Bringing lots of rain. Hopefully that will translate into lots of tasty greens in a few weeks but it is putting a damper on my digging out the worm bin project.

So many projects lined up. Tonight I spent some time readying a chest of drawers for my daughter’s room. Secondhand and the staples and a few knobs were loose, so I got out the wood glue, a screwdriver, and a hammer to tighten it all back up. I have drawers sprawled across my living room drying tonight; hopefully tomorrow they’ll be ready because I’d really like to get the dresser moved into one of my daughter’s closets to give her more floor space and further the organization of her room. She wants a big girl room and I told her that the only way she’s going to get it is if we can get the clutter under control on an ongoing basis. Her room is the victim of generosity from family and friends. We just don’t have enough storage space for everything she’s been given.

I was hoping to carve out time tonight to do some cutting and sewing. I have some old sheets that I’d like to turn into circle skirts and shorts for her before summer. I also have to cut and sew new insoles for my favorite pair of scuffs. The soles and uppers are still good, but the insoles are a tattered mess. I’ve been looking at fabrics trying to figure out what would be cushiony on my feet yet durable. I’m thinking that I might layer some fabrics to get the effect I want. I have some thick, soft felted wool scraps and an end of upholstery fabric. The upholstery fabric would probably adhere nicely to the interior of the shoe with a layer of strong glue and the wool would be comfortable on my feet. I really love my scuffs, I don’t want to replace them if I can repair them.

I also need to get my canning jars out and prewashed since the farmers’ markets are opening again and I can get cheap produce to can. I didn’t can hardly anything last year because of my eye surgery and such. Definitely can’t let that happen again this year. I need to at least put up several quarts of bean soup for convenience eating all year long.

My daughter had some impacted wax in her ear that was causing problems, so we were home Thursday and Friday to take care of that with a combination of heating pads, homeopathic ear drops, and gentle massage around the affected ear. It drained on Friday morning and she’s been feeling better ever since.

However, since she was mostly laying in bed, that gave me time, when I wasn’t working from home or taking care of her, to do some cleaning and work on projects.

I’ve been drying excess fruit in the oven pretty much around the clock and my daughter is eating it as fast as it cools off. Today there are the last of the apples, nectarines, and blueberries in there. The house smells amazing. We also baked sugar cookies because I wanted to experiment to see if I could bake cookies in the solar oven. I baked most of them in the conventional oven, but put a dozen onto the bare floor of the solar oven, then promptly forgot about them as I got busy with laundry and washing the kitchen floor. My daughter reminded me that they were out there. They didn’t come out soft like the ones from the regular oven, they came out thin and crispy but still very tasty, the butter and sugar both browned to a deep golden color. I won’t call them an absolute success, but they helped me learn some more about my solar oven. next time I’d bake them on a silicone mat for ease of removal and I might form and chill a butter-heavy dough before putting them in an already-heated oven so the butter didn’t just melt off and the cookies might retain some loft and softness. My other thought was to make a pan-sized sugar cookie and place it into a heated, covered pan for baking and slicing.

Even when things don’t come out perfect, I like learning more about what I can do with my oven. Every mistake that I make teaches me more about how to work with this marvelous piece of equipment. I really want to take it to the beach on a sunny day and bury it in the sand for insulation, then use it to cook a late lunch.

I’ve been out in the garden a lot, last night I spent an hour sifting old potting soil to remove perlite, rocks, and large debris. I’m trying to get as much of the perlite out of my garden as I can. I hate to throw perfectly good soil away, though, so I’m out there with an old colander sifting it all into buckets, then I’ll separate out the rocks and bark from the perlite and compost the natural materials. I haven’t decided if I’m going to throw out the perlite or use it as a white mulch around something that needs some protection from the heat – I really hate to throw things out if there might be a use for them. Tonight I’m going to use yesterday’s reclaimed soil to prep the carrot and radish pot. I’m hoping to get at least two harvests of carrots, maybe even more of the radishes.

Last night I added an organic activator to the outdoor compost barrel. I need that barrel for one of next year’s apple trees, so I wanted to break down the components as much as possible well ahead of spring planting. I also set up a folding plastic table and, until I can build the box planters that I want, it doubles my planting space so easily and gives me a place underneath for plants that need some sun protection.

In our walks around the neighborhood, I can’t say how sorry I am that so many useful plants are planted way too close to the road, soaking up pollution from traffic. There is a juniper near us that is drooping with the weight of its berries (they’re used as a spice and as a medicine) and it’s way too close to traffic for me to feel safe about harvesting any. What a waste! So many wild edibles and medicinal plants that I can’t harvest. I really need to get back to the land so “traffic” is no longer a reason for not foraging for free, useful plants.

There are some exciting events coming up in my area. There is a Portland Fermentation Festival on Thursday, August 27th 6-8pm at Ecotrust’s Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center, 721 NW 9th Ave. Portland, OR. I’m going to try to make it to that to see what people are doing with natural fermentation processes and, hopefully, to taste lots of yummy treats. There is also a native plant sale coming up at the nature park on Millikan Way on October 3rd from 12-4pm. I’m going in the hopes of finding some native edibles such as Indian plum. That nature park also has family hikes and a lot of other fun, educational activities throughout the year, usually free or very cheap.

I found out that the recreation center near our house is going to start offering a parent-child martial arts class. My daughter is very enthusiastic about the idea. I’m going to see if I can get us registered for that, as well as get her registered for swim lessons again.

Still so much to do but my back is aching from doing the floors. I’m hoping that a lie-down will give me the relief I need to finish my other projects for the day, not to mention tomorrow’s projects.

In the outdoor compost pile, we had cherry tomatoes and millet volunteer this year. The harvest from the tomato plant has been meager though the quality has been very good. I think that the millet is foxtail millet. It has soft, feathery heads and tiny seeds that would actually look nice in a vase with some fall flowers. I picked a handful of the seed heads that were drying on the stalks to save seed. I brought them inside, laid them on a paper towel that I’d set on a wire rack, and the seeds should finish drying, then be easy to strip from the stalks without damaging them. Once they’re dry and off the stalks, I’ll package them in an envelope to plant next year or to trade with other seed savers.

We don’t have enough millet for hulling and eating at this point but because it has proven to be so hardy, I definitely want to keep the seeds. I think that home grain production is an important and almost forgotten art.

I’ve been doing further experiments with the solar oven. Today I baked some bite-size spinach tarts by laying a silicone baking mat on the floor of the oven and setting the frozen tarts right on it. They cooked all the way through in about three hours. They didn’t brown quite like they would have in an electric oven but they were perfectly edible. I warmed tomato soup in a small pot on the side for an electricity-free dinner that was quite tasty. The more I use my solar oven, the more I like it. Someday I’d like to build a stand for it to sit on with an electric eye that would move it to follow the sun for longer cooking times and less time spent turning the oven for maximum sun.

I’ve been spending so much time on creative projects lately that I realized my house is in need of some attention. Oops! I guess this is a cleaning weekend.

It’s like Christmas without the crowded stores!

A few weeks ago, I made some online catalog requests to a few seed companies that claimed to have heirlooms and almost all of them arrived at once. I’ve only lightly flipped through, but the array of baby greens alone is staggering. So much variety! I use my speed reading skills to locate key words such as “dwarf” and “container”, then mark those to go back and read more about later.

Now that I’ve worked some of the knots out of growing baby greens in pots on my deck, buying larger seed packets to mix custom blends by season seems like a good expenditure. We both love baby greens as salads or on sandwiches. One of my favorite sandwiches ever is a whole-grain bun with a veggie patty, spicy baby greens, and horseradish mustard – it’s so good!

I’ve also seen a few mixes touted as “braising/stir-fry” seed mixes and those would be great, too. We love lightly sauteed greens with garlic and lemon or garlic, ginger, toasted sesame oil, and tamari with a splash of ume plum vinegar. It makes me hungry just to think about it. A big mess of tangy, spicy greens on top of a bowl of brown rice or soba noodles with some lentils or adzuki beans to complete the protein. Delicious.

So I have something to occupy my nights for awhile as I design the garden, trying to fit as much good stuff as possible into my little space.

Now if I could just figure out how to incorporate a discreet rainwater harvesting system into the deck garden without my HOA getting their collective panties in a bunch. Any future home purchases, I will be avoiding HOAs and neighborhood associations like they have a pox. They mostly seem to be full of environmentally unfriendly zealots who don’t want you to install solar panels or sky lights but are perfectly happy to have tons of chemicals dumped on the lawn every week and they’re very, very concerned that your storm door be the appropriate shade of almond. So annoying.

But someday, hopefully in the next few years, we’ll have a piece of land to call our own and we will be able to work it and tend it without the interference of others. We could make our already fairly small eco footprint even smaller if we were able to produce almost all of our own food, some fibers, and other useful goods.

Since I was already working from home today, I looked at the morning forecast and, after consulting with my daughter, decided that it would be nice if she stayed home from her summer program today, both so I could spend time with her and to have a break from the heat. We got to have a leisurely breakfast of whole-grain toast with peanut butter, fresh fruit, and herbal tea before I started my workday. She watched some educational children’s programming on public broadcasting but after a little over an hour, started clamoring for my attention. I handed her a pile of felt, fabric scraps, and a fabric marker, then told her to design some clothes and accessories for her favorite dolls. She set to work and spent most of the day engrossed in designing purses, backpacks, aprons, guitars, and more. She’s very artistic and I like to encourage not only her particular talent for drawing, but her ability to entertain herself. I think it also helps her not to think as a constant consumer when she actively can create her own playthings (with some help from Mom). Tonight I sewed the backpack she designed and, while I sewed the body together and the straps, she sewed on the small, decorative pocket herself while I coached her. It was only the second time she’s sewn with a running stitch but she did a really good job. I think that basic hand sewing skills are so vital, even if you only ever use them to do minor repairs.

I worked all day with a break for lunch, leftover whole grain pilaf with black beans, roasted peppers, and corn topped with a dollop of yogurt, and a short walk around the cul-de-sac with child and dog. It was too hot to go far, none of us like this kind of intense heat. Once we were back, I juiced some apples with beets and the last carrots for a quick refresher before tackling the take-home work again. I ended up having to work late to finish it all, so we had a quick dinner of quesadillas with fresh, chopped tomatoes and finely diced onion with a plate of cut fresh vegetables on the side. It was good and left us with plenty of time to get out to the garden.

We planted more basil because I really want a basil plant to bring indoors for the winter. They rarely produce enough for pesto but it is so nice to have a few fresh leaves to shred and sprinkle over pasta or soup. We also planted a bowl with red oakleaf lettuce for cut-and-come-again baby greens and a few more chives sprinkled between for companion planting. I planted two of the four broccoli plants that I plan on over-wintering.

The chamomile I was trying to start for an indoor plant seemingly got burned to a crisp today even though I’d been watering it evenly and moved it into the shade of a larger planter this morning. I’ll keep at it for a bit longer to see if anything survived, but I may just have to wait until spring to have a lovely window box full of German chamomile. It’s my daughter’s favorite herbal tea and I definitely want enough of it to harvest for tea and medicinal purposes. Several years ago I was introduced to an herbal syrup made from boiling down organic apple juice and chamomile or mint; it was fantastic diluted with water or sparkling water over ice. I would love to make and bottle my own versions. I bet rosemary or lavender syrup would be excellent as well.

I have more fall and winter seeds on the way. I’ve set aside a large pot for seeding with easter egg radishes and thumbelina carrots. I know that I can do successive seedings of the radishes all the way through to severe winter weather, perhaps a double crop of the carrots as well. I think my daughter will like the carrots, they’re natural small globes, also called French market carrots.

The compost that we’re getting from the worm bin is just of such excellent quality. Black and rich. I need to figure out a way to sift it, though, to remove larger particulates and the worms. Honestly, I’m thinking of just buying a child’s beach toy with a sifter bottom and using that. It seems like my least expensive and time-consuming option. I need another brick of coconut fiber or peat to help retard clumping in the compost because it can be really dense and holds a lot of moisture. I also need to keep my eyes open for more downed branches from the maple trees to use as leaf mulch in my layered containers.

I have a large jar of honey that is starting to crystallize. My plan is to pour off the honey that is still liquid, then scoop out the crystallized honey into a saucepan with some strong chopped onion and garlic to make cough syrup. Too bad I don’t have a source for coltsfoot, which is also good for coughs. Maybe I can find some slippery elm, echinacea, and goldenseal to add to it, though, to make it a more broad-spectrum syrup. I need to restock our supply of elderberry syrup, too, it was so helpful during last winter’s flu season.

Another busy day drawing to an end, but I feel so good about the things we’re doing right now that it gives me energy. The gardening, the projects, the cooking, the healthier mostly whole foods diet. I feel good. I feel positive about the much bigger steps ahead. Those steps back to the land.

Tomorrow we’re going to plant broccoli for overwintering in three of my larger pots. It’s our favorite vegetable, but one that I’ve never tried in a container before. Here’s to hoping, because I know we’d both be thrilled with fresh broccoli from the garden.

I splurged and bought a copy of McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers after having trouble parting with the copy I checked out from the library. A fantastic and easy-to-understand guide to cultivating edible plants in containers and/or limited space. I am so excited about the directions for growing columnar apples, dwarf citrus, figs, grapes, fruiting roses, and currants! And one of the authors, Rose Marie Nichols McGee, is the owner of Nichols Nursery, my favorite local source for open-pollinated seeds – so that’s fun for me.

I was reading the book on the train home and my head is so full of ideas for next year’s garden already. I think it will be my best one to date. My daughter will be thrilled about the variety of edible flowers we’re going to plant. That’s quite possibly her favorite part of gardening. She loves salads full of colorful flower petals or sprinkling them over cakes or ice cream.

I’ve been thinking that, instead of letting seeds languish on the shelf, I might plant most of them in newspaper pots and give them as goodwill gifts to friends, family, and neighbors. I just hate to see anything go to waste, including lowly seeds. I’ve also joined an online seed exchange that I’m hoping will take off, another way to get variety and spread goodwill among like-minded people.

Still sketching potential garden plans for next year. Using intensive organic methods, I’m pretty sure I can get the garden in a year-round cycle of production to augment our CSA deliveries.

Speaking of our CSA delivery, we are going to be eating like queens this week: blueberries, black cherries, strawberries, peaches, nectarines, heirloom tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, radishes, zucchini, summer squash, and more, including a huge bunch of basil that is begging to be turned into pesto for the freezer. I may dry some of the fruit as a mixed fruit melange, adding some almonds, walnuts, and pecans for a healthy treat. I’m going to hang a small handful of the basil in the kitchen to dry and replenish the jar of basil in the spice cupboard. Such a bountiful time of year for great, fresh food and I think next year will be even better when our garden is in full swing.

Today was a bit hectic at work. Hardware issues. Much to do. Time that seemingly flew by. I felt a little frazzled by the time I got back to my side of town and shut the door to my own little suburban sanctuary behind me. There were only two sensible things to do: 1) Make banana/orange/pineapple/pear smoothies; and, 2) Head out to the garden with my little one to re-pot the mint plant, plant some chamomile for a window plant this winter, and plant some beets for greens and baby beets for pickling this fall. *happy sigh* Much better! Just about everything in life can be made manageable by getting some dirt on my hands.

While digging compost out of the worm bin, we found an interesting cocoon that I put into a bug jar to see if anything hatches. I don’t recognize what type it might be; it’s a little over an inch long and a rich maroon color. I remember finding cocoons as a kid and either putting them in a jar or keeping close tabs on where they were in the hopes of the rare opportunity to watch an animal emerging. Something I’d love to share with my daughter, that delicate beginning of a new life.

I have been having back pain since Saturday, though it has abated somewhat with stretching and self-massage. If it continues, I may mix up a mustard herbal bath to soothe it.

The weather was very mild today, the perfect day to do heavy work in the garden. I clipped the dead stems from the bunching onions, top-dressed them with compost from the worm bin, and re-seeded the soil since only one flower was produced this summer and there were bare spots between. We really love our green onions, they’re so nice to have and so easy to maintain all year long.

I have a hanging terra cotta pot sculpted to resemble a face. It used to have a thyme plant in it, but the finches laid waste to that earlier this year when they were looking for nesting materials. I decided to try it as a planter for chives, so I removed the soil that was in it and worked in some compost, then refilled the pot and seeded it before moving on to prepare a pot for bush basil that I’m planning to start outside in this nice weather and bring in as a window plant when the weather turns cold. Fresh basil in November would be a treat.

After puttering around out there a bit more, I washed up and went to the store to get dog food, check the clearance bins, and purchase a beautiful mint plant that I’d seen while walking by the day before. It’s nothing fancy, just common mint, but it’s big and abundant and needed a home with me – it was calling to me. I’m trying to decide which planter to put it in. Once it’s established it needs some trimming because it was allowed to get very leggy and unkempt; besides, trimming it should make it bush out a bit and fill a pot. It has some lovely flower spikes on it.

The clearance bins yielded canned salmon, diced green chilies, and whole grain pilaf – not a bad little haul. I bought a few other essentials, then carried my loot home. The people at the grocery store always look at me like I’m crazy when I ask them to try to divide things up evenly between the bags because I’m on foot. “But this is so heavy!,” the courtesy clerk said as he was handing me my reusable bags today. It really wasn’t bad, probably 30 lbs. divided between two bags. Are people really so soft that carrying 30 lbs. a few blocks is considered near-impossible? That just seems strange to me. I mean, I was happy to set it down when I walked through the door but I wasn’t in pain or gasping for air or anything like that.

We ate leftover lentils and rice for dinner with banana-orange-pineapple smoothies for dessert. Yum! Since then I’ve been sitting, nursing a bit of a low back ache from bending and stooping so much today. I’m making an afghan for my clerk because she got married a few weeks ago. A lovely scrap afghan made from Lion Brand Homespun in a variety of colors. I like how it’s shaping up; it looks nice and it’s so soft. I recently finished an embroidered dresser scarf for my daughter and I’m now making one for myself. The same daisy pattern but in different color schemes to match our personalities: her daisies in variegated purples with vivid yellow, green, and blue; mine in white with softer yellow, green, and red. Not sure what my next projects will be, but I’m trying to make a serious dent in my embroidery thread and yarn collections. It’s kind of a challenge to see what I can do with what I have here already. I may end up making more home decor items to gift in an effort to use up the low-end acrylic yarns I have in abundance from my thrift store purchases. I should do some more charity crochet, too, because I have some baby yarns. Make hats and booties for the pediatric hospital that saved my daughter when she had pneumonia a few years ago.

Productive today and more to do tomorrow. Hopefully my back cooperates.

[caption id="attachment_307" align="aligncenter" width="385" caption="Backpack pocket patched with a fabric scrap."][/caption]

I’ve had my backpack for about two years now. I carry it almost every single day and it takes a beating. Recently two large holes opened up in one of the side pockets. I stitched the long, thin one closed but there was a second, round hole that needed a patch, so I cut a corner from a piece of thrift store fabric, cut it into a heart shape, and sewed it over the hole. My shoulder straps also need repairs. I’m out of fray check, so I found nail polish in matching black and painted the fraying areas to that I can try stitching them later, though, honestly, it may be a duct tape job. The wall between two inside pockets is also coming apart. I know that I could get another day pack for $10-20 but I really hate to toss something that still has a useful lifespan, so I’ll try to repair that this weekend.

For dinner we had pasta with the whole foods pesto I made yesterday. It was delicious and there’s enough left over for our lunches tomorrow. I served it with sliced tomatoes and fresh blueberries on the side for a great, nutritious summer meal.

After dinner I planted peas in the container I prepped yesterday. I’d had them marinating overnight in legume inoculant. It would be nice to have some more fresh sugar snaps before winter. There were a few leftover seeds; I tossed them in the outdoor compost to see if they’d volunteer. We already have volunteer cherry tomatoes ripening in the compost – far be it from me to turn down free food where I can find it. Hopefully my other seeds will get here soon so that I can tinker further with my tiny garden.

The cake turned out fantastic, a little more dense than a cake made with white flour but very tasty, not overly sweet. We did end up making a peanut butter chocolate icing for it by melting a square of bitter chocolate with butter and peanut butter over low heat, then whisking in powdered sugar until it was the proper consistency for spreading.

I tried to come in and finish my day early, I really did. My back is aching from bending and carrying; however, I felt that I had to go out and put together a pot for bush peas since I only have about another week to plant those for a late fall crop. I layered wet newspaper, fine soil, worm castings, a thin layer of dead, crumbled leaves, and more soil, then watered it with a dilute solution of worm tea and water. The pea seeds are soaking overnight in legume inoculant. I’ll plant them in the morning in a zig-zag pattern to get more plants into the long window box I prepared. I like the bush peas because they tend to web together and not need much in the way of extra support and they’re fairly compact. Good, sweet flavor in both the peas and the pods.

Took a shower and decided to give my skin a treat, so I brought a little plastic bowl of sugar into the shower and exfoliated my face, neck, and chest. You just wet your skin and rub the sugar in gently until it turns to syrup, then rinse it away. It leaves your skin feeling so soft and smooth. Got out and gave myself a scalp massage with a few drops of rosemary and lavender essential oils, easing away tension, feeling a bit luxurious. I need to get some more sweet almond oil for my skin and hair, nothing else I’ve found makes it softer.

I still haven’t finished the dresser cloth but I did make progress on it during my breaks today. We have some good food for the week and I’m looking at Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces,
playing with potential garden plans for next year while I sit here watching a movie. I ordered a bunch of nursery catalogs online tonight so that I can spend happy winter hours cozied up with a stack of them and a cup of hot tea.

I may need to get my dad or someone else handy to come help me build some planter boxes for next year. I mostly need someone to cut the lumber and help me get it out to my deck. I’m pretty sure I could get it put together from there. I have this idea for a two tiered box against the back wall with a trellis attached or a single, wider box with a trellis so that I can grow pole beans, cucumbers, and other vining plants. I’d like to have two half-barrels for columnar apple trees as well as the strawberry barrel I already have, and maybe another half-barrel for another dwarf fruit such as a fig or mulberry. I need to make much better use of my railing, too, installing planter boxes all around for herbs and small or trailing plants. I’m going to make the strawberry jar I already have into a planter for herbs and lettuce. I need to get rid of some of the smaller pots people have gifted to me since they’ve not proven to work well in the microclimate of my deck. Unless I can find compact, useful houseplants to put in them.

Alright, it’s time to sleep. I am one tired girl after my busy Sunday.