Quinoa Harvest

This season I planted quinoa seeds for the first time.  They grew into plants with bunches of red and gold flowers.  Yesterday I cut off the flowers and threshed them to release the quinoa seeds.

I winnowed away the chaff and critters.

The harvest yielded 3/4 of a cup of quinoa!  Very exciting :)

first pepper and other updates

A sweet Italian pepper, the first one I've ever grown:


I ate an avocado, sprouted the seed in a jar with toothpicks and water and then transplanted the seedling into a pot. Seems to be doing well. I find the plant quite stunning:


Fixed up the backyard pots with flowers, two types of mint, oregano, basil, avocado, parsley, lavender, rosemary, epazote, purple sage and thyme. Everything besides the basil seems to be doing well.

This is not from the backyard, but I couldn't resist taking a picture of this flowering artichoke plant growing in a yard in the neighborhood. Artichokes are becoming really popular plants around here, but they take up a lot of space so I haven't planted one yet. Maybe next year.

curing garlic

A couple weeks ago I harvested my first crop of garlic. The rafters underneath the staircase make for a cool, shady, breezy place to cure the garlic. Curing dries the garlic for better storage.

With the garlic harvested, space in the bed opened up to plant a couple of zucchini plants, some dinosaur kale and I added some green beans.

with the rabbit gone, the bed is planted

The rabbit problem has been resolved (the neighbor caught it) and I finally was able to plant my garden bed yesterday. I planted a couple hot pepper plants, some lemon cucumbers, a dozen salad starts and some carrot seeds. I used my homemade compost to surround the roots as I transplanted. It rained today so that was good timing. The garlic is looking good as well.

composted soil!

Last year I began a compost pile in the backyard. I tossed vegetable scraps and fallen leaves into the pile, watered it and turned it every once in a while. New to composting, I was doubtful that I could actually make the process work. But low and behold, I checked the compost bin today and there was some sweet smelling compost all ready to go! I sifted the compost using a makeshift contraption, collecting the sifted compost in a wooden box. It looks so nutritious!



The sun has finally returned to half of the raised bed, right up to the garlic section. So I cultivated the sunshine half, mixing in the crimson clover. I saw lots of worms which is a good sign. I hope to plant some starts soon!

two white bunnies

The neighbors in the house behind the backyard recently got two white bunnies. These bunnies like to come into our backyard and eat from our garden. They particularly enjoy the bolted lettuce.


Not a big deal at the moment, but if they continue to visit the garden and eat my spring and summer vegetables, I will not be a happy gardener. I warned the neighbors that this would be a problem but it seems that the bunnies are incorrigible. They spend a lot of time in the front of our house and in the street. Two random passersby have knocked on my door to let me know that there are bunnies loose in the street. I tell them that they are not my bunnies, that I'm much more concerned about my garden, and that I'm not going to go too out of my way to protect the bunnies from passing cars. Harsh, I know, but I refuse to experience another Pedro episode.

shady garlic

During the winter, the sunlight in the backyard changes radically. The raised bed, which typically gets a lot of sunlight in the summer, goes into complete shade. The north bed gets more sun in the winter than it does in the summer. It's taken me a while to get used to the changing sun/shade patterns.

I've debated about what to do with the raised bed when it gets full shade in the winter. I decided to try planting a crimson clover cover crop to fix nitrogen over winter. The clover has sprouted and looks like it's doing okay without sunlight:


On November 26, I also planted 15 cloves of garlic. Checked on them outside just now and they have all sprouted. Need to keep the garlic weed free, because as my friend says, "you can grow garlic or you can grow weeds but you can't grow both." Given the relatively narrow rooting of the garlic, it doesn't compete well with other plants. Garlic is planted in the fall/winter and won't be ready to harvest until July. Big commitment but I think it will be worth it. I planted a variety that we received in our CSA, from Riverdog Farm in Guinda, California.

where the wild things are pumpkin carving

I spent several hours carving the Wild Things character (Carrol from the movie, Moshe from the book) into a pumpkin. A lot of people remembered my Obama pumpkin from last year. I try to make my pumpkin carvings "timely."

chard harvest and cucumber snacks

The garden continues to give. Our first chard harvest:


A crisp, healthy, cucumber snack with a sprinkling of lemon juice, salt and pepper:

oregano flower bouquets

When herbs are ready to reproduce, they send out flowers. As I pruned the massive oregano plant, I cut off all of the tiny purple flowers so that the plant would continue to grow.


The bees were swarming around the flowers and werent' thrilled about me taking the flowers away.

full bed in august

Here are a few pictures from early August. The raised bed is looking full and healthy. The bluish dinosaur kale looks great:

Here are some good-sized dragon carrots that were planted months ago:


But now the kale has been attacked by aphids so it is time to remove the kale plants and trim back the tomatoes and oregano plants.

a week at smith farm in central maine

I just returned from a 3 week visit to the east coast. I spent one week working on my friend's farm in Troy, Maine. It was inspiring to see the diversity of delicious vegetables produced on the farm. I assisted with harvesting, weeding, cultivating with a horse-powered cultivator, washing, bundling, selling etc. Farming is hard work, but spending time there motivated me to keep working hard on my modest backyard garden.

On the farm, we woke up each morning at 5:30 to harvest vegetables in the cool morning air. Here are some carrots, chard and chinese cabbage:


Here is the cart full of the morning's harvest:

The garlic is hung up to cure on the rafters of the barn:

Here is the horse with the cultivator attached. One person steers the horse with the reins, the other steers the cultivator with the handles. The cultivator has metal blades that dig up the ground, ripping up the weeds between the rows of vegetables.

We spread out the bounty on the tables at the farmers' market:

a pile of pits

Over the past year, occasionally I would save the seeds and pits from fruit that I ate....cherries, apricots, peaches etc. In April, I dumped all of the pits into a 1x1 square foot plot in the backyard just to see what would happen.

In early May, they started to sprout.

Now the mystery fruit has grown quite a bit. At first I thought they were cherry trees based on the size of the sprout, but now they are looking more like melon...who knows?

more cucumbers

Going out of town so I thought I'd check under the big cucumber leaves to see if there were any cucumbers hiding below. Found these four, the biggest yet!

harvesting dinosaur kale

We planted dinosaur kale in mid-May. It's my favorite kind of kale...those bumpy, dark green leaves:


I have begun harvesting the biggest leaves. This gives the smaller leaves more room and sunlight.


I chop them up and cook them down with olive oil, red onion, garlic, salt and pepper. They really cook down a lot so you need a lot of kale to make a dish. Healthy and delicious, although I think I put in a bit too much salt this time...

rainbow over the garden

I went outside today and looked up to see this incredible rainbow in the sky over our backyard:

spiky cucumber harvest

Disappointed by the cucumber experiment in the greenhouse, I picked up some organic cucumber starts at the local drug store. I bought 4 plants, each about 5 inches tall. I planted them in the raised bed in the beginning of May. Here they are to the right of the massive oregano plant:


Since then they have flourished, growing up and out of the bed. They have yellow flowers that turn into mini cucumbers that grow to a size of about 8 inches. The stems of the cucumber plant are very spiky, I assume it's an adaptation for protection. But the cucumbers themselves are also spiky. Need to remove the spikes before the cucumber is ready to eat.

pierre the cat

A frequent visitor to our backyard, we're growing more fond of Pierre the cat. And I think he's taking a liking to us as well. He'll approach looking for a nice scratch behind the ears. Not sure who his owner is....in my mind I keep telling myself that he's not the cat who used the raised bed as a litter box. And yet, he may be...but he's still so cute.

second radish harvest

I'm a huge fan of these French Breakfast radishes. This is the second harvest, meaning I planted a second round of seeds after the first batch of radishes were harvested. 30 day cycle. The space is now ready for another round...but I have more pickled radishes than I can eat!

dragon carrots

Way back in March I planted some carrots in with the radishes. Carrot seeds are so small, so I planted them just beneath the surface of the soil. The radishes came up so quickly, leaving the carrots behind and crowding out the carrots for sun.


But some of the carrots persevered through two rounds of radishes. They grow slowly but they sure are beautiful when they finally come out of the ground. This variety is called Dragon Carrot. Inside, they are yellowish-orange.