Category Archives: garden

Potting Bench!

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We finally found a use for the awkward space behind the fencing and gate: it is now home to my new potting bench.

Yes, I now have a potting bench! Gavin built it for me out of redwood and pressure-treated lumber. It took him a few weekends, and the results are wonderful!

The potting bench is replacing the two plastic containers I got from Walmart in 2001 to house my stuff over winter break at college, they were unlikely to survive another winter out in the elements on the side of the house.

The gate keeps the kids out, and the bottom shelf keeps my bags of potting soil and mulch off the ground. I have a few other pots on stands along the other side wall, and while I have not yet potted anything on it, I am quite pleased with the results.

Mud!

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It has been raining the last few days. Instead of arguing with the boys about playing inside, they’ve been bundled in their rain gear and sent out to play. Our yard has become a mud pit and experimental zone.

See this dirt? It will be come mud, fabulous mud to be smeared ALL OVER the patio.

And mixed in the water table.

And liberally sampled by Baby Brother.

And then there will be a BIG WET PILE OF LAUNDRY.

And the boys will end up in the bathtub.

Backyard Fun

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Yesterday afternoon the boys were let loose to run in the yard while I cleaned up the kitchen (an unending task). After a time they wandered out of my immediate line of sight so I ventured out to check on them.

Turns out P had mastered the ladder on the climbing structure and he and O were taking turns climbing up and going down the slide.

This kept the boys happily occupied for nearly forty five minutes, until they were pink from the heat and I insisted they come in and have some water and a light snack before swimming lessons.

 

and now for something completely different: WTF-Leather

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Long-time readers of my blog will remember last years post about the WTF, and my attempts at making WTF-sauce. My attempts were wildly successful, but the popularity of the WTF-sauce waned as the novelty wore off.

Yesterday was O’s last Farm Day at his pre-pre school program and the mommies and daddies were invited to walk to the farm too. I struck up a conversation with one of the other mothers and the topic of excess fruit came up. I mentioned the WTF tree and it’s bountiful yields, and she suggested I use a dehydrator make fruit leather.

I don’t have a dehydrator (maybe one day), but I do have the internet, and one of my favorite food blogs had simple directions on how to make fruit leather.

As I already had several pints of pureed WTF I skipped down a bit to the dehydrating directions and then improvised some more: I used parchment paper instead of plastic wrap (I don’t trust the stuff in my oven), and I have no idea how long it was in for – a few hours here, a few hours there, it seems to have turned out mostly OK.
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May Day

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In both 2002 and 2005 I had the pleasure of being in one of the little towns near Augsburg for May Day. Instead of workers rights and civil unrest, the Germans celebrated the arrival of spring, erecting a giant may pole, serving lots of food and getting quite drunk.

Today we opted to celebrate more in line with the German tradition (minus all the beer): we grilled burgers, ate outside for the first time since last year, and the boys got played in water table.

It was Patrick’s first time at the water table (and outside on the patio without being held) and with the help of Oliver, he got soaked to the skin. Oliver also helped to “wash Baby har!” and make a “road!” of water all over the patio.

    

I suspect this is going to be come a recurring theme over the summer, so I need to find Patrick some shoes that can hold up well to getting wet a lot. Hopefully I can find some in the box of shoes O’s outgrown (although P has larger pudgier feet than O did at this age and O was 11 months in the dead of winter). I suspect there will be a pair or two from last summer, or the summer before that fit, I just need to figure out the American vs. European sizing and find all the size-labels.

Weird-Tree Fruit Sauce

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Once upon a time a Girl from Suburbia, Tx. got married and moved to the Urban outskirts of Boston. After a year of bustling City Life, she and her husband moved to Not-Quite-Rural California for job opportunities in last Slightly Urban outpost before the Pacific ocean.

After a year of life in West County they bought a house, which was blessed with Great Potential, and cursed with a Weird Tree* in the front yard.

They pruned the Weird Tree shortly after they took ownership of the house, and then Things Happened and the Tree became Seriously Neglected. Every year the Weird-Fruit Tree grew bigger. It sprouted Weird-Tree Fruit which hung heavily on the branches, occasionally ripping them off. The WTF also dropped into the jasmine below. It rotted, festered and stank.

After two summers of Rotting, Festering and Stinking WTF (and several large branches ripping off the Tree) the couple took action, did some serious pruning, and thinning of the WTF, filling the green bin (yard waste) to the brim.

The Girl from Suburbia looked at the buckets of WTF that had splatted wastefully into the asphalt. After almost four years in West County she had imbibed some of the Local Crazy (and seen the signs for canning materials at the local hardware store), and felt compelled to do something with the WTF.

She searched the internet and came across a recipe for WTF-butter that could be made in her crockpot (she’s got one so she may as well use it, right?)

Six-to-seven pounds of WTF hardly made a dent in the Tree’s bounty, but it was a starting point and what the recipe called for. After an afternoon of peeling and coring, she realized it would not all fit in the crockpot (per the recipes directions), so she ran it through her cuisinart food processor (she’s got one of those too!) and then filled the crockpot to the brim. She liberally modified the recipe, cut back on the sugar, omitted the water entirely (the WTF were quite juicy once they were grated), and switched out the spices for cinnamon and nutmeg (what she had on hand).

After a few hours bubbling away on high she ran it through the food processor again using a different blade, and then simmered it for a few hours in her large cast-iron enamel pot (using all the cool kitchen gadgets!) before ladling it into pints (leftover from a very failed persimmon chutney experiment), and finishing them off in a pot of boiling water.

She offered the pot scrapings to her toddler to sample, he refused. Her husband said he “needed to try it on something” and her babysitter said it was “tasty” and it “would go well over ice-cream” (but she’s also being paid, there might be some bias). She re-named the concoction WTF-Sauce, because the consistency was more like Apple Sauce than Apple Butter.

So tomorrow the Weird-Tree Fruit Sauce is going to go on top of waffles, and if all else fails, when the baby hits six months it will become a staple of his beginning-foods diet. WTF-Sauce and rice cereal.

*The tree is an Asian Pear Tree

yardberries!

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Today is Juneuary 4th. It has been cold, grey and rainy for a few days, and this trend is set to continue through early next week.

This afternoon there was a break in the rain and Oliver and I picked the seasons first batch of strawberries. There were more than I expected, just over a dozen. Several had been pre-sampled by birds and other creatures, several more were super-over-ripe to the point of being black and moldy (I should probably go in with gloves and pick them out so O doesn’t get into them).

We sampled a few of them on the way into the house, they’re quite good, and I suspect they’ll be excellent with waffles at breakfast tomorrow.

Spring in our backyard

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This morning Oliver and I were up early and out in the backyard pulling weeds, sweeping and trying to make a difference. Gavin joined us, and did some preliminary power washing. Later, Gavin and Oliver tested out the hammock.

I may be slightly biased when I say this, but I think our backyard looks better than it has in previous summers, and is only continuing to improve. Thanks to liberal use of cardboard, weed paper and mulch, there have been fewer weeds to pull this spring, and O has made a very capable weed-pulling assistant.

All of our plants survived the winter, and they are all showing signs of new growth. The $12 peach tree from Costco is showing signs of life, my herb barrel was in much need of pruning, and we moved the olive tree further away from the play structure.

We rinsed off the patio furniture. O was quite helpful putting the whirligigs and assorted garden decor out, sadly I still need to mend my gnome stakes. Gavin hooked up the drip system again, so my mint pots, newly added Lemon Balm, and other plants should should should survive the summer in spite of my neglect.

The weather today has been quite lovely, although today’s high was 63, as long as you stayed in the backyard on the sun-baked patio and didn’t get too much of a breeze (or too wet). When the wind picked up, we put the umbrellas down and came inside.