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Saturday, October 12, 2013

Happening Right Now

 

Next week our twins turn 8 years old, so the preparations for the birthday itself and the double party are in full swing.

The making of lots of soap favors is afoot. Button soaps and orange and raspberry “cake” soaps for the girls (Lalaloopsy is the theme for my girl) and Millennium falcons and Darth Vader soaps for the boys. No guessing what my son’s theme is!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday we discovered that a lot of the pods on the sesame plant had opened up and we harvested our first handful of homegrown sesame seeds! How cool is that?

In the picture above you can see the contents of just one little pod!

 

 

The corn and cucamelons (also called Mouse Melons, which are very small cucumbers that look like miniature water melons) and the corn have a mutually beneficial co-existence going on!

 

 

 

The other cinnamon basil in bloom! The cinnamon basil is so easy to propagate and the bees love it so, so now I have several all over my garden to attract the busy little pollinators!

 

 

Our Honeysuckle has decided to go for round two this year!

 

 

The Hummingbirds LOVE those trumpet plants!

 

 

Our first taxi tomato is almost ready!

 

 

Many zucchinis are a-coming!

 

 

The lavender is starting to bloom!

 

 

A new for me herb, grown from seed and just starting to bloom!

 

 

It is finally cool enough for the Nasturtiums to start peeking through!

 

 

And the cake making is afoot too. Anna wants a Lalaloopsy cake, of course and Max wants an Angry Birds Star Wars cake! Thankfully the fondant decorations need to dry, so that gives me the opportunity to make a lot of them ahead of time, reducing the time crunch factor for making two specialized cakes in one day on their party day!

 

 

Thinking of making this for dinner tonight! With homemade Apple sauce! Yum!

 

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Thursday, October 10, 2013

Worm Condo = Garden Bling = Bird Bath

Several months ago we started to compost in our little backyard garden.

I really wanted a worm condo, but with my kid’s obsession for worms and a variety of other practical reasons, having the worm condo inside, didn’t seem like a good idea!

And around here it is HOT a lot of the time, so simply putting it on the patio would have cooked the worms too.

It seemed that the most logical thing was to have the worms and their precious castings right where we wanted them the most - in our veggie beds!

 

 

 

So, I decided to have an in-bed worm condo that we can feed the worms little scraps here and there while they would be able to go to ground, when it got too hot or too cold.

 

 

It was really easy to do and you can customize it any way you like!

I had photographs of the process (which isn’t really complicated) but for some reason they have disappeared from my camera! So, I will describe it to you as best I can!

I got a large 3 ft. PVC riser pipe from Home Depot.

I measured out about 10 inches from one side and marked it all the way around.

Then I drilled some holes with a 1/2 inch bit randomly all over that 10 inch space. This is the part that will be buried underground and the holes give the worms access to the scraps.

Now, you could be done. Just dig a 10 inch deep hole in your garden, lower the pipe into it, fill the hole back up with soil and your worm condo is in place.

Find something like a little bucket, or a bowl etc. that would serve as a lid and you have the basics in place.

 

 

To make your worm condo work, you now need to add a few things to the inside, to either attract worms, or if you purchased some, to give them a nice home.

First of all, water the inside of the condo. Worms like it nice and moist. Then add a layer of compost. Just drop it in there!

Then follow that with some shredded paper or some kind of other bedding, like coco coir. Water that a little too.

Then add some kitchen scraps. They love fruit and veggie peelings, coffee grounds, the odd egg shell and such lovely things. NO meat, grains or dairy however, and I also don’t tend to feed them citrus fruit or any cooked food scraps.

Then empty your box of bought worms on top of it. They usually have soil and castings in the box of your bought worms already, so that should be fine as the top layer.

Place your lid over the top and let the wigglers do their thing!

Depending on how many worms you have, give them a hand full of scraps every day or so to keep them happy. My kids LOVE feeding the worms!

 

Of course, having this blank canvas of a pipe just sitting there, had me think up all sort of things to decorate it. In the end I wanted to dive into my box of old tiny tiles, scraps of glass, broken mirrors and glass pebbles that I have sitting in my craft room.

If you don’t have a stash - try ebay. You can get lots of leftover mosaic tiles fairly inexpensively!

It was just a matter of nipping the glass bits to shape, gluing them on in a pattern I liked and letting it all dry.

 

 

Then I used a basic sanded grout in grey to grout in between the tiles and letting it dry a bit. Then I cleaned off the excess grout, polished it all and finished with a couple of coats of outdoor grout sealer.

 

 

And there it is - the worm condo that’s doubling as garden bling.

Now, if you really wanted to go all out, you could even make this do triple duty and turn it into a bird bath.

All you need to do is use a footed bowl as your “lid” and fill it with water!

 

 

I picked this one up quite inexpensively at a thrift store.

 

 

You could also use one of those large clay saucers that come with terracotta pots, continue your mosaic on the inside and outside of that plate and have a totally fabulous mosaic bird bath/worm condo!

 

For the kids it’s easier to handle the bowl, so we’re sticking with that.

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Sunday, October 6, 2013

In The Garden Right Now

Since the more hostile temperatures of the Phoenix summer have dropped considerably, things are really starting to spring to life in the garden!

It’s still early for some things, since I just sowed them, but others are really coming into their own now and we’re starting to be able to have a few things here and there for our meals again!

Here are some photos of a few of the things that are growing in our garden!

 

Some of my trusty pots!

You can see the Holy Basil on the left back, then a tomato plant that has really started giving us tomatoes last week and seems quite prolific, then to the right we have a pumpkin plant climbing up. It has just starting with a lot of male flowers, but no sign of the females just yet. There are also two kinds of sunflowers in that pot. Next to the holy basil, much lower so you can’t see it, is also some lovage just starting to come through and some winter savory making an appearance!

In front, from the left, we have peppermint and a tomato plant that surprisingly made it through our hostile summer and has just started to green up again. Next to it we have a rosemary, that also made it through the summer and about doubled in size while doing it!

 

 

 

This is my herb spot. The ones you can see prominently are the Lemon Verbena and the Cinnamon Basil. They made it through the summer too and have kept the pollinators happy! What you don’t see are the smaller herbs inside the bed which range from parsley, chives, oregano, rosemary, tarragon to a couple of Mexican herbs I’ve never grown before but was interested in trying. Most of these aren’t quite as tall yet and don’t peek over the wall yet! Far on the left is a grape vine that I picked up at the beginning of our summer as a mostly dead plant. I thought I might just try and see if it will survive. It did - and it has tripled in size and has lost more leaves on it. Hopefully it will continue to do well and we might have some homegrown grapes in a couple of years or so!

 

 


These are my latest raised beds. They are only about 5 weeks old. and they are pretty much in full sun during the summer months. So, these beds will be exclusively spring and fall beds and will be solarized during the summer months! But right now It’s really springing to life!

 

 

We have cucamelons starting to trail up the bamboo, strawberries, cinnamon basil, bok choy, the first lettuce seedlings peeking through and some zucchini starting to bloom.

 

 

Another section of the raised bed along the wall. We have all sorts of goodness happening here! The cucumber plant sustained some sun damage, but it’s given us our first cucumber just a few days ago, so it seems to be doing fine. We also have some tomato and tomatillo plants getting their bloom on in there, as well as some zucchini plants throwing out a lot of blossoms! In the middle front I have some more herbs.
Stevia, onion chives and dill.

Over in the corner You can just see the boxes against the wall where I have butternut squash and corn stalks growing.

 

 

We also have a couple of spaghetti squash on the vine.

 

 

The Malabar spinach is climbing all over the place and starting to bloom.

 

 

The eggplants are going for another round!

 

 

I planted several kinds of zucchini this year! It will be interesting to see which ones do well in fall here!

 

 

The promise of another variety of melon! I have Water melons, musk melon, cantaloupe and one other one whose name escapes me right now growing in the garden! The cantaloupes are almost ripe enough to pick!

 

 

I have never grown sesame before, but my husband brought home a couple of  sesame starters a few weeks or so ago and I was intrigued.  Since it was still pretty hot, I wasn’t sure how well this would fare.

Well, judge for yourself!

 

 

Yup! Apparently they like it!

In that same box I have some more “exotic” things going on.

Horseradish - also something that doesn’t seem to mind the heat! Who knew! I planted that one right at the height of the summer heat, because that is when it was available. I just hoped it would make it. Seems it’s doing just fine, even though the heat does slow the growth. It’s starting to get much bigger now though, so it’s catching up!

 

 

Next to the Horseradish I have some ginger. Grown from store bought organic ginger! Seems it’s doing ok!

It took a while to start growing too through the heat, but despite some heat damage on the leave tips,  it seems to be really coming into it’s own.

 

 

Next to the ginger I am growing some Turmeric! Turmeric has a fantastic array of health benefits, but it’s so hard to find fresh! So, I planted this from organic store bought turmeric too and like the ginger, it seems to be doing ok, even though it sustained a little bit of heat damage on the leaves initially!

 

 

Harvest time will be interesting in this box - I can’t wait!

 

 

I have a variety of peppers throughout my garden, but oddly enough, I’ve never been all that successful with bell peppers. This is somewhat of a last ditch attempt to grow some. If it doesn’t work either, then I think I’ll just take bell peppers off my list of things to grow! This one is however looking pretty good, so may we’ll get some this season after all!

I have managed to grow arugula and small Swiss chard throughout the summer in a semi shaded bed, and the newly sowed lot is just coming through now too!

 

 

I managed to get a little Pomegranate cutting a few weeks ago and decided to propagate it! Seems it has worked pretty well, as it’s now about triple the size and growing every day!

 

 

We’ve already had a handful of strawberries from our new plants last week, and it looks like there are many more to come!

 

 

Our potatoes on the right are almost ready to harvest.  The ones on the left were replanted from the coffee sack that fell apart on me. They are later ones, so we won’t get those out until around thanksgiving time!

 

 

Some more pots on our patio! The pomegranate in the very back, then a little kumquat. Obscured by the dried up lavender (didn’t make it through the summer but I’m letting the flowers dry) is a tiny 2 inch fig “tree”.

 

 

Further to the front is the lemon grass I regrew from grocery store lemon grass. Couldn’t believe how easy that was!

 

 

To the side are a couple of baby Aloe Veras that I removed from the larger one I have in my herb raised bed. And to the front there’s a pot with a variety of native wild flowers that are about to bloom.

 

That’s a small glimpse of some of our garden right now! What is still growing, or if you are in the low desert, what’s just beginning to grow in your garden?

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