Late Summer Gardens

Sometimes at this time of year I pull into the driveway and think: "Ugh." What must the neighbors think? The cupplant are beginning to brown, towering above the rest of the garden beds. Most of the flowers have given up their blooms. Various plants are dying back, setting seeds, and generally not putting on the best show. This is when I have to stop and remind myself that this is one of my favorite times of year in the gardens.
Those dried cupplant heads attract my beloved goldfinches. The finches stop throughout the summer, checking to see if their coveted seeds are ready yet, knowing our yard will provide a smorgasbord when they are. Now we hear the finches from everywhere in the yard, chattering as they feast. There's one little lady in particular that steals my heart. Yes, one. There's no doubt who she is when she arrives. She's cheeky as can be and she prefers some of the seeds that are setting in one of the forest garden beds near the rain barrels. When I water from the barrel, she scolds me until I leave the premises. She gets more daring each week. Today when I decided to try to get a shot of her, she let me within 3 to 4 feet before flying to a further perch and scolding me heartily. Her mate has begun his transition into fall coloring, and is a lovely shade of lime green.

The prairie beds, rain gardens, and spent vegetable beds all buzz with pollinators that find our yard to be an oasis as gardens start to die back. Our asters, butterfly weed, and even traditional garden plants like sunflowers, butterfly bush and russian sage all attract visitors. I watched a female hummingbird at the russian sage and sweet peas for a solid 10 minutes today. In the summer, they only visit for a few seconds at a time. The spiders love the visitors as well. As little love as I have for arachnids, I have to admit their particular stark beauty. The yellow and black arigopes are the most prominent, with their zig zag down the middle of their web to support their bulk. It's always a bit of a shock to come across one in the gardens, so you have to step carefully, knowing they're quite abundant. We have a variety of crawlers, and they decorate the spaces in-between the plants throughout the yard.

It's amazing what you find when you take a few moments to just poke around. We haven't spotted a single monarch caterpillar this year. Usually we have dozens in the gardens, but the butterflies have been few and far between this year. In my quest to find one yesterday, I came across this beautiful imperial moth caterpillar in our sycamores that dot the back prairie bed. He'll be heading underground soon to pupate.

As the garden beds slow down and surrender the last of their fruits, I almost forget to look up and remember that we're just weeks away from the trees' contribution to our harvest. A few tiny apples and some lovely asian pears are shadowed this year by our big pear trees. They had hundreds of buds this year and are boasting impressive fruits now.

It's a busy time of year, and it helps to remember that though our suburban neighbors may shake their heads, we are hosting a whole amazing ecosystem right outside our door. Enjoy these last beautiful days of summer.

For a closer look at any of the pictures, just click. Enjoy!

Elemental Garden Dinner

All the fancy recipes come later. For our first big harvest, we stuck with the basics. Tonight's dinner is brought to you by what Rob brought home from the farm today: broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots; and my evening's garden harvest: chard, and beets. Throw in some onions from last year's garden, a bit of olive oil here, lemon juice there, a sprinkle of apple cider vinegar... Ahhhh, summer!

Fraternizing with the Enemy

Spring has come on so quickly here in Wisconsin. I've watched Rob busily working on starting seeds and getting cold tolerant crops in the ground for the farm and nearly forgot about our home gardens. Last week I got a small area cleared and turned and got a few rows of beets started. My goal on this beautiful day was to finish clearing and turning that bed and get it planted with carrots and spinach. I was clearing the last little corner of the bed with a small rake when I noticed some fur in the straw I was pulling back. I carefully cleared away a bit more, expecting an abandoned mouse nest, but saw it was actually rabbit fur, and soon spotted a few pairs of teeny ears to match. I know I will be cursing our cottontailed friends in a few short months or even weeks, but lets face it, I'm a sucker. I've always been a sucker in particular for baby bunnies. So I called Wildlife in Need and they assured me that mom won't care that I disturbed the nest, and that if the dogs hadn't bothered them thus far then they might not bother them at all. Baby bunnies have big mammalian tummies, so Mom is careful to only visit at dawn and dusk so as not to attract predators. Wildlife in Need assured me that I could even fence off 3 sides of the nest to keep the dogs out, and that as long as mom could get to them, she would. I let the kids get a closer look before I covered them back up. They are quickly outgrowing their little depression in the garden but we think we counted 5 sets of ears in the little jumble of legs and backs. I planted the other half of the bed that I'd already turned, but left this half for momma and her babies. Hopefully when they grow up they'll decide that a two-dog yard isn't the best home, and move along. Happy planting!

Early Garden Days--Propagation

Spring seems to have finally won over Winter, just in time for Ostara. A few warm days have finally lured me out of the shelter of the house and into the garden. Our crocuses are finishing their show, which was better than ever this year. Our hyacinths didn't do much of anything this year, and our daffodils are a bit behind, but our early blooming daffs are just about ready to burst. The peonies, iris and allium are up, and I've seen peeking leaves from the columbine, bergamot, bleeding heart, and a few others. I took clippers to the perennial beds today to take most everything to ground level--we leave almost everything up in the winter to provide food and/or shelter for the critters. I also began this year's battle with the quack grass, which apparently got a better foothold than I'd realized last year. As I was trimming the false indigo, the lure of the crackling pods finally got the better of me. I harvested the pods that hadn't yet split open, and set them aside for planting. One of the things I most enjoy about gardening is propagation. To me, that's a huge part of the magic--taking just one plant and seeing it become many more. For years, that's been a necessity for us as we build beds faster than we can afford to fill them with new stock. So I've gotten pretty good at splitting and dividing plants and letting them fill in where they will. In the past I've toyed with the idea of propagating more seriously. Now we're finally at a point where our beds have filled in nicely and we can turn our efforts in another direction. Last year I had a small nursery bed where I kept plants leftover from garden installations and "volunteer" plants from our more controlled prairie beds. We were able to use a few of them for more installations and to fill in to other beds. This year I'm hoping to do much more. I started all of the indigo seeds I could find in some peat pots, and rounded up some red milkweed seeds from the rain garden to try as well. I also dug into the dwarf iris in our larger rain garden, to split some for professional propagation, and move a few. I'll do most of the splitting for our own garden in the Fall. I'm confident that I'll be able to stock up on a good number of Purple Coneflower, Cupplant, and a few of other frequent volunteers before the season gets too far. I'm hoping that if I can succeed in expanding our collection of native nursery plants, I can supplement our stock that we need to order for garden installations as well as give us something to sell at the Farmer's Market when all of our produce is going to our restaurants and regular customers. Last year we didn't make it to market once, because our produce sold so quickly.

A Watery Glimpse of the Future?

Some of my dear readers have been wondering how we're doing here in Wisconsin with all of the flooding. Before I begin, let me say that we are fine. We are 1000 times luckier than the majority of people in our area. Our basement is dry, we can not complain. We have had some major damage to our seed crops and lettuce, and our vegetables that survived are overgrown with weeds in fields so soggy we can't possibly step foot in them without damaging the plants. So. We've done what we could. We did two huge lettuce harvests before hail took the remainder that we couldn't get out in time. The refrigerator was overflowing with lettuce. Think I'm exaggerating? That's where you'd be wrong. I have photographic evidence! So that and a car with a few hail dings is really all we can claim as inconvenience. That--and being relatively stranded. We live very near the Rock River. Most of you know we live right up against I-94. Half of it has been closed because of flooding on the Rock. We basically can't get West with any rhyme or reason. We can't get South either without going way east first. We can go North, but not far, and not to any practical purpose. We can easily go East, we just can't get back. The first picture up above shows the Rock River 3 days before we got the last set of really big storms--3 nights before we spent most of the night in our basement listening to tornado sirens go off. We've seen the Rock flood it's banks a bit at this farm before--the normal path is a few yards to the right of the line of trees on the right of the picture. It's crept into this farmyard a bit before, but nothing like this. If you look at the fenceline, you'll see that it's under about 3 feet of water. Now this picture is of the park directly across the water. There is usually a parking lot in front of that sign. (It's still there, just under a couple of feet of water. Notice the picnic pavilion that's barely above water. Now. Like I said, this was three days before the last big wave of storms hit. The day after the storms hit, we were driving home from the North and the bridge was closed. This pavilion? Was 3 feet deep in water. And then? It rained again. A lot. So we can't even get onto this road anymore but I can only imagine what it looks like now. And the farm on the other side--the water has to be up over the ground floor level of that house now. I'd guess their first floor is under at least a foot of water. The water just keeps coming, and there is nowhere for it to go. It is bizarre to be stranded like this. Events are being canceled left and right, local business is suffering since most people are avoiding the interstate, and you just "can't get from here to there" as someone reminisced is once true again. This is all bad--but nothing compared to what's happening in Iowa. The scariest part is that this may very well be just a glimpse of the future as we experience continued climate change, AKA global warming. In other news Sprout graduated from Kindergarten and our little bird turns 5. The world keeps turning on, regardless of climate change, regardless of the rain. It helps a little to know that hopefully our kids will grow up in a brighter future if we all do our part to stop and reverse the changes that past generations have put into motion. As Beo says, and it is more important than ever now: Be the change.

Our Winter Stores

Here I am again, with my thanks to those of you who have checked in over the past few months. It's been a bit of a rough road balancing the two jobs, losing our long-time pup, and battling pneumonia for 6 weeks. There was a myriad of other sore luck, including losing our hard drive along with the past four months of pictures we'd taken. That included a much fuller picture than the one in this post, showing off our winter stores. At this time last year I was pining for having put up more local foods. This year we remembered, and were good little squirrels. We have strawberries in the freezer still, (my dream of our own strawberries in November and December oats has come true), jams from our strawberries and currants, salsa verde from our early tomatoes and peppers, diced tomatoes and sauce from our garden bounties, and applesauce from local orchards. The pickled peppers came from my sister's garden--we canned them together at our grandmother's house. (That was an adventure--believe the part of the recipe that tells you to wear gloves. I'm just sayin'.) We had our own garden peas for dinner tonight, and there's at least one more dinner of those, and also in the freezer we have double the tomatoes pictured. We've supplemented here and there with store-bought sauce and jelly, but I think we should move comfortably into the next harvest season. Supplementing this are the local pumpkins, squash, potatoes, onions, carrots and beets (some from our own garden) that we remembered to stock up on this year. We have certainly learned a lot and come a long way since committing to eating as local and organic as possible.

Looking back at my goals for this year, I can say that I've come closer to meeting them. I wasn't perfect, but I made improvements here and there--I'm moving in the right direction. Our holiday gifts this year will consist of (hey family, skip the rest of this paragraph!) a sampling of our preserves and photo gifts of the kids. We worked hard all summer to make that happen. (If you are doing your own gift shopping, feel free to check out my Guilt-Free Shopping Guide from last year.)

I admit my shortcomings and I can assure you I won't be posting a lot in the next few weeks. Enjoy my posts from last year if you so wish. Much of this month will be reliving the same joys. This year we've adopted a local family to give them a special holiday, which will make our own twice as helpful. Tis the season of giving, and I feel blessed knowing that my blog readers will be taking that to heart, and spreading their good will to all in their own communities. Happy Holidays to all of you, and best wishes for the new year.

2007 Preserves

This has been a challenging garden year, between the dry spells, the wet spells, the heat, and our busy lives in general. Still, we've already managed to put up more food than last year, and we hope to get a few more good weeks in before things really taper off in the garden. We lost at least 100 tomatoes to the rain--probably more--batches and batches of sauce. We've gotten a few good batches in though. This year we opted to skip the boiling, de-seeding, coring and peeling and go for a food mill. With ripe tomatoes, this thing is a dream. Orange tomatoes make it a bit more of a chore. In some respects, it's as much labor, because you have to set the thing up, clean it, wash all of the catch bowls, etc. It's far more efficient though. I end up with a small dry pile of peel and seeds instead of a huge pile of gorp. Check out the before and after shot of how much more pulp and juice I got and how much "waste" was reduced, just by re-processing the "waste" from my initial run through of the tomatoes.

Yes, these are actual pictures. No, my kitchen's never really this clean except for pictures and company.
We also invested in a pressure cooker, but we've only done one batch of sauce in it. I don't really care for the sauce that we've found recipes that are safe for canning for. We've eaten lots of my own special non-recipe (sauteed onion, garlic, lots o' garden herbs, simmered waaay down, S&P at the end) and frozen 4 pints. I also did a few batches of salsa verde about a month ago, before the tomatoes started turning. With all of the cucumbers we had before the rain, pickles were tempting, but we had a market at the coffee shop for them, and Bird eats them whole, so we let all of the cukes go beyond pickling size. Maybe next year. My sister is bringing some of her banana peppers this weekend and we hope to pickle those. If I can get one more batch of sauce put up, along with the applesauce and apple butter to come this fall, I'll be pretty happy. I do hope we're spared some of the rain next year so that we have more tomatoes to put up, but I can hardly complain when I look at the devastation our big-cousin family farms have suffered.


Sprout starts school next week and I can hardly believe it. I've had unbelievable anxiety this week instead of the calm relaxing preparatory week I'd hoped to give him. We're heading out for the weekend though, and hopefully that will refresh us for jumping into this next big phase on Tuesday. My baby is growing so fast.

Darling Vermin !@#$%#!s

Earlier this year Beo and I were thrilled to spot a thirteen-lined ground squirrel in our front yard. He was eating the seeds around our bird feeder, and we were so glad to have attracted more wildlife. Soon we saw him scurrying around the back prairie, and we crowed over the fact that we had a real ecosystem going there now, with a native critter having made his home back there. When the gardens got going, we were happy to see that we didn't have any problems. Beo had spotted more than one ground squirrel at a time in the backyard now, and we'd seen them scurrying in from other areas of the neighborhood.


Then about 6 weeks ago we had such a rush on lettuce orders from our coffee shop that we started some new lettuce seedlings. Once they had multiple leaves, we transplanted the 1.5 inch plants into a carefully prepared bed. The next afternoon, they were gone, nibbled to the ground. Meanwhile the new bed couldn't seem to push up a seedling for the life of it. We'd planted about 100 seed patches, and only a few things were coming up. Finally we realized that the seedlings were coming up, only to be gnawed down overnight. At first, we decided it was rabbits, and we put up chicken wire. No dice. Next we decided it was birds--we'd spotted a robin in the lettuce beds on multiple occasions. Beo spent an afternoon and rigged an elaborate netting system over both of our seedling beds. Our poor little lettuce seedlings kept getting nibbled to the ground. Soon we noticed holes appearing in our garden. One little burrow came up right in the middle of one of the seedling beds. Another exited on either end of the raised potato bed, and as soon as the tomatoes started turning orange, we began finding half eaten tomatoes at the edge of the hole. It was the dang little adorable thirteen lined ground squirrels.



We debated over how to handle it. They're so tiny that there's really no way to protect the garden from them. Although we loved having them in our ecosystem, we finally agreed that since they were ruining our gardens, they had to go. Beo bought a small live trap and we baited it with peanut butter--somewhat skeptically. The next morning I spotted our little friend sniffing around the trap. He got a tomato (little bugger) and ate it on top of the rock border, eyeing the trap the whole time. When I next looked out the window, the trap was sprung, and sure enough, our little friend was in there. We took him to a local park where I'd recently found there was a whole colony of his kin. The next day, Beo took the NEW lettuce seedlings of of a bench, and by that afternoon they'd been eaten to the stem. We saw another little friend in the prairie today, so set the trap back there. 5 minutes later Bugger2 had sprung the trap, but we had set it wrong and he got out. You'd think he'd have learned a lesson, and you'd be right if that lesson was "Peanut Butter is tasty!". We baited the trap again and less than 2 minutes later he was in it again, this time for good, and is off to find a new home. There's definitely a balance to this whole permaculture thing, and I guess sometimes there's just not enough room for all of us in the backyard.

The Fruits of our Labors

I'm behind in writing this, but wanted to give you a picture of our June. Our strawberry plants are in their third year, and gifted us with a steady supply of fresh fruit. It was so wonderful to have it after a long winter/spring with fruit being a rare treat. At first, we were excited with the first single strawberry that came into perfection. We picked it, photographed it, savored it. Before long we had such huge harvests that we didn't know what to do with it all. In years past, Bird would forage her way through the beds and there was little left for the rest of us, but this year even our little Bird had her fill. Our visitors were encouraged to pick their heart's delight--and still we had more than we needed. With an early and mid producing variety, we had a steady supply for weeks.

Last year's attempt at jelly put me off of such ventures, but looking at strawberry jam recipes, that looked less intensive. Grape jelly involved peeling, seeding, and boiling down the grapes, but strawberries just get hulled and mashed. It's still work to prep the strawberries and prepare and can the jam, but after a first batch we decided it was more than worth it. We did 2 batches of straight strawberry jam, and one with currants when our champagne currants came into fruit. The strawberry-currant jam is particularly delightful. I still get a bit nervous about the canning aspect, but I am so paranoid about doing everything right that I realize I have little to worry about.

As we went hulled our strawberries from huge bowls, I selected the most perfect berries to be frozen for later. I set these individually on a tray, froze them for a few hours, then put them into a freezer bag. (This method prevents them from freezing together in a great lump.) I'm looking forward to making a strawberry smoothie with our own backyard local organic straberries--in October. With a gallong bag of frozen berries, and a dozen jars of jam, we're a far cry better this year towards preserving more of our fruit, to take us further into the less productive garden months on local fruit. If we do as well with our garden goodies, we'll be in great shape.

Summer Updates

Well I've planned a half dozen posts but there's just not time for them all, so let me give you a digest version of how summer is going. We've been gardening, traveling to weddings, celebrating birthdays, and gardening...and gardening. The gardens are glorius this year, and in some ways less maintenance as they mature and shade out weeds. We've put in more beds this year though, mostly vegetable beds, so there's more to keep up with, and much more watering. When we get a good rain I breathe a sigh of relief knowing I'll get a few more free hours the next day or two.

One of the most exciting things is that I've taken on the market garden component of Someday Gardens. We have been selling our lettuce to a local coffee shop, that's featuring them in a special salad. It started off slow, with a delivery every week or so, but the salad took off in popularity, and soon we got a call that they'd take all we could deliver. Suddenly we were delivering two containers (about a pound of lettuce each, washed and dried) a day. Beo went in and asked for the salad for lunch one day after I'd made a delivery that morning, and they told him that our lettuce was already gone! It's nice to have it going over so well, even moreso when you look at the cycle of it. We drink their coffee, compost their coffee grounds and vegetable waste, grow lettuce with the compost, which we sell to them. I've even been watering our new lettuce seedlings with the rinse water from the lettuce. We had to put in an entire new bed just for lettuce because we quickly tired out our early spring batch. It is pretty labor intensive to pick and triple wash, then spin and dry that much lettuce, but I am thrilled to be able to do it. The other day I came out from making a delivery, saw our "Be the change you wish to see in the world" bumpersticker, and smiled to think how we were implementing local organic foods in our own community.

The flower gardens and the prairie have taken off as well. We're thrilled that a little thirteen-lined ground squirrel has made our yard his home. We've also had a frequent hummingbird visitor who is new to us this year. There are pollinators galore buzzing all over the place, and we had a huge influx of butterflies late last month. There were dozens all over our front yard, and at first I thought they were just everywhere, but looking up and down the street I realized that they were all concentrated in our yard. If I were a butterfly I guess I'd hang out here too. Heck, I'm not a butterfly and here I am.

Eating local has been somewhat of a breeze. We've made a couple of trips to the Farmer's Market, but many of our meals came from our own backyard until late last month, when things got so busy we were always on the run and our lettuce was all going elsewhere. We did enjoy a harvest of peas though, and an early harvest of beets. Beets are one of those vegetable creatures that I never learned to love until I'd had them fresh. Now they're one of my favorites. This meal was oh-so-local: backyard peas, lightly steamed; backyard beets, roasted, homemade bread spread with locally produced goat cheese; backyard lettuce with local feta and a homemade vinaigrette. Divine. I so love eating locally. It gives one something to look forward to. I will do my best to keep up more with my blog. It's frustrating that the time of year I have so much to write about, I have so little time to do so. I hope everyone's enjoying a fabulous summer.

Salad Season

When we returned from our trip, we were greeted with exploding gardens. In the vegetable garden, our Speckled Trout Romaine (Forellenschluss) was ready for harvest. Beo was up for trying some salads as our main course, and we have both found them delightful. This is a wonderful lettuce variety and I highly recommend it. Working on the CSA, I learned how to best prepare lettuce. After harvesting, it should be rinsed in a cold water bath as soon as possible. Make sure to use plenty of water so that any debris can float away from freely-moving leaves. Remove the leaves from the water, drain the water, and rinse any dirt or other undesirable material from the sink or rinse container. This process should be done 3 times to get clean leaves. If you don't currently clean your lettuce this way, you will probably understand why you might want to after seeing your rinse water the first two times. I've been using our first rinse water to water plants outside, the second for inside plants, and the third for the dogs water dishes (heck they drink out of puddles in the mud outside) or to fill pots that need to soak. I just use another container to scoop the water out of the sink, or use a large bowl if I only need to wash a small amount of lettuce. After washing, let the lettuce dry (this will help it stay crisp and retain nutrients--use a salad spinner or lay leaves on clean towels), and store it in a ventilated container in the refrigerator.

We started out with some basic salads. Our radishes were ready too, so the basic formula was lettuce, sliced radishes, and nuts. We like almonds, pecans, and walnuts for a little crunch. For extra protein, we often saute some sliced tempeh with a bit of Bragg's Amino Acids. We've also been doing sliced boiled eggs lately. I do not particularly like eating eggs. I have a personal mindset that just puts me off of them. However I've realized that if I want to eat more locally, eggs are far and away my best vegetarian protein source until we have enough land to grow heirloom beans. That's not in the near future, so for now, eggs it is. We enjoyed the beautiful pear, walnut, and goat cheese salad last week. The pear was our last domestic one we had, and I wanted to really highlight it. I was inspired by a salad Beo and I shared when we were at a restaurant in North Carolina.

You may have a favorite dressing recipe, but try something new to spice up your salads. I recently got some Organic Valley Mexican Blend cheese on sale, so I threw it into a salad with some seasoned black turtle beans, salsa, corn chips, and goat cheese for a Taco Salad. (Forgive the picture, I was in a hurry. My dear family is often waiting to eat while I try to get a good shot of our dinner!) I concocted a basic vinaigrette and added lemon juice and chili powder. It was delicious! To make your own, just use a formula of 2 parts oil to one part vinegar, and add a pinch of salt. You may also want to try a bit of sugar. I have used mustard, lemon juice, garlic, soy sauce, garam masala and more to try to create the right dressing for the salad. Give it a try and enjoy the wonderful greens that are in season now!

Heatwave with Flowers

We are in our third year of gardens here, and it's wonderful to see how things have finally gotten well established and are coming up bigger and stronger than ever. We were surprised to see how well the shade garden is coming back. My anemone is finally doing what it's supposed, to being big, white, and showy early in the garden.





We have one Jacob's Ladder that is weeks ahead of it's kin in a shower of delicate periwinkle buds.

The columbine have budded out and the bleeding heart are already blooming. I love how they capture moisture within their luscious petals. You can see the drops when the sun shines through.

I was thrilled to spot our lone trillium which my sister picked up for me at a native plant sale. I didn't really believe it would make it back, but it made it's ephemeral debut this week. These are one of my favorite flowers. They're so simple in essence, but their elegance is enhanced by the smooth green leaves that frame the three white petals. They remind me of the big ruffs that English queens sometimes wore--or the big headresses of vegas showgirls! I hope you enjoyed the walk through our garden today.

Early Spring in the Garden

Now that Spring seems to have taken hold over the late spurts of Winter, the Gardens are starting to take off. It's so nice to see things popping in to bloom. I'm pleased to say that as of right now, it looks like we may have lost only a few plants. My perrenial snapdragons have yet to bud out, but I haven't given up hope yet. The clematis we put in last year had a rough year and I don't think it will return, and it's too early to look for hostas yet. Our Wood Poppies are probably my favorite native that we have. They live in our partial shade bed, liking wooded edges in their normal habitat. They've done so well over the past few years. I shared a picture earlier this week, but here's a better shot of the plant, now that the flowers aren't bent over.

Our cushion spurge (Euphorbia epithymoides) is some of the earliest color in the garden every year. It's bright yellow foliage belies the fact that it's flowers are actually tiny little things set in the middle of the riot of color. (They are related to the pointsetia, which has the same characteristic.) Our flower lady recommended these when I first had the garden set 3 years ago and was looking for anything I could put in in the earliest days of April. I haven't been dissapointed. As it fills in, it will create a mass (cushion) of these yellow "flowers", that really create a nice chunk of bright color in the early garden.

The last of my favorites to emerge is our Indigo. This is actually a lovely hybrid of two natives, and is known as Baptisia Purple Smoke. I sought our it's lovely shoots under their blanket of wood chips, and was finally rewarded with the lovely purple spears. As they open up their leaves, they lose some of the dramatic color, so these shoots are one of my favorite stages of the plant. They're quite pretty after they go to bloom, and it looks like they're happy where they are--lots more shoots this year than last. Beo loves it too because it's a nitrogen fixer, so every year we add a few more indigo to our gardens.

Last fall we finally decided to plant bulbs, and we've been rewarded with some spots of color as most everything else fils out it's leaves. This narcissus just opened up today to contrast it's yellow cousins. I look forward to continuing to share as our gardens grow and new things come in to bloom.

100th Post

Happy Earth Day! This is my 100th post. Yep, it is. I thought I'd show you a number of different things for this momentous occasion. Here's some things growing in our yard. Here's our great groundcover:

Here's one of the native plants in our shade garden: Beo's latest rock wall: Here are the flowers I got at the Farmer's Market Saturday:

Here's my little beauty and my big dopey hound:

Here's me really, really happy that Beo felt 100 posts deserved a new camera! (Actually the 100 thing was a bonus to the fact that Beo got a bonus at work and has secretly been planning to get me this. What do I call him in my profile? Enviable? Yes, I think that's apt!)

Summer Fresh Pesto

The garden has been beautifully bountiful this year. We've had produce trickling in all summer, but the past 6 weeks have been simply overflowing. I've enjoyed testing and inventing new recipes to try to use up all of the Goodness.

If there's one thing you can't have too much of in a backyard garden, it just might be Basil. This is especially true if you have a preponderance of tomatoes. The basil has been thick in the garden this year, glossy and brilliant. It's incredibly versatile and adds a splash of freshness wherever it finds a place. Slice some tomatoes, top with fresh dipped mozerella and basil leaves, drizzle with balsamic, and throw under the broiler for a few minutes. A beautiful caprese dish, inspired by "Luzer's Tomato Plate of Doom". Then there's pesto. It couldn't be simpler. Take a few handfuls of basil leaves, a handful of shredded parmesan, maybe a handful of pine nuts, definitely a good drizzle of olive oil, and throw it in the food processer. Voila! Now the kids weren't thrilled about it until we called it "Green Spaghetti", making it out of Mollie Katzen's "Pretend Soup". (More on Mollie's kids cookbooks later!) Then they each ate 2 helpings. It's amazing how getting kids involved and adding a bit of imagination can make a big difference.

One of our favorite dishes so far has been a pesto primavera, ala the Pesto Cavatappi at Noodles & Co. Our currant tomatoes are unbelievable little bursts of Tomato Goodness. Their jeweled strands on the vines are almost magical, and they are perfect for this dish. Just make a pesto, however you like it, and your pasta of choice. Reserve a bit of the pasta water to thin the pesto. Toss the pesto and pasta together, then add a bit of extra parmesan, and your choice of fresh veggies. We used baby yellow pear tomatoes, isis candy tomatoes, and currant tomatoes. Toss and serve. So simple, so good.

If you're serving it to little ones, let them strip the leaves of the basil, choose the tomatoes or other fresh veggies to add, let them add in the cheese, let them stir. The more they help, the more they own the dish, and the more likely they are to enjoy it themselves. Bon Apetit!

Into the Wilds...and Back

This was a post intended for August, but Summer slipped swiftly away...

This is our second summer here in our little house on the subdivision. Our subdivision is an odd enough entity in itself. Our village is just off the interstate, halfway between the two major metropolitan areas in Wisconsin. It's claim to fame is an outlet mall. (Seriously, I tell people where I live and they say: "Oh, where the outlet mall is!") Exiting the interstate you'll drive past the typical small, rural, tightly packed houses, huddled together for protection from the wilds of the surrounding farms. Turn down a little street and you'll pass the small library--right in the same building with town hall, the playground at Veteran's Park (newly remodeled thanks to added tax dollars), a tiny laundromat, the baseball field, then one more turn and suddenly you're transported to the middle of suburbia. Brand new houses seem to spring from the newly grass-seeded ground--a striking contrast to all you've seen up to that point. Yes, we've cut down the trees (well, mostly just bulldozed farm fields) and named our streets after them.

It's a strange place to find our family. We don't quite belong in either of our village worlds. Our house stands out from the rest, because instead of a Chem*Green lawn or even a sadly struggling grass menagerie, you'll find 3-5 foot wide garden borders all the way around the house, and big island beds on both sides of the driveway. (This picture was actually taken in tame, tame June, the others in wild August.) Our landscaping preferences don't exactly make these manicured suburban dream gardens. They're all more than a little wild (as evidenced by our huge spiders, birds, and frogs, which honestly I wouldn't change for anything). I think most of our neighbors would be shocked if they could see behind the fence, to where things really get wild. We've even more gardens back there, and frankly they're all left a bit more to nature than normal folk might be comfortable with. There's the sunflower house reaching for the sky and carpeted with pumpkin vines, the "meditation garden" which has become more of a nursery and experimental bed, the strawberry patches that sprawl onto the paths, the giant compost bins, more flower beds, and now even a prairie. Last year it got even a bit wild for me. This year it seemed it might remain a bit more tamed, but I'd not counted August for all it was worth. With the heat and rains of August, the wild side of the gardens showed their faces, and one had to be brave to venture in. It was amazing to see the sunflowers shoot up feet at a time, the bergamot burst like a milkweed pod, the prarie grass burst fireworks from their stems, and the green to spread thicker and deeper. The new rain garden sunk it's roots deeper and the new prairie burst into bloom. It was a riot of life in our backyard. It wasn't suitable for the garden party I'd envisioned, but the thrill of it was more than worth it.

Now September has come, and the time has come for taming back the gardens in preparation for a new season. I love this time of splitting and moving and cutting back--dreaming of what wilds await us next year.