A Little Garden Recap

It's about time to make it up to you all and post some pictures and stories about the garden.  The weather around here is still fantastic, 60's and 70's during the day and cool at night, and though there's a threat of frost Saturday morning, it shouldn't be too bad.  The zucchini are done, but the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants all still look good and are going strong. 

This was a learning year for us and some things worked: all tomatoes, especially the wild Mexican cherry tomatoes, potatoes, and zucchini.  Some things didn't work as well: peppers (just starting to produce now that weather has turned slightly cooler) and eggplant (I think they got crowded out from being planted near the tomatoes).  We'll continue learning, making improvements and trying out new veggies.

 

This was the main bed of tomatoes.  The word "unruly" cannot even begin to describe the tangled mass of tomato-ness.  I was out of town for some of their formative weeks, and they missed out on some of the necessary staking/trimming required to be organized members of a polite garden society.  Despite lacking that structure they still produced prolifically.

 

This was the first tomato harvest in mid-August, grape and cherry tomatoes.

This was two days later, cherry tomatoes and beefsteaks tomatoes along with a few eggplants. 

This was the very next day.  We got a ton of tomatoes, Alycia had the food dehydrator running  24/7 for several weeks and we have a ton of sun dried tomatoes for use all winter.  They make a delicious addition to soups, stews, chili, and on top of pizza.  The bigger tomatoes were either eaten right away or transformed into delicious pasta sauce. 

The zucchini plants were indeed prolific and we got more than we needed from just two plants (there are indeed two plants right next to each other), but unlike others who find themselves cursed with too many long green squash, we saved ours with the help of the food dehydrator.  Cut into circles and sprinkled with a bit of the sultry mistress of spice, Mrs. Dash - viola! we had zucchini chips, quite tasty and probably a healthy replacement for potato chips (which we never really eat anyways). 

For the next few weeks we'll try to keep the tomatoes and peppers warm (in case it freezes) and slowly producing more goodness.  I'll make another raised bed or two for next year and we've already taken some of the excess strawberry runners, grown new offspring plants and transplanted them around the blueberries.  We're also going to mulch over more of the lawn area in the garden, in and around the apple trees (I"ll take some pictures of this later - don't worry) so that next year we have more room for large spreading veggies like squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins. 

Homemade Ketchup/Catsup/Katsup/Kyatsoop

Due to the large amount of Roma and Amish Paste tomatoes that we planted in Spring, we recently had a proliferation of tomatoes that I no idea what to do with.  Our freezer is already overflowing with (among other things) chopped/quartered tomatoes that Alycia froze over the Summer, and we've still got a ton of pasta sauce that I made last year that we haven't worked through, so what to do?  Well I've always wanted to make my own catsup...

This is actually about half of the final tomato haul of the season that I used to make catsup.  And to clarify, these are only the ripe ones.  We harvested all the green tomatoes when we ripped out the tomato plants and cleared the raised beds over the weekend, and the green tomatoes are now sitting in a cardboard box in the cellar.  If given a dark, dry place and a few weeks, the green tomatoes will eventually ripen.  They definitely won't be as tasty as the ones that had time to ripen on the vine, but they're certainly better than store bought, and more than adequate for pasta sauce or chopped up and frozen to be used in soups, stews, chili, etc. 

Sorry for the tangent.  I took all our 'maters, heated them up, and added a few ingredients:

• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2/3 cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

And brought everything to a bubbling simmer for about 10 minutes.

I pressed the tomato mixture through a strainer, which was actually a decent amount of work.

And catsup came out the bottom of the strainer, as though by magic.  OK, not really magic, more like a combination of gravity and elbow grease*.
For those not familiar with the phrase "elbow grease" (probably anyone under the age of 20), please note that this is just an expression and that I actually don't have any elbow grease, my elbows are remarkably clean and non-greasy, and even if I DID have elbow grease, I certainly would not have added it to my homemade catsup. 

I had to cook it down for a few hours to remove all the liquid and thicken up the mixture.  The recipe said it would only take an hour, but it took me more like 4-5 hours to cook down.  

Some people feel that making your own condiments is some kind of sign of larger issues, or as my Brother-in-law put it "Dude, you made your own ketchup?!?!  You have WAY to much time on your hands."  Yes, yes I do.  And it's wonderful.   

Half a Bushel

Half a bushel of tomatoes. Yup, that's what I bought. First time I've ever purchased anything in an increment of a bushel, or fractional part of a bushel. I'm not gonna lie, it felt good. And since it's prime tomato harvesting time, half a bushel of beautiful, ripe tomatoes was only $15. To give you an idea of how many tomatoes that it, the box they gave me was an old beer box, case size. That's a lot of tomatoes.

My plan was to cook up a big ole batch of pasta sauce, and instead of canning it, I'd honor the sauce by making it the first item inside our newest basement inhabitant - the chest freezer.

It took me a couple of hours to process all the tomatoes, and another hour or so to pick some fresh basil, oregano, and chives from our backyard herb garden to add to the sauce. I also purchased five pounds of onions for $3, so I chopped those up as well and threw them in the pot. The sauce took a while to cook down (the tomatoes were quite juicy), and I actually left them on low to cook down overnight.

I ended up with 11 jars (quart size) of pasta sauce, which are all happily hibernating in the basement freezer. From a cost benefit analysis, I only spent $18 on 11 jars of pasta sauce, which is still a savings over what I would have paid at the grocery store, but the joy is not in saving money, but having tasty homemade sauce waiting for me in the freezer.

Tomato Cage Update

In case you missed it or need to get caught up, you can read previous posts about my homemade tomato cages Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

These homemade tomato cages were an unbridled success, fully supporting the two plants (an Early Girl and a Polish Heirloom) with minimal training of the plants and effort on my part.  Both tomato plants are spilling out the tops of the cages, 6 feet plus in height and have produced an average crop with almost no fertilizing or attention from me.

The cages do make it slightly more difficult to harvest the tomatoes because you have to reach in between the small squares of the re-mash grid, but that's really the only downside. 

This is the other half of the tomato box, the Roma and Amish paste tomatoes, pretty much a complete mess.  I did stake these with the regular tomato cages (the only thing I had left) and the weight of the plants collapsed them in about a month.  This is the "do as I say, not as I do" mea culpa of our blog post today.

The lesson from the tomato caging this summer has been that I need to make a dozen or more re-mesh cages for all my tomatoes for next year.  They worked so well that I want to stake all of my tomatoes (eating, heirloom, Roma/paste, and cherry tomatoes) with this method next year.  Making new tomato cages will be a good fall/winter project for when the weather turns nasty and cold since I can work on this in the relative comfort of the garage.

Hmong Cabbage Dish

When I was in college, and for a few years after graduation, I lived with one of my good college friends, Sue, who is Hmong. Now Sue was very smart and a great writer, but she was not much of a cook. Sue's sister, Kauyer, often lived with us during the summers when she was out of school, and she was a fantastic cook. She exposed me to a variety of Hmong cooking recipes and while I can't really recreate them for a variety of reasons (dietary restrictions, kitchen skills, etc.), over time I learned some of the basics.

One of my favorite Hmong dishes that she made for me was a cabbage dish. Now, that alone was a feat, as I don't think I ever ate cabbage growing up. But cabbage can be mighty tasty if you do it right. Kauyer modified the original cabbage dish for me, as it called for hamburger, but since I am vegetarian, she substituted tofu for me. I'm sure that the hamburger version might be even more tasty due to the grease and flavor of the meat.

Since we are growing lovely, small cabbages, I picked two from our front mound and added the few cherry tomatoes that were picked green before our frost and are ripening in the basement.

These are the other things that I put into the dish: tofu, dehydrated/dried tomatoes (since I didn't have enough fresh ones), tamari sauce (the gluten free version of soy sauce), canola oil to fry the garlic in, bullion for some extra sauce flavoring, sweet chili sauce, and spicy chili sauce. Now I'm sure if Kauyer reads this she might be appalled with all the sauces, as Hmong cooking is very light (as compared with the heavier Chinese cooking) and it often calls for fish sauce and oyster sauce - neither of which I had on hand. So this is my North Dakota-ized Hmong dish.

I'm not going to give you a recipe, as I don't really have one. Start with frying up the garlic in the oil, and then add the cabbage and sauces, tofu, etc. Steam it down. Toward the end, add in the tomatoes for extra flavor (and they will add to the sauce juiciness, too).

I served it with brown rice. It's not the most colorful photo, with brown rice and light green cabbage, but it is yummy.

Try it. You might discover that you like cabbage, too.

Homemade Tomato Cages

We had some serious trouble last year with our tomatoes.  Both the cherry tomatoes and heirloom/eating tomatoes got so large and heavy that they quickly wound up dragging on the ground and entangled in a huge mess.  Sure we used tomato cages, but quickly found that the small tomato cages are useless, the large "sturdy" ones are a bit better but they still collapse under the weight of all the delicious fruit by mid summer.

The solution?  Homemade tomato cages, with a large side dish of John overkill.

I read an article about homemade tomato cages using re-mesh (the stuff they use to lay on the ground to pour concrete over).  You can probably have it delivered if you have a Lowe's in your area. So I scampered over to the local hardware store and bought a roll of 5' by 50' 10 gauge re-mesh, some bailing wire, and large pair of bolt cutters to snip it with.  Construction actually went faster than I anticipated and I got two completed in about 45 minutes.  Subsequent ones will go much faster since I have a system now.*
*These are famous last words of mine.  "Having a system" always seems to work theoretically but usually loses some of its efficiency in practice.  I can't remember how many times I've "had a system" only to find that the system isn't as great as I thought.  It may even be that once I declare I "have a system" that I officially jinx myself and the universe must forcefully readjust the size of my britches since they have obviously grown too large for my own good.  Thanks universe. 

Fall Garden Clean Up

This weekend was a big garden clean up weekend.  We had to get the raised beds cleaned up, veggies pulled out, and everything prepared for the hard freeze that's coming this week.  For me, fall garden chores are more urgent than Spring garden chores.  Why?  I know in Spring that no matter when I start seedlings or seeds that they'll start growing when they feel like it, so there's no sense of urgency to get anything done.  I know that un-staked tomato plants will still produce tomatoes (though they will make a huge unruly mess, more on this in another post), so there's no rush.

This year, cucumbers started from seedlings and extra seeds (that were four or five years old) that Alycia threw in the ground both started producing at the same time.  Zucchini, pumpkins, and watermelons all languished in the ground for weeks before starting to grow.  The message from Mother Nature?  You can bust your butt and get things planted right after the last frost, coddle seedlings with little mini-greenhouses, or casually throw seeds in the ground, everything will grow when it's darn good and ready. 

Fall chores spurn me to action, the hard frost hangs over my head knowing that it'll turn those "just-starting-to-turn-pink" tomatoes into frost mangled mush if I don't get them inside where they might have a chance to ripen.  And experience has taught me that potatoes and onions are much easier to harvest from ground that isn't frozen.  This should be intuitive, but sometimes I need to learn things the hard way.

Alycia snipped and pulled the remaining pepper plants.  We're hoping that, like the tomatoes, we can store the peppers in a cool dry place and they'll ripen a bit more.  If not, they're still tasty even though they might be a bit green.

We harvested onions out of this raised bed as well.  The only hard part was removing the marigolds.  Even though they were still full of blooms, they were unlikely to survive the mid-20's that were forecast for a low temp Tuesday night and Wednesday night.  It's also easier to remove everything in the raised bed at once so I can cover it with a thick layer of grass clippings, shredded leaves, and mulch for overwintering.

Sad, empty raised bed.  'Till next year.

Homemade Tomato Cages - Follow Up

Just a follow up to my previous post - Homemade Tomato Cages.  I'd be remiss if I didn't offer more information on whether this project was a success or failure.  The tomatoes are both heirlooms and are about four feet high so they still have some growing to do, but the cages are supporting the plants very well.

I'm not ready to call this an unbridled success right now since that's a sure way to anger the Gods, but I will say that so far these tomato cages are performing excellently.  We also have yet to harvest a tomato from these two plants, so it may dampen my enthusiasm if the T-maters are hard to get to or the cages somehow impede the gathering process. 

In another few weeks, we'll start harvesting fruit and see if the plants start excessively spilling out of the cages (in which case I have no problem pruning them).  I'm pretty excited about how these cages have done so far and am planning on building more for next year.  I'll probably need to build another 8 to 10 of them for all of our Roma/paste tomatoes and our cherry tomatoes as well. 

And as you can see I'm a big fan of surrounding the bottom of the tomato plants with marigolds.  These are the "Lemon Gem" marigold, a small, compact marigold with a lovely lemon scent to the foliage, so every time you brush them you get a wonderful lemony smell that permeates the air. 

Garden Recap - Part 1, The Successes

Even though it's cold and marginally snowy outside, it doesn't mean I'm not thinking about the garden, thunderstorms, fresh tomatoes, warm summer evenings, and what plants to grow next year.  Alycia and I usually spend several weeks every winter flipping through the various seed catalogs that are mailed to the house, debating what new tomatoes we want to try, which onions grew best, and if we should stubbornly keep trying to grow things that didn't do so well the prior year.  We're right in the midst of whittling down our seed catalog choices to a semi manageable number of veggies and flowers since Spring is (hopefully) right around the corner.

This exercise always leads to the very helpful analysis of what worked and what failed last year.  So here's a list of things we learned, success we had, and failures we experienced last year in the garden and around the homestead and how that'll change what we try this year.  So for Part 1 of our garden recap, here are the things that did well and we considered successes last year.

Successes:
Cucumbers.  I can't decide if we did really well with these or if the weather and environmental factors just lent themselves to a good cucumber yield.  Multiple people I talked to mentioned that their cucumbers were going gangbusters last year, and the same was true for us.  The pickling cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, and regular cucumbers all produced prodigiously.

Pickles.  The unexpected number of cucumbers was sort of a surprise, but my plan was to make/can pickles last year.  This is all part of my plan to try a few new things every year (new things we canned in 2011 were strawberry jam, pickles, and ketchup) and build every year on that knowledge.  You can't become a self sufficiency or canning expert overnight, so I'm employing the "learn one or two things a year and build the toolbox of skills" plan.

We had enough cucumbers to can (10) Quart jars of sweet pickles and make (2) 1-gallon jars of refrigerator sweet pickles.  Canning pickles was a snap, a limited number of ingredients and short prep time made this one of the easiest canning recipes I've tried.  The refrigerator pickles were also a huge asset since I could make the vinegar/sugar/spices mixture, put it in the gallon jar and store it in the refrigerator.  Once the mix was made Alycia could easily chop and add cucumbers as they became ripe (this was especially useful and efficient when I was out of town and cucumbers were ripening).  See the post - Bread and Butter Pickles for more info and the recipe. The only downside to the refrigerator pickles is that the gallon jars take up a lot of space in the fridge. 

Changes....A New Job...A New Blog Helper

I know I left everyone in a bit of a blogger version of a dangling cliffhanger ending in our recent More Deaf Dog Antics post in reference to some large life changes.  Well I've been in North Dakota for three years now and the time has finally come for me to get a real job.  Yes, it's true, a real job.

Since moving from Southern California three years ago, I've remained an active Senior Financial Consultant (impressive sounding job title huh?) with clients back in San Diego.  Luckily I was able to perform a lot of tasks remotely, frantically e-mailing documents back and forth to various contacts.  But only so much can be done through the computer or cell phone, and I had to physically be at the client site every so often.  Unluckily the times when I needed to be partially physically at the client work site in San Diego was roughly May through November, which is also known as "the months where it's nice to be outside in North Dakota".

When I was working in San Diego I had the best of all possible worlds, family I could stay with for free (significantly reducing my travel expenses), an environment I enjoyed and was familiar with, and a great group of friends to hang out with.  But it just wasn't the same as being at home.  Living out of a suitcase in my Dad's spare bedroom just wasn't the same as being with Alycia, the dogs, the comfy confines of my house, and wondrous garden I was trying to create.

The time that I was here in North Dakota during May to November was spent working to prepare for the next business trip, feverishly getting the garden back in shape from the two weeks that I ignored it, packing in quality time with Alycia and the dogs, and trying to get healthy again and back into my familiar diet and exercise regimen (it's so easy to eat out all the time and ignore physical activity when you're on the road).

Your intrepid blogger on his first trip to North Dakota, more than four years ago. 

For the last three years I missed out on a lot of stuff, especially garden related.  I'd leave for a trip and the tomatoes would be juuuussst almost ripe, and three weeks later I'd get back and Alycia would be sick of them since she'd spent the last two and a half weeks eating, freezing, and canning tomatoes by herself.  I missed garden tours, State Fairs (I still haven't been to one in Minnesota or North Dakota!!), golf outings, volleyball tournaments, and evenings sitting on the porch with a cold beer enjoying the last rays of sun on a warm day. 

While this unusual working arrangement was great in so many ways, it also left Alycia and My schedules totally out of whack.  My busy time (Summer) was her slow time, and her busy time (the school year) was for the most part my slow time.  That left us unable to fully appreciate the dream of an academic lifestyle (aka not doing squat all summer) together.  

I'm also very much a homebody, and being a homebody while working on the road and living away from home just didn't jive with me.  Spending so much time crafting an enjoyable, cozy, beautiful home and garden and then being away from it for most of its period of greatest glory just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

This has turned into a crazy tangent, as most of my posts do. Sorry.

The bottom line is that I have accepted a job teaching accounting at a local community college.  It's going to be a challenge.  I have no teaching experience but a wealth of real world experience and a zest for BS, which I hope will be enough.  One of the courses I'll be teaching is Cost Accounting, and I HATE cost accounting, I'm gonna have to get over that.  It's only a 9 month position so I'll have summers off, which is ideal for slacking. 

Your new blogging team.

I thought all these changes would lead to the slow demise of our magnificent blog, but our newest field reporter (this is her job title for her 6 month probationary period) has really stepped up and prepared some blog postings.  She may be over-embellishing the "you must contribute our I'll shut down the blog" ultimatum she claims (in her post - The GF Girlfriend Emerges) I threw out there, but truth be told I did tell her that I would need her help to keep the blog going.  And thus far she's responded well.  You will see her posts in the coming weeks and months and I think she'll add a slightly different (less cynical) viewpoint.  A big Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes welcome to Alycia, our newest field reporter.

Garden Recap - Part 2, The Failures

I delineated some of our garden successes in Part 1 (see Garden Recap - Part 1, The Successes).  Now on to the fun stuff, the mistakes I made and lessons learned during the last year on the urban homestead. 

Failures:
Strawberry Jam.  You can read all about our strawberry jam making in the Strawberry Jam Insanity post.  The jam is delicious, but more like a runny, gooey, jam-esque substance than actual jam.  It's still a great topping for pancakes, waffles, ice cream, and gluten free yellow cake but it doesn't have the consistency of proper jam.  The problem was I got a little too big for my britches and thought I could modify the jam recipe.  The lesson learned?  If you want your jam to set properly you need to follow the recipe precisely.     

Onions.  The one set of onions that we tried to plant in the raised bed of strawberries?  They hung around for a week or so, then they just disappeared, totally overwhelmed by the strawberries.  Since we had no place for the onions, this seemed like a good idea, in retrospect this was an idea that was doomed to fail.  Lesson learned?  We're going to make some space for rows of onions and give them plenty of space to do their thing.

Apple Trees.  We lost a couple of apple trees (one each of two varieties) over the winter out of the eight that we planted.  It's hard to tell if it's because they were still vulnerable in their first full year, if I planted them poorly, or if it was just a super hard/cold winter (which it was). We're going to replace them this year with a couple more hardier "North Dakota approved" varieties that should fare better.

Germinated Seeds Become Seedlings

I thought I'd follow up with my previous post about starting seeds in the basement (see Starting Seeds Indoors) with some pictures about our progress.  We're still a good 2-3 weeks from being able to put plants outside, and even that might be pushing the timetable a bit.  Some of the more cold tolerant plants, like cabbage, might get sent outside shortly once they seem hardy.  I have so many cabbage starts that if I lose a few it wouldn't be a heartbreak. 

Honeydew melons, three kinds of watermelons, and cherry tomatoes.  These are definitely going to wait for warmer weather since they're frost averse and simply won't do anything until the soil and air temps are to their liking. 

Zinnias, hollyhocks, salvias, and coneflowers.  I may divide these up in a week or so and put one plant per pot cavity.  I honestly didn't expect this many seeds to germinate since some were from seed packets that were 4-5 years old

Cabbage starts.  These have a full second set of leaves and have graduated from sitting under the fluorescent light to the West facing basement window.   Now I have to try to keep them from getting too leggy before it's warm enough for them to go outside.

More cabbages (different variety).  I always seem to forget that cabbage, like tomatoes, have a 185% germination rate.  Even though I swore that I only used one seed per space, multiple shoots have sprung up, and EVERY seed that found its way onto the dirt germinated.  Looks like we'll have plenty of cabbage for sauerkraut and for drying/storing.

Warm and Dry Weather

After a protracted Spring of cool and wet weather, summer returned to more normal weather in North Dakota, hot and humid.  Maybe even more humid than normal.  The precipitation was also perfectly spaced throughout the summer growing season, and didn't come all at once.  Just a nice quarter to half an inch of rain every two or three days.  It's been a pretty good gardening season for sure.

This week has been warm (mid 80's) and dry, great for the farmers to harvest everything from grain to sugar beets (sugar beet pre-piling started this week).  The warm weather is expected through the weekend and has a "last gasp of summer so you better get your ass out and enjoy it" quality to it.  So enjoy it I have been with meanderings through the garden and wanderings through the shady park with the pups. 

We have a big pumpkin, two watermelons, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, eggplant, and a bumper crop of cucumbers still coming in.  Alycia has been running the food dehydrator almost non-stop making zucchini chips with the bounty from our garden and donated stuff from her parents garden.

This is a pretty typical daily haul from the garden, lots of various kinds of cucumbers, some eggplant, some tomatoes and a few peas.  Good stuff.

Fall Garden Pictures - Apples and Marigolds

It's Fall here in North Dakota, both the calendar and the weather are attesting to this fact. We have had a long stretch of warm and dry weather, which has extended our growing season a good two to three weeks longer than normal.  It's also been nice that cool temperatures have killed all the mosquitos and made outside work much more pleasant. 

We finally got a hard frost (down to the mid to low 20's) over the last few nights, which means that we had to pull up our tomato and pepper plants.  The more cold hardy beets and onions were able to stay outside for a few more days, but we pulled those as well yesterday and got busy pickling the beets and drying the onions. 

Our zinnias, hostas, Monarda (beebalm), and coneflowers (echinacea) didn't make it through the hard freeze, but the marigolds and petunias are still going strong.  The marigolds look pretty contrasted next to the brown foreground/background of fallen leaves.  The orange flowers on the left are 'Golden Gem' Marigolds, with 'Inca Gold' Marigolds on the right side of the raised bed.  These are regulars in our garden and we plant them in abundance every year.

More 'Inca Gold' Marigolds in front with 'Golden Gem' Marigolds in the back, along with onions and tomatoes and even a 'Paprika' Yarrow way in the back.  We're big believers in flowers and plants that attract beneficial bugs; marigolds, yarrow, sweet alyssum, verbeena, petunias, etc. the list goes on.   We intersperse them with all of our veggies and include them heavily in our annual flowerbed planting.   

These are cherry tomatoes (Sweet 100) which produced prolifically this year. Believe it or not, there are only three tomato plants in that huge mass.   This is probably the perfect location for them, along the garage wall, underneath a bit of the eaves, facing West.  This site was a compost pile last year and has a large amount of well rotted compost and horse manure. 

Our apples are just about ready to pick.  These are Haralson or Haralred apples, I'm not sure.  They can withstand a bit of frost, so we're going to leave them on the tree as long as possible to give them an opportunity to sweeten up a little more. 

That's an update from the homestead in mid-October.  We've been frantically busy around here and posting has been sparse, sorry.  Plus honestly, the dogs just haven't been doing anything cute recently...so there hasn't been much to post about.  

Follow us on Instagram

Link to Our Online Store

 

Birthday Week Celebration

Alycia here. When I was in college, my friends were nice enough to indulge me with an entire birthday week, which for anyone who loves their birthday is much more fun than celebrating on just a single day. I have tried as much as I can to introduce this concept and get John on board with continuing the tradition of birthday weeks, and he is really starting to come around. This makes for an exciting end of May/beginning of June, as John's birthday is just one week before mine, and our Anniversary is smack dab in the middle of the week between our birthdays (I planned this as such).

The birthday week allows the birthday celebrant to be in charge of all sorts of daily household decisions, such as what we will watch on TV at night, and what we will eat for our meals. So while it may not seem like a big deal, I feel that it allows for the feeling of a little extra specialness for an entire week, which is always nice.

For John's actual birthday day, we planned a day trip out to visit some small towns in Minnesota. The first stop was a cafe in Winger, MN that had been recently reviewed by world-renowned local food critic, Marilyn Haggarty of the Grand Forks Herald. The Depot Cafe and Bakery was appropriately located in an old train depot that had been moved and renovated.

There were some nice touches that reminded the customers about the building's history.

The interior was nicely finished with lovely wood paneling and lighting. The food was actually pretty good. John had a very large burger on a homemade bun. I had some of the best egg salad I'd had in a while.

In Marilyn's review, she mentioned a bakery. She made it seem as though it was right next to the cafe, but when we queried the waitress, she said that it was actually in McIntosh, MN, about 10 miles up the road. So after lunch, we headed to the next stop. McIntosh was actually a very lovely town that we will visit again. The bakery had a very large kitchen and appeared to specialize primarily in bread products (duh, it's a bakery), but it had a respectable amount of doughnuts as well.

John was able to pick up a package of sandwich rolls, as well as a couple doughnuts and an apple fritter, which made him happy.

After the bakery stop, we crossed the street to check out the meat market. Why, you ask, would a gluten-free vegetarian support visiting a bakery and a specialty meat store? Well, it was John's birthday and I think it's important to check out all available options for interesting food. Being in the middle of nowhere, beggars can't be choosers when it comes to possible food delicacies. We didn't buy anything at the meat market since there's a pretty good one here in Grand Forks (L&M Meats), but for a town of a couple hundred, it was fairly impressive.

Our next stop in town was the McIntosh Country Store. John didn't think we should go in - he thought it would be a feed store for cattle, etc. But I argued with him and said that the sign said they had fresh eggs, of which we needed some. So in we went. It was actually more of a natural foods store, with some random farm animal necessities. They had a whole bunch of gluten free items and bulk foods, as well as vaccines for your animals. In addition, as I was walking through the store, I kept hearing the cheep-cheeps of baby chicks, but I couldn't find them. Eventually I located the chicks, they were in a box under a table. (John here - it's been a while since Alycia's gotten to play with chicks)

It appeared as though the chicks had been mailed to the store, and they were waiting for their owner to pick them up. While I thought it was somewhat inhumane to mail live animals, according to my mother, this is often how its done. The chicks really didn't seem the worse for wear, at least based on my quick peek inside the box.

I also liked that the store had this lovely metal chicken outside.

And across the street from the store, was a plant nursery that the store ran. We picked up some (hopefully) lovely heirloom cherry tomatoes. We've had heirloom regular sized tomatoes before, but the cherries are a new one and I'm looking forward to what they'll produce.

We then headed home for a birthday nap and later had a lovely dinner with my parents at the Brick and Barley here in town. It's a newer brew pub that has a decent selection of rotating beers on tap. John likes to try the different beers; I stick with the always gluten-free ciders. There are very few decent gluten-free beers and I've learned that the ciders are usually a better/safer bet.

I'm Baaaaaack

OK, so I never really went away.  Things have been very busy here, and as such I've neglected the heck out of this blog and denied thousands of faithful readers the chance to stay updated with the happenings around here.

In the spirit of the World Cup of Football/Soccer I have prepared a comprehensive list of excuses for why I haven't posted in so long.  Consider this the blog equivalent of "flopping", the soccer practice of flailing to the ground like you've just been shot to try to get a penalty call.  This is an insidious and disgusting practice that makes soccer look like an incredibly wussy sport, and unfortunately the practice has started permeate other noble sports like basketball, but that complaint is for another post.

Without further adieu....my list of excuses:

1 - Alycia's ankle surgery. We're on week 4 of post surgery and she's in a cast and on crutches for another few days.  She's become quite an impressive one-legged hopper (we have several nicknames for her, but none I can share), but for the first few weeks she was in a large bandage-wrap and pretty much completely immobile.  I was her nurse, caretaker, errand boy, dog-walker, ice pack changer, foot elevator, foot pillow deliverer, water fetcher, and more.  It was all worth it.  She was a great patient, her recovery has been quick and her foot is healing well, but it was an exhausting couple of weeks taking care of her. 

2 - Work.  I've actually been working.  No really.  I had a trip back to CA to do actual work, of the "in an office, wearing pants and shoes" variety.  I can provide contacts of clients who will testify on my behalf for all of you non-believers. 

3 - Sunspots.  They've been bad lately.  You may have noticed.

4 - My garden and other outside work.  Once the weather gets nice, it's hard to escape the illogical-ness of sitting inside and writing a blog about my gardening instead of actually getting outside in the garden.  The last two weeks of rain and warm, humid weather have left things looking awesome.  The tomato plants grow six inches a day, it's nutty.  You can almost sit there and watch them get larger.  In a month or so when they start to ripen there will be many, many tomatoes.  My estimated daily intake of lycopene in August and September will be approximately seven hundred thousand milligrams.

5 - High winds.  Windy conditions make typing incredibly difficult.  And North Dakota gets very, very windy.    

6 - Blog inertia and the weight of expectations.  For those of you don't blog, you just won't understand (please read this in a snarky voice for full effect), but suffice to say I know how Hemmingway, Tolstoy, and the guy who writes the Garfield comic feel.  The pressure of knowing that the tome you are writing is to be digested, critiqued, and beloved by millions puts an enormous pressure to have it be perfect, and sometimes the motivation to write at that level is hard to muster.

Actually what happens is I say:

"Crap, crap Mother Hubbard (yes I swear a lot in my internal monologue), it's been two weeks since my last post, I better write something really good".  The two options are 1) buckle down and write or 2) procrastinate.  Anyone who knows me will know what option I choose. 

Scene - two weeks later:

"Crap damnit, it's been a month since my last post, I better write something good and not just tell stories about Shaak Ti chasing squirrels".  Refer to decision tree above for results from this dilemma.

Scene - another two weeks later.

"Pasta Fazool!! It's been a month and a half since I wrote anything, I'm gonna sit down right now and....wait, what's that?  The Ivory Coast vs. Switzerland world cup match is on???  Ooooh, this should be a good game".  But it isn't.  Like 90% of the games I've watched, it ends in a 0-0 tie, I mean a draw. 

So that's all we've got for now.  Hopefully with calmer winds, fewer sunspots, and no extremity surgeries, we can wrangle up some more regular posts over the summer.  But of course, no promises.

My Urban Homestead and What It Means To Me

There was a big dust-up last week when some folks decided they would attempt to trademark the phrase "Urban Homestead" and "Urban Homesteading" among other things.  Though these folks (who shall remain unnamed) carry much capital on the subject of urban homesteading and sustainable living, and have been role models and a source of inspiration for many people over the last few years, the public has responded with a backlash of epic proportions against the idea.  The thought of trademarking such a classic, time honored, and public phrase such as "urban homestead" has generated a cavalcade of anger and disappointment. 

I first heard the phrase "Urban Homestead" several years ago in a Mother Earth News magazine article and added it as a byline to my blog - Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes.  What does an urban homestead mean?  Everyone has a different definition and they're all right.  Whether you live off the grid and grow 100% of your own food on 1/5 of an acre in Los Angeles or have tomatoes and herbs growing on your apartment balcony in Kansas City, you're an urban homesteader.

The call went out on the Internet to write a blog entry about what urban homesteading means to you.  I normally don't get all preachy and didactic on you, so sorry if this rankles or annoys you, but I couldn't ignore a call from the wilds of the Internets.  

Big Melon

I wish I could claim this huge cantaloupe as my own, but it didn't come from my garden. 

Alycia's parents have a friend out in the country who's a retired farmer and grows corn, pumpkins, and some of the biggest cantaloupe I've ever seen. 

It's larger than the bowl of peppers and Japanese eggplant that we picked the day before.   

I couldn't come up with anything in the kitchen that was of standard enough size to be able to compare this monster melon to.  The best thing that I came up with was this egg carton, which seemed more than capable to demonstrate how large this gargantua-melon really is.  

Big melon, circumference larger than my large knife.  It was quite tasty too, even though it wasn't organic.  If I buy fruits and veggies I prefer to purchase organic, but if it's free?  Well, I can't be too choosy. 

It's that time of year when things are coming in fast and furious.  We processed a bunch of tomatoes to turn into pasta sauce. Along with our giant melon, peppers, and eggplant we have a shopping bag full of fresh picked corn and sack of apples. The corn and apples were courtesy of Alycia's parents, they're phenomenal providers of produce. 

End of the Week Links & Raspberry Currant Jam Recipe

Our Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes raspberry jam recipe (posted from our marathon-of-deliciousness jam making session last month) got published on The Wisdom of the Gaucho

How to Make Homemade Raspberry Currant Jam

And while you're surfing the web, you should also check out:

• Some awesome (and very timely) Tips on Preserving Tomatoes.
• A fascinating article on the recent Scrabble Cheating Scandal.
• A well crafted plea to keep your garden from encroaching on the sidewalk - Keep Your Garden Out of My Face.

We've got lots going on here and a bunch on cool stuff on the horizon: the puppy's awesome new pool, Shaak Ti's strange habits, the impending start of my new job and photos from garden tours, canning projects, and big yard shindigs.  There's only so many hours in the day, but we manage to fill them all.  Stay tuned (preferably on the edge of your seat) for more great pictures, stories, and videos. 

Paprika Yarrow and Awesome Customer Service from BloomingBulb.com

I wrote about some new plants that we added to the garden last summer in this post and this post last year.  These plants were root divisions that were on (huge) markdown from BloomingBulb.com.  Sadly the Arizona Sun Gallairdia didn't survive the winter, at all.  The Summer Sun Heliopsis, Paprika Yarrow, and Caradonna Salvia are mostly all thriving whilst very few of the Zing Rose Maiden Pink Dianthus made it through the winter.

Here's a photo of the Paprika Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), planted between tomatoes in the raised bed on the left and the apple trees (out of frame) on the right.  Please ignore those weeds.

A few weeks back I e-mailed the customer service department of BloomingBulb.com to tell them that some of the plants didn't live and requested a replacement.  They claim to have a "no questions asked replacement/refund" guarantee.  And do they ever.  I got a credit for the plants they no longer had in stock and a box of Zing Rose Maiden Pink Dianthus was shipped out to my house.

Their customer service was so fast and efficient though that unfortunately the box arrived when we were on vacation and the root divisions looked pretty dicey by the time we got home, so I'm in the unfortunate position of having to request a second replacement.  But BloomingBulbs' customer service was so outstanding, I don't think it'll be an issue.  For that reason they get a full Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes two thumbs up seal of approval.  I'll certainly be buying from them again.