May 31, 2009
blogging
I've been missing blogging, and I promise I'm coming back! Life is just so dang full of stuff lately, plus it's recently occurred to me that some of you might be a tiny bit sick of seeing pictures of plants every week:) I do still have thoughts that are not about plants. It's just that the ones that aren't boring are either confidential or complicated or navel-gazing so...
Here are some facts:
I've done at least one or two solo court appearances every week for over a month, two of which were final trials. That pace is hard for me now, and I often wonder if it's going to get easier or if it's really just this hard to be a full-fledged lawyer.
The green beans quit producing a couple weeks ago, and I have I think confirmed now that they are done for the year. We replanted a new set a week ago. Not sure if they'll be able to get going before the August heat gets too oppressive.
We've had three house guests this month. We still don't have any doors in our house. (Except on the bathroom).
My cousin got married yesterday, and at the reception I had the chance to spend some time with the now very-dwindled Watkins side of my family. My great uncle looks so much like what my dad would have looked like as an old man, that I knew he had to be some kind of relative the minute he walked into my line of sight.
On that note, It is really hard to introduce yourself to someone you're supposed to (probably) know by blood relation when you have no idea who they are. According to the man who turned out to be my great-uncle Ralph, he and I hadn't seen each other since I was six. Or, in his words "just this high." Also according to my great-uncle Ralph, my dad hoarded his allowance as a child and then loaned it back to Ralph at the end of the week for interest. The story of why Ralph would be borrowing money back from a child by week's end is not surprising, but better told off the internet.
I have already opened one of my jars of pickles from last week, and they are delicious.
A teenager down the street wants to buy my old car, and we're probably going to sell it to him. We're just waiting for him to earn the last of the money. Awww. It will make me happy to sell my old beat up car to a sixteen year old for a song. That's how I got my first car too, from some guy who lived down the street from me and was selling his old beat up truck just to get rid of it. Go cycles.
I just finished reading the most recent Charlaine Harris book, and I really want the next one to come out NOW. That said, I'm kinda scared to find out what happens. I should just quit reading series that aren't totally done. Delayed gratification is too painful
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 10:36 PM | Comments (3)
May 14, 2009
HTGG corn! and other stuff like cucumbers
Earlier this week, Jeremy harvested our first backyard corn, which was indubitably turning corny:
Here is is a few weeks ago:
Here it was on Tuesday just pre-harvest:
It is still amazing to me that anything edible comes out of our yard...
Corn plants get kinda big, so once they're done, it takes some doing to really remove them...
So, corn, it worked! It was being attacked even as it was harvested, so thank goodness we didn't wait longer. Not sure how we'll protect next year's corn. In other news, we've been having about a collinder's worth of grean beans per week these last three weeks or so....
We've also seen a lot of growth in our cucumber plants. They're vine-ing and reaching out and growing up things and being bigger. It took me a while to realize, but after a while I realized I should do some research on where the cucumbers were supposed to actually come from, and what I found was really quite basic. Cucumbers make two kinds of flowers, male and female. No, they don't climb into an ark. But, they do work together.
We have both. Male cucumber flowers look like this:
They're on short, thin stems and focus on the flower part.
Female flowers look like this:
It's only the female flowers that turn into cucumbers. If the flower is fertilized, the fat stem area behind the bloom grows into what we know as a cucumber. Now, to be fair, I caught this one at the end of the flower part of the cycle, so the bloom is fading and the fat-future-cucumber-stem part is especially big. But, that's why I'm putting it up for you too isn't it, so you can see the biggest part of the difference - yes? There is more flower to the flower if you catch it while it's more bloomy.
We're still working on the tomatoes, we've had some but some of the plants are struggling. We'll see. The first year of gardening is definitely teaching us a lot!!!!
Though we're only starting to really see the fruits of this first year, we're already seeing how we can better lay things out for future yields. This is the year of experimenting, but that doesn't mean we're not learning too!!!
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 11:07 PM | Comments (2)
May 9, 2009
HTGG peck of pickled peppers
I've been taking pictures of plants and working on posts off and on these last two weeks, but somehow none of them have actually made it up...until now.
Peppers! Our jalapeno and chile plants are, um, working. They're making a bunch of peppers, and frankly I have had no idea what to do with them. I've put jalapeno in everything I can think of and there really just is no way that two people need this many of something that has a serving size of about an ounce.
See what I mean?
Finally, while reading a really awesome book about a gardening family that Jeremy's mom gave him for his birthday (more on that another time, it really is a great book), it dawned on me that you can pickle just about anything.
You just need all this stuff:
There are about a million recipes for pickled everything online, but most of this stuff was in most of the recipes. Particularly the jars. Why do they call it canning if there aren't cans? I do not understand that. Also, with many recipes for pickly/salsa type stuff, there is the option to skip the official "processing" part where you seal the jars in boiling water. If you don't process them, they have to stay in the fridge, but at least with this recipe they still keep for around six months or so.
Next time I'm going to try the processing, but for today, I was just excited to get through the basics. Like sterilizing the jars and lids for instance. You would not BELIEVE how many websites I looked at just trying to make sure I was sterilizing jars and lids correctly. How long do I boil them? Do I boil the lids too? Or not lids? Ok, yes the lids too but then do I do them for the same length of time as the jars or is that going to hurt them? Do I have to put anything else in the water? Do they have to cool them before I fill them or can I shove my peppers in right away?
If you have a dishwasher, this is much simpler. Most people say you can just run them through with the rest of the dishes. We, however, are among the seven or so yuppies running around in this day and age washing all of our dishes by hand (it's really not that bad I have to say). So, I boiled empty glass jars WITH their lids and fished them out with tongs and then packed them right away. I actually hope that there WERE some germs in there that died, otherwise I feel like I went to all that trouble googling and boiling for nothing.
While my empty glass jars were boiling, I obeyed the recipe and stabbed each pepper three times with a knife:)
And I put together the "brine" solution. I used David Lebovitz's recipe (click here to take a peek). You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of his post to see the recipe part.
Then, I just took the jars out one or two at a time, stuffed some peppers in. Washed peppers of course, and with very washed hands since I went to all that trouble boiling the germs of the clean empty glass jars. I almost googled whether I had to boil my hands too in order to touch the peppers, or whether I should boil the peppers so that they wouldn't contaminate the jars, but google was tired from the jar debacle and it told me to go away.
It's kind of like tetris trying to stuff the jars:
Once the peppers were in, I poured the hot brine in on top, and screwed on the lids.
And that was it! Really, all in all, fairly simple. At least compared to what I feared!
Aren't they cute?
If you're thinking that that one on the right looks a little odd, you're right. I boiled too many jars (seriously, how often in life does one have to estimate how many jalapenos fit in a half pint jar I ask you, I'm lucky I was only off by two!), so at Mrjuicebox's suggestion I pickled a squash as well. Since we have one or two squash laying around at all times now, we're hoping that this turns out to be the most delicious thing ever in history.
Not that we're holding our breath on that:) It seems like an ok idea, I mean a squash is a little bit like a cucumber - but then again there could be a reason that squash pickles aren't sweeping the nation. . .
They look good sitting in the jar though!
So, first preserving-of-food experience down, hopefully many more to go. I'm totally like all Peter Piper - ing DOWN here in this photo. Actually, I'm sort of making a creepy state fair smile face, but still, my creepy sweaty state fair smile face is hiding an internal Peter Piper's butt-kicking pickle person. I mean, really, that dude didn't even know how many pecks of pickled peppers he picked. Whatev. I totally picked two and a half pints. Or five jars. Take that Peter.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with pickled jalapenos. . . .
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 10:33 PM | Comments (6)
April 26, 2009
HTGG foodtography edition
We are finally getting food out of the garden other than leaves! (Not that the leaves weren't good while they lasted, but I could only eat so many pan-fulls of sauteed greens. Mrjuicebox didn't like them so I was on my own.)
The plants that are now stepping up to the plate (haha "plate" get it - ok, bad, I know) are the squash, the carrots, and the green beans.
Still life with beans and squash:
We picked two squash about this size last night to put on the grill, and I picked this one this morning:
I also went ahead and picked some of the green beans this morning. I kept trying to wait until we had enough mature beans to actually make a side of green beans for both of us, but these were getting kinda big and I was afraid it would hinder the little beans from growing to leave the already grown ones on the plants. As it turns out, I waited long enough to get maybe one serving of green beans at the same time:
I foresee that this may be a logistical problem with the green beans. They seem to be wanting to produce well, at least in this first round.
But the beans being produced are all at different stages, so with ten plants we can only get about a handful of mature beans at once at any given time. I guess we'll have to alternate who gets the side of green beans each week:)
One thing we won't have to alternate on, however, is carrots. The first set of carrots actually officially got big enough to be eaten a couple of weeks ago. This was the very first one:
Since then, we've each had a couple. They're pretty good, not as sweet as the baby carrots you get from the grocery store, but not really bitter either. They taste about like the full-grown bag carrots you buy at the store, just way smaller.
And they grow a little differently sometimes. What I am about to show you is, in my opinion, actually a little creepy. Jeremy says it's not, but I tell you, I almost couldn't eat these carrots, because they looked just like legs! Ack!
These two mutant double-ended carrots grew in bed #2 next to herby the hershy hybrid pepper. I say that not because I think herby had anything to do with their mutation, but just to give you an idea where they were. They were not in the main carrot area in the back of bed #2. However, I can't see how that should have made them MUTANTS. We actually planted a few carrots in each bed because we wanted to see if the different conditions would affect them. The results of that experiment have now been that carrots grown in mostly clay (with some compost) soil have two bottoms, while carrots grown in the more compost rich soil of the raised bed are normal. It's not really been a very scientific process. Still, why would two carrots growing next to each other BOTH do that?
And why would they look like they were dancing and jogging?
Creepy.
Creepy leg carrots.
We need a few random happy pictures to wash that weirdness off:
We moved some of the potato plants last weekend, and when we did we got two potatoes. That was happy:
Bigger potato
Little potato
The broccoli are blooming. What you eat off of a broccoli plant is actually the "flower" which makes the term broccoli "florettes" make a bit more sense :
It's a good thing we've moved on to non-leaf garden food, because the spinach and asian greens have "gone to seed" as of this week. We were warned about this initially by my grandfather back in February and by a few other people along the way, but it still took me a bit by surprise when my dear cute little spinach plants suddenly got these odd shaped leaves and shot up stalks.
I can only imagine that this is a bit of a pale shadow of what it feels like to see your child hit puberty. Gross.
The non-spinach greens (they came as a group called "asian greens mix") never did taste that great, which is why I was always sauteing them. Anything tastes good with enough olive oil and garlic:)
This "asian greens mix" was supposed to be very heat tolerant and water efficient, and it was I guess, but two of the three plants had to be pulled last week because they kept getting so horribly bug-eaten and the third one went to seed just as early as the spinach.
(The two in the foreground are the ones that ultimately had to be pulled, the one at the back is the one that went to seed)
Seedy greens, going the way of the spinach:
Next year I think I'm gonna try something more mainline like kale or chard in addition to the spinach and just plant all of it through the winter.
The corn are "going to seed" too, but they're supposed to so it's ok:
I'm still creeped out by the leg carrots. They remind me of artwork I saw online recently by a fairly successful female artist who liked to do collage. Specifically, she liked to collage together bodies of people or animals and plants. It sounds creepy (and it is a little), but she managed to make it more whimsical than macabre. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I'd link to it if I could find it, but I'm afraid to google "human torso plant head."
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 11:09 AM | Comments (4)
April 20, 2009
HTGG belated edition
I took these pictures not this weekend just past, but the one before, on Easter weekend. Then I never got around to putting them up, and because gardens are just like (I'm told) kids are, the dang thing has already changed since these were taken. Not tooooo much though, so here you go:
Starting as always with the cucumbers:
At least a third of these cucumber plants have now bit it during the thinning process, and one has been transplanted to another area. I'm waiting to see how it does, then I may transplant some more. It's so hard for me to kill them once they're so big (they're quite a bit taller now), but it's also hard to transplant them with sucess.
Remember our old friend the baby green bean?
He's finally getting going:
His neighbors, the half-grown green beans, are starting to bloom though, so he's still got some catching up to do...
The jalapenos were blooming as well last weekend, and a couple of them have half-sized peppers on them now. I don't have pictures of the peppers yet, but here are the blooms:
Pretty no? If you look closely you can see an out of focus pepper embryo in the foreground.
We have a watermelon plant that's doing well, but it's way far away from blooming...
And, it's in a war with an encroaching pumpkin, as seen in the left side of the frame. I keep trying to train the pumpkin to go the other way, and it keeps creeping toward the watermelon like a vampire toward a sleeping maiden. Creepy.
Speaking of creeping plants that are taking over giant areas of the garden, the squash is still going strong:
The first few baby squash were right at ground level, and they got partially rotted during the rain, so I'm hoping we get a few good ones off the new round that are growing further up.
Herby the Hershy Hybrid is still going strong, and still remains far and away the front running bell pepper. As I write today, he is finally showing some signs of turning dusky. I'm still very curious to see just how "hershey -ey" he'll get!
Here's another shot, b/c he's kinda crooked and I thought that was cute:
Finally, I took a picture of the okra! They're only a bit bigger now, and you'll be happy to know that they all survived Byrd's garden invasion last weekend, also known as the "Chicken Poop Massacre"
It really wasn't a massacre though, because thanks to his soft lab mouth and some innate sense of what won't get him killed, Byrd managed to dig/nose/lap all around and up to and even almost under a bunch of our plants without killing or even so much as injuring a SINGLE ONE. They are all fine. Including one of the baby okras which was almost buried in mulch, and the hershey hybrid which is a little unstable due to the giant pepper baby it's carrying. If Byrd MUST be disobedient, I appreciate him doing it with such grace and style.
Mr. Juicebox grew a whole set of red bell peppers in a pot after we bought one for roasting a month or so ago, and this week we deployed most of these to the garden.
Hoping they grow fast.
Speaking of growing fast, our tomatoes and potatoes got way out of control recently. I did a bunch of propping up and adding extra caging and tieing things off and pruning this weekend, and I still only barely got the forest under control. Perhaps forest is the wrong word. It was more like a hedge. A solid wall of alternating tomato/potato insanity.
If the tomato/potato hedege is any indication of human things to come, I am in BIG trouble.
On the plus side, while I was all up in there I found a whole bunch more tomatoes than I even knew were in the works! Including these (which I had already found since I photographed them the week before, but they were still there)
We have grape (above), cherry, regular, lemon boy (not sure what that is, it's yellow), and a stripey hybrid variety. However, right now they are all green. Just different sizes and shapes of green.
Last week I was talking to our neighbor and she told me that the first owner of our home, the one who lived here before the people who destroyed our house and sold it to we buy ugly houses (catch that? I should just say "the original owner") was a huge gardener and had a giant organic garden in the back yard. She said we should have good dirt back there, which we haven't really noticed too much, but I guess things are growing well so maybe it's better than we think? She also said he hated trees b/c he didn't want them shading up his garden. This would explain the lack of trees. He apparently planted the fig tree, the one tree in our yard that is old enough to have been there when he still lived here, because he liked our neighbor's figs and wanted to try growing them. Interesting.
That's the garden update. We're extending again out past beds 3 and 4 in the foreground of this shot. Not because we're crazy though, rather b/c we have too many plants and not enough dirt.
Nope, definitely not because we're crazy:) (also, in the top right hand side of the shot along the front of the raised bed, you can see the tomato/potato hedge. I just thought I would point that out).
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 8:36 PM | Comments (1)
April 15, 2009
ZOMG I can't believe I did that.
I had recently, maybe today, maybe another day, a really amazing result at court. The judge had compliments. It's probably nowhere near what you're thinking, and it's privileged, but I feel a certain extent of accomplishment tonight knowing that a family out there is not in a totally unmanageable situation, is in fact in a workable situation, in good part because of me. That's why I went through the hell of becoming an attorney, because I really thought I could make some kind of difference in the world and I hoped for cases like that one where I would have the opportunity to do so.
There was a time when I believed I had to achieve like this guy to be useful. Now I feel dumb for thinking that. Not just now, but for awhile. Apparently, this guy was accepted into the Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society while receiving a bachelor's degree in government from Harvard University, attending Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and receiving a law degree from Yale. Really, he did all that at once? And I almost died just getting married during law school....
I am so grateful for the moments when the crazy weeks seem worth it. Thank you dear clients and God. You make this mainly wacky work worth it, when I let myself see the good in what can happen.
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 9:20 PM | Comments (4)
April 14, 2009
adios Twitter!
A friend posted today on facebook asking if anyone had ever been unfriended there, and it reminded me of something I've been meaning to do in my life. Namely, get rid of twitter.
Now, I say this here because when I undo my twitter account (whatever that does), and all/some of you people suddenly experience the absence of my non-existent twitter posts (fairly soon, whenever I get around to it) When that happens, I don't want anyone to think that it is personal. Just so we're clear.
I feel like I had a good attempt at twitter a while back, and during that time it gave me some insight into what was going on with a few friends that I didn't see that often, and some that I did (so the updates were sort of unnecessary). Ergo, I've decided to let Twitter go because: 1) I don't have time to update anOTHER site. 2) it drives me crazy the whole "I'm updating to my twitter, my facebook, and my status message"! craze. Great, now if we're webbishly linked all that resulted in is me finding out how you feel right now THREE TIMES in THIRTY SECONDS; 3) Facebook does basically the same thing but with more stuff; 4) the blog is totally different and I would miss it at this point, so I'm not going to cut it out if I'm cutting down on the web-interfaces.
I can let go of Twitter, in part, because I really feel like I gave it a good go. I had just about every experience that you could have via twitter, and I tried to cherish them all. I got "followed" on Twitter, I "followed" other people on Twitter, I got "direct messages", I sent "direct messages," I logged in daily for awhile and updated pretty regularly for awhile, I responded to other people's updates - I even got BLOCKED once on twitter folks. I mean, you can't very much engage a service more than to get barred from interacting with someone through it can you? I think that qualifies me to graduate from Twitter with extra Twitter-attempting points, don't you? I tried so hard it made someone not even want to get my "tweets"! That means I REALLY engaged!
At the end of the day though, it just isn't worth it. The baby blue screen is calming, and that whale is dang cute, but really, I have to pick my input stream battles you guys, and this is just not one I want to fight. I'm taking my profile down tomorrow night.
So, Goodbye fair Twitter, you served me (sort of) well.
I'll see you all on Facebook if you dare!
Posted by Mrs. Juicebox at 8:47 PM | Comments (7)