Attack ! An encounter with the worlds deadliest chicken !

Steady yourself dear reader... what you are about to witness is largely boring. It's not very interesting at all. Seriously, at one point Meghan looks at a chickens butt. However, toward the end, right before I am laughing hysterically behind the camera... Meghan gets pecked in the eye by a chicken.

Sleep with one eye open... because you can't open the other one because a chicken pecked it.

hahahahahahahahaha

Raised Beds ( take 2 )

Some of you may remember our raised beds from last year. We used discarded pallets, broke them down to individual slats and rebuilt them into raised beds. Overall they worked wonderfully , but the major flaw was that they we a lot of work. It took us nearly two weeks ( on days off and after work ) to assemble 5 beds. This years effort took only about 2 hours to assemble and yielded over 80 square feet of growing area. 

As always we start with pallets.

12 in all, all cut in half.

Using wood screws we begin to piece them together.

It's a surprisingly fast process.

We lined the bottom with tree trimmings that 

would have been heading for the compost otherwise.

add 4 bales of straw 

Break up and spread the straw

Add a layer of compost

Spread to near the edges and make sure it is 6-8 inches deep.

Water thoroughly

Plan and Plant.

The medium of straw and compost has maintained an ideal temperature for growing. Our sprouts are coming up strong and fast. Some seeds ahead of their expected germination. As always we let you know how it progresses. 

Now enjoy this silly video of us ( and the dog helping ) build these beds. 

Pallet Table (a.k.a. palatable)

I apologize for the poor pun / word play of the table. I assure you that this is a serious post about making a table from a pallet and will involve no shenanigans or squirrels drinking beer.

In the beginning there was a pallet & no where to sit. 

Nowhere to enjoy a meal.

Nowhere to pry the fruit of its pit.

Only bad poems written with zeal. 

This table was built in the background over a couple of months, you may have (literately) noticed in the background in photos since we began. 

We started with a pallet, a pry bar and an idea. This is our idea of re-purposing.  

It turned out one 4x4 wouldn't hold up the table.

We added 3 more

The last two pictures have our benches in the background :) ...

We built them so the squirrel had somewhere to drink his beer

A wee bit of paint...

Some found foam and purchased vinyl 

Come on over... let's have a BBQ

Test your soil.

Is your soil alkaline or acidic? If you aren't sure here is a cool ( 9th grade earth science kind of cool ), cost effective and easy way to find out.  

Science Rules

You will need two containers approximately one cup in size

1/2 cup of vinegar

1/2 cup of baking soda

A couple handfuls of your soil. 

Go out in the garden and get yourself a nice fistful of dirt and split in into your two containers. 

In the first container mix in 1/2 cup of white vinegar. In the second container mix 1/2 cup of water ( mix ) and then 1/2 cup of baking soda. 

Product Placement ( I'm waiting for my check )

If container #1 begins to bubble and fizz it is alkaline. 

If you have no reaction turn your observation to container #2. Is it bubbling ? Well, you have acidic soil. 

I observed equally mild reactions placing our soil somewhere in the middle. A nice place to be since we can tilt the soil to the needs of a certain plant. Roses want some acidity... that's easy... just add some coffee grounds and the soil is suited in a couple days. 

Enough about my dirt let's get back to you. If your soil turned out to be acidic you can amend it with  wood ash or lime. If it was alkaline add sulfur or pine needles. 

Yup, you just used science. Congratulations.

Cool ( as a ) cucumber thing.

In yet another effort to use everything that we can get our hands on Meg grabbed some plum branches that were being pruned. The idea is to strip them of their bark, sink them into one of our raised beds, lash them together at the top with the stripped bark and use them for our cucumbers to vine.

Here is how she did it.

You will need:

• branches of a sapling
• a knife
• bucket filled with water
• pruning shears

First trim back all of the leafy branches leaving the strong main branch.

Hold onto those smaller branches though. You will need them.

After scoring the length of the branch peel back the bark

Soak bark for 15 to 20 minutes

Choose your location for the tripod

Using the soaked bark lash the tops together

Using the smaller branches begin your trellis. Lashing 

sets of branches using bark. 

Plant your cukes...

...stand back and admire. 

All in all the the project took around an hour and was fairly simple to do.  Plus, it looks really cool in the garden. 

Radish Greens Soup

We picked our first prize from the garden last week and after proudly munching on it raw in the garden ( with huge grins ) we dashed to the kitchen to make something from it.

What we picked was our radishes and what we made was Radish Greens Soup. A subtle yet hearty Italian inspired soup great for any day.

Radish Greens Soup

• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• 1 cup chopped leeks
• 3 medium potatoes chopped
• 3 bunches of radish greens
• 5 cups of veggie or chicken stock
• 1/2 cup of cream
• 1 tablespoon of butter 
• 5 tablespoons of grated Parmesan

In a large saucepan saute the leeks and radish greens in the olive oil for a few minutes ( until soft ). Stir in the potatoes and toss over medium heat for five minutes. Add the stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and let cook for 20 minutes.

Partially puree the soup in a blender and return to sauce pan. Stir in the cream, butter and parm. Garnish with julienne of raw radish and enjoy. 

The Life of Cabbage

Among the produce we have growing is red cabbage. Neither of us have grown cabbage before and knew nothing going in. We have had a warm spell here in California that had us concerned that the cabbage ( among others ) was bolting and wasn't going to properly grow and produce.
This prompted a Google search and a lot of learning about cabbage.

Stage 2 ( our current stage )

We looked at our plants and didn't see cabbage, we saw a weed like sprout in our beds. It will continue on like this, adding leaves and stems and leaves until stage 5 when it starts to look like it wants you to make soup out of it. 

Stage 5 a.k.a "pre-cupping"

By the end of stage 5 the base and the stems are completely concealed when viewing from above. 

When we hit stage 6 all we will be thinking about is corned beef recipes.

Stage 6 a.k.a. "cupping"

At stage six we will have between 20 and 25 leaves and the innermost "heart" leaves will be concealed by the larger older leaves. Then we leap forward to stage 9 ... Mature Cabbage !

Huzzah ! Let's throw them at lousy vaudeville comedians !

I am rather disappointed that not a single paper I read, website I looked at or stranger on the street could explain to me how it is that creepy dolls come from cabbage. 

How ?! Why?!

The Little Things

It's often overlooked in a lot of these blog posts how much little bits of work are put into the garden everyday. For us, Tuesdays and Saturdays are always jam packed with chores in and around the garden. There is ( of course ) weeding, watering, transplanting and contemplative squirrels to deal with  but there is also the little things.

Meg planting her Felicia Rose

(more to come on that rose later)

Refilling the slug traps.

(one for me... one for my sluggies)

I''m really starting to appreciate the maintenance for the first time. Getting out there, getting dirty, and tossing slugs & beer off this slimy mortal coil while Meghan waters with sniper like precision.  

Weeding the soon to be epic herb and flower garden.

Chewing on a bit of early harvest celery

The best of the little things happens tomorrow morning when we harvest the bulk of the radishes before work and get to share them with friends and family. 

And that squirrel thing that you have been wondering about since you read the first paragraph...

Contemplative Squirrel

The Great Potato Nipple

Today we made some modifications to The Great Potato Experiment. It seems we missed a few small details in our slightly less than careful planning of our potato cage.

It seems obvious to us now, but we weren't getting enough water to the lower layers of taters... so after great debate and discussion we made what I am calling The Potato Nipple & for the record Meghan refuses to refer to it that way.

The problem was that the cage was 3 feet high and we needed water to make it at least 2 feet down so that it would soak the rest of the way down. 4 dollars in PVC pipe & fittings later we had it solved.
Here is how we did it.

The plants toward the top are doing much better than the one toward the bottom. So we wet the soil and hammered a 1 inch schedule 40 piece of PVC down the middle of the cage to create a cavity.

Once the wet soil had settled ( about 3 hours ) we pulled the pipe out & drilled several ( alot ! ) of 3/16 holes in the lover half of the pipe, put a cap on one end and a 1 inch couple on the other ( for stability )

We reinserted the pipe into the cavity ( holes drilled & cap on ) and put an inverted bottle on top filled with water ( not whiskey ) to create a slow drip system.

Happy Taters 

All of that being said, what we should have done is put a perforated pipe down the center of the cage when we initially planted, designated a hose ( or similar re-purposed drip system ) for watering. Either way we are still looking at a harvest of over 100 potatoes on a footprint of less than 3 feet. We got to be creative on an already creative idea and we are going to yield a lot of food.