Yesterday's harvest

Look at these colors!



We have potatoes! This is just the tip of the iceberg...we went a little crazy with the potato plants this year. But one can never eat too many mashed potatoes and home fries, right?

And yes, they too are purple. I guess purple was the theme this year.

Our beautiful chilis are turning red:


Last night we made tomato sauce for the eggplant parm we're making this week...yum! Nothing beats the smell of homemade sauce (especially from homegrown tomatoes) cooking on the stove. Well, maybe chocolate chip cookies. And apple pie.

Tomatoes!

Lisa and I are like pigs in sh*$ at the moment -- we harvested our first Cherokee Purple tomatoes. These are an heirloom variety, meaning they weren't bred for cross-country travel or to look all firm, round and red in your grocery store, they were bred for TASTE. Since becoming a food snob I discovered the beauty of a truly delicious tomato. We started growing Cherokees last year, and I'm so happy that they are doing wonderfully this year. Look at these beauties:


mmm...so delicious. I think they look kind of like macintosh apples....


And keeping with our theme of weird purply - colored veggies, we're also growing a chocolate beauty bell pepper:


They are doing really well, too, and are just starting to turn. We could eat them now as green peppers, but we want to get the chocolaty effect. Yes, it is growing upside down. Why? Because they are cool.

I also wanted to add a few photos of my perennials for you to see. I started a new flower bed this year, made up entirely of native perennials. Many I started from seed, so when I put the little plants in the ground this spring, they looked very small and sad. I knew it would take them a while to get big and beautiful, and wasn't even expecting any of them to flower this first year. It has been a wonderful surprise to see so many of them in bloom already:

Butterflyweed, grown from seed


Bee balm, grown from seed

Phlox, mail ordered bareroot


The yellow flowers are coreopsis, which I bought as a small plant. It has tripled in size. There are also some Ox-eye sunflowers (grown from seed) behind it. They are also yellow so it's tough to tell them apart in this photo. I also have asters, liatris, and big and little bluestem in this garden...

Hello everybody!

While in Taiwan recently, Lisa and I visited the world's tallest building, Taipei 101.


This was taken from a nearby mountain we hiked that morning, which gave us an interesting view of 101 and the city. Later that day, we went to the top of 101, to stare at the mountain we just climbed.

Not only is Taipei 101 the tallest building, it also has the fastest elevator (floor 5 to floor 89 in about 40-50 seconds...I was a bit creeped out), and is the only building to have one of its three wind dampers on display. What is a wind damper? It basically is a huge sphere set inside the building that keeps the building standing in high wind. They painted it a shimmery yellow and played really dramatic music to make it seem more exciting that it actually is:

To make it even more exciting (and I guess marketable), the Taipei 101 "people" created little animated damper statues which they call, of course, 'damper babies:'

This is one thing we love about Taiwan (and perhaps Asia in general?) -- their ability to anthropomorphize anything. Look:


They even put faces on their fried sweet potato balls!

Anyway, we fell in love with the damper babies and took many photos with the various statues (they come in different colors). We'll spare you the slideshow...for now. The best was the mural they have on the bottom floor right where you stand in line for the elevator:



If you're having trouble reading it, it says: Hello Everybody! We are Damper Babies!
I don't know why, but Lisa and I got such a kick out of this. That phrase became a bit of an inside joke; funniest when exclaimed at random times. I guess you had to be there...

What will it be?

Lisa's artistic display of our harvest:


We usually have no luck with zucchini so we are pretty proud of those beauties. Two of them are already zucchini bread. The little yellowy things at the front of the basket are ground cherries -- they are related to the tomatillo and come in these little papery husks. Inside is a fruit about the size of a blueberry; I'm still trying to figure out what it tastes like...


Our compost is always sprouting volunteer vegetables, which we usually just let grow and see what happens. One year we harvested a good pile of new potatoes straight from our garbage! This year, we have a bit of a mystery. Squashes are pretty common to find growing amongst the discards and we had been assuming that this guy was another zucchini:


Until we noticed his fruit:


Last summer, Lisa's mom brought down some round zucchini, so perhaps this is the offspring of one of those. But it could also be a pumpkin or maybe a watermelon? I'll have to look up the leaves and flowers to figure it out. Or I could be lazy and just wait to see what he does!!

How many desserts did we eat this week?

So this is what we are currently harvesting from our garden:
green beans
zucchini
ground cherries
beets
tomatoes (speckled roman and yellow pear)

Yes, we harvested our 1st tomato on June 6. She had a bit of end rot, but we just cut it off and ate it anyway. Isn't she beautiful?


We promise to have some more action shots of the garden soon...

Tonight for dinner we made Taiwan-inspired barbecue skewers:


We guessed on the sauce and tried a Ponzu sauce; not quite right but pretty close and still very tasty. It looked so nice and we reminisced about Taiwan. It was strange to be eating this at a kitchen table and not in the back of Ellen's car!


Note: the green beans and zucchini are straight from the garden!!


Now we move on to dessert. We're finishing the last 2 pieces of strawberry cake that Lisa made Wednesday night. Not bad that we were able to polish off a whole cake in 5 days. What's even more impressive is that we ate an entire peach crostada and strawberry pie in the days before that.

Caretta

Our cat (well, one of our cats),* is a gray tabby. If you aren't familiar with tabbies, they all have the same characteristic 'M' marking on their foreheads:

Caretta is a bit bipolar, even more so than the average cat. She is super loving and affectionate one minute; the next, she'll bite your face off. She is also quite a spaz, and can keep us entertained (read: aggravated) with her crazy antics for hours. I get the impression that her personality is pretty similar to other tabbies, so when a co-worker of Lisa's was thinking about adopting a couple of kittens, Lisa warned her to stay away from the M. M for Monster. The funny thing is, she ended up with a tabby, claiming that she saw a 'W' marking, but not an M!

Lisa especially loves Caretta. They have an understanding and respect for each other and Caretta loves her more than me. Even though I'm the one that rescued her from death. That's OK though, because now I can blame all the craziness on Lisa's cat!

*any David Sedaris fans?

In the beginning

One of the reasons why we talk about our gardens so much is that we are rather proud of ourselves. We bought our house in October 2006, and although we fell in love immediately, it had the most desolate, "blank canvas" of a backyard. Maybe that is why we loved it. This is what it looked like:




Note the ugly chain-link fence exposing our neighbor's pile of junk. Here's another one:


The point here is to show the sad, lonely bird bath in a sea of green. The poor birds...they felt so exposed...

It was a bit daunting at first, but we got to work right away to transform our personal landscape. Lisa's sister, Jen, built us a fence to hide the blight, and we went to work removing as much lawn as our skinny bodies could handle. Here's the work in progress:




So now, 2 1/2 years later, we tend to marvel at the progress we've made. And we still enjoy doing it. Our goal is to have no lawn at all, save for a small patch for Vivian. Here's the current status:



oohh, ahhhh.....

Just getting started

When we're not working, Lisa and I tend to spend much of our time either in our garden or in our kitchen. We love it all, from starting seeds, watching little plants grow, tending to the garden, harvesting edibles, collecting seeds, composting, and making wonderful meals from our own produce. We talk about it all the time, and Julie (Lisa's sister) suggested we start a blog so we can share our photos, recipes, and stories with all our friends and family. So here we are. As an added bonus, it may help us keep in touch with friends without joining up for the dreaded Facebook.

We'll try to keep it updated but we'll just have to see how it goes!