Babies in the Garden

No, not pictures of my kids again... I met two new babies in the garden this weekend (August 8th/9th).

Meet 'Baby Green Anole" I'm not sure when he was born, but boy oh boy is he ever cute! He cannot be more than just a few days old. He was small enough to fit inside a drinking straw (no, I did not try it). He was very shy, even more so than the adult anoles that frequent the garden.

Follow the brown leaf down to near the base and you can see the little cutie's head.

Here he is out in the open.

The second new addition was discovered at the SAME TIME as the baby anole. Meet 'baby fence lizard".



He lives on the arbor and I have seen him each time I have gone to the garden since our first meeting. Baby Anole has been hiding.

The first day I saw them both, they happened to run to the arbor at the same time and I was able to get a picture of them together.

Baby fence lizard is at the center of the frame and baby anole is on the gate in the upper right of the frame.

Welcome new babies! I love it when nature is happy in my garden.

2009 Spring/Summer Harvest log

Here is the 2009 spring/summer harvest log from our garden. I had been picking since early April, but did not pull out the scale until June 2nd. Oh well, 85lbs is not too bad, but I was hoping for more than my body weight. Maybe I can still reach that goal if the fall garden does well.

the formatting is a mess, I'll have to work on how to post a chart neatly in blogger.


Harvest Log
date items weight (lbs)
6/2/2009 squash, green beans 0.75
6/4/2009 green beans 0.1
6/5/2009 8ball squash, 2 big zucchini, green beans, onions 3.5
6/7/2009 very small potatoes 1.5
green beans 0.5
Kennebec White/Yukon Gold 4.5
Russet 8.25
Red lasoda 10.5
6/8/2009 sqaush, green beans 0.75
6/10/2009 caserta squash, green beans, 2 marconi peppers, bell pepper, tomatoes 1.1
6/12/2009 caserta, patty pan, 5 sweet 100 tomatoes, 1 round squash, 1 pepper 2.5
6/13/2009 1 better boy, 1 beefsteak 0.5
6/14/2009 2 roma, 1 little porter 0.1
6/15/2009 Roma, beefsteak, porter improved, chetrry, green beans 0.5
6/16/2009 zucchini, roma tomatoes 0.75
6/17/2009 patty pan, 4 roma, 1 porter improved, 2 small zucchini, 1 better boy 1.4
6/18/2009 3 roma, cherry tomatoes, 1 pepper 0.8
6/20/2009 1 black krim, 3 better boy, roma, cherry, beefsteak, 2.5
2 caserta, 1 zucchini, 1 yellow crookneck 2
2 cucumbers 0.4
potatoes, 4.1
onions, shallots 0.6
6/22/2009 tomatoes 1.5
6/23/2009 patty pan, peppers, cucumbers, better boy, black krim 3.2
6/25/2009 6 super fantastic, 1 better boy, 1 black krim, 2 roma, 2 zucchini, 2 round, 1 cocozelle, 3 cucumbers 7.5
6/26/2009 tomatoes 3
squash 7
cucumbers, peppers, okra 1
6/29/2009 black krim, beefsteak, super fantastic, 4.5
7/5/2009 tomatoes, squash, okra, beans 6
7/7/2009 rutgers tomatoes 1
7/9/2009 bitter cucumbers
7/15/2009 okra, cucumbers, rutgers tomatoes, beefsteak, roma 1.5
7/21/2009 patty pan squash, okra, peppers, tomatoes, 1 cherokee purple 2
85.8

Ever hear a tomato scream? Maceavelli comes to the garden

Just as planned this year, we decided on July 23rd to get ready for our fall garden. The hard part, the part it still makes me shudder to think about is that to plant a fall garden, we had to rip out the lovely spring garden I had just spent the last 5 months doting on. That is where the screaming tomato comes into it. Luckily for me, my hubby is heartless and ruthless and bloodthirsty (or is it sap thirsty?) and destructive and OH the horror of seeing my plants ripped from the ground. But it was all for a good cause. All of the old, woody, buggy, non-producing disease ridden plants were ripped up by that plant destroyer and once the dust had settled, I had three new sections of fresh soil to plant it. I'm sure I've botched the Greek history reference, but was it Machiavelli that said the end justifies the means? So in the end it was all clear for me to plant again.

After the destruction was done. I put the dead plants into the compost (and next to it, and behind it--there was a lot of dead plants) and then raked the old straw mulch into a big pile. The plan was to let the hot sun bake the garden for a few days in hopes that any bugs would leave before the new plants went in. Curtis took down the sun shade for me to accelerate the baking effect.

We let the garden sit for a week and on Sunday, August 9th, I shoveled, forked, hoed and raked the soil until it was loose. Despite it being miserably hot, it felt good to do physical labor in the garden again. All of my hard work paid off in a blister on my hand--interestingly enough, shaped like a perfect heart. Hubby said it was because "I heart gardening"...



Next step was to lay soaker hoses and re-do the watering systems in the fresh garden areas. I had purchaced three new tomato plants (Tim's Chery Tomato, ? and ? ), a Eureka cucumber, Fairy Tale Eggplant, two malabar spinach, and a packet of bush beans. The plants were placed in the south side bed (old potato area), the squash were planted in the west bed (old tomato area), the beans were planted in the north bed (old squash area) and the pepper and okra bed was left alone from the spring-hmmmm-- why is it that the only area that was not attacked by the plant destryoer was his own pepper plants? (this was planned ahead of time, the peppers look great and are still producing so they got to live through the attack).


I set up the 8 way octopus drip irragation system in the bed with the tomatoes and secured each of the 8 drip legs to the tomato cages and it hs been on a very slow drip since.

I ran a soaker hose in the bean and squash bed and planted directly under the soaker hose in hopes of maximizing the water usage.



Ahhh, fresh dirt!

Lasagna Recipe

This is my #1 recipe for having people over. It makes a HUGE amount of food, it can be made ahead of time and held in the fridge until time to cook, it is very adaptable for hiding veggies--I have a list below of what I usually add. When I make this for my family, we usually have enough for dinner and lunch to follow. I then portion off any extras into quart sized freezer bags and freeze for later. The frozen and reheated portions look terrible (they freeze best when squished flat) but taste great and can be easily tossed into a lunch box.

Lasagna

1 box lasagna noodles (the kind you have to boil, I don’t like the texture of the no boil ones)

Cheese layer:
1 tub cottage cheese (this is cheaper than the ricotta cheese)
bread crumbs
1 egg
Italian seasoning
Cheese (I used Colby Jack, cut into 1 inch cubes)

Meat Layer:
1/2 jar spaghetti sauce
Onion
Ground meat (I used ~1/4 lb of ground deer meat, but I’m cheap)
Random veggies (grated zucchini, spinach, grated carrot, mushrooms)
Italian seasoning
Garlic salt

Follow the directions on the side of the lasagna noodle box for cooking and assembly directions.


Other notes:

The veggies are cooked up with the meat and hidden in the spaghetti sauce.

I usually end up with a lasagna that is 1 cheese layer and 1 meat layer. So the pan layers look like this

Cover the pan with foil and bake until the sauce at the sides start to bubble. When it bubbles, remove the foil and add extra cheese on top and allow to melt.

Change of Motto

We've struggled to put what we do into words for a while now. We borrowed the motto "Horton Living like no one else" from Dave Ramsey because on the financial side he's a role model for us. But it's not really an all-encompassing description of what it is we strive to accomplish. We've described it to several people as "we're just odd or different". We do a lot of things that could be considered 'green' but we are not 'Greenies' (members of an activist political party focusing on environmental and social issues). We don't believe in man made global warming, but we do hate waste or wastefulness.

We believe in being self reliant (as much as possible), and helping other become self reliant. We belive that taking care of the soil organically is the best way to help the soil grow healthy food that we can eat. We belive that small changes to the way things are done around the house can make a big difference to the efficiency of the house (and it will show up in your wallet). We have been open to anything new that could change the way we live for the better.

We are very goal oriented: we regularly write down our ambitions and strive daily towards those goals. While we are not necessarily good at maintenance, we have acknowledged our shortcomings and work towards setting up 'systems' that help automatically maintain what we have. We are both self professed nerds; we love to learn new things, 'crunch' data, or test a hypothesis.

Conscientiousness defined as a personality trait: acting according to the dictates of one's conscience, self-disciplined, achievement-striving, deliberate (the tendency to think carefully before acting). Of course, we are not always conscientious, but we have set a goal to have "a conscientious approach to life". In short, I think we've found our all-encompassing motto for our lives and for this blog.

"Horton Living a conscientious approach to life"

Fall Garden Planning

With our good watering system in place, we want to try a fall garden this year. All of my previous garden experience was to give up with the heat in July, so this is a very new and exciting idea for me. I'm doing lots of research on what it takes for a fall garden and my notes are below.

Good TAMU (yeah Aggies) article http://plantanswers.tamu.edu/fallgarden/fallgrowing.html

My notes:

--Rip out tomatoes, even with green fruit on the vine. Earliest produced tomatoes are the best, quality goes down as the plant matures.

--Daily adequate moisture needed directly to plant to allow good root system development

--Surefire, Heatwave, Bingo, Merced and Whirlaway (these also require more care, water, fertilizer) Carnival and Celebrity (more forgiving)

--Surefire and Heatwave are the only tomato varieties which will set flowers and fruit during the heat of September and are thus the earliest maturing tomatoes of a fall planting

--categorize as long term or short term fall crop (based on frost sensitivity)and plant together

--Frost- tolerant vegetables include beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, chard, collards, garlic, kale, lettuce, mustard, onions, parsley, spinach and turnips.

--Plant short-term, frost-susceptible vegetables together so that they can be removed after being killed by frost. Frost protection and the planting of a cereal rye cover crop are facilitated if such a grouping system is used. Frost-susceptible vegetables include beans, cantaloupes, corn, cucumbers, eggplants, okra, peas, peppers, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes and watermelons.

Keep in mind the relative maturity rate, average height (in feet) and frost sensitivity of the crop of various garden vegetables with FS meaning frost-susceptible crops which will be killed or injured by temperatures below 32 degrees F. and FT meaning frost-tolerant crops which can withstand temperatures below 32 degrees F.

The quick (30-60 days) maturing vegetables are: beets (1 1/2 feet) FT; bush beans (1 1/2 feet) FS; leaf lettuce (1 foot) FT; mustard (1 1/2 feet) FT; radishes (1 1/2 feet) FT; spinach (1 foot) FT; summer squash (3 feet) FS; turnips (1 1/2 feet) FT; and turnip greens (1 1/2 feet) FT.

The moderate (60-80 days) maturing vegetables are: broccoli (3 feet) FT; Chinese cabbage (1 1/2 feet) FT; carrots (1 foot) FT; cucumbers (1 foot) FS; corn (6 feet) FS; green onions (1 1/2 feet) FT; kohlrabi (1 1/2 feet) FT; lima bush beans (1 1/2 feet) FS; okra (6 feet) FS; parsley (1 1/2 feet) FT; peppers (3 feet) FS; and cherry tomatoes (4 feet) FS.

The slow (80 days or more) maturing vegetables are: Brussels sprouts (2 feet) FT; bulb onions (1 1/2 feet) FT; cabbage (1 1/2 feet) FT; cantaloupes (1 foot) FS; cauliflower (3 feet) FT; eggplant (3 feet) FS; garlic (1 foot) FT; Irish potatoes (2 feet) FS; pumpkins (2 feet) FS; sweet potatoes (2 feet) FS; tomatoes (4 feet) FS; watermelon (1 foot) FS; and winter squash (1 foot) FS.

Miserable Texas Heat

My kitchen faces directly west. It is a real pain to cook dinner when the kitchen is already an oven! We are still working on solutions to keep that part of the house cooler. Here is what we have done so far.


1) Outside shade. We have a large tree growing in our yard, we normally keep the low branches clipped back, but this year we let them grow in a direction that shades the back side of the house better. This has made some difference in the early afternoon, but does not help once the sun drops below 30 degrees on the horizon.
2) Solar film. I just bought a roll of solar film from Lowes. One roll plus the application kit (needed) cost less than $50. I only did one window and the difference is HUGE. I can now stand at my kitchen sink at 6:30 and not be baked alive. The room is a bit darker overall, and there is a mirror like reflection from the window at night, but I am very pleased with this film overall.
3) Curtains. I have decorative curtains across the other windows in my kitchen (don’t close all the way on their own, mostly just for ‘pretty’). In the summer, I use clothes pins to hold them shut tight and this provides a bit of shading and helps to cool the kitchen too.
4) Fans. If it is just unbearable in the kitchen and I have to cook, I pull out a box fan and direct cooler air from the rest of the house into the kitchen.
5) Solar blocking fabric. This is not in my kitchen, but we just bought a few rolls of solar blocking fabric (70% block) from Home Depot for about $75 for a 50 foot roll. We used this to build a shade barrier for some of my tender plants outside. It seems it would be very easy to make an exterior shade cover for windows.
6) Alternative cooking… I almost never use the kitchen oven during the summer because it heats up the kitchen further, I also try to limit the number of burners I use (we have a gas stove). My previous baking solution was to use a toaster oven in the garage to bake small side dishes for meals, but my sweet husband actually installed a full sized oven for me in the garage so I can bake to my hearts content and not heat up the house.

Some other solutions we have considered, but have not been willing to shell out the time or $$ for yet are:
1) wider eaves
2) covered porch area built behind kitchen
3) exterior roll down shutters
4) pretty arbor with vines to provide shade at the west side of the house
5) custom solar window screens (I have seen these at friend’s houses, but never asked how well they work)
6) Moving to a cooler state (HA!)

As you can see, we have put some real effort into beating the miserable Texas heat.