November 2011
3 posts
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3 tags
Link: The Cash-and-Carry House →
Here’s a link to an article about people who are salvaging prefab homes and dragging them to cheap land they’ve bought. This is another variation on the tiny house phenomenon, combined with the green urge to recycle. This “alternative lifestyle,” “homesteading,” “hoarding money is not as important as having a good quality of life” trend is very...
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Your Own Private (Snowy) Mountain
This link to Urban Rancher’s blog has nothing to do with community gardening, but I’m sharing it because it falls into the category of my two latest obsessions:
Building or buying a tiny house
Putting it on a vacant piece of rural land (preferably in Central NY State, but I wouldn’t sneeze at a California mountaintop like this, as well)
More gardening posts soon, I promise. We...
August 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Link: Los Angeles River Tries on New Role, as... →
I hope the L.A. River becomes a usable kayaking and canoeing attraction, but it’s impossible to imagine how the city would restrict the river access when it floods and becomes wildly dangerous to the inexperienced. I’m thinking armed guards…? Something about that image is very L.A.
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June 2011
2 posts
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May 2011
4 posts
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Hipster Housewife: Make a Rocking Garden Guardian →
Looks like fun.
hipsterhousewife:
One of the odd things I’ve moved around from apartment to apartment to apartment to house is a little blue cement frog my high school bestie and I painted together the summer after graduation.
We’d put him in the garden, but he needed an update.
I got out the Rustoleum Ultra Cover — a great…
April 2011
1 post
5 tags
Patience is a Virtue
I realize I need to update this blog, but I’m busy living. We’re gardening about once a week, but that’s about all I can handle right now. Writing about gardening is not in the cards for me until work slows down. (Also, I’m taking a writing class, which is ill-advised given my current schedule…)
A few garden-y things to note:
We have taller planter boxes and are...
March 2011
1 post
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February 2011
0 posts
8 tags
Saturday's Harvest
Saturday we visited our plot for the first time in over a week, and this is what we found. It’s quite a happy sight, isn’t it? What you’re looking at is mustard greens, rainbow chard, golden beets and New Zealand spinach. We’re drowning in green stuff. (Not as serene as the white stuff that’s burying our friends and family, but still pretty good.)
A close up...
January 2011
4 posts
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Link: When a Community Garden Isn't So Rosy (L.A.... →
Just about everything in this article sounds familiar to me. We waited two years to get our plot, and our own garden neighbor has a habit of working in short bursts, then letting her plot go fallow and weedy for weeks or months at a time. Actually, both our neighbors are like this. We’re forever trimming their expanding rose bushes and pulling up the tall grasses that crawl under their...
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December 2010
1 post
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November 2010
4 posts
community | Kendall →
Cool.
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7 tags
Happy Anniversary, Little Garden!
Yesterday, Halloween, was the one-year anniversary for our community garden plot. Last year, I struggled alone in 100+ degree weather to clear our plot of weeds, armed only with a pitchfork and my iPod.
This year, we both dropped by around 4:30 p.m., after returning from a 10-day fall foliage trip to the east coast. The weather was breezy, crisp, 65 degrees. We plucked a few weeds and took a...
October 2010
7 posts
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Garden Troopers
Sorrel
Mustard
Swiss chard and neighbors (Nasturtiums, I think.)
Tomato plant
Fennel, coming back to life after a flowering. I love it; it looks like a Christmas tree.
I have to admit, though I adore our neat, new planter boxes, my favorite corner of the garden is a shady, bedraggled one we’d given up for dead. It’s the corner where our corn caught a fungus and had...
4 tags
4 tags
Early October Garden Update (No Photos)
This morning we mixed up more soil and filled our final 2 boxes. I made 1” indentations in the center of each and planted 3 zucchini seeds here, 3 there. Fingers are now crossed.
The garden looks great. Almost everything we sowed is growing, with the beans in the lead. We took a long moment to reflect on how much we’ve learned, built, harvested, destroyed and rebuilt all in under...
3 tags
September 2010
5 posts
8 tags
Garden Update - Final Week of September
This square foot gardening thing is criminally easy! A few photos from our visit at around 9:30 a.m. today:
Keisuke, thinning the sprouts.
Something happy. I’m not sure what it is — a pepper? A lettuce?
Cups and stakes.
Beans.
Sorrel from High Mowing Seeds in Vermont.
Bell pepper.
Sweet pea, Exhibit A: climbing our southern gate.
Sweet pea, Exhibit B: on...
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Garden, Season 2 - First Sprouts
Our second season of community gardening is taking off quickly. Today we stopped by to water the plot and discovered that about 33% of our planted boxes has yielded sprouts.
I’m not sure what the sprouts are; Keisuke did the sowing alone this time, and he keeps a diagram tucked into a book somewhere on his nightmare of a desk. I do know we had some healthy-looking beans.
Out came the...
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August 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Garden Update: First Day Back
We stopped by our garden this evening; our first visit since we got back into town on Wednesday. A reminder: we summer in Central New York, so we haven’t seen our little plot since mid-June. (Many thanks to our good friends R & J, who watered, harvested, and tore out our infested corn while we were away.)
I didn’t take any pictures tonight, but here’s what I can report:
...
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July 2010
12 posts
3 tags
via Lawn Takeover: Bruschetta →
This looks amazing.
This is one of my favorite things about Tomato Season, Bruschetta! I get to use my €5 Gratella aka Tostapane purchased in the Campo di Fiori when my “fully furnished” apartment in Rome was lacking a toaster. Also? The “sch” is hard, do not call it brew-shet-a within my hearing range or there…
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link: World War II Themed Victory Garden at the... →
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via shamar | life: $10.60 →
This is the cost (without tax) of the meal that the family featured in Food, Inc. purchased from Burger King. The rationale for buying it from Burger King is that the same meal could not be purchased or made for any less.
But I don’t buy it.
My goal is to show that you can make this same meal…
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7 tags
via shamar | life: Chased Down By A Deer →
Reading this post, I’m reminded that I wrote an entire comedic feature script (“Deers!”) about bloodthirsty deer who hate humans. That script got passed around Hollywood a bit but never got produced. Maybe by re-blogging this real-life experience, fate will throw me a bone (or a fang)…
Now that I think about it, I remember managers and producers asking for more horror,...
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via Lawn Takeover: Use It Or Lose It: Cucumbers →
Because I love cucumbers. Especially Kirby cukes. (I buy them here in Upstate NY and eat them plain.)
You never get just one cucumber. It’s feast or famine and there’s no way to choke down fifteen pounds of cukes before they go bad or you get sick of them. Time to pickle!
I usually make refrigerator pickles. I go through them pretty quickly and as much as I love my pressure canner I...
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That Sound You Hear? It's the Sound of My Heart...
Uh oh… Jessi left off the bad news. The corn didn’t make it. Some insects got in and turned it to mush… I ended up ripping it out and we took the stalks to the trash. It wasn’t pretty. It did open up more space for the pumpkin and UFO-squash though.
An email we received yesterday from the friends who are watching our garden. Gahhhh! Thank goodness we ate those 2...
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Hoop it Up
On Saturday, Keisuke’s sister journeyed in from the Mid-West to drop her older daughter off at camp. While she was in town, she and her younger daughter swung by Wal-Mart to pick up some emergency hula hoops. It seems that all three gals are completely addicted to hooping, and Mari, who recently lost a lot of weight and looks great, credits it to helping her keep in shape. She insisted...
