Monday 7 November 2011
New pics!
I have finally figured out how to put pics right on the text of the blog. You can go back to my earlier posts and see what they look like now all decorated. I also put a lot of photos on the photo page (look at the link to the right near the top of this page.)
Saturday 5 November 2011
Computer challenges
"My therapist hid in the bushes of her tomato and pepper patch during my last rant at the world.
She converts my problems into salsa verde picante."
Farkas' comment on facebook, reprinted with his permission, on condition I promote his itunes. http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/micky-farkas/id408690526
He is an awesome musician. I am not technically his therapist, but listen when he needs a friendly ear, and in exchange he plays great music in my living room and shows up at my door with four kids and pizza. How can you say no?
I tried to add this as a comment on the blog entry entitled Harvest Festivals and Garden Therapy (October 2011)but my new computer is set up with all kinds of firewalls and barriers which I have not been able to master in my first hour using this thing. I decided not to put it directly into an edited version of the post, because it will not be re-read by those who already read it, and I would not be doing Farkas any favours posting his i-tunes link with no one seeing it. I also made an attempt to copy and paste a photo of the pepper and tomato harvest, but that failed as well.
It also turned out that not everyone in my house is asleep. Zara has joined me at the computer and is rubbing the bird's neck, who should also be asleep but is still sitting on my shoulder chewing on my earrings. We are still celebrating national extra hour of sleep day, and I used my extra hour to do an extra blog.
She converts my problems into salsa verde picante."
Farkas' comment on facebook, reprinted with his permission, on condition I promote his itunes. http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/micky-farkas/id408690526
He is an awesome musician. I am not technically his therapist, but listen when he needs a friendly ear, and in exchange he plays great music in my living room and shows up at my door with four kids and pizza. How can you say no?
I tried to add this as a comment on the blog entry entitled Harvest Festivals and Garden Therapy (October 2011)but my new computer is set up with all kinds of firewalls and barriers which I have not been able to master in my first hour using this thing. I decided not to put it directly into an edited version of the post, because it will not be re-read by those who already read it, and I would not be doing Farkas any favours posting his i-tunes link with no one seeing it. I also made an attempt to copy and paste a photo of the pepper and tomato harvest, but that failed as well.
It also turned out that not everyone in my house is asleep. Zara has joined me at the computer and is rubbing the bird's neck, who should also be asleep but is still sitting on my shoulder chewing on my earrings. We are still celebrating national extra hour of sleep day, and I used my extra hour to do an extra blog.
Putting it all to bed
My children believe that the night we change the clocks back from daylight savings time is a national holiday where they can stay up extra late. I usually wait until they are in bed, if not asleep, before taking time for myself on the computer but there was no chance of that today. I woke up before any of them and they are going strong, so I told Josh to deal with them and let me blog.
The past couple of weeks I have maintained radio silence for multiple reasons. First of all, my computer started to go wonky (that is a technical term for malfunctioning in unpredictable and creative ways. First the keyboard froze. Then the internet failed for no apparent reason. Finally, the computer stopped communicating with the keyboard and the screen altogether. I patiently waited for my brother Marty the computer genius to get back from his trip to Italy to take a look at the computer. He graciously gave me some fresh croissants from the baker whose computer he had just succeeded in fixing, dumped an enormous old monitor (still works, kinda blurry) on my computer table for any community organization or poor friend who won't laugh when I make the offer (call now or it ends up on the curb for the local dumpster divers) then set to work to discover he had no idea what to do with it. He left with it, to let a colleague tinker with it.
Isaac's laptop was still functioning and linked to the internet but he is not too generous with it, especially as he was in midterms this week. I was able to check e-mail and assure my mom I was alive and well, sorry I had not been in touch (she is out of town too). So blogging was not much of an option.
It has been ridiculously busy in my life (I mean more than usual) as Josh has been working on a job site out of town and commuting back on weekends. Between being solo mom with some help from my friends (THANK YOU!!!), and the sun going down too early for me to get to the garden in the evening, I have been cramming my end of fall garden wrap up into my already busy weekends.
Gardening in November is all about putting everything to bed. I am racing the clock against the first snow fall. Actually, it snowed a bit on Friday but nothing stayed on the ground. I have removed all of the annual vegetables and occasional weeds which came through the hay from the vegetable gardens. All the broccoli, tomato and pepper plants, stripped bare of all but a few baby green tomatoes and time pepperlings, were tossed into the compost. I dismantled the tomato cages and put the chicken wire and bamboo components up against the fence. Everything looks so naked!! I pushed aside all the hay, recruited my kids to help me plant garlic, rake out last year's compost and put out two large bags of composted manure. I also harvested some small, almost ripe butternut squashes which Orianne had carefully covered up with hay to protect from frost. They are very cute, and hopefully edible. Zara and her friend Marlon had a roaring fun hay fight, which broke up the compacted books of hay and spread them pretty much everywhere (whatever it takes!). Orianne rescued any worms which were accidentally exposed by my shovel and lovingly dropped them in with the garlic cloves before Isaac covered them up with earth. I was please to see I have a ton of worms all over the place.
Iulia next door was also outdoors working on her garden. We swapped a rake for a spade, some garlic bulbs (the super awesome music cultivar from my in-laws) for tulip bulbs and anemone seeds. She also got a garbage bag full of leftover cut down chrysanthemums from her friend who owns a restaurant. He has a terrace which is surrounded by potted flowers, but he doesn't have the space to keep the perennials so he gave them to her. I have no idea what colour they are but I now have some chrysanthemums in front of my house. She begged me to take some of her strawberry plants which were taking over the whole space at the back of her garden. They are domestic strawberries, the big ones like you buy in the store. We already have a cultivar called alpine strawberries which are small, super sweet and prolific with a ridiculously long season (I still have strawberries, in November, in Montreal). I also have patches of wild strawberries which have popped up in unexpected places in my garden. Who knows what interesting hybrids may emerge. I transplanted some next to the bathtub.
Once I finished planting for this year (I swear that is all!!) I went around with bales of hay and covered up the bare spots. I added some around the flower garden areas of my front yard in order to expand the area for next year. I watched Iulia hacking away at a patch of her lawn to plant tulips and told her about the hay method of turning your lawn effortlessly into garden space. It kills the grass underneath and makes planting infinitely easier. I also moved my empty compost box to a new spot, leaving behind the most fertile patch of the garden for planting something or other in the spring. I keep two boxes, one active and one becoming earth. Isaac cringed when I asked him to help spread the compost, but I showed him that, with the exception of the odd eggshell or shrunken corn cob, there was nothing but thick black earth coming out of the box. It had reduced to one-third of the amount that was in it when I shut it last fall. The wonders of compost.
Meanwhile, things are busy inside as well. Last week, I had conflicting advice from friends and family about how to turn green tomatoes ripe. I put our green tomato recipes aside, and tried the paper bag approach. According to Jack who is one of my garden gurus and maker of extraordinary home grown/home made hot sauces, green tomatoes in a paper bag in a cool, dark place, will start to turn orange. He told me to check them every two days, remove the ones which started turning and leave them in the light to finish ripening. I have already made a full large freezer ziploc bag full of red tomato puree from the tomatoes harvested by Naomi and my daughters, several dozen orange tomatoes in a basket on my dining room table and six brown paper bags of green tomatoes which I am not giving up on yet. Josh has bought mason jars in anticipation of the tomato sauce which is soon to come.
The peppers were processed up with a bunch of green tomatoes into a lovely salsa verde. I have something like eight live pepper plants in the basement (I shoved a bunch in one pot, not sure how many) which are producing lots more hot peppers. Orianne has added a school experiment to our basement greenhouse. They sprouted parsley and arugula, and I am trying to keep them alive and growing under the big light. We may eat them before spring, if they make it.
Although my gardening season is ending, I am not closing up my blog quite yet. I have intended to have lots of photos on this blog, and the only way I found to upload photos was to put them in a photo page which can be accessed over on the upper right side next to this text (under Pages, then Home it says Garden pics? I don't know if anyone noticed them way over there). Well, when checking Isaac's blog
(http://thiistheblog.blogspot.com/)I noticed he had cool pics right in his text, so I asked him how he did that. Cut and paste, he said, with a look that made me feel real dumb. I expected something a tad more complicated. I would have redecorated this blog already if I had the time (see paragraphs 2 and 4), but now that the outdoor work is done and I have a computer again, I will find time to download lots of photos into the text. Then you can read it all again and feel like it is summer already.
I also promised back in September that I would dedicated one blog to the recipes through which we ate our garden, and I will get there too. Then I will go offline for a bit until we start planting our indoor seed and convert my basement into a greenhouse, but that won't be before April. I will also be in the final planning stages of a bat mitzvah so I may be playing on-line catch up in May.
In the meantime, my garden is in bed, and so are my husband and my daughters. Isaac is watching another movie, but I am also going to bed.
The past couple of weeks I have maintained radio silence for multiple reasons. First of all, my computer started to go wonky (that is a technical term for malfunctioning in unpredictable and creative ways. First the keyboard froze. Then the internet failed for no apparent reason. Finally, the computer stopped communicating with the keyboard and the screen altogether. I patiently waited for my brother Marty the computer genius to get back from his trip to Italy to take a look at the computer. He graciously gave me some fresh croissants from the baker whose computer he had just succeeded in fixing, dumped an enormous old monitor (still works, kinda blurry) on my computer table for any community organization or poor friend who won't laugh when I make the offer (call now or it ends up on the curb for the local dumpster divers) then set to work to discover he had no idea what to do with it. He left with it, to let a colleague tinker with it.
Isaac's laptop was still functioning and linked to the internet but he is not too generous with it, especially as he was in midterms this week. I was able to check e-mail and assure my mom I was alive and well, sorry I had not been in touch (she is out of town too). So blogging was not much of an option.
It has been ridiculously busy in my life (I mean more than usual) as Josh has been working on a job site out of town and commuting back on weekends. Between being solo mom with some help from my friends (THANK YOU!!!), and the sun going down too early for me to get to the garden in the evening, I have been cramming my end of fall garden wrap up into my already busy weekends.
Gardening in November is all about putting everything to bed. I am racing the clock against the first snow fall. Actually, it snowed a bit on Friday but nothing stayed on the ground. I have removed all of the annual vegetables and occasional weeds which came through the hay from the vegetable gardens. All the broccoli, tomato and pepper plants, stripped bare of all but a few baby green tomatoes and time pepperlings, were tossed into the compost. I dismantled the tomato cages and put the chicken wire and bamboo components up against the fence. Everything looks so naked!! I pushed aside all the hay, recruited my kids to help me plant garlic, rake out last year's compost and put out two large bags of composted manure. I also harvested some small, almost ripe butternut squashes which Orianne had carefully covered up with hay to protect from frost. They are very cute, and hopefully edible. Zara and her friend Marlon had a roaring fun hay fight, which broke up the compacted books of hay and spread them pretty much everywhere (whatever it takes!). Orianne rescued any worms which were accidentally exposed by my shovel and lovingly dropped them in with the garlic cloves before Isaac covered them up with earth. I was please to see I have a ton of worms all over the place.
Iulia next door was also outdoors working on her garden. We swapped a rake for a spade, some garlic bulbs (the super awesome music cultivar from my in-laws) for tulip bulbs and anemone seeds. She also got a garbage bag full of leftover cut down chrysanthemums from her friend who owns a restaurant. He has a terrace which is surrounded by potted flowers, but he doesn't have the space to keep the perennials so he gave them to her. I have no idea what colour they are but I now have some chrysanthemums in front of my house. She begged me to take some of her strawberry plants which were taking over the whole space at the back of her garden. They are domestic strawberries, the big ones like you buy in the store. We already have a cultivar called alpine strawberries which are small, super sweet and prolific with a ridiculously long season (I still have strawberries, in November, in Montreal). I also have patches of wild strawberries which have popped up in unexpected places in my garden. Who knows what interesting hybrids may emerge. I transplanted some next to the bathtub.
Once I finished planting for this year (I swear that is all!!) I went around with bales of hay and covered up the bare spots. I added some around the flower garden areas of my front yard in order to expand the area for next year. I watched Iulia hacking away at a patch of her lawn to plant tulips and told her about the hay method of turning your lawn effortlessly into garden space. It kills the grass underneath and makes planting infinitely easier. I also moved my empty compost box to a new spot, leaving behind the most fertile patch of the garden for planting something or other in the spring. I keep two boxes, one active and one becoming earth. Isaac cringed when I asked him to help spread the compost, but I showed him that, with the exception of the odd eggshell or shrunken corn cob, there was nothing but thick black earth coming out of the box. It had reduced to one-third of the amount that was in it when I shut it last fall. The wonders of compost.
Meanwhile, things are busy inside as well. Last week, I had conflicting advice from friends and family about how to turn green tomatoes ripe. I put our green tomato recipes aside, and tried the paper bag approach. According to Jack who is one of my garden gurus and maker of extraordinary home grown/home made hot sauces, green tomatoes in a paper bag in a cool, dark place, will start to turn orange. He told me to check them every two days, remove the ones which started turning and leave them in the light to finish ripening. I have already made a full large freezer ziploc bag full of red tomato puree from the tomatoes harvested by Naomi and my daughters, several dozen orange tomatoes in a basket on my dining room table and six brown paper bags of green tomatoes which I am not giving up on yet. Josh has bought mason jars in anticipation of the tomato sauce which is soon to come.
The peppers were processed up with a bunch of green tomatoes into a lovely salsa verde. I have something like eight live pepper plants in the basement (I shoved a bunch in one pot, not sure how many) which are producing lots more hot peppers. Orianne has added a school experiment to our basement greenhouse. They sprouted parsley and arugula, and I am trying to keep them alive and growing under the big light. We may eat them before spring, if they make it.
Although my gardening season is ending, I am not closing up my blog quite yet. I have intended to have lots of photos on this blog, and the only way I found to upload photos was to put them in a photo page which can be accessed over on the upper right side next to this text (under Pages, then Home it says Garden pics? I don't know if anyone noticed them way over there). Well, when checking Isaac's blog
(http://thiistheblog.blogspot.com/)I noticed he had cool pics right in his text, so I asked him how he did that. Cut and paste, he said, with a look that made me feel real dumb. I expected something a tad more complicated. I would have redecorated this blog already if I had the time (see paragraphs 2 and 4), but now that the outdoor work is done and I have a computer again, I will find time to download lots of photos into the text. Then you can read it all again and feel like it is summer already.
I also promised back in September that I would dedicated one blog to the recipes through which we ate our garden, and I will get there too. Then I will go offline for a bit until we start planting our indoor seed and convert my basement into a greenhouse, but that won't be before April. I will also be in the final planning stages of a bat mitzvah so I may be playing on-line catch up in May.
In the meantime, my garden is in bed, and so are my husband and my daughters. Isaac is watching another movie, but I am also going to bed.
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