More Deer

The deer are making themselves quite comfortable in Dad's back yard. Several times in a day he will see these two napping on the lawn. They have not been bothered by the dog at all. I do wonder what the garden will look like in the spring time. Will there be anything left, or will it all be nibbled away through the winter.

Kohlrabi

We're getting lots of kohlrabi ripening in the garden now. We've eaten them julienne raw with Italian dressing for a while now. In fact, to the point that Rick and the Engineer will not enjoy any more.

So I went in search of kohlrabi recipes. There has to be a way to serve this cooked, right? I found some ideas, such as scalloped, creamed with herb sauce, slaw salads, and several others. But these are the ones I think will go over best with my family.

I don't have all the ingredients for any of the recipes (go figure!) so I'm improvising.

My first step is to blanch the julienne kohlrabi about five minutes in water with lemon juice added.Next they braised in some butter till they were tender enough to eat pleasantly.
I am not out of burnet and lovage. Rather, I have not heard of burnet and lovage before!

A little search on line told me burnet was an herb with a cucumber flavor. I'm not sure what to substitute for it, because the recommended substitute is parsley. However parsley is also called for in the recipe, so I will be using that already.

Lovage was a little easier to work around. I can use chopped celery leaves as a substitute. That sounds tasty to me, and nutrient rich to boot!Back to the braising. A taste test at this point reminds me somewhat of turnips, but much less harsh and more creamy in flavor. Then I get the idea that this creation might end up with a topping of Parmesan cheese.

By this time I've removed the kohlrabi to a serving dish and begun making a cream sauce in the pan. Before it gets too thick, the parsley and celery leaves go in. After I got this photo I begin stirring in the herbs in, and I was struck with the thought that this will be a very pretty sauce. Am I the only one who thinks about these things -- aside from the pros?Ahh Done! But have I sabotaged myself? The veggie is done and the kids will need to eat in about 20 minutes and I have nothing else prepared. Looks like the rest of lunch will be leftovers.

Playing with a new recipe was fun. With a final taste before serving, I decide against the Parmesan cheese.

Zucchini Success

Five, or maybe more, years ago I tried to grow zucchini. I had a beautiful, robust looking plant that bloomed well and developed some fruit. However, the little zucchinis all suffered blossom end rot, beginning when they were about four inches long. I never got to harvest even one.

That was depressing. I gave up on zucchinis for a while. Then the deer discovered my kitchen garden and I gave up on almost everything else for a few years. Although I was not planting anything but lettuces, I still added calcium, compost and other nutrients to the soil in hopes of having a nice garden again some day in the future.

Today is the day I'm cooking the first garden zucchini. As I write this it is sauteing in olive oil and garlic, soon to be joined by a light blanket of Parmesan cheese.

Happily, there are more healthy fruits on there and the plant continues copiously blooming. I dream of stuffed zucchini and zucchini bread!

Salad Days Again

We planted more than just lettuce in the garden this year, but we got off to a late start. So far we have beans, peas and zucchini that looks like they will be good producers.The kohlrabi looks good but the leaves are being eaten by caterpillars and the Artist (she planted the kohlrabi in her rows) is not too interested in picking worms. She planted some banana peppers too, and they took more than a month to sprout, so they are now making an appearance mixed among some kohlrabi plants in one of her rows.

The Engineer's spinach never came up at all, and the beets he planted have given poor showing, with only four plants sprouting and they are still too small to tell whether they will survive or not.

The best producer, though is the lettuce. The Engineer planted one row, and I planted three rows. Next year, I think I can have a total of three rows, rather than four, or delay the planting of a couple of rows until late July so we can enjoy it longer into the autumn. Here one morning's harvest filled the smaller basin in my sink. After washing it would fill three gallon-size ziplock bags. I'm glad we all enjoy it, and our nearby relatives have shared in the salad too.

Tulip Drama

I'd been thinking lately that I should go and refresh the deer repellent that I strew around our shrubs in the back yard. The snow is gone, mostly for good. The bushes look like they have sustained some nibbling, but they are not completely devastated.

After refreshing the repellent, I looked around the rest of the garden beds. There is lots of work to do. The dozen or so bags of yard waste we got rid of last week helped, but there are two more beds to clean out, and one is large.

Last of all I looked at the front of the house. The tulips should be showing some leaves by now.

To my horror, I found my tulips are the latest item added to the deer buffet. The previous owner of our house had planted this pretty row of 40-60 tulips in the front bed. Every year we've enjoyed them tremendously. This year, alas --they've been munched. I'm not sure we will have even 10 lonely blooms. I was probably a week too late in getting the repellent refreshed in the back. Now I see I'll need to begin using it in the front of the house too.

Let Us Have Lettuce

We've been having a lot of lettuce lately and no one is tired of it yet. Salads almost every day, lettuce on sandwiches and burgers, salad for late night snacks, and so on.

Every five or six days I'm going out to the garden to harvest some more. Who knew this is the one veggie that would really take off in my garden? Yesterday I brought in arm load after arm load to wash. Twice I filled my small sink full as I dared with lettuce leaves. After washing I filled four one gallon freezer bags of lettuce waiting for use. There is still a half bag left in the crisper from last weeks pickings. We are all so very pleased that the deer appear to be uninterested in lettuce. I still see their hoof prints in the ground occasionally, but no nibbles noticed. With the way they would scrounge peppers and tomatoes and peas it had become completely worthless to plant those veggies any more. I think it was the rabbits that got to the green beans. They left more for the gardener but did manage to damage a lot of beans.

Next year I do plan to plant more variety again. With the composter working all summer long I should have some nice nutrients to add to the soil. I have more time to think about some sort of fencing protection. In the mean time Rick planted a thought in my mind that has taken hold and flourished, but the harvest, if it ever comes, is a long time in the future:

Container Gardening

I love growing a garden. This year it hurt to not plant my garden. In the end I gave in to the temptation and I did end up planting some lettuce. I simply could not imagine going through the whole summer with no homegrown vegetables. Poor soil condition is still a huge factor so I'm not sure what to expect. Or maybe I am but I'm in self denial because I'm full of that hope that a gardener plants along with each seed.

The spring planting is a fun time for the children too. In the past the Artist has had a section of the garden to manage by herself. This year would have been the first time the Engineer had the same.
For a while I thought I'd be giving up that pleasurable learning experience for the kids. But as either luck or absent-mindedness would have it, they each planted a container garden.

In past years I've had two window boxes of marigolds outside my back door. This year I expected the same, but somehow I have managed not to save any of the seeds from last year. And all my trips to the nursery were done. And I wanted to get the dirty outdoor work all done yesterday while the weather was nice.

I looked through all my little seed packets and found I had only one kind of flower, a few left over vegetables and lots of herbs. I let the kids look through all the seeds and choose what they wanted to grow in their window box.

The Artist must have enjoyed the kohlrabi she grew last year, because she chose it again. And the Engineer surprised me by selecting lettuce. We will have unusual back porch flower boxes, but I think the kids will enjoy them more than ever. The eagerness they showed in the planting, and the way they compared notes about whose seeds should germinate first and how tall the plants should grow was satisfying for a mom to see.

Compost

For the last three years my garden has been doing more and more poorly. This year I'm giving it a year off, mostly. I'll probably have some potted tomatoes and let the kids plant something if they like.
To help with turning the tide I've invested in a composter. The tumbler information page speaks of compost in as little as six weeks. I'm very skeptical of that time frame, especially with the amount of grass clippings I have in the tumbler right now. Hopefully with the dry leaves I was able to gather this spring, the compost starter I added, and some hot, sunny days I'll be able to mix some good compost into the garden soil before the end of the summer. If a miracle happens and I do have usable compost in six weeks then I'll hope to give the garden two applications this year.

I'm absolutely tickled with the copper compost pail to keep in my kitchen. I remember a horrid, smelly plastic bucket mom kept under the sink that was always filled with mold. That kept me from doing any composting heretofore and made me an avid garbage disposal user. This pretty pail has not caused any offending odors yet, and it has been filled a few times. Having a lid and using a liner helps I think.

The copper pail has made friends with all the other copper accents in my kitchen.

Fiddleheads

Nature is unfurling one of her great beauties -- fern fiddleheads are breaking ground and stretching for the light in my back yard.

These ferns are special to me for their beauty and because they were my mom's. They also remind me of my brother, the math whiz, who spent some time studying fractals like these. This is not his work, but it will give you an idea of what he did. I don't love math enough to try to figure it out.

It will be a few weeks before my ferns approach the looks of those fractals.

This one will make its music before a background of lilting lily of the valley. And this has narcissus for neighbors to the north and west, moss moseying up to the fern trunk and some hovering hosta beyond. Most of the summer the ferns benefit from the shade of the six large oak trees in a corner of the yard. Those oaks do dry up all the moisture though, so I need to give the ferns some extra when the soil gets dry.

Fresh Herb

Fresh Herb: So Charlie Chive says to this Blushing Blossom...

The past several days have been beautiful outdoors. Before I hurt myself, I was doing some yard clean up and I noticed the parsley was sprouting, but not near large enough to harvest yet. The chives were coming in so thick and lush, I could not resist.

I clipped a medium size handful of chives and brought them inside. It was rather difficult to rinse them with their being only about 3-4 inches tall. But they smelled so oniony-sweet and fresh. It was invigorating to have something garden fresh to put on the table. Even if it was only slightly more than a garnish.

The chopped chives went into a three-bean salad topped with honey, balsamic vinegar and a half sesame, half olive oil mixture.

I used my last tin or anchovies to garnish my salad bowl. It makes everyone in my family happy if I don't share the anchovies.

Fall Clean Up

It was about time I did something about the sorry little plot I like to call a garden in my back yard. The plants left behind by the animals were dried to crisps and the seeds were mostly done dropping for next years parsley and dill. Most of the clean up was quick and easy. I'll turn over the soil after a few more days. I sprayed some weeds I'd battled all summer with a weed killer, so I'll give it a few days to work.

Then I looked over to the flower garden. There were some out of control weeds there too, waiting to be pulled. Got that taken care of. There were hundreds of twigs from the oaks waiting to be removed. The squirrels provide more little twigs every day. I didn't begin to clear out the acorns that have begun falling into the garden. But I did get some overgrown hosta divided and tiger lilies removed . They were becoming nuisances to their neighbors.

Then I remembered the forsythia needed to be pruned back just a little to keep away from the neighbor's garage. I wanted to be very careful about this. If new branches were cut I'd lose next year's blooms. So I crept back behind there to get a good look all around.

What should I find back there but a huge weed. It was about an inch in diameter where it grew from the ground, taller than me and covered with ripe burrs ready to snag any deer that might get close to it. In an unparalleled display of acting first and thinking later, I tried to uproot it. I succeeded in raining thousands of burrs down upon myself -- hair, shirt, shorts, socks, shoes, all over.
By the way, I did not even succeed in loosening the soil around the roots. So I trotted out to the garage for my shears. Walking in burr covered clothes served to drive the burrs further into my clothing and make them itch against my skin. But the worst part was that they looked like bugs. I kept spotting them clustered all over myself and thinking they were bugs. Countless times I reminded myself-- they are not bugs. Its a good thing too, else I'd probably still be running around the back yard screaming.

Finally I hacked through the stem with the shears and got that big bully into a garbage bag. Next I had to figure out how to get rid of the burrs. Thankfully the Artist could fetch my bathrobe for me. I wonder how many times I'll need to launder that outfit?

Then I got myself into the shower. You may have heard teenagers take long showers. Today I probably had them all beat. I lost count of how many times I washed my hair. I just kept going until I no longer saw burrs rinsing out to the tub. When the steam cleared from the clock I learned more than half an hour had passed!

Paw Prints Revisited

Some of the lettuces I started early are getting robust enough that I can snip a few leaves and encourage more growth. In another day or two I should have enough for everyone in my family to have a dinner salad. I can't wait!

While I was harvesting the lettuces, I noticed this nice set of paw prints next to the peas:



I don't know for sure who they belong to. Any ideas? In a previous post I had some much shallower prints to work with. My best guesses were opossum, skunk or raccoon.

From this set of prints today, I can (thankfully) eliminate skunk as a possibility. The toes of skunk tracks are not long and slender like the specimen in my garden.

Raccoon and opossum are very similar in the front paws and very different in their hind paws. The good mud that this critter stepped in does not seem to show the opposable thumb.

To discourage further visits from the critters who keep eating my green beans as soon as the shoots erupt from under the soil we invested in some Deer Scram. It makes me so mad that they eat those seedlings! I planted two packets of bean seeds and I'll end up with fewer than 20 plants. If it works, I'll probably be a customer for life.

Pitter Patter Paws

Some one unexpected has been visiting my garden. It is kind of hard to see the tracks in these photos but I thought I'd give it a try anyway. I have not ever seen a raccoon around our house. I have seen skunks pass by and I have seen opossum once in a while. The size and depth of these prints (and the lack of offending odor) leads me to believe these are opossum tracks. I cannot tell for certain because the prints were not distinct enough to show whether or not there was an opposable thumb on the hind paws.Lettuce, pea and bean shoots are just starting to come up in the garden. I need to get moving on putting up my fencing!

More garden goodies... I thought I had lost all my roses in the late cold snap we had. The canes had leaf buds on them, then after a late freeze there were no signs of life. The buds fell off or shriveled up. I was most disappointed to lose my favorite and most fragrant rose at the side of my front porch. It grows taller than me and has loads of blossoms each summer. In an attempt to salvage it I cut down about five feet of dead canes. They were dry and brittle, most definitely dead. But while doing so I found some fresh, still tender-red shoots near the base of the plant. Hope!!! After the weekend it is making a valiant come back. I wonder how tall it will grow this summer. And since last spring a lot of ivy had grown to choke the base of the rose. While I was clearing it away I discovered someone had borrowed under there to hibernate. We choose to believe this is Chloe, the wollybear who came home from a field trip with the Artist in October. She was not too happy about being uncovered, so I showed the Artist what I had found and and loosely covered her up again.

Outdoors

The whole family is thankful for spring.

Yesterday I planted tomatoes seeds in pots (maybe they will do better there than in the garden). I also got the bush bean seeds in the ground. It was great fun for the Engineer to help. He had not ever been invited into the garden before.

And in the evening the family took to the hoop. The Engineer is making an occasional shot by himself now. The Artist's lay-ups are looking good from both sides. And Rick is gratified to see his students' progress and to get to jump around himself a bit.

Seeding the Garden

Over the weekend I was able to start some seeds in the garden. I planted three little (one yard) rows of peas. Last year after the sprouts recovered from severe deer chomping we did harvest plenty of peas to satisfy our taste for the stir fries we all enjoy over here.On the transplanting docket were some little sprouts of lettuce. They looked a bit spindly (too pitiful to photograph) and I'm not sure they will take. The thunderstorm we had last night may have done them in. That will not set me back too far though. I planted four additional rows of seed. I think each lettuce row is about four feet long and the transplants filled less than one row. Of all the green beans I started early I have one lonely sprout. I'll remind myself to check the date on the seed package next time.

I have not had any good bell peppers in years past, so I'll not try those this summer.

For something different and new this year I'd like to grow some turnips. The Engineer and I enjoy them quite a bit and I think Classical Pelican will like receiving some now and then. I have never planted them before. Can anyone recommend a type to try?

These jubilant tulips always make me smile. The Dutch iris are lush.
And again I planted my window boxes for the back deck with marigolds. I'm hopeful they will germinate soon.

Garden Problem-Solving

Maybe I should have reconsidered my title today. Perhaps Garden Pest Control Ideas Needed would be more suitable. The deer have already been visiting my yet-unplanted vegetable plot this spring. Thankfully, the parsley clump and the two chive mounds are unmolested.

Over the weekend I turned over all the soil in the garden,
worked in some peat into the clay, arranged the stepping stones, and tossed some 30,000 sprouting acorns out of the area. Sunday morning there were fresh fawn prints deep in the newly turned soil. Now a second generation of deer have our yard as a regular spot on their nightly foraging routes.

The other chief culprits in my garden are rabbits and chipmunks. I need to find some kind of covering to keep the deer from jumping in and keep the little critters at bay. I'd hate for the deer to jump the wooden fence from my neighbor's driveway and then get stuck inside my garden.

I have no experience in this area. What do you use or what have you seen used to protect the plants from nibblers? What has not worked? Do you have any experience with, recommendations or advice about deer repellent products?

The series of burning bushes we planted as a hedge at the back border of our property have also been nibbled nearly to death. This was the year they were to approach four feet tall. We've readjusted expectations based on the deer damage. Hopefully they will all live and grow back to the two and one-half foot height.

Science & Seeds

In school we have been pushing hard on the math and grammar lessons since the second semester began. Science has been neglected for an entire quarter. In order to get that horse back on track, I have declared this week to be Science Week, with a bit of history and reading filling out the rest of the time. But we will do an experiment every day this week. This will bring us nearly up to speed with the rest of the subjects. Then the challenge will be to balance them all so we do not have to extend and classes into the summer. I really don't want to do that.

The Artist writes her science definitions. The Engineer practices crafting letter 'R'.

The kit containing our physics experiments has taken its place on the table and the Artist is grudgingly looking up definitions of terms used in today's experiment in her science encyclopedia. We will learn about how an inclined plane is part of a wood screw and make a model screw with pencil and pipe cleaner.

materials for today's experiment

She loves the experiments but despises doing the write-ups for her experiment note book. Such is life!

Yesterday I did an experiment of my own. I was greatly disappointed in last year's vegetable garden. Most of my disappointment was due to deer, rabbits and chipmunks gobbling up sprouts the day after they dared to show their greening faces to the sun. I planted my three little rows of bush beans three times it seemed, and still ended up with very few plants. In past years the beans had been the most successful plants in my garden. I usually harvest enough beans to freeze to last for a few months into the winter. Last year I didn't quite fill a one-gallon freezer bag.

I'm hoping that planting seedlings in the garden plot rather than seeds will reduce or eliminate the problem. Yesterday afternoon I got out in the glorious sunshine and planted seeds in old paper egg cartons.

My family took the first shots of the new year at the basket ball hoop, the Artist scraping rust off her technique, the Engineer making his first basket all by himself, and the Quipper coaching in-between his own shots.

With the rhythmic thumping and cheers of encouragement and celebration in the background, I used my trowel to mix potting mix and water in a big bucket. I plan to plant beans, peas, lettuces, tomatoes and green bell and mild peppers again this year. I was limited, however to four-dozen-less-one egg cups (For the life of me I can't recall what I needed that one egg cup for earlier this winter!) of seedling space. So the only seeds I planted were 23 beans and 24 lettuce.

After delicately burying the little bundles of hope in their designated egg cups, I stuck the group on a plastic tray in the sunshine, but out of the most likely path of errant basketballs. After about an hour I noticed they were drying rather quickly so I added water and put some loose plastic wrap over them. I'm hoping this will give a hot-house effect more than a mold-house effect.

potting soil and newly planted seeds warming in the sun

Today (Monday) storms are expected, so I'll be bringing my tray indoors when the winds kick up. I look forward to having the sprouts show and the plastic being removed soon. One more reason to enjoy the sunny days to come.

It sure feels good to not have to wait until late May to get some seeds started.