Weekend (farm) Warrior

We had a fantastic weekend...

Friday night we did our usual dinner and the bookstore-- where I aquired the new Cottage Living and Country Home magazines- two of my favorites. I was actually inspired to clean up and reorganize our little house, and start making it look festive for the coming Fall!

Saturday we had a harrowing morning of spending way too much money on fixing our old cars, but to make it all better, my 3 1/2 month old nephew, Hudson, was christened. He handled it like a man, and all was lovely. We were supposed to babysit for my other two nephews (7 and 2) but at the last minute the older one backed out and needed to go home, so it'll have to wait for another day. Gotta get them ready for "Farm Week with Aunt and Uncle" in the *hopefully* not so distant future.

Today, though, may have been the best. We woke up a little late to a delightfully brisk morning! The first one we've really had, it was in the 50's, and we actually got to put on SWEATERS for our morning walk to get coffee down the street!! My parents and grandmothers came out for lunch, and it was the first time for them to see the house, so we did a little yard work. I trimmed up all of my severely overgrown and seen-better-days summer crops, and Wes put together our new grill. I went down to our fabulous farmer's market for some fresh purple hull peas (yum!) and some pumpkins for the front porch (looks cute-- I'll post later!), my dad brought steaks, and we fried up some potatoes on the grill for lunch.

Then this evening, the cooking continued while I made our lunches for the week, and got to deal with the fruits of my cleaning up the crops, an abundance of basil. I hopped on over to Farmgirl's website for her Pesto recipe, and whipped up a big batch for later consumption. I subsitiuted tomatillos for tomatoes (hubby doesn't like tomatoes-- don't ask me!) and it's pretty spicy and wonderful! I may have to freeze some... there is a LOT. (And we got a fancy pants new immersion blender. Works wonders since we don't have a blender or a food processer!)

Anyhoo-- it was a great weekend-I hope y'all's were just as great- and Happy Fall To All!!

Guerrilla Gardening, Part III

Well Sunday morning i FINALLY planted a little fall garden in our Guerrilla Garden-- (see Guerrilla Gardening, Part I and Guerrilla Gardening, Part II). Yes, it has been sitting idle since the end of June, and to testify to our lack of rain and of good soil, there were only about five weeds to pull in the whole plot.

I planted some broccoli, red kale, mustard greens, turnip greens, radishes, spinich (which will be nice to have nowadays!) and I'm pretty sure some other stuff I can't remember right now... I'd post a photo, but for now it pretty much looks like what it did in the last photo-- bare dirt.

I amended the soil with four big bags of compost, but that soil was pretty bleak looking, so for now I'm just hoping that SOME of the seeds sprout! The radishes I planted in a pot on the back porch, though, and they're already peeking through! They look good, until the point at which Camilla finds them. They're not only in her favorite bathing pot, they are also green and on my back porch, and she unfortunately believes that anything that falls into these two categories also falls into the "chicken food" category. Hence the reason for my back porch/yard looking like a desolate wasteland, and my front porch and walk leaning toward jungle.

On a positive note, the plants I recently labeled as "mostly unproductive" have all of a sudden become profusely productive!!! I don't know if they heard me or what, but all of a sudden I have numerous poblano and habanero peppers growing away, and the plants are covered in blossoms. Weird... maybe the pavement under them was warming the soil too much? Maybe they needed the natural rain instead of my "artificial" rain? For whatever reason, they and the strawberries are going NUTS (strawberries just with foliage, though).

The weather is fabulous-- staying in the 60-85 range most days, and hopefully these mild days will stick around a little longer... or at least until i get ONE poblano pepper... then I'm sooo ready for WINTER!

That Crazy Camilla

Camilla in her new favorite dirt bath location...