Garden Milestones

Not having been raised in a farming family, I've had to glean little morsels of folksy, hand-me-down farm wisdom wherever I could. Things like:

 -Tomato plants go in the ground on Mother's Day weekend
 -Don't cut hay before the 4th of July
-Fresh cream won't whip unless it's at least 3 days old
-Turkey poults are constantly on the lookout for new, more exciting ways to die
-Foxes and coyotes are at their murderous peak during the full moon

And maybe the most apropos bit of wisdom re: a Western Washington garden - if it isn't planted out and well established by mid-July, your crop ain't happening.

Our Summers are short here and typically have just two weeks or a month of any kind of heat, which is not always enough to make many garden favorites happen. I've learned the hard way that, short of using a greenhouse; hot peppers, watermelon and anything else that takes more than 90 days to grow or a month's worth of heat to ripen,  isn't meant to grow here.

There are exceptions, of course, a few of which are merrily growing away in my garden right now. My short-season corn is looking amazing, and well after I'd already resigned myself to the fact that in the land of mold and hungry raccoons, there would be no homegrown corn for us, ever. Behold the beauty (and note that the tassels cometh!) -

Yukon Chief Corn, day 37 (direct sown on 5-30-13)

Minnesota Midget Melons (Cantaloupe), day 70 (started indoors 4-27-13)

These melons are supposed to only take 70 days from seed to fruit (hence their appeal), but were held up on account of my delay getting them out in the ground, and their very rough (nearly fatal) transition from indoors to out. I'd love to see our first melon harvested before July is out, but I guess we'll get what we get when we get it.

Toma Verde Tomatillos, day 70 (started indoors 4-27-13)

Giant Greystripe and Miriam Edible Sunflowers, day 42 (direct sown 5/24/13) 

It may not look like much, and honestly, it's not, but to me... how do I put it? I get a sense of pride and nervous excitement when I think about my little garden, and all of the stuff that is growing beautifully there in spite of it a) being grown in soggy/unsunny/unpredictable western Washington, and b) being grown by a lady who is still learning to speak and understand the language of plants. So far I haven't screwed this up. Suffice it to say I'm pleased.

In addition to all of the up and coming beauty and bounty in the garden, there are a few other foodie delights coming our way shortly - wild blackberries and the opening of crabbing season in the Puget Sound. Happy days are here again!

If you're interested in learning more about any of the varieties of seeds/plants that I've mentioned here, you can read more and/or purchase some of these same seeds through Victory Seed Company and Seeds of Change. By the way, this is not a sponsored post - just one farm nerdess gushing about her garden. :) 

Yo!

Just popping by quick to say Hi, and to mention that I may not be able to post for the next Idontknowhowmany days, because my terminally ill computer has taken a sudden, steep nosedive in which the caps lock, w & q keys have all, rather abruptly, surrendered the burden of this mortal coil and have left me angrily shaking my fist in the general direction of hoever designed this stinking heap of a Helitt-Packard. Once the mystery illness spreads to a vowel, I'm sunk.

Anyhoo - I've been managing to knock out a brief Today's Take post each evening over on Ye Olde Bog Blog, should you be interested in keeping you finger on the pulse of Mudlandia. For instance - on the agenda for this lovely Independence Day? Cleaning chicken coops! The glamour of farm life never ends!

Eggzilla!

According to a handy-dandy little chart on Wikipedia, any chicken egg larger than 2.5 ounces (70+ grams) is considered "Jumbo". Well, they might need to invent a new category for some of our laydies' eggs. Check it out -

Booyah!

Can you read the bitty numbers on my scale? That there egg is a quarter pounder! Curiosity had me googling average duck egg sizes and even they don't typically get this big. Dear hen that laid this - thank you and also, I'm sorry. Maybe we should cut back your protein a tad? :-\

Now that I've brought this egg in, the girls are suddenly keen to have eggs for dinner. They're dying to see how many yolks might be inside this badboy. My guess is at least two. We'll let you know!

Update: Mystery solved! Two full sized yolks!

Soap Box Rant - GO!

Smithfield pork is the latest company to fire Paula Deen for her use of racist language. Bravo! There is no room in this growing, changing world for that kind of backwards thinking. However, Smithfield got a little high and mighty with their PR statement confirming the firing -

"Smithfield is determined to be an ethical food industry leader and it is important that our values and those of our spokespeople are properly aligned."

Ethical?! Maybe they forgot about how their CAFO's treat their pigs? (YouTube it - if you dare. It's brutal to watch.) Or how their "swine effluent" (poop and chemical lagoons) do irreparable damage to the ecosystems in the areas that call their ginormous factory farms home? Or, maybe they forgot that they feed obscene amounts of antibiotics and ARSENIC to their swine and eventually, consumers? All above board and a-ok, according to them.

The word/s the Paula Deen used/uses are unforgivably ugly and have no place in our society and earned her her walking papers. The people at Smithfield congratulating themselves as being ethical? It's a flat out lie and damn near as offensive to me. Anything to make a buck, seems to be a mantra that Smithfield and Deen share - maybe they've been "properly aligned" all along?

Our Victory Garden - 6/23/13

It's been just over a month since we got the very first few starts and seeds in our garden - radishes, kale, lettuces and peas - most of which started off on such rocky footing that I wondered if we'd started too late, chosen the wrong varieties, or otherwise blown it again this year.

In spite of my concerns, we kept plugging still more seeds and starts into the garden beds and watering everything each evening just before heading in for the night. It's a really nice "chore" when compared to some of our other glorious options, like feeding the pigs. In the garden, you get to calmly walk amongst little green things and flowers, doing a mental inventory of any changes that have occurred in the past 24 hours, or any that will need to be made in the next 24. All the while, swallows and robins swoop and dart overhead, catching mosquitoes and gnats. It's extremely peaceful.

Even being that connected with a place, you don't always really notice the very small daily changes. It's sort of like raising kids - you take your eye off of them for a minute, and suddenly they're huge. Our garden pulled just this sort of presto-change-o on me this weekend. We left town for just 3 nights, only to come back to our very own greenery jungle.

Everything grew appreciably in just those few days. The beet tops have grown by inches and they're starting to put on some root as well. The lettuces and kale need a good, heavy-handed trim, lest they go to seed, and the peas, finally recovered from the trauma of transplantation, have started blooming like crazy and setting pods. But the runaway success, the beast in my garden are the radishes. Behold -

A 2-ounce Cherry Belle and a 3-ounce French Breakfast radish.

These beauties were planted from seed just 35 days ago. Gotta love that fast turnaround! We still have several dozen in the ground that urgently need picking, so it looks like our little pipe dream of a small, roadside farm stand could be just a day or two away from becoming a reality. We won't have much variety -  just the radishes, kale, lettuces, oregano, lavender and some eggs - but boy, what a long time in coming this little project has been! Farmer Chelle is one happy little camper right now. :)

Stocking Up for a Shindig!

Maybe I've mentioned once or twice that the past year has been slightly bumpy? Well this weekend is shaping up to be the official end to the year of bleh. My nephews (and their awesome parents) are coming to visit, all the way from Tennessee, and that, my friends, calls for a party.

In preparation for the party, I've been running my hiney off, trying to get this old place looking nice, and trying to plan a yummy-but-not-overly-complicated menu for our BBQ/Karaoke Good Times-fest. Today I took a stroll through our infant garden and was happy to see that a few of our very early crops should be ready to go, come the weekend.

We don't have a lot, maybe just enough for a very Spring-y green salad - lettuces, radishes, basil, thyme, chives and *maybe* some strawberries and beets. And, if I steal the pigs' goat milk ration for a day, I can make up some fresh chevre. Hmm... this is kinda coming together!

Anyway, even after going half bananas planning and plotting this par-tay, I can't wait to have a house full of family and friends here to help us celebrate Fathers Day, the beginning of Summer, lots of May/June/July birthdays, our recovery from our year of crazy, and most importantly, the safe return of my brother-in-law from his most recent tour overseas. Our cup runneth over with Good Things.

Now, let's get funky! :)))

My handsome little nephews, gettin' their crazy on.

Our Eggy Spectrum

Well, 2 out of 3 are our eggs anyway. 

The quail's egg is from my friend, B. She shared a few dozen of these gorgeous little eggs with me, which we will be taste-testing alongside our chicken and Guinea eggs tomorrow for dinner. They're almost too pretty to eat!