There are many reasons for me to be thankful about living where I am; I am pondering a top ten list with photos some time. But for now, I just want to mention how happy I am to be gardening this year.
When we owned our little house, I had a garden. I didn't take good care of it. I got tomatoes with black spots on them, and weird little curled up cucumbers. I was told the latter was from not watering evenly, which is exactly what I did. We had sandy soil and I would get bored with the garden by mid summer, go on vacation, and forget all about it. Lame, I know. It would just get away from me. I didn't weed it enough.
One fall, I raked all the leaves from our one-acre plot onto the garden. This is really saying something; only raked the front half of the yard, but we had a lot of leafy trees and dragged tarp-load after tarp-load onto the tarp-sized garden. Then, on a poorly chosen day, I got bored and dropped a match on it. Since the leaves were too many to be tilled under, I thought I'd hasten their decay with fire. Did I mention we lived in a no-open burning Town? Or that it was a very windy day?
I didn't burn the house down, cause a wildfire or get a ticket. But I'd get a driveway from the fire department, after the wind picked up the think smoke of damp leaves and carried it across the road at the front of our house.
Hi,guys. Thanks for swinging by. Nothing to see here. I've got my garden hose and it's all under control.
The last four years we've been in such a state of flux that planting a garden was out of the question. We weren't staying anywhere long enough to see it through, or weren't in the same place in the spring that we would be in the summer. There are garden spaces on the campus where we stayed last summer, but we weren't there in spring and didn't know how long we'd stay. I thought about it several times and would have liked to have a plot, but it just wasn't an option.
So this year I've got the space that was my father-in-law's garden. Since, you know, we're living in their house, and they are not here. So I get to have a garden again. I'm still not very good at it, but I'm doing two things differently. One, I caved and used the black plastic layer over the dirt, so there'a whole lot less weeding to think about. This always struck me as a lazy way to garden, but this year I've come to terms with the fact that I
am lazy! At least on hot, sunny summer days. So, black plastic garden it is! Caution: hot on bare feet, but so is the sand under it so that's no difference. The second thing that's different is that I can see the garden from the house! Makes a huge difference, no kidding! From my spot at this desk I can see whether the garden is wilting in the heat, and needs the sprinkler turned on. From upstairs, I can look out in the morning and see all the blossoms opened up to the sun. Some of them are huge! And it's just a nice feeling to see that there, it makes we want to keep it happy.
When I planted the garden, I didn't keep a good track of what I put in. Yup, still lazy. Also, it poured buckets the next day and I think some of the seeds just plain got washed away. So the spinach, lettuce and pepper plants from seed didn't turn up. Peas that my husband insisted on having did. But, they came up a bit close to the zucchini & squash, so now they're all tangled up. Still getting some peas, though. I see no sign of the green beans. And the onions got overwhelmed (covered up) by the loose plastic, so I don't think they are doing anything either.
So, what've I got in that garden? Cucumbers. And they were even growing straight up until a couple of says ago. We've got mounds of them! I have long ones that are from plants I got from a nursery down the road, and in the spots where I planted from seed I've got stubby, fat and prickly ones that look like they want to be huge pickles. I didn't think the plants were big enough to have fruit yet but I went out one day and there were 5 huge cucumbers! They must be loving the very rainy month of June and early July we had. I'm still deciding whether to try pickling, as the stove here is glass top and you're not supposed to use a canning contraption on it. I have zucchini, and as much as I swore I was only growing a few because I didn't want to be inundated with them, here we are buried under gigantic zukes that become gargantuan overnight when you didn't even know they were there! Zucchini bread, anyone?
I also have a variety of peppers that we got from down the road- they were payment for some work hubby did - Bulgarian carrot chiles, purple jalapenos,banana peppers. No regular green or red peppers. Not sure what to do with these yet besides make chili- but I will probably make poppers at some point. We've also got medium sized tomatoes that don't want to get red, and totmatillos- had to google to find out how to know when they are ripe. Right now they are just big green empty skins. We may get to make salsa. I have pumpkins that were supposed to be pie pumpkins but appear way too big to be pie pumpkins already, something that might be a watermelon, and a huge vine that's a member of the squash family and it going right over the outside edge of the garden and up the fence, but has no fruit on it yet. As I said, I don't remember what I put where, so the jury is out on what that is. Oh, and I am pretty sure I have an acorn squash, too.
The Mayor wanted corn so there's a couple short rows of that, and in between them I planted garlic. (I planted the corn twice because the first batch didn't do anything.) I know you're supposed to plant garlic in the fall, but they come in huge quantities, so I saved some for later but I tried some for now, too. I hope to replant with spinach and lettuce crops for the fall weather, so I'll do more garlic then. If there's one food item you go through a lot of cooking vegetarian cuisine, it's onions and garlic. And really, the garden should be a kitchen garden, stuff that I will use, shouldn't it?
I enjoyed making pie from fresh pumpkins last fall, so it looks like I'll be doing a bunch more of that. Sign up now for your thanksgiving dessert!
The party proceeded through the Five Senses tasting, and then I served the mousse I had made with the Swiss Bittersweet. It was delicious and so velvety! Daughter #2 gave us a generous helping of whipped cream with it, and since I had a lot of people, I served it in little cups and got 24 samples out of a recipe that should make 8-10 servings. Soooo good. Then we proceeded with the truffle samples, guided by the catalog page. The most popular truffles that evening were coffee and dark orange. 
