here is the view on the street. They're digging a hole for a new foundation. Apparently, the old one was really bad, but some parts were ridiculously over-reinforced. That's kinda what you get in a house with a really old history. That house had been built in the Midwest in the 1930s and moved to Colorado in the '50s. And now, it's gone. Ah well. It's not like Europe where they build things to last for centuries.

In my garden...

The garden, above, has grown even more. I've helped it along by adding new plants, as well, but the things in it have been flourishing lately, too. On the right is my compost bin. Love this thing. I have put all kinds of things into it and the bottom layer IS starting to turn into dirt. It's gonna be a great feeling next Spring to put our own compost onto our garden and watch it start a cycle. On top in the composter right now is the result of me thinning the corn. It was growing a bit too well in ways, with 4 or 5 stalks to a space, so I thinned it. I am sure it could stand to be thinned more, but hey.

Speaking of corn, I employed something I learned from my dad, and it really worked. He said corn grows best if it's planted in multiple rows together. So, I planted three rows of corn, and sure enough, the stuff in the very middle of the pack is the tallest, healthiest corn I have in the yard. It's not much, but apparently, much better than setting it out there to grow alone. Who knew corn was a social plant? Knowing that make me like it even more.

These are the seeds I have either planted recently or am going to plant in the next day or so. First are my pumpkins. A great pumpkin patch needs more than one kind of pumpkin, I think. From left to right, let me introduce you to mine. :) Far left were planted yesterday, they are my Sweet Sugar Pumpkins. They're fairly small, but are the perfect pumpkin for pies and cooking and baking. In the middle on the top are my Fairytale Pumpkins. They grow pretty large, taste like winter squash and are really decorative. They look just like Cinderella's pumpkin. They are growing next to the sugar pumpkins and in front of the corn. I planted them last night. Below them also in the middle are my heirloom Giant Pumpkins. They're supposed to grow to be about shoulder-height on an average-height person. Exciting. I think they're purely decorative. My giant pumpkins went in the ground two days ago. On the right is the Tom Fox Pumpkin...aka perfect for carving jack-o-lanterns. I haven't planted them yet, but they're going in the ground tonight. The pumpkins have an average growing season of about 100 days and cannot experience frost. So, my goal is to cover them if frost comes early, and they should be ready for harvest at the end of October-ish. I think our house will be pretty festive this Fall! To add to the sense of Fall festivity, I have here my heirloom blue popcorn. Not sure how well you can see the label, but they're pretty awesome. As with most of my seeds, I ordered them from Amazon. I planted the popcorn last week and it's coming up now! The final picture is basil. The seed packet is to the right of the envelope here. I planted them while I was outside taking these pictures and harvesting a few greens for my juice today. I have three types of basil in my garden already, but this is the kind you buy at the store with the big leaves and loads of flavor. I have purple Thai Basil in the ground as well as Sweet Basil and Genovese Basil all gathered around my tomato plants. My friend, Stephanie, told me that tomatoes like basil and the two plants help each other grow well.

Here's the basil I planted a few weeks ago. Looking pretty happy there in a row beside my tomato plants. It smells divine to go out there and get near this part of the garden. Especially on a warm day. Oh man. The way I see basil is that it's not possible to grow too much. It costs a fortune at the store and it's great as a pesto sauce in the winter. So, whatever we can't eat fresh this summer and fall, we'll just grind up before the first frost and make it into bags and bags of freezable pesto sauce that cost us, well, almost nothing. Pesto is amazing, but cheap-as-free-pesto is the BOMB. I am guessing that. I've never tasted the feeling of basically-free-pesto before. I bet the price makes it tastier. :)

The planting methods of putting "friendly" plants next to each other is called companion planting. It's something I haven't learned too much about, but the idea behind it is that different plants have different strengths and weaknesses, and some even work together symbiotically. By playing to your strengths, you're supposed to get a bigger, better harvest of everything. The book I saw on this topic was called "Carrots Love Tomatoes". I have no idea if it works well, and honestly, haven't even bought the book. I read several excerpts and it sounded interesting and like something I will probably try some time. And apparently, carrots do not love tomatoes, but it's a clever title. It's in that vein of thought, I think, that my friend, Stephanie, recommended planting basil with tomatoes. My tomatoes had been pretty sad, pathetic, nearly dead, etc. until I planted basil beside them, and they do seem to have flourished. I've also planted soybeans and other legumes in my garden to help return nitrogen to the soil.
Most plants leech nitrogen from the soil, making a one-way street of nutrients leaving the soil. Legumes like beans, soy, etc. "fix" nitrogen, or return it to the soil. Many farmers leave fields fallow for a season and then will plant something like soy in the field before planting the original crop again. That's because they're trying to get as much nitrogen naturally returned to the soil as possible making it a better growing environment for other plants.
You can see here how much my tomatoes have loved their basil friends. This plant is covered with green tomatoes. This variety is called the "Health Kick" tomato. I bought it because I liked the name and it said it grew medium-sized fruit. Large tomatoes are harder to grow, so I went with this one and then looked up why it's called that. The link above on its name takes you to someone's blog where they have a recipe for fresh tomatoes and some info about the Health Kick tomato. It's apparently quite gonzo as a cancer-eraticator. Well, that sounds quite nice to me! It has extra lycopene in it. My other tomato plants were grown indoors on my back porch and have yet to produce fruit, but they are happy and very green. They're just your normal tomatoes. Honestly, I don't remember what variety they are. Sad, I know.
I am hoping to get enough tomatoes to can them in jars and make tomato sauces and salsas from my garden all winter long. Next year, I am planning to grow Romas and more Health Kicks, probably about 5 or 6 plants. I really want to have no shortage of tomatoes! So, I planted more basil today and I'll update you on it when it comes up!



Now, poor wandering mind of mine, back to where we started this whole basil/tomato thing off.....pumpkins. Ah yes, I remember.

 Here's where they Fairytale pumpkins went in. They're supposed to have a large (1 foot tall!) mound where you plant the seed 1 inch deep. It's the weirdest planting instructions I've read yet, but I did it that way. Makes me wonder what they could get me to do by printing it on a seed packet and writing that it was necessary to make a plant grow. Sad thought, I bet there's a list too long and too strange to expound upon, so I'll move along. Next to the Fairytale pumpkins are the sweet ones. They're uphill and I dug a cool trench between all the pumpkin mounds so that the water goes where it's supposed to and I just put the hose in one spot. It's cool.

You may notice a few pieces of pea gravel here. Oh, my friend, there was a foot-deep layer of pea gravel here before. Jason scooped it all out and beneath it was real dirt. This is not bad at all!

There's the row of pumpkins! This is just the Sugar and Fairytale pumpkins. They're at the very front of the garden in front of the corn, peppers, broccoli, and everything else. They're supposed to have lots of space to grow. This area should grow just 7 pumpkin plants. In Guinea-Bissau, pumpkins are called bobra. They're really a gourd that looks nothing like a pumpkin, but tastes similar. They grow like weeds. We had one that was determined to conquer our back wall there. And it won. It took over a papaya tree and won that fight, too. We're praying these pumpkins aren't as aggressive. Also, the fact that there's a shorter supply of water and a shorter growing season should help, too. I hope. :)

Below here is the space where I planted two mounds for Giant Pumpkins. I am a little scared at the mostrosity they sound like they could become. Hoping they're managable. Either way, it's also exciting.

These guys are my herbs for indoors. This way, I'll have fresh herbs year-round. They have survived my care this far! It's excellent. They've even grown. I've harvested from each one of them, as well. I am rather in love with my little herb garden and plan to make it a stand for sitting in my window this winter. I feel like the herbs will be better-cared-for if they live in a place I spend a lot of time in so they'll get noticed more. I sprouted seeds on my back porch last winter, but I think they'll be happier all the way indoors. Mmm, looking at that mint plant makes me realize that in August, I am going to have a fresh, homemade mojito!

Alright, it's time to talk about this fabled popcorn! The type I bought was called "Shaman's Blue Popcorn" and it came off of Amazon.com. The kind I posted a link to is not the exact one I bought, but it looks like the same thing, possibly even a bit better than what I have here. I have no idea if this stuff is supposed to get as tall as regular corn, but we'll see. It sure sprouted FAST. I put it in the ground late last week, and here it is. It's the little green bits that look like grass. That's how my other corn looked when it was sprouting. See the height comparison? The foreground is my new little popcorn shoots, and the background is the corn that's about ready to make some food! In between (you can't see them too well) is my New Mexico Big Jim Green Chiles. I am looking forward to those! So is Jason. Hehe. The corn has tassels growing above, and the chile shown is a banana pepper!

I planted blackberries and raspberries earlier this summer. Now, they're growing and I am getting berries off of one of the raspberries. I am about to put blueberries in the ground as well, but they can't just go in normal dirt, no, blueberries need acidic soil. This concept made me so nervous for a while. People were talking about getting meters to read the acidity of their soil and I imagined myself in a chemistry lab feeling completely confused, just wishing I was in my garden again. Anyway, you need peat moss to plant blueberries in Colorado. Dig a hole, throw a bale of peat moss into the hole, and throw the blueberries directly into that bale of peat moss. Water generously, and you have happy blueberries! You also need two varieties of blueberries to cross-pollinate with each other. I nearly killed one of mine last week, so I might be going to the plant nursery for another one at some point.

 This is my climbing wall deal for my gourds and melons. They are vines, so they need something to grow on. This also helps them not get moldy from sitting in the dirt. They're kinda hard to see against the fence. but they're pretty! Under them are my absolutely prolific greens. They're out of control in the best way possible. Love this garden. It's way better than I guessed it would be.

 This is me on my birthday! It was a great day, I'll write about it later.

Garden Time!

As a combined effort to avoid over-processed foods with mystery sources and a desire to do something productive with my yard, I am going to have a garden this summer. We're also in the process of making a spreadsheet (yes, Dad, if you're reading, I said spreadsheet) that helps us find Farmer's Markets throughout the summer (and winter, there are some excellent winter Farmer's Markets). I figure, we should be able to eat local pretty much all summer.

This is my garden when it was a dream, really a figment of everyone's imagination. My parents came to help put this baby in place. That's them in my enormous back yard in the figment of a garden. The garden goes here mostly because the corner to the right of what you can see has some trees that we plan to tear out, and we also buried my dear childhood dog, Allee, in that area, not a great place for gardening, ya know? The tricky part about the south side of the yard is the shadow you can see running the length of the yard. As the season goes on, I think this shadow will shrink a bit as the sun begins to move a little differently in the sky, but we still accounted for the shade in the digging of the garden.

These are some of the things I've planted by now. The green things are herbs mostly: thyme, basil (x2 because it is so yummy), hot oregano, chocolate mint, and a goji plant for indoors. The other two green things are asparagus plants. I guess these guys take 2-3 years to get to where they produce asparagus, but once they start, they are unstoppable. They'll grow for like 20 years. Hope everyone loves asparagus! Then, I planted some bulbs of garlic, elephant garlic and onions. I also planted some carrots I started inside several weeks ago. Hope those babies make it! They said they were alright in this zone at this time of year. Oh, and there's also rhubarb in there. An all-time favorite of mine. And for those of you wondering, yes, I can count...most of the time.

What do you attack such a garden with? Well, I would like to tell you we used a tiller, but being broke, we did not buy or rent one. We don't even have a lawn mower right now... Anyway, back on topic, we (my dad, actually, as shown in the picture) used a pickaxe. My dad did most of the breaking of ground, my mom and I did a lot of the shoveling and weeding. With a yard that's pretty much a blank slate (as seen above), there's not much in your way but weeds. They were impressively established having gone years without being challenged, but they eventually gave way. The wood lying on the ground is from the fence breaking in the wind. It is going to need to be replaced this summer. Our house is a constant project that we love very much and are also hard-pressed to keep up with right now. We're always gettting a little further in things, but it's so old and hasn't been really cared for in so long, it's a lot to bring back up to speed.

There's Jason, my husband, and mys sister, Kirsten finishing the tilling. Her dog, Saoirse really enjoyed the yard. After the garden was in, she seemed to particularly enjoy barreling through the poor new garden. She's a rescue pet, can we blame it on that? Probably not, she's just a dog. The garden is starting to shape up in this photo. You can see the difference between the garden and the weed-yard we keep. Some day, we envision sod and REAL landscaping, but I am getting ahead of myself, as you can see. This is today and this is phenomenal progress. Day by day.

 One last piece of grass/weeds to remove. We'll probably have a lot of weeding to do this season, but it's alright. Gotta start somewhere. I planted a garden in Bissau. It's a photo in an earlier blog on here. I was tending those poor seeds until my last day on the continent. Apparently, they have indeed sprouted. I just need to call someplace home, so this is it. I am growing my own food in my yard this year. Maybe next year, I'll try a winter garden. I hear those can be extremely successful, and besides, how rewarding would it be to still be eating food from your garden in December?

 It's all tilled and the plants are ready to go where they are meant to be. I'll get you some pictures of my indoor makeshift herb garden some time soon as well. I bought a few more things for it today. It's seriously absurd that for the price of a container of an herb at the store, you can buy an entire plant, and if you care for it properly, you'll have those herbs for a long time. Genius, I say. I also am amazingly fanatical about perennials. How brilliant is it that even in Colorado, things can live through the winter and make more fruit and such the next year?!

This is me planting the first thing. Anyone who knows me well won't be surprised that it was garlic. I just adore garlic. I have been hearing tales that garlic shoots are a thing worth noshing, and can't wait to have them growing in my own yard.

Root part down, pointy part to the sky, about a few inches deep and voila, garlic.

To the left is the garlic going into the ground. Um, yes!!!! I am intrigued to know how to pick garlic and how one clove turns into an entire harvest and all that. The elephant garlic was planted as one clove (yes, that is ONE clove) and the others were to be planted as an entire head of garlic all together. Wonder what's going to happen. Will we get one head of garlic per thing planted? I certainly hope it somehow multiplies. Just ONE garlic would be kinda disappointing for this kind of work.

There it is all lovely in the ground and about to be buried. Later, it will hopefully be like 10 heads of garlic that are eager to be eaten! One can dream. It seems like garlic farmers would go out of business if you needed an entire head of garlic to get one in return. Surely, there's better stuff to come than that.

This is the garlic securely in place and the asparagus waiting to be planted. Those things will turn into an entire BED of asparagus. Again, I totally don't get it. Those plants look NOTHING like asparagus, and they also look nothing like photos you see of growing asparagus. I am guessing that's the miracle God performs in the dirt. This wispy thing turns into a stalky enjoyable food item. Side note: I have been much in love with asparagus of late. I want it all the time. There's something satisfying in eating those green spears. They're tender and flavorful. Yum. What's your favorite veggie?  

 Oh, to completely take a tangent here, those hands belong to my sister, and she is consuming a San Pellegrino Limonata. It's like sparkling lemonade, except amazing in every way. It's made with real lemons and tastes like summer in a can of goodness. Drink some. You will be glad you did.

My sister helping me plant a row of onions. We talked about the value of having rows of things with trenches beside them for the water to go in. Who knew it was so funny that the garden is laid out this way. My dad has always used a hoe to dig the trenches, and he did this time as well. Then, you kind of make a furrow (seeds don't get planted that deep anyway) in the top of the mound and put the seeds in and then close it back up. I really enjoyed having my dad and mom there to help me with my first garden. Some of my best memories growing up were of being in the garden with them during the summer.

There it is after an entire day's work. The lumps closest to the camera are for asparagus and garlic, the rows have carrots and onions, and out of your view is the rhubarb. It later got moved because it needed more sunlight and is now quite a happy plant. This is a good day's work, and was lots of fun. I have high hopes for this little plot of land and hope to show bountiful pictures of the products. If not, maybe it will at least be entertaining. Since taking this photo, I have added rainbow swiss chard, kale, and collard greens to the garden.

Fun is in the dirt!



I'd love to know any new tips on gardening that you have. I am a newbie and am seeking wisdom. I will show you my indoor garden next time!