Here you will find an archived weblog of my food, travel, and creative pursuits which I kept from 2010-2016. Please note both that the travel information contained here may outdated and that these logs were created on a prior version of this website and may not yet be optimized for the current version. If you’re looking for specific content, use the search field below! <3
If you've been around here long enough, you'll remember the Edible Garden Project series I used to write. At the end of last season, I decided to end the project on this site and focus in on all things travel. However, I certainly never stopped growing edibles and building upon my gardening skills.
Read MoreTotal honesty? Our garden is hideous right now. Truly hideous.
It's been suffering from a total lack of attention, as has the rest of our yard. But that tends to happen when you end up on the road a lot and spend time doing other things like recovering from the flu, designing your website, and celebrating other various events.
We did take the time to harvest the rest of our summer bed. The bowl of beets and carrots were juiced. Since we ended up with loads of green tomatoes - we tried the internet myth of putting them in paper bags in a dark place. And it worked! Well, at least sort of - for about half of the tomatoes. The other half I roasted with a little olive oil and sea salt and it was super tasty.
Hopefully next month, I'll have a better update with our winter edible garden plans
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Read MoreThis year, my high travel season seems to have coincided almost exactly with the most productive time of year for our garden. When we returned from our Canadian Rockies road trip, our garden was brimming with red, orange, and green. Unfortunately, I only had about a week at home before heading out on the road all over again for another two weeks. So in that short week, we harvested as much as possible.
As I had planned, this year I started experimenting with making sauce out of our tomatoes. The Sun Sugar tomatoes were cooked into a fresh puttanesca sauce and a combination of Amish Paste and Brandywine varieties were cooked into a basic sauce using this recipe from the Kitchn as a guideline. The Walla Walla onions, which by the way I plan to grow every year from now on (so easy!), were caramelized for French Onion Soup, eaten on top of pizza, and cooked into chili. Lastly, those beautiful carrots were slow cooked with chicken breasts and shredded for our pup (I know, she's spoiled).
In general, I've been very hands off with the garden this year. Lots of unexpected things have come up and I just haven't had the time to be as attentive as I'd like. I am, after all, a rather lazy gardener with purposefully low expectations. That being said, at the beginning of the month there was only one tomato each on the Brandywine and Amish Paste plants. So, I decided it was time to give pruning a try. The idea behind pruning is that you get more good nutrients going towards producing fruit by cutting off some of the excess foliage which is taking away that energy and fuel. I ended up removing most of the lower branches as well as most all without flowers all around the plant.
The result?
In the last two weeks our garden seems to have finally taken off. Especially when I look back last month's update, our plants have had a major growth spurt. Our middle raised bed in particular has become somewhat of a jungle with the combination of Tuscan kale, tomatoes, beets, onions, and carrots.
To be honest, aside from some very interesting weeding to be done - I haven't really done much garden work or up keep in the past month. Perhaps the only thing that has caught my attention are the tons of tiny tomato sprouts, not that we planted, appearing in that middle bed. So that's my new lesson learned for the month; when planting tomatoes in raised beds, expect lots of volunteers the next season. Other volunteers from last years planting include New Zealand spinach and Echinacea.
All the seeds have sprouted and our edible garden is growing mighty well - even though the Seattle weather seems to be on some sort of roller coaster ride (we've even had hail). Things seem even better when I go back to look at last months pictures of all the teeny tiny sprouts. In even better news, our living situation has finally been straightened out and we'll get to stay in our rental house for at least another year. Phew!
That means we've planted the center bed and after moving it, the first bed will also be planted for a fall crop (or winter, depending on when we get it moved). Overall, we should have a much grander and more varied harvest than last year.
How grand and varied a harvest you ask? Well, at this point we've got about 50 different varieties of of edible plants growing around our property and I've got the full inventory in the rest of the post.
Well, it's been a month since our 2013 edible gardening plans were tossed up in the air and the roughest part is that we still don't have any kind of closure or sense of exactly how and when our living situation might change. So we soldier on with a mobile version of our original plans.
It's been a chilly month in Seattle and our sprouts have been appearing rather sporadically. Although the addition of our Windowfarm (read more about that here) means that not all of our edibles growing quite so slowly. As I mentioned last month we started with the full grown plants but also began the process to start a few other plants from seed.
You're probably wondering why in the world I would have a bunch of filled containers on top of a beautiful rich soiled raised bed.
The answer? We are renters.
Specifically, we're renters who dream of being homeowners. We like to grow stuff, build stuff, and do stuff. In the house we've been living in for almost the past three years, we were lucky enough to have our landlords approve our plan to build three raised beds in our front yard last spring. 2012 was a wonderful year filled with an amazing garden that made all the passers by stop and gawk. We built the beds thinking we'd be living in the house for at least 5 years. Figuring that another 2 or 3 years were in our future, the investment of time and energy didn't seem like a waste.
It turns out, life happens and plans change - now we have to adapt. If things go as planned, our lovely little house will no longer be a good fit for us by September and it will time for us to move to a new home (we're crossing our fingers that we may find the means to buy this time).
If you're relatively new around here and wondering why a gluten free food & travel blogger is writing about edible gardening - it's simply because growing your own food is a mighty simple way to make sure you're eating gluten free. Plus, I enjoy it and I like to share - so there's that too.
It's almost time to start planting for the warmer months ahead and I'm super excited for our garden this year! We're adding a number of new things to the mix including even more planting space.
What major changes are we making based on lessons learned from last year?
In addition to the containers above, we currently have three raised beds and will be adding a fourth mini-bed for herbs. Oh and now that I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I forgot about our two Russian tea plants, pink lemonade blueberry, and lingonberry plants that also live in containers. This year will be the first that we get to harvest some of our tea!
Sometimes gardening isn't all that pretty and that's certainly true of our experimental winter garden. With a dog trodden and mud covered front yard - nothings going to be that pretty.
It's been awhile since the last update, but some of our plants are still going strong. On the other hand, the arugula, bok choi, kohlrabi, and cabbage don't seem to be changing that much week to week. I think this may be our last attempt to grow all of those except the arugula.
On the other hand, all of the plants have held up suprisingy well through the major frosts and cold weather we've been having here in Seattle. Even more impressive, at least in my mind, is that our cover hasn't blown away yet!
