Seedling update

Last summer I was astounded to learn that the foot-tall potted tomato plants at the local green house (the ones that shouted "Feed me, Seymour!" when I walked by) had actually been planted nearly a month after the spindly, quaking, awkward tomato specimens in my basement. I assumed they were using some kind of super secret green house steroids, and that may still be the case, but more importantly I learned that proximity to the light is essential in regulating the rate at which the seedlings gain height.
So this year, I'm following the directions that sage oracle at the green house laid out for me. First, throw the seeds loosely into the growing medium and cover them lightly. Heat the trays from below. When they sprout, get them up into the light. After they show true leaves, transplant them up to their necks and keep them right in the lights.
Supposedly this will yield a super hearty tomato specimen ready to withstand the rigors of late spring (also known as July).
Here are the Stupice variety I planted. They are doing amazingly well. Their seed leaves are enormous and the true leaves are ready to come in. They are supposed to yield a large number of fruit about the size of a baseball that are good for all typical tomato uses, from canning to sauce to slice and eat.
These are the Wisconsin 55 variety I've planted. They are struggling to shed the seed pods and as a result, their seed leaves are a bit jagged and rough looking. Hopefully they rally soon. Both are heirloom seeds from SeedSavers Exchange and I've had mixed results with them previously. Most of my problems resulted from having growing the plants too tall and not hardening them off properly before planting them, so I'm hoping this year will be different.
I'm in the process of re-wiring the light rack they are growing in. I'm adding more bulbs, which I hope will further assist the plants in growing thick instead of tall. Stay tuned...

Splash of Color

In the wintertime everything seems to lose its color. We get a little tire of seeing the same white landscape, and there's not much we can do about what's outside. So instead we like to put up fun colors around the inside of the house.
This is a close up of the fabric we used to make new curtains for the kitchen. Lulu found a fabric designer she likes on the interweb and we've ordered a variety of interesting stuff from them.

Here's a little less of a close up. Some of the silvery parts are threaded with shiny metallic thread. This is just a simple one-piece curtain hanging on a spring-tension curtain rod, so we can move it around and take it down with no hassle. In the summer, the cats like to hang out in the open window, so we like to be able to move the curtain however we need.
So you end up with this. Our kitchen window looks out over the alley, and occasionally there will be folks walking by (more often when it's not minus 20 degrees...) and it's a little weird to be making diner and have someone walking their dog five feet away, looking at you. Maybe I'm too conditioned to the space you get living out in the sticks, but for me, the curtain is the way to go. It lets in some light, it's bright enough to liven things up, and I can make my morning coffee in my PJ's and not have to be accused of flashing anyone.

Fall Project

Here's a project we worked on and finished while waiting for the produce to ripen in the garden last Fall.
Lulu and I like to refinish furniture. Occasionally we find items that are well built or worth salvaging and we fix them up. This is a sideboard we found at the Goodwill for like 4 dollars. Notice the crooked drawers. The slides were so worn that the drawers hung like loose teeth.
I was able to save the awesome funkadelic orange and lime green patterned, fake velvet fuzz accented, 70's era contact paper drawer liner in its original splendor. Sadly, I was unable to find a roll of matching contact paper to line the other drawer.

The top looked like wood grain Formica, but turned out to be simulated wood grain contact paper, on top of bright orange contact paper, on top of heavily scratched wood grain Formica. It was a regular archaeological dig to get down to bare wood. Apparently contact paper played a prominent role in the decorating style of its previous owners.

This flashy pink sideboard is the refurbished and rejuvenated version of the crumbling Goodwill purchase. As you can see from the original pictures, it was falling apart. Now, it's one of the most unique items of furniture in our house. The top surface is treated with a type of paint that turns it into a chalk board.
Incidentally, that candelabra was initially black wrought iron. It's interesting what a little Robin's Egg Blue spray paint can do for you...

Snow Day!

I think I'll work on my basement nursery and get it ready for planting seeds. This year I intend to focus on starting only those items that need the extra growing time for our climate, such as tomatoes and peppers and a few squash. I'll direct sow the rest of the crops like beans and peas. I've read my Mother Earth News diligently over the winter and have learned several new tricks for maximizing our garden's productivity and enhancing biodiversity and microclimates (that last part is just for you, Lulu!) Stay tuned!

Winter Update

Here I am getting ready for my morning commute. I work 1.4 miles from home now and typically venture to work under people power. Now that it's deep into winter, I have to bundle up. I've modified my winter garb until I had the studly ensemble you see here.
The back pack is ideal for transporting my stuff, but some times it doesn't all fit, as is the case here where the monster size bag of Honey Nut Scooters protrudes from my pack, making it an official protuberance.
Layers, snow pants, and my headphones get me to and from work everyday.


By contrast, here I am on the first day of school, decked out in full dork regalia. Yes, I do roll the right leg of my pants to keep it out of the chain.
Since this picture, I've added fenders to keep the mud off my goggles and upgraded the seat. This bike is approaching ten years old and hasn't aged well. I hope to find a more suitable used bike before school starts again in the fall. I've considered getting actual saddle bags that are designed for bikes, but I really like the Publix milk crate, so we'll have to see what transpires.

The Harvest

A few weeks back we had several days of heavy rain with the first hard frost forecast for the season, so we went up to the garden to see what was to see. These are pictures of our two plots in mid harvest. We found that many of the tomatoes had begun to ripen and a mild frost at some point had weakened the plants enough that some of the fruit was falling off.


We collected 83 pounds of produce that day, mostly in tomatoes, and made our first batch of awesome tomato goodness. We went back up to the garden before the big frost was expected and harvested every green tomato we could get. These we divided up with TJ and we loaded our bounty onto a 4x8 sheet of hard board in the garage to ripen. We also put up a small table on the front porch and loaded it with plenty of green fruit.

Here's a peek at some of the cool stuff we grew. You'll see lots of tomatoes, but there are two kinds of squash shown here and a reddish husked breed of sweet corn that turned out surprisingly well. Slugs, centipedes and mammalian garden varmints got into our potatoes pretty bad this year, so our crop left a bit to be desired. We ate several batches of beets but lost the last one to the voles.

How to Eat Out of a Brain Bowl...

First we wanted fresh, firm tomatoes. These ones were collected from our garden and from the Farmer's Market in Duluth. We have them ripening here in the south facing windows of our three season porch.

Next, we prepare the tomatoes. After you quarter them, you roast them for about 40 minutes at 350 degrees. We drizzled some good olive oil over them and sprinkled some sea-salt and fresh cracked pepper, plus added some fresh, minced garlic before they went into the oven.
Here we are using our Foley Food Mill, a device that separates most of the seeds and the skins from the flesh of the tomatoes. We purchased ours at a second hand store and I had to bang out a dent in before it would work properly, but once we got going it worked like a dream. I think I prefer this approach over the large conical sieve and wooden paddle model. This one is compact and worked very well.
Here we added fresh chopped basil and rosemary to the velvety tomato goodness that our food mill created. We had both herbs growing in the back yard, so this batch of soup has some extremely fresh ingredients!
We cooked the soup for a bit to mix the flavors, then fried up some cheese sandwiches, poured the delicious tomato nectar into our brain bowls and, voila! Aub found the brain ware on Etsy, an on-line artist's studio. These were hand crafted and shipped to us for just this kind of culinary excitement. We also have matching brain mugs, so we may need to experiment with some Bloody Mary mixes for those...