The Falling Blog

I put together the three week progression of my backyard garden.

Take a look at the progress of the sunflowers, the tomatoes and the cucumbers. They just climb and climb into the sky. 

The melons look to be just about ready to start producing fruit now. SO many bees in my yard today just makes me so glad. 

The sunflowers are now ready to open up their eyes. I cannot wait to see that splash of orange and yellow lining my fence and tracking the sun. 

Have a great holiday weekend everyone! 

Mid week garden update and Soup Recipe!

I’m amazed at how much has changed in my humble little garden in such a short time. 

A switch has been pulled and my tomatoes, melons and squashes have all jumped into super growth mode. I even started researching pruning tomatoes to keep ahead of the extensive number of new suckers growing on my plants. It’s sorta funny, when I received the plants initially from Gurney, they were left of my stoop for a couple of days and looked real poorly. I picked up 3 more from my local shop, (which I may live to regret looks like!!) Oh well, practice makes perfect. 

Honey Bees seem a bit more scarce this year than in previous. I have some suspicions as to why, but the wasps and bumblebees are picking up the slack mostly. 

I’m not feeling terrifically well today, but my wife is quite sick. I’m working remotely to help keep a lid on the kids and to let my wife rest. I figured I would do double duty and make some fresh soup from my garden carrots. They’re crowding the tomatoes anyway so, woo! Fresh soup.

Fresh Soup Recipe

Water (2-3 cups)

2 diced onion spouts

1 small clove of garlic. 

5 carrots sliced thinly

5-8 baby red potatoes

2 bouillon cubes

2-3 chicken breasts chopped into pieces

Kosher Salt, pepper, red pepper, onion powder, garlic powder

1. In a pan start heating the water to a boil. In a separate pan, brown the garlic with some butter. 

2. Once the garlic is browned, put the butter and the garlic into the hot water. Place the chopped chicken breast into the garlic oiled pan (that you used to brown the garlic). Sear the chicken on both sides and reduce heat. 

3. Slice the carrots, potatoes, and onion greens into the heating water. Throw in the salt, peppers, powders, and the bouillon cubes. Once the mixture boils, reduce heat and set a timer for about 45 minutes. This is now your main soup stock. 

4. While the stock is heating, finish heating the chicken. You don’t want to throw it into your soup too early, or it will get really stringy. Once the timer goes off, place your chicken into the soup and get ready to serve.  

You can make this a cream soup by starting with a condensed soup of your choosing. I would recommend like cream of chicken or cream of mushroom, depending on your tastes. 

Have a great day! I’m going to take some more vitamin C and get those kids settled down. 

Garden 17 Jun 2011

Just some fun updated photos of what change a week can make on a backyard garden. Happy Friday everybody. 

MOAR PICTURES

No big update, but we’ve had temperatures in the 100s lately, while not so great for my peas, has been amazing for pretty much everything else in the garden.

Tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, potatoes, all are thriving now. I’m so surprised at how the sweet potatoes are faring, since I didn’t bother trying the black plastic method this year. 

The flowers have started in earnest on most of my plants, bringing the bees. I’m so happy to see them. I can’t wait to pick the cucumbers! Will post a how to on canning once that starts. I’ve strung some more line for the peas and will try to get them to come back, but I fear they may be done already. I’ll just have to plant beans, instead.

Happy Friday everybody :) 

Potatoes! 

I live in a townhouse, and I do not have a tremendous amount of space. Last season, I tried potatoes in the garden beds themselves and got very few potatoes.  But from what I’ve been reading, the methodology of vertical potato gardening is purported to yield substantial numbers of tubers with a minimum of space utilization. I’m very excited about how well the plants are doing, already.  

I’ve covered the plants at least three times. The first layer of earth is a mixture of peat moss and potters soil. Once the greenery made it’s appearance, I covered over the leaves with peat moss. The next layer after the shoots came up through this layer is another thin covering of potting soil. Then I allowed the shoots to reach about 10-14 inches in height and have now started just covering with peat moss (sphagnum) and will continue this until the box is entirely full. Then I’ll allow the shoots to die and allow the potatoes to mature.  

Now that the shoots are above there first course of boards, I’ll have to add more boards to add more dirt/moss/(or even newspaper I’ve read). Also, you might notice the screen and the soil liner, I included this to get a little more drainage for the box just to ensure that the tubers don’t get too wet. 

Happy backyard gardening! 

I can’t wait to see how the cucumbers fair when the weather finally decides to stay warm.