Day 6: Twelve Days of 2023

And this is my June 2023 recap. I was given boxes of squash and Digger Dog would steal and eat them

The Hollyhocks were amazing this year

The crazy amazing tomato garden

A little gopher snake. I've only seen a couple this year. I have seen a lot of the king snakes.

First tomato




 I had bought Bentley awhile back but didn't have pen space so he'd been living at my friends house. Since Gazelle and Chocolate and their kids had left the farm I had space to go pick him up and bring him home



He started out sharing a pen with three young boys from front to back, Jupiter, Apollo and Tiny Tim who isn't so tiny any more!

The spring pullets are growing up

And some older girls are laying

A nice basket of tomatoes

Around this time I started making sugar or face scrub



A canine of some sort (I do suspect a coyote but it could have been a stray dog) Dug under the back of my big chicken house and killed several young layers. I moved the survivors to a safer spot and temporarily patched the hole.

Harvest Monday & Seedy Saturday Winner!

baby lettuce, violas, society garlic blossoms, chives, lemon thyme

Welcome to Harvest Monday! This weekly bloghop is hosted by Daphne, over at Daphne's Dandelions. This week of course saw more baby lettuces, along with some herbs and edible flowers.

yellow beets, baby carrots, tiny potatoes

One day I pulled a couple of big yellow beets, some baby carrots and emptied a tub that grew potatoes. The potato plants have looked quite pathetic all fall and all I got were these 3 tiny potatoes. I think the problem was the soil was just not fertile enough. Looking at the plants I'm sure they didn't have enough nitrogen and looking at the potatoes I'm equally sure they didn't get enough potash. Ah well, there is always next year!

Pineapple Sage flowers are great in salad

The small Pineapple Sage plants that I bought recently have begun to bloom. I sprinkle the flowers in my salad. They have a lovely sweet, floral flavor with hints of pineapple. Their bright lipstick red color adds another dimension of color along with flavor.


Many people look askance at me eating my salad without dressing. While I do like Ranch dressing, it is way too heavy and overpowering to put it on baby lettuce. It is better as  a dip for things with more robust flavors, like hot wings.

I don't even usually use vinaigrette these days, preferring to actually taste the different flavors of the lettuces, other baby greens, flowers and herbs.

yellow marble & Princepe Borghese tomatoes

Since we were expecting snow and freezing temps I picked all the little tomatoes that were at least beginning to turn color. Since it is predicted to be in the high 20's overnight all week I suspect these will be the last.

This weeks harvests:
lettuce, herbs, edible flowers           1 pound  5 oz

potatoes                                                        3 oz
beets & greens                             2 pounds 14 oz
baby carrots                                                  5 oz
tomatoes                                                       1 oz

total                                              4 pounds, 12 oz

This week's Seedy Saturday giveaway is for Sweet Magnolia, a purple podded snow pea. The seeds were saved in 2009 and should have good germination. The plants will go to 6 ft+ on good soil. I wrote everyone's name on a slip of paper and folded it up. Then I tossed them in the air and picked up the slip of paper that landed closest to me. And the winner is......... Shannon B.! For the rest of you, stop in and try again next week.

PS. I have one more space that I might plant Sweet Magnolias in and after that I might give away the seeds that are left in the jar, so be sure and check in every Seedy Saturday!

Harvest Monday & Seed Giveaway Winner

Baby lettuce and edible viola blossoms

Welcome to Harvest Monday! This blog hop is sponsored by Daphne's Dandelions. I do hope you will stop over there and see everyone else's harvests; it is a lot of fun to see fresh homegrown food from around the world!

So a recap of the weeks harvesting, mostly a lot of baby lettuce, which is good considering that Organic Spring Mix is over $5 a pound at the store and I can eat at least two pounds a week.  I've been tossing viola blossoms into the salad mix too. I tried my big purple pansies and they were OK but nothing to brag about. The violas have a slightly sweet taste with a lingering floral essence. They are more bite sized, too.

Baby lettuce and Easter Egg Radishes

Another day there were several Easter Egg Radishes to pull along with the baby lettuces.

Radish, mizuna, spinach, lettuce

On Sunday there was another radish, some mizuna and some baby spinach in addition to the lettuce.  There was also 2 ounces of little tomatoes. I've moved the tomato pot into the greenhouse for more protection. We haven't had a hard freeze yet but when we do I expect the tomatoes will be done for, even in the greenhouse.

Yellow Marble and Princepe Borghese Tomatoes

Harvest Totals Week of November 21-27
Lettuce and other salad greens   2 pounds, 2 oz.
Easter Egg Radish                                     1.5 oz
Tomatoes                                                   2  oz
TOTAL            2 pounds, 4.5 ounces






Now I know everyone wants to know about the seed giveaway! To read more about how I'm doing this you can read this blog post. To read more about this weeks giveaway go to  my very first Seedy Saturday post.  If you want to get in on the action stop in next week for Seedy Saturday. I am trying to get the Mr. Linky thingy so that others with seeds to give away can join in but have been having technical difficulties. I will keep trying but if not I might allow links in the comments for that day.

So now, the Winner is......drumroll please...... BeeGirl! I'll be sending you an email through your profile, but if you don't get it be sure to contact me with your snail mail address so I can send your beet seeds to you! Congratulations!

Building Soil

mmm there's supposed to be steps in there someplace!

First off, Happy Turkey Day. Today I am remembering Thanksgivings past when I lived 1,000 miles away from any family. But we always had a good holiday. Some of those years everything on the table came from our own place except the flour for the pie crust and any sugar used. The meat, milk, eggs, vegetables, pickles and relishes were all homegrown. There were always some bachelors that didn't have any where to go and we would feed them, along with a young couple who were also far from their family. We traded and bartered with these folks all the time and many of them lent a hand when we built our house. Good times indeed.

Today was a very nice day outside so I did some more clean up work out back. There really is a set of steps in that mess someplace! It's buried in silt and leaves that washed down during the July 4th storm.

Shredded tree prunings with fertilizer sprinkled over.

A big part of what I actually worked on today was to continue shredding up weed trees. I also worked on soil building in a new garden bed right next to the sidewalk. I plan to do an informal espaliered apple tree on the fence with perhaps strawberries or flowers and herbs as an under planting. So I loosened the dirt up and piled tree chips over the area. Then I put on some blood meal for nitrogen to help decompose the wood faster, some potash because the soil has none, and some seaweed meal for trace minerals.  I watered all that in.

Silt and oak leaf compost spread over the top

Then I began mucking out that set of steps. They are buried in fine silt mixed with decomposed desert oak leaves. I tossed it on the growing bed, right over the wood chips.

and mulched with fall leaves.

Then I topped off the bed with a bag of free leaves from a friend. I'll probably pick up a new apple tree around January when they come into the garden centers. By then most of the raw organics I've added should be pretty well decomposed. The next time I'm working over the worm box I'll grab a few and drop them in the bed to help things along.

Since the garden is a bit higher these days than the sidewalk I set some old boards right along it to keep the soil and leaves from washing off onto the sidewalk. I also managed to set the posts and string most of the fence (only about 8 feet). There is one small gap next to the green house that I have to cover and I have to make and hang a gate. I haven't decided what I'm going to make a gate out of. I have several options; a couple of different sorts of wood or a wood frame with wire fence or perhaps a piece of junk art.

Grow Peas!

Sweet Magnolia, a purple snow pea

I love peas, I could eat green peas every day of the year. However, here in the desert they only grow from fall through spring as they don't do well once the temperatures start getting over about 80 degrees. So I plant peas everywhere I can and gorge on them during the season. I don't like canned peas so don't bother growing a lot of shelling peas.

If there are any extras I do freeze some of the snap and snow peas to use during the off season. I've just written an article about growing peas of all kinds, including sweet pea flowers, which you can read at How To Grow Peas.

A few years ago I grew six different kinds of peas and wrote a review of them which you can read at 6 Pea Varieties on Trial.

So what else is new around here, not too much, mostly I've been working the day job and with the days getting shorter there is less time to be working outside. I'm still hauling rocks and building walls as fast as I can and of course, planting peas!

Harvesting Has Begun ;-)

Shelly beans, lettuce, beets, Oct 21, 2011

Very strange. I know that I wrote this post yesterday, and that I published it, yet it is not showing up on the blog nor is it in my list of posts or showing up as a draft. Just strangely disappeared. So if in the future you see this twice, you will know it is because the original post magically re-appeared somehow! (edit: I have discovered that somehow the missing post has appeared on my art blog. Have no idea at all how I managed to do that!)

Anyway this was my harvest Friday, 2 pounds, 6 ounces of Hopi Purple Pod beans that shelled out to 8 ounces of beans, 3 ounces of mixed baby lettuces and 1 pound 12 ounces of beets & greens, the roots alone were 10 ounces. All of it quite yummy! Oh I love my garden!

Fresh raw Hopi Purple Pod Beans

Some folks are puzzled by the term 'shelly beans'. This refers to eating fresh those beans that otherwise you would eat as dry beans, like pintos, kidneys, black beans, etc. As you can see I picked some pods that weren't as mature as they should have been and the beans are a little small. The pink ones are about right. The ideal time to pick shelly beans is when they have completely filled the pod and the pod walls have thinned out but are not yet beginning to dry up.

Pea Planting

Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea

In 2009 I planted 6 varieties of peas. I am a fool for peas and between me and the grand kids we ate all the garden could give.

I wrote an article comparing them for Associated Content. I could probably plant peas now, but I'm not going to since I will be leaving soon on my vacation. The weather should be a lot cooler when I get home, so I will plant peas in mid-September instead.

Here are a few photos of the peas from 2009. Enjoy. (Unfortunately I didn't label the photos with the variety, and I don't remember now what some of them looked like!)

Bleushokker, a soup pea

I'm not sure which one this is, either Sweet Magnolia or Bleushokker

Maxi Golt, a shelling pea

Varieties Growing in 2009 May 22, 2009

Varieties Growing in 2009

May 22, 2009 at 2:48 am

Well, I’m getting around to a few things, one is a list of what’s growing this year, this includes things we’ve already harvested and eaten as well as what’s in the ground now. But it doesn’t include things that I will plant in the future. Altogether I count 132 edible varieties. That number will grow somewhat as the rest of the summer planting goes in and later on when I put in the fall and winter crops.

VARIETIES GROWN IN 2009

This is a list of varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs and edible flowers grown in 2009. Items marked with * are from home grown seed.

VEGETABLES & ANNUAL FRUITS

BEANS
*Apache Purple Pod
King of the Garden Lima
Royalty
Yardlong or Asparagus Beans
BEETS
*Cylindra
*large mixed [yellow, pink, red, white]
CARROTS
Danvers Half Long
Imperator
Purple Dragon
COLE CROPS
Purple Sprouting Broccoli
Purple cauliflower
White cauliflower
CORN
Chires Baby Corn
Bloody Butcher
EGGPLANT
Black Beauty
Neon Hybrid
*Neon F2
GREENS
Lettuce mix
Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach
*Swiss chard
Mache
Claytonia
*Red Russian Kale
Giant Red Mustard
Pak Choy
NZ spinach
Malabar spinach
Sorrel
HERBS & EDIBLE FLOWERS
Basil, Lettuce leaf
Basil, Spicy Globe
Basil, Thai
Bergamot
*chervil
*Cilantro / coriander
Chives, regular
Chives, garlic
Chaste tree, aka Monk’s pepper, buddleia, summer lilac
Daylilies
Dill
Hollyhocks
Honeysuckle
Lavender
Lilacs
Marigold, Lemon Gem
Marigold, Tangerine Gem
Marigold, Texas Tarragon
Mint, peppermint
Nasturtium, Alaska
Nasturtium, Empress of India
Oregano, Italian
Pansies
Rosemary
Sage, broadleaf
Sage, chaparral
Sage, Pineapple
Tulips
Violas
Violets
MELONS
*Hales Best Jumbo cantaloupe
Blacktail Mountain watermelon
Jubilee watermelon
OKRA
Burgundy
ONION FAMILY
-Leeks- the Student
-Garlic, regular and Elephant
-Onion-
Ebenezer?
Florence Red Bottle
Welsh bunching
Red Bunching
PEAS
*Sugar Snap
Blueshokker
*Dwarf Grey Sugar
*little Marvel
Maxi Golt
Sweet Magnolia
PEPPERS
Ancho Gigantea
Jimmy Nardello
Anaheim
Santa Fe Grande
Sweet Red Bell
Georgia Flame
Alma Paprika
POTATOES
All Blue [Peruvian ?]
Red LaSoda
Yukon Gold
Russet
RADISHES
Easter Egg
SQUASH
Baby Blue Hubbard
Trombocino
Kabocha
Delicata
SWEET POTATOE
Beauregard
TOMATOES
Super Italian Paste
Polish Linquisa
Snow White
Yellow Pear
Yellow Marble
*Princepe Borghese
Imur Prior Beta
TURNIPS
White Globe Purple top
MISCELLANEOUS
Jicama
Purple de Milpa Tomatillo
Ice plant
Honey locust tree
Poppy
PERENNIAL VEGETABLES
Jersey Hybrid Asparagus
Connover’s Colossal Asparagus
Elephant Ears
FRUIT
Sequoia strawberries
Thorn less blackberry
Blackberry
Blueberry
Granny Smith Apple
Anna Apple
Grimes Golden Apple
Summer apple [mislabeled, unknown variety]
Boysenberry
Heritage Raspberry
Baba Raspberry
Santa Rosa Plum
Wild Mexican Elderberry
GRAIN & SEEDS
Buckwheat
Winter wheat
Rye
Popping sorghum
Mammoth Sunflowers
Oil Sunflowers
Sunflowers, mixed kinds & colors
VOLUNTEER/EDIBLE WEEDS
Red root pigweed
Lambs quarters
Chickweed
INEDIBLE BUT OTHERWISE USEFUL PLANTS
Soapwort: roots make cleansing suds good for gentle cleaning of delicate or vintage fabric
Golden bamboo: useful small garden stakes
Madder: produces a long lasting red dye from the roots, yellow/tans from the tops. My chickens love it.
JUST STUFF
Vinca major, drought tolerant ground cover
Virginia creeper, Drought tolerant vine/ground cover
Bearded iris: flowers
Star jasmine: fragrant flowers
Trumpet creeper: draws humming birds

but it’s a Dry Heat May 11, 2009

but it’s a Dry Heat

May 11, 2009 at 4:56 am

It has been about 90 in the shade the last few days, so the things that like cool weather are becoming crispy critters but the summer crops are taking off. The Little Marvel peas didn’t make it past the first hot days a couple of weeks ago and The Dwarf Grey Sugar peas were _very_ unhappy. So we fed the Marvel plants to the rabbits and let the sugar peas set as many more pods as they would to save for seed. The Bleushokkers have been very different sorts of peas. They are a purple shelling pea that were traditionally grown in Europe for soup. I had read that they could be eaten pod and all when small and flat. They were tender at that stage, but not sweet like other peas and actually didn’t taste very pea-like.  So I tried them as raw shelled peas. They were actually a little bitter. Today I had some of them cooked, what a surprise. They went from being a bit bitter to sweet and starchy. Very much the sort you might make into soup. So half the row goes for seed saving & half for eating for as long as they’ll last.  The green shellers, Maxi Golt, were ok, but no thrill so I didn’t plan to save seed from them. They hadn’t made any new flowers in a week so I pulled them up and fed them to the rabbits. All the Sugar Snaps are going strong, but I can see the signs of heat stress. The purple snaps, Sweet Magnolia are also still doing well. Again, half the row to eat and half for seed for next year so I can plant a bigger area.
The potted potatoes have also been drooping in the heat, but since they were in pots I was able to move them where they will get a little shade in the afternoon.  So far the tomatoes on the patio seem to be doing well, but the Super Italian paste and the Polish Linquisa have started dropping blossoms.  I found a peice of shade cloth to put over one patch, but really need some more for the rest of them. Tomato pollen dies when it gets to be about 90 degrees so the flower falls off instead of setting fruit. Hopefully a little shade in the middle of the day will help keep them a little cooler.
Different kinds of beans are sprouting up all the squash and melons are doing well. I’m just trying not to think about my next water bill.
Miracle with her sunflower plant in my back garden. The bed on the left is the greenhouse with snap peas. The one directly behind her was planted last fall with carrots, turnips, beets and purple broccoli. The only thing left are the beets which will come out soon so we can plant the baby corn. The trellises in the background aremore peas.

In the garden…. May 8, 2009

In the garden….

May 8, 2009 at 5:25 am

In the Garden things are growing & changing. When you see pictures of gardens you must realize that they are just a fleeting moment captured in the life of that garden. No other day or hour will it look exactly like that again because a garden is a living, breathing, growing life form, which also contains many other living, growing breathing life forms. Even if we weren’t working on making changes and improvements to the garden all the time, it would be different every day or two.
A beautiful pink poppy. The bees are always loving these big poppies as soon as they open in the morning because they are full of pollen.
The chickens have been working over this area for several months now. When we cut down a big evergreen this is where I had piled all the little branches too small for firewood. That yellow thing is my little electric chipper/shredder and now I’m shredding up the bigger stuff that the chickens haven’t eaten or broken up. When done, the area where the chickens are will become a new garden area and the chickens will go back on the other side of the tree for the summer where they will get more shade during the hot part of the day.
Well, ‘ol Stumpy is gone, thank goodness. this is the pile of chunks and roots we dug and cut out. There are actually some more roots in the way of finishing off this area, but I can only get so much done at a time.
Well that first green tomato is getting really big and now it has company.
A new view from the patio, this is looking back towards the greenhouse, which now has no plastic on it. You can see all the roots there on top of the wall we pushed over getting the stump out.That whole area will become more greenhouse eventually.
The Baby blue Hubbards are thriving on the compost pile. That thermometer says 160 degrees!
Since the days have been 85 to almost 90 I took the old windows off those watermelon & cantaloupe seedlings growing on the other compost pile. The watermelons are running already.
The bunnies are _almost_ big enough to be BBQ. Yes, I eat rabbits. Rabbit meat is like the breast meat of chicken, only all over. Also it has almost no fat and is higher in protein per  pound of meat than chicken, so it’s even better for you than chicken meat.
Two of my grand daughters pull the tops off the carrots and feed them to the bunnies. The rabbits and chickens are integral parts of my plan for self sufficiency. The rabbits eat a lot of greens, prunings from the roses, fruit trees and brambles and produce meat and manure. The chickens eat up a lot of spoiling food and table scraps and make eggs and manure. The manure from both helps raise earthworms which are good food for the chickens as well as making great compost to help our garden grow even better.

I dig my dinner april 7, 2009

I dig my dinner

April 7, 2009 at 2:27 pm 

Like I said I’ve joined up with Freedom Gardeners everywhere in the 1 million pound harvest challenge. Here’s a great link for you:

  I can’t seem to make the link work with the picture so go to www.freedomgardens.org for more info. Growing your own food is easy. Plants and seeds _want_ to grow, that is what they are designed to do. You just have to give them the right conditions to let them do their best.  Most veggies like full sun and rich fertile soil.

If your soil isn’t so great you can make it better. Adding manure, compost and organic fertilizers will help bring poor soils into better condition for plants. Properly managed gardens just get better and better every year. So if not everything does well the first year keep on trying. Many factors affect plant growth, soil and air temperature, water and weather are also big factors besides soil fertility. Keep a garden journal where you write down what you planted and where and make note of how it does. If it doesn’t do well try and figure out why. Maybe you planted too early or too late or that spot doesn’t get enough water or that’s where it floods when it rains. All of these can affect plant growth. Then adjust for the next year.

Even experienced gardeners have plants that don’t grow as well as others. Figuring out why and correcting it is part of the learning curve. However, every year there is always something that does really well and yields bumper crops so rarely is there a total failure. Happy growing!