house potatoes

We came home today with 4 new baby chicks:

We’ve been thinking about raising chickens for eggs for years and years, and today we took the Love Apple Farm backyard chicken keeping class in Santa Cruz.  They spend the day telling you about the ins and outs of starting a flock and send you home with week-old chicks and a brooder set.

The brown speckly one is an Araucana, yellow is Buff Orpington, black is Black Cochin, and the one with a pom pom on its head is a White Crested Black Polish.

They alternate passing out every few minutes with cheeping around.  Super cute.  Holding them feels like holding fluffy air.

2nd haircut of the year, according to the Dave Wilson Nursery backyard orchard guidelines.

Everything got chopped in half, and things crossing the center got entirely pruned off. It went from taller than me to shorter than my shoulders.

It’s been an unusually cold start to the summer, and even now, the days are low 70s and the nights are mid-50s.  I blame that, and the late plant starts, on the poor showing our veggie garden has had.

So far, we’ve had 2 real “harvests”.

The first one turned into a salad:

And the 2nd is what we found after we came back from the weekend.  Of course the cherokee tomatoes decided to ripen while we were camping, so animals got 2 out of the 3.

Tally:

• 6 lemon cucumbers (it’s really starting to go now)
• 8 japanese oxheart tomatoes
• 3 cherokee purple tomatoes (2 fed to animals)
• 0! green zebras
• maybe almost a pint of sungold cherry tomatoes, 4 at a time
• 3 zucchini
• 0 watermelon (blossoms not getting fertilized)
• 3 haricot verts

The fact that I remember the exact single digit count of everything is pretty sad. At this rate, they are all going to really produce right after we get to Japan, boo.

The garden, as of 2 weeks ago:

I was going to post about the front yard chronologically, but I don’t think that’s happening.

We took down the gimpy old eucalyptus back in February. It was big enough to be considered a heritage tree, which meant that you needed a permit in our town. A bit sad, but consider: 1. not a California native 2. drops dangerous large branches 3. highly flammable 4. ugly as heck.

I took the morning off to watch it come down. It was very exciting.  We stayed inside to avoid getting squashed by large things falling down.  Some of the plants in the front yard weren’t so lucky.

We got a lot of pretty big stumps out of it.

The plan is to furniture-ize some of them into benches or end-tables after they dry for a year.  (I saw a beautifully simple end table once that was just a rectangle made out of a log, with all the heart grain surfacing in the center.  But I suspect sanding an existing stump like this might be more within our abilities.)  The rest will be fuel for camping — the weird knot was sacrificed at Ocean Beach this weekend.

I planted a native western redbud to replace it.

April – May is the time for wildflowers in California, and so now is about the time to try saving seeds.

With California poppies, the seed pods are ready when they feel a bit dry and start to split at the end. The seeds are black and round.  If you pick them too early, the pods will still be green, as will the seeds inside.

middle 2 photos show an immature seed pod and its insides

For clarkia, you wait until the pods start curling/splitting at the ends as well.  Instead of one chamber, like a bean, it’s got 4 tubes.  You can break across and shake them out into an envelope or split it along its length. The seeds are dark and a bit papery / wedge-shaped.

This one is a volunteer salvia that showed up in the front yard.  As near as we can guess, the dark bracts + red petals means that it’s the Forest Fire variety.  Once the petals fall off and the bracts look dry, you can pop seeds out of the bracts by squeezing them.

I think I picked the garlic too early.  They are all tiny.

But the internets said to harvest when the leaves were 1/3 brown (6 green leaves left) even if they were too small, so I worried and pulled them up.  I bet I could have left them in another month.

the biggest one — all the leaves had died

Useful link about harvesting and curing garlic: http://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/growing.htm#anchor17762007

In May, we spent a lot of time prepping the garden since it was getting a bit late to be planting things. It ended in a marathon session over Memorial Day weekend.

Lawns were turned into veggie beds!

Compost was sifted and used!
(A whole bin turned into 1.5 wheelbarrows.  It looked mostly like pine needles, bugs, and worms.)

Trellises were made!  Drip irrigation was rerouted!

Plant starts were planted!

• lemon cucumber (2 of 3 eaten by bugs)
• tomatoes: japanese oxheart, green zebra, purple cherokee, sungold cherry
• golden bantam corn

So were seeds.

• zucchini (hasn’t sprouted after 2 weeks)
• basil (also has not sprouted)
• purple basil (1 of 2 sprouted patches dug up by squirrels)
• moon and stars watermelon (Steve actually had been growing this for a month in a yogurt cup)

If Steve is up to it, he can describe how he made the trellises, tomato cages, and compost sifter.

Turns out 10-12 plants is just right for us (enough to eat once per week).
Can be cooked:
European style = pop out, boil, peel
Chinese style = pop out, saute
Next year, I’d like to try growing English peas. Those things are like $7/pound at the market!

It looks like we will have 5 cherries this year from our 1-year-(+ however many other years it grew in the nursery)-old cherry tree.

The front yard was a pretty daunting thing to tackle, so we first tried the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the road.
After reading some blogs about removing lawns, I followed (with help from S) the general recommended method. It took us about 2 or 3 weekends.

1. Turned over all the sod with a shovel. This took the longest.
2. Got cheap mulch at municipal dump. It took 2 trips and 5 big garbage bag fulls for only ~1-2″ of coverage.
3. Spread out newspaper on top of sod, then mulch
4. Planted things: I bought a few CA natives at the Hidden Villa biannual sale
- pacific coast iris (lavendar lace)
- conejo buckwheat (said to be sulfur yellow)
- san francisco wallflower (said to be pale yellow)
- and two little satellite plants off the parent penstemmon & mexican sage I already had.
I was still going for a purple/yellow/silver scheme at the time.
5. I found random bricks and used them to edge against the neighbor’s weedy grass hellstrip so it wouldn’t creep in.

pink circles = new plants

before and after

during and after

You can’t see much because the plants are still tiny and there’s debris from other yard work. The grass is gone for good, and I’ve only had to weed a little here and there. All the plants survived, though the penstemmon shrunk back to a tiny little sprout, and I suspect people like stepping in it when they get out of their cars.

In the fall, we dumped a whole bunch of extra pine needles on top. Don’t do that — weed seeds really like settling in there.

And a week ago the wallflower bloomed for the first time.