It's easy being green

I think I've made mention of it a couple times in posts previous, but we've had a rather hot and humid spring and summer so far. There have been huge dumps of rain followed by pot-boiling temperatures, with neither lasting for too long, but close enough together to create days where it feels like you're swimming in a crock pot.

Oh, and that same weather cycle has been insanely good for our garden. Check out the photo in this post from nearly exactly 3 months ago. Then, look at the photo below taken from the same exact spot.


This is one of our 8x8' garden beds, and it has 9 tomato plants of different variety, a big bush of basil, and 3 green peppers (which you can't see). The scarecrow is still in there, he's just dwarfed by the plants themselves, some of where are nearing my height.


This is another of the garden beds, the one pictured off to the left in the previous shot. This 4x8" bed houses 2 more pepper plants, another big bush of basil, 2 tomatillo plants, and 4 roma tomato plants. In other beds (4 more not pictured), we have one dedicated to herbs, one with more romas and some swiss chard, one dormant (which housed lettuce and spinach that has gone to seed and will be replanted in the fall) and a last one with cucumbers.


Around the edges of our yard (and taking over parts of it already) are viney plants, including the aforementioned pie pumpkin vines, as well as 4 different butternut squash. We'll use a lot of them for ourselves and baby food and end up giving a lot of them away.


Speaking of green, here's a picture of Matilda and I from a day when we went out and hit the town. Not only is clothes shopping for little girls fun (I found the madras dress she's wearing at a thrift store for $1), but it gives me an excuse (as if I needed one) to dress even more colorfully. On this particular day, I decided to do my best to match her outfit, with some bright green vintage Lacoste pants and a pale pink Lands' End oxford-style polo.

Hopefully we can do the matching outfits many more times before she decides that she's embarrassed by such things.

Planning ahead; Fashionably late

The due date has come and gone and there's still no arrival at our house. We'd gotten the room arranged and the car seat installed and extra food cooked and stored in the deep freeze, so we're just kind of waiting. We figured we might end up at the hospital this past weekend, and when it didn't happen I decided to spend an entire day in the garden instead. The scarecrow needs a new outfit as well. His pants are torn into strips near the hems and his OCBD has pieces missing that went into building a squirrel nest (no joke).


The freeze cut-off date still isn't for several weeks, but we thought we'd take our chances. We've been saving milk jugs for months to serve as miniature hot-houses, so I turned our four beds and planted 16 tomato, 12 pepper, 3 squash, 3 pumpkin, 3 cantaloupe, and 4 basil plants. There are a few smaller spots that we'll fill in when and if we get the chance.


Despite another real burst of spring weather, I kept it subdued today with a vintage Brooks Brothers repp tie, a navy jacket and university-stripe OCBD.


Gray chinos and burgundy penny loafers rounded things out.


The magnolia is blooming and the grass is greening up, so even the snow forecasted for later in the week won't last long.

Spring will be here soon enough, and hopefully another arrival will grace us with her presence in the near future as well.

All good things must come to an end

The usual freeze date in our neck of the woods is somewhere around October 8th, so I was feeling pretty lucky when we were still picking large bowls of tomatoes and peppers for almost 3 full weeks past then. We'd had a couple mild freezes before now, but gentle breezes and sheets managed to keep things alive.

This week, though, we had temperatures dip low several nights in a row, and even coverings couldn't save our plants. By Friday, everything was wilted and dying, and I bought a big pile of lawn bags to gather the carnage.

To give you an idea of what we plant, here's a picture of me standing in the middle (12 plants of different varieties) of one of our tomato beds in June.

Off to the left is another tomato and pepper bed, above and behind me are grapevines growing on our pergola (where our owls live).

For reference, I stand about 6'6", while our headless "scarecrow" clocks in at about 5"8" or so. If you've been reading my blog for any time at all, you know that we're kinda crazy about gardening and canning food, and the extended growing season gave us a couple more small harvests to work with.

The chives are still standing!

Here's the one big tomato bed (8x8 feet) after I pulled out all the dead plants this weekend. Standing solitary is our stylish scarecrow, which we affectionately call "Patrick" (after Patrick Batemen, of American Psycho), wearing his faded blue oxford (which was shredded and plundered in one place by a squirrel building a nest) and also-faded poly-blend pants.

The official end of summer has also brought me to my actual favorite season in terms of my wardrobe. I'll miss the fresh tomatoes and other produce that we've enjoyed for the past 5 months, but we have quite quite a few jars of sauce saved away in the basement and I'm excited to finally break out the tweeds and woolens.

I just hope this winter isn't as brutal as last.

At least the heat is good for something

The past 8 or so days here have been between 90-95 degrees, and the next three days are supposed to be about 100 with heat indexes at around 110-115. It's days like these that I honestly have a hard time getting excited about much, and style points fade knowing that anything I'm going to wear is going to get sweaty during the day.

Lest I complain too much about the weather, though, I will say that this hot weather has been absolutely amazing for our large garden. Here is the tomato haul from the past week...

Day 1, the start of the binge (sorry for the camera phone picture).

Three days after that, a bigger haul.

Three more days and yet another huge batch.

It looks like an absolutely huge amount of tomatoes (and it is), but one of our major goals this summer was to pick and then can enough tomato sauce, paste, and other random assortments (including BBQ sauce, Bruschetta spread, etc) so that we didn't have to buy anything from the store for the next 12 months.

It's a rather ambitious goal, and to meet it, we planted 21 tomato plants. Within that 21 are 11 romas (which include several different variety) and 10 other tomato plants (with about 3 different varieties). As the pictures above show, we've got a really good start so far on our goal, and if we can just keep things watered (or get some timely rain), hopefully the production won't slow down too much.

When we got our house, one of our major buying points was getting a house with a yard large enough to do a garden, and we've dug up a little bit more of it each year to plant more things. We have a couple huge piles of compost, and I have to admit still feeling a bit giddy each year as the plants get larger and larger and finally bear fruit.

There's no easier way to know where your food comes from.