Tonight's dinner was, I think, my favorite kind. It was brought to us largely from our garden. Green beans from the garden. Couscous with zucchini and basil from the garden, plus chick peas and feta. Homemade crusty wheat bread with basil butter (again, basil from the garden). This is how I want to eat all the time. Good protein, clean flavor, herbs, freshness, and stuff I grew or made myself. I'd need about three times the garden space I currently have, or more, if we were going to make a real go of growing most of our own vegetables... and wouldn't it rock to have some blueberry bushes like Jack's parents have, and/or a couple of citrus trees? I'm dying for more space to grow greens, and I want to try winter squash this year after some of the summer stuff is out of the way. Lumber and dirt would cost a lot upfront to make a super-expanded garden, not to mention the carpentry hours to build more raised beds. At least my husband does carpentry for free. Sometimes I feel like I'm always planning the next season. Though I love the sprouts and flowers and vegetables I'm seeing, I'm always itching for the chance to try new things the next time.

Anyway, this is all to say that I really enjoy deliberate growing and cooking when they're this closely tied together. I enjoy growing for its own sake, and cooking for its own sake, but it reaches a wonderful new level when they're intertwined, when I've planted the seeds and nurtured the plants that sprouted the vegetables we're enjoying for dinner. I'd imagine it would feel much the same way to raise a calf, then make butter or cheese from her milk. Don't worry. I'm not looking into livestock just yet. However, I know too many chicken people, and they have definitely tempted me with the promise of quirky pets and fresh eggs. (Z and Lauren, meet Jon and Emily.) I already have names picked out for our someday chickens...

Also, can I just say how amazing it is to watch my children take up this cause of mine? Kent is a wonderful helper, going on green bean treasure hunts with me, and turning on the sprinkler, and getting so excited about the growth of vegetables and herbs even though he cares nothing for eating them. This summer's corn crop will be a little present from me to him, since our carrots fizzled out last year, and corn on the cob and raw carrots are basically the only vegetables he enjoys. I want to reward his hard work and excitement with something he really loves eating. Dean is too young to harvest much, but is an avid leaf grabber, and he eats herbs straight from the garden. He'll just walk around the back yard with a sage leaf in his mouth. He also loves my cooking, at least for now. Today, when I harvested our very first okra pod and then sliced and fried it, he got his first taste of that amazing snacky thing and couldn't get enough. And I noticed that our watermelon plants have three teeny-tiny bumps already, so all of us shall watch those grow with much anticipation of the sticky summer days to come.

Even though Kent doesn't do the eating part of our vegetables, he still loves to help in the kitchen, so today I gave him my old job from when I was a kid: snapping the beans. I showed him how to snap them in half so the two halves are almost the same size, because his first few were about 1/5 and 4/5. He was so darn proud of himself once he got the hang of it. It reminded me so much (and I told him this) of the day not so many years ago when he sat with my grandmother in her living room and watched her snap beans.


This afternoon (don't you love his determined expression?)


Kent and my Granny, September 2008

So I'm calling this whole thing Lifestyle Gardening. Gardening for the kind of life you want to have. Last week, we picked and immediately took some green beans to our very good friends who live about ten minutes away, just because we were thinking of them and wanted to bring them some of our harvest. And I had so many green beans yesterday that I shared some with our neighbor, and she returned with a finished dish about an hour later for me to sample. I barely know her, but my garden brought us together. That's just awesome. Flowers are beautiful, but I feel like I have to concentrate my efforts. I want to grow things that mean something and that nourish my family, and that I can share to nourish other people. So each year, I ask my husband for a new raised bed, and I continue the dreaming that, over time, works its way into magic on my plate.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 5/17/2011 09:56:00 PM
•  5 comments

We had a hard freeze last night, so this morning some of our less hardy plants are starting to shrivel up. The basil plant looks terrible and will be completely brown by tomorrow, I'm sure. The pumpkin vine has also started to wither, so today, Kent and I scooted out to the garden with a large knife and cut one of the pumpkins off the vine. The second one may never completely ripen, depending on how that vine is doing, but I figured the one that's basically ripe can stand to come inside now. I washed it off, then weighed it, and it's a whopping 13 pounds. It will surely make many delicious pies and raviolis. And it's already made one little boy very proud of himself and his budding (ha) gardening skillz.

Labels: flora, Kent, photography

• posted by erica 12/07/2010 11:02:00 PM
•  1 comments

Kent's pumpkin patch has two pumpkins that have been growing and ripening for the past two months. They're just days away from being ready to pick, at which point they will be made into all sorts of delicious holiday pumpkin concoctions. I still think it's magical that we can grow things like pumpkins in our yard.

Labels: flora, photography

• posted by erica 12/02/2010 02:59:00 PM
•  2 comments

I've decided we have to grow pumpkins every year. This is the most exciting plant I've ever seen. The vine is lovely, with all its spirally sprigs popping out everywhere, the broad dark leaves make a neat canopy, and the huge flowers are such a brilliant orange color. For a while, all of the flowers were male flowers, so they just fell off and no pumpkins grew underneath, but I loved the vine even then. And now that it has a few female flowers, one of which is already making a sizable pumpkin... well, it's basically the coolest plant ever. Also, it has long since spilled over the side of our raised bed and is slowly taking over that quadrant of the back yard. Kent is pretty thrilled. He wants to check on it every day, and the pumpkins do not disappoint; they get visibly larger overnight, so there's always progress. When the kids are a little bigger, it would be really fun to measure and weigh the pumpkins each day and chart their progress.


See these amazing blooms? Our bees have never been happier.


This is the first pumpkin as of about a week ago.


Here's the same pumpkin as of this morning. It's bigger than my hand, and the outside is kind of furry. I have no idea how big it'll get before it turns orange, but I'll try to post a pumpkin update.

When I made pumpkin ravioli a few months ago, I made up a little song to get Kent interested in trying it. As with most new foods, though, he is more excited about the idea of it than the actual eating of it. Still, he talks about making his pumpkins into pumpkin ravioli. And to make his parents melt, when he sings the song, he says, "rabioyi." Oh, how I adore three-year-old speech. Considering the fact that we have pumpkin in the freezer from last year, and we got two pumpkins from the pumpkin patch this weekend, I see many pumpkin delicacies in our future. Perhaps there will be pumpkin gifts for family at Thanksgiving, if they're ready by then.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 10/15/2010 10:12:00 AM
•  3 comments

Kent is away. He's on a road trip with Jack's mom to Oklahoma for a family reunion, and Jack, Dean and I are going to fly up in two days to join them. Except for our hospital stay when Dean was born, this is Kent's first real time away from us. I know he's going to have a blast. I also know that, as much as I've been craving some time away from him and a chance for him to bond with a grandparent, I already miss him. He's so big, going on a road trip without me.

As soon as Dean and I came home from lunch, I got started on clearing off our monstrously messy computer desk. I sifted through a few papers and started organizing Kent's art supplies, and then I came across a folder from the first church women's retreat I attended a few years ago. They had given us notebook paper to jot down thoughts over the weekend, and I found a little mini-essay I had scrawled. I had completely forgotten about it, but as soon as I started reading, I remembered exactly what it felt like to visit Feliciana for the first time on that spring weekend, to sit outside on a bench overlooking the slope of pine trees and the glassy lake in the distance. It's a beautifully still space, a magical escape. What I saw was this:

"As I sat outside, I scanned the grounds and admired the slender long-leaf pines. The tallest and straightest caught my eye first, but then I noticed that not every tree had such a clear and unembellished way about it. Some forked early, with mighty branches reaching out in all directions. Others were smaller, younger. Before I knew it, I found myself searching for the most crooked that might stand in opposition to the straightness of the others. Suddenly, the trees became to me a community of individuals, each with its own separate path to the sky. Because, in spite of the twists, forks, and sideways growth, they were, all of them, stretching ultimately upward to be guided by the sun. They were all sisters and brothers, parents and children in a glorious lineage of greenness and vitality. How could I not look for that crooked pine? It was the one capable of reminding me that, though I have surface incongruities, I have a family. I also have something that is all my own — the spontaneous perfection of individualism that is treasured by God."

Keep in mind that I wrote this before children, before abandoning a PhD, before I took a hard look at my life and realized academia for its own sake was not my calling. And yet, I still knew that I was a crooked pine. I was grappling with my place in the world, and as usual, was crafting an elaborate analogy to explain it all.

I love being a mother. LOVE. My choices have led me right to this spot in life, this frustrating, exhausting, beautiful spot. I couldn't be luckier. But man, it's nice to have some time to be inside my own head again.

Labels: church, flora, Freude, observations, SAHM

• posted by erica 8/11/2010 02:13:00 PM
•  2 comments

Pesto tortellini and green beans, with green beans, basil, and parsley from our garden. The tortellini is not from our garden. If there were plants that grew tortellini, and I had them in my garden, I would never need to go grocery shopping again.


We're getting beautiful clusters of cherry tomatoes. Just today, Kent and I were out there scouring for veggies, and since he has a lot of trouble finding green beans among the vines, he was looking for red tomatoes. I thought surely he'd be done soon, but he just kept yelling, "I see a tomato that's ready to be eaten!!" then picking it and dropping it into the bowl. At dinner tonight, he said that when Dean got bigger, Dean could look for tomatoes and he could look for green beans. I told him that was a great idea and that it was probably going to happen next summer.


I started a bunch of okra plants from seed, and there are four nice-sized plants in our garden and a couple of other small plants in a pot that are producing pods. They make these gorgeous pale yellow flowers, then after the flowers die, the pods start growing in their place, and they grow fast. If I see one that looks about ready to eat (3 or 4 inches), I have to get it that day, otherwise it gets huge and really tough and it's not as yummy. We get 2 or 3 pods per day, so I just rinse them and keep them in the fridge until we have enough to bother cooking. Tomorrow we're having some with red beans and grits.

This gardening business is fun stuff. I definitely need a second bed next year.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 6/10/2010 07:45:00 PM
•  2 comments

I just pulled nine green beans out of our garden. NINE! Guess what we're having tomorrow with dinner?

There are several juliet tomatoes (a cherry variety) sprouting out, thinking about turning red. I finally wrestled the tomatoes into cages today, far too late to be doing that because I seriously damaged a few of the more stubborn stems. Next year, I'll try to remember to put the cages around them before they're three feet high.

I think I put the plants too close together, in all my excitement about growing different things. I was afraid of that when I planted everything, but now it's very apparent. The peppers barely have enough room to grow, though they're looking a little happier without tomatoes sprawled all over them. The okra plants are doing well too, though they're not producing any flowers yet, so it'll be a while before we get to enjoy any of them. And just as I knew it would, the mint is already going nuts. Time for mint tea and Greek salsa (tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, mint, and parsley). FYI, Greek salsa is really excellent paired with hummus and flatbread. We'll have to make spring rolls with some of the mint, too. Mmmm. Any other suggestions for using mint, like syrup, or something I could freeze?

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 5/02/2010 08:17:00 PM
•  0 comments

Possibly the best looking loaf of bread I've ever made.


Green beans in the garden! We ate one raw last night. Kent said it didn't taste very good, but Jack and I disagreed. It tasted like success to me.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 4/28/2010 05:47:00 PM
•  6 comments

Okra and green bean seeds just went into the ground last weekend, and they're already coming up. The plants that I started from seed several weeks ago, however, are doing a terrible job of staying alive. They sprouted inside but then stopped growing altogether, so I transplanted them outside to see if being in the garden would help their morale. No such luck so far. I might have to buy tomato, pepper, and herb plants, but that would be okay. It worked last year.

Kent is amusing us with language funnies. He's trying to synthesize verb tenses he doesn't know, which is pretty cool, but he comes up with some silly stuff on the way to the right answer. For example, when trying to decide the past tense of "to pick", he arrived at "pook" (rhymes with "took"). And his new thing this week is the negative version of "I am", which is apparently "I amn't." Some days, like today, I find myself wanting to sell my toddler to the highest bidder, but the cuteness helps mitigate all of my frustration with this amazing developing person. Free will is annoying.

Dean's new signature move is pooping, then immediately falling asleep. Also, he's incredibly cute, sleeps a lot, and is still as squeaky as ever, as Anilia and her family can attest since they were here all weekend for a wonderful visit.

I finally got my containers from the milk bank a couple of weeks ago, and I'm borrowing an electric pump from a friend for Project Milk. So far I've collected 20 ounces, which means five of their little 4-ounce bottles. I have cute flower stickers procured from Target, and Jack is making me a sticker chart to keep me motivated. As if helping other babies isn't motivation enough, I now have girly stickers, too. I'm going to be borrowing freezer space from at least one person, because there's no way that 50 of these bottles are going to fit in our freezer. The logistics of pumping while parenting two small people are kind of tough some days, but it's worth it.

Over and out, so I can live to fight another day.

Labels: Dean, flora, Kent, Project Milk, SAHM

• posted by erica 3/16/2010 07:58:00 PM
•  1 comments

Both last Friday and this past Friday at the midwife's office, I was 1 cm, 50% effaced. So it goes.

I'm having a lot of contractions when I've been on my feet, and since I've had some serious bursts of energy this week, there's been a lot of activity. I really thought my cervix would have changed somewhat, but it hasn't, so I'm still. Just. Waiting. Rather than being painless like the contractions I had during my labor scare of a month ago, they've started to hurt just a tad, leading me to think that they probably are somewhat productive and might still mean my actual labor will be shorter. But I have zero intuition about this sort of thing.

While I wait, I'm trying to strike a balance between making a lot of plans (which have the potential to just fall through) and being on a state of high-alert all the time. Another couple of weeks of this might make me crazy, though. My due date is 6 days away, and if it comes and goes with a whole lotta nuthin' going on, I may not be a pleasant person to be around.

There's a flurry of upcoming celebrations, not even counting our impending progeny: Jack's birthday is the 12th, then Valentine's Day is two days later, and then Mardi Gras is two days after that (which really means that Mardi Gras is ongoing for several weeks and will be *over* on the 16th). I know I'm not expected to do much of anything for these celebrations, but it would be nice if I had some clue what to do for Jack's birthday, at least. He is the love of my life, and I enjoy celebrating his existence. The only thing I've decided is that I want chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine's Day, and I'd even be happy to make them myself with some fresh berries from the market. Yes, I'll say it again: I LOVE Louisiana's growing season. My mom will be in town that week, during all three aforementioned celebrations, so I'll make her some chocolate-covered pretzels or something similar since she doesn't like fruit. Or maybe we'll have fondue that day. Or maybe I'll be in the hospital, or home but barely walking, and I should just stop trying to make plans. See, this is my problem.

Kent and I started most of our garden plants from seed this week, so they'll just get to sit in the window and germinate in their little cardboard trays while we wait for Dean. I may run out of space in the garden, but so far, we've planted three hybrid varieties of tomatoes — Beefmaster (huge and red), Jubilee (medium and yellow), and Juliet (grape-like and red) — plus sweet peppers, basil, parsley, and Kent's various seeds (sunflowers from last year, plus whatever we get from his watermelon and pumpkin cups). I'll also be starting okra and green bean seeds in the ground sometime in late February or early March. I cannot WAIT to have okra. That's the one I'm really pinning my hopes and dreams on this year.

I've just made a batch of meatballs for Kent and me, most of which have gone into the freezer for future spaghettis and meatball subs. I love homemade meatballs, especially since I get to make them nice and moist (a little ketchup and sour cream, yum), and I add carrots, onions, and spinach to up Kent's veggie intake. A sweet friend of ours is bringing by a couple of freezer meals today for us to have around after Dean arrives, and I think some of my mom friends in town are going to organize meal drop-offs as well. This is all very helpful, because not only did we LOVE having food brought to us last time, when our church stepped in to help with that, but also I have done very little food planning in all my nesting efforts. The extent of my food planning has been to make more room in the freezer. Winging it. I'm counting on a quicker recovery this time, based on the advice/experience of friends.

And now, more photos.

Series: Kent and the tomato cages







Biggest. Tower. EVER.


Kent sitting on a package of toilet paper, eating a strawberry. Note the nice haircut.


Sharing some Dean kicks

Labels: belly, flora, Kent, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 1/31/2010 04:02:00 PM
•  6 comments

I'm scheming about our vegetable/herb garden already. We've been having warm, sunny days lately, so even though it's only January and we're not past the danger of frost yet, I'm ready to get started. The raised bed had been completely overgrown this fall, and then when it was so cold in December, everything turned brown or grey and died except for two red peppers that were overrun with bugs by the time I noticed them. After taking a good look at the bed on Saturday morning and tugging on a couple of dead vines, I decided that Kent and I could clear it out pretty easily while Jack had some rest and study time, so we started pulling vines and piling them in our yard waste bin (an old trash can, which just makes it easier to drag stuff to our compost pile). Kent had a wonderful time tossing sticks and vines into the bin, and then he started playing with our sad, bent tomato cages (way too small for the plants we ended up producing). He lined them up and rearranged them in various ways while I finished the last of the pulling. The dirt underneath all of the dead vines is in great shape — dark and rich with lots of happy bugs in it — so we shouldn't need to buy too much soil or dig through our compost heap to find what little bit of compost might be in there.

After chatting with my grandmother yesterday about various options, I decided to go check out the seed packets at Lowe's and get some ideas of what to grow. I'm going a step further than last year, attempting to start everything from seed instead of waiting to see what plants I can find at the market or gardening stores. I feel like I have a lot more choices this way, and I'm excited to start the process earlier and have more ownership over the whole thing. Plus, if I fail miserably and nothing comes up, I'll still have plenty of time to buy plants and get them into the ground. Now, I just need to find a spot in my house where I can start the seeds that need to start inside. Hmm.

Tomatoes are a definite yes, probably 2 or 3 hybrid varieties, since our hybrids did well last year but the Brandywine plant (an heirloom variety I was really excited about) got some sort of horrid disease last year and we were never able to eat a single one. The onions never grew very well, I'm lukewarm on bell peppers, and I'm not interested in doing eggplant again even though it grew well last year. It's just so hard for me to get excited about *that* much eggplant. But what can I get excited about, day after day, week after week? Okra. I'm 100% sold on trying okra this year. Green beans are also high on my list, and my grandmother suggested the little French beans because their vines don't get as unruly as the regular large beans. I was briefly tempted by the packet of sugar snap peas I saw at Lowe's today, but then I read on the back that they're sensitive to heat. Ha. I think I'll skip those.

I'd love to have dill and cilantro, but they were so hard to keep alive last year that I think I'll just buy those fresh from the market like usual. The dill got fried and turned brown pretty quickly when the summer hit, and once the cilantro started producing flowers, I couldn't get it to make any more leaves no matter how much I trimmed it back. I have no patience for fussy plants. The basil and Italian parsley grew like rock stars last year, so I will happily invite them back, and I may try mint again, too. It's probably just as well that I keep the herb selection low so that I have more space for veggies.

I'm waiting until the weekend to get seeds, soil, and tiny cardboard planting grids that I can just break apart and put into the ground after the seeds germinate, but I couldn't resist getting Kent a couple of $1 Dixie cup gardens to get started today. He grew an awesome sunflower last year, and once it started dropping seeds late in the season, we gathered several of them in hopes of growing more this year from his original plant. The company that makes these little Dixie cups with seeds and a dirt pod also has watermelons and pumpkins, so even though it seems almost ridiculous to have either of those growing in our yard, we're going for it.

Since I won't be smacked over the head by first trimester nonsense this summer, I hope I'll stay more motivated and involved with the garden and all the veggies it produces than I was last year. I have images of my two boys digging around in the dirt year after year as our family learns more about gardening and we expand our efforts, and they're nice images. Dean will probably lie on a blanket or hang out in a carrier strapped to my chest for his first gardening summer, but next year, when he's toddling around, I expect him to be throwing himself headlong into the whole project. And Kent, of course, will be a master by then.

Labels: flora

• posted by erica 1/25/2010 02:14:00 PM
•  2 comments

I was pretty bummed that it rained so much at the end of the week, especially since we were going to go to a parade and get our tree on Saturday morning and couldn't do either because of the weather. However, it stopped raining by Saturday afternoon, and I snapped this photo upon leaving the house for the first time in three days (see aforementioned illness).

I love the juxtaposition of different plants and plant stages: the pine needles and dry leaves on the patio, the reflected long-leaf pines as a reminder of things that are evergreen, and the reflected live oak that has lost its leaves for winter. And then there's the texture of the clouds hovering above. I also think it's really cool that the hexagonal-shaped the patio umbrella appears to contain the dry leaves underneath, since it's the only thing that's dark enough to prevent light from reflecting on the table but rather allows the eye to look *through* the glass. Our glass patio table is constantly inspiring me because of reflections I catch in it, the way it refracts light, and the things I can see underneath it, sometimes all at once.

Labels: flora, photography

• posted by erica 12/13/2009 08:53:00 PM
•  1 comments

Oh my. Pregnancy and an almost-2-year-old. And that almost-2-year-old's birthday party in two days. It's getting exciting, people.

Yesterday was a rotten day in terms of how I was feeling. It was my first throw-up day, and I just wanted my mommy. I think I only had about three of those days when I was pregnant with Kent (though I had my two and a half months of constant nausea and motion sickness), and all of the incidents occurred when I was rushing around and trying to get a lot done. My favorite memory is of being doubled over by the side of I-10 on the way to the airport at Christmas, then getting to the airport too late for our very early flight because I just couldn't get it together. While I was being sick yesterday morning, Kent was in his room playing, and for some reason he found the sound of it hilarious, so he was giggling the whole time. I thought, "Well, at least I'm entertaining him." It actually made it a little more bearable, surprisingly. Afterward, we got through a fun playgroup and made it home in one piece, but once I realized he wasn't going to take a nap when we got home, I completely ran out of energy and spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the sofa with movies in the DVD player. Every time I moved, I felt the nausea hit me again, so I tried to remain motionless except for cooking myself a potato in the oven. I managed to hold off on calling Jack until 3:30, when I begged him to come home an hour early. Yeck. I'm really thankful that I have that option, but I can't do it often, or he won't have any vacation time for travels or for when the baby comes.

And there's Kent's party. I'm excited, even though I feel like crap on toast most days. Party prep is going well so far, and things are mostly under control. We're going to have a sunny (read: ridiculously hot) morning at the sprayground with friends, lunchy foods and a cake, and a book swap for all the kids so that everyone gets to go home with a new book and nobody feels like they have to bring a gift for Kent. There are a few gazebos at the sprayground, and a friend of mine who lives nearby has offered to get there early to help claim a gazebo, so we should at least have some respite from the sun while we're eating and visiting. When I asked Kent about a cake several months ago, he informed me that he wanted a yellow cake with blue frosting. This quickly became a Nemo party in my mind, so we're having Nemo and fishy decorations. I'm trying this recipe and making blue cream cheese frosting instead of the whipped stuff it calls for, because I never get tired of cream cheese frosting. Also, I assembled all the little treat bags today, with stickers, Swedish fish, Goldfish crackers, Nemo splash balls (we have to have SOME kind of water toy), and a fun squiggly straw for each kid. Tomorrow's highlights will include grocery shopping for the remaining lunch items, and baking the cake. I'm also working in some rest time, since our wonderful friend Mary is taking Kent for part of the afternoon. I have really needed some rest time lately but have felt like a totally lame mom for popping him in front of a movie every day, even though I keep telling myself that it's only for the next month or so.

The reason we're not having enough rest time is that Kent's naps have been sporadic for the last couple of weeks, because we've weaned. Celebrate this new phase of his big-boyhood! I always had nursing until age 2 in the back of my mind because of the World Health Organization's recommendation about how long to breastfeed, so considering we made it to within a week of his second birthday, I'm pretty happy with how the whole thing went. I had an incredibly easy time nursing him from practically the first day and felt so lucky that our nursing relationship was so long and prosperous, but it was time to nudge him off of that one last naptime nursing each day so that I could have my boobs back for a few months. They were telling me how ready they were, and I strongly believe in listening to my pregnant body when it tells me that it would like to devote all its resources to growing a new baby. Kent doesn't seem upset to have given it up, because we (Jack, Kent and I) talked for a couple of months about how he's growing up and doesn't need to nurse all the time the way babies do, and we also told him that soon it would be time to say "Bye bye, ya ya" (his word for nursing). There was also lots of positive encouragement about all the things he can do now that he's getting bigger, just so he doesn't think that growing up only means giving up things he likes. I loved involving him in the process instead of just springing it on him, and I think that if he were a pacifier kid I would have wanted to do the same thing. It's good for both of us that he's weaned, and since he was only nursing once a day, I haven't felt any ill effects like engorgement; the only ill effect is that it's very difficult to convince him to take a nap without that cue he's so used to having. Some days, I'm able to get him to fall asleep in the car and then put him in his bed when we get home, but if he's been asleep in the car for longer than 15 minutes, it doesn't work and he's just awake for the rest of the day. No amount of naptime routine seems to be doing the trick, and I'm not sure whether we'll ever get him back on a predictable after-lunch nap the way he was before. Several of my friends here in town have kids slightly older than Kent who have given up napping, often around the time they weaned, so I guess I'm bracing myself for the possibility that he's just going to be awake all day, every day. I feel like he still needs that afternoon nap, but if I can't help him fall asleep, we're kind of stuck. Anyway, that's not for any of you to worry about — I just wanted to share it.

Kent has made great strides with potty training lately, starting to tell us when he needs to go (though so far, it's only a couple of times a day that it occurs to him). I'm so proud of him, and he seems to be getting that it's something he should be proud of, too — he gets especially excited when he makes a poop in the potty and I sing the poopy song I made up for him. Today, he pooped on the potty shortly after we finished watching A Bug's Life, and Kent looked down in the potty and remarked, "K have grasshopper poopoo." I guess it's because it was brown like the grasshoppers in the movie... he says all kinds of weird stuff these days, and I love it. I decided that once I kick this first trimester nonsense, we're going to shift potty training into a higher gear, perhaps taking the bare-bottom approach and certainly getting some training pants. It would be amazing if he were mostly done with training by the time the baby comes, though I'll certainly expect accidents and some regression when he and I are both faced with such a drastic change to our routine.

In other news, Jack has basically taken over the gardening duties for two reasons: (1) I *hate* going outside in this heat wave, and (2) fresh vegetables are really getting to me, a random and most unwelcomed consequence of the first trimester. The sight/thought/mention of fresh tomatoes actually makes me gag. How bizarre is that, given my usual adoration of them?? I don't like it.

I was thinking yesterday about all this sickness and how I thought when I was pregnant with Kent that maybe we'd just have one kid, because it would be very hard for me to gear myself up for feeling this way again. Of course, I did it again anyway, and I don't think it's because I forgot how it felt. I think it's analogous to the 20-some-hour flight to Australia. If you want to see Australia, you just have to take that incredibly long flight. But then you're there, and you see Australia, and you think it was totally worth it even though the flight was obnoxious. This is all idle speculation, since I've never been anywhere in the Southern hemisphere, but I'm guessing that's what it feels like. So I get through it, because I love my son more than anything and I want him to have a sibling, and I want us to have another child to share our lives with.

And I'm still happy, even in the midst of feeling like crap on toast.

Labels: belly, Beta, Dean, flora, greening, Kent, kitchen adventures, LLL

• posted by erica 7/01/2009 08:41:00 PM
•  5 comments

Everything in the garden is still growing well, but while we were gone this past weekend, the tomatoes went nuts and decided to pull their cages over. The weight of all the branches and new tomatoes is too much for the tiny cages, apparently, and there's no way for me to prop them up unless I put a bunch of stakes all over the place. I decided just to leave them all crazy, in true "experiment" fashion.


Here's a close-up shot of the Superfantastic plant, which is attempting to pull its cage completely over the edge of the bed. We got our first reddish tomato from this plant a couple of days ago, and it's ripening happily on the counter with a handful of cherry tomatoes.


I can't get over how different the Brandywine tomatoes look, all squatty, with their very pointy leaves at the top of each fruit. There are about 15 of various sizes all over the plant at this point. Yay!


Kent's still having a lovely time helping. He only picks the tomatoes that aren't green anymore, but today, that meant he picked one that was a slightly greenish shade of yellow. Eh, it'll still ripen on the counter.


Check out the sunflower. It opened up on our arrival back home, and Kent is thrilled to pieces. He keeps saying, "K eat SUNFLAAAAAHHHHHHH!" I guess since we're eating everything else in the garden, he thinks this is edible too. I wonder what he'll do if it makes it to seeds and I hand him a pile of sunflower seeds.

Some of the eggplants are getting really big, but we still only have the one pepper, which my grandmother informs me is NOT a bell pepper, as I suspected. Her best guess is a banana pepper. Oh well. We can still eat it, and our CSA has no shortage of bell peppers for us for June and July. I also picked the first okra a couple of days ago but I still haven't eaten it yet. Soon, I think. Maybe tonight.

Labels: flora, greening, Kent, photography

• posted by erica 6/10/2009 09:20:00 AM
•  4 comments

In garden news this week, I resorted to getting ant spray. That's right, my garden is no longer organic, if it ever really was. It seems to have worked somewhat, though I think I need to do another treatment, because one of the eggplant plants has ants going into its stem now, and I think they're taking refuge in there. Nasty business, the whole thing. If they were just crawling around on the plant, I wouldn't really care, but they can destroy the roots and eat the plant from the inside out, and I'm feeling very defensive about my first gardening foray here.

Anyway, photos:


The coleus in our side yard is really shooting toward the sky now. Most of the plants have a long stem of flowers between 4 and 6 inches long, and they look really cool with all the different colors of foliage, and the pink and white dianthus in the background. Such a fun little garden patch.


The so-called bell pepper is doing great, but now I'm starting to wonder if it's a different kind of pepper because of this shape. Maybe it really is a bell pepper and it'll fill out and get rounder soon. Anyone have experience with these?


I've realized that even though the nice plant people at the farmer's market *said* they were selling me two Japanese eggplants, they actually gave me one Japanese and one of a different variety. I think. Here's the Japanese one, which is obviously long and skinny just like Japanese eggplant ought to be,


and here's the other eggplant, much squattier and bigger around, with green stems instead of reddish-purple (sorry for the lack of focus). There's nothing wrong with having two kinds of eggplant; I'm just surprised that they're turning out to be different.


The dwarf okra has produced one vegetable that looks like I could eat it soon. I think they stay red, and I read that they're supposed to be about 3 inches long when you pick them, so I might pick this one today or tomorrow and cook it up. It's kind of funny to just have one okra, but I only have the one small plant. It's like how the cherry tomato plant produces about one tomato every 2 days that we can eat, so we never quite get enough to make anything, just enough for a little snack. But man, those cherry tomatoes are delicious, so I don't mind.


I finally have Brandywines! There are several small and medium tomatoes on the plant at this point. I can't WAIT to eat them.


The Superfantastic has several big clusters that are on the verge of ripening. It's taking a great deal of restraint not to pick these and make fried green tomatoes, but I feel like I need to wait for the first one to ripen all the way just to make it official, and then I'll start picking some of the others when they're green.


Overall, the raised bed is starting to look like a jungle. The tomato plants are engulfing their cages, but they seem to be doing fine, so I'm not too worried. I know the plants grow better if they're not resting on the ground, but this is what I have at this point, so I'm just going with it. I think I'll have Jack build a shorter bed next year for the tomatoes and the sunflowers and whatever other plants are supposed to get ginormous, so that I'll be able to get bigger cages and let them grow higher while still being able to reach them. The sunflower is almost completely out of reach at this point (it's at the right of this picture, and is so tall it's out of the frame), but I still tip it downward each morning so that Kent can look at it. He'll be pretty surprised when it opens up and he realizes there's been a bright yellow flower in there the whole time.

Labels: flora, greening, photography

• posted by erica 6/03/2009 09:16:00 AM
•  2 comments

Bell peppers are starting to pop out. Aren't they adorable?


Cherry tomatoes! Kent is so excited to pick them when they turn red. Right now, they're only ripening one at a time, and he can't wait to pick them. I'm kind of torn about something, though — he keeps saying, "K eat tomatoes!" but he doesn't actually like the taste. Every time he gets one, he takes a bite and then spits out the rest. So I'm not really keen on giving him all our yummy veggies, but I would love for him to eat them enough that he gets used to the taste and starts to like them, the way I trained myself to like tomatoes when I was younger. It's not a big deal, I guess, but I talk to him a lot about not wasting things, and this seems to fall into that category. I suppose he needs a reward for his patience with gardening, so if he wants to eat a tomato, I should probably just let him eat it, even if I know that it would actually make it to my stomach if *I* ate it. Maybe I'll cut them in half and we can share them.

Related to the wasting thing is something else that makes me crazy: Kent sometimes picks the plant buds when I'm not looking. I try to take deep breaths and remind myself that he's too young to understand, but it makes me really frustrated that the things he plucks off will never have a chance to become vegetables we can eat. Patience. This is supposed to be an experiment, after all.


The Superfantastic is doing superfantastically. I cannot WAIT for one of these to ripen. Still no tomato activity from the Brandywine plant, but it has to be soon.


The sunflower taunts us with its incredibly slow opening process.


And here's my Little Lucy okra plant, generally a container plant but doing quite well in the garden so far. I saw several pointy things on it that I thought were tiny okras and that I figured would ripen and get bigger.


Turns out they're flowers, which I guess will become okras next. The flowers are such a beautiful, sunny shade of pale yellow that compliments the dark red and green foliage so well. I see now why people keep these as container plants, and not just for the food.

The only other piece of news is that a couple of ant colonies have moved onto the eggplants and have built little hills at the base of each eggplant plant. I actually called our local gardening show on public radio this past Saturday, and the host, Louis Miller, told me I could disturb the hills every day and they'd eventually move, or pour soapy water on them and effectively disintegrate the part of their bodies that helps them float so that they drown, or buy ant killer that's safe to use around vegetables. I tried the soapy water thing and tried not to think about drowning Flik and Princess Atta from A Bug's Life, though they built up another hill the next day, so I assume it didn't work. I've been poking the hill or knocking it over every day as well, and so far, that hasn't moved them, either. I'm kind of reluctant to use a chemical, even though he assured me I could find something safe, but that might be in the future, since I really don't want the ants to destroy the root system and kill my eggplants before they've had a chance to produce anything edible. Advice is always appreciated.

Labels: flora, greening, photography

• posted by erica 5/27/2009 09:25:00 AM
•  6 comments

We officially handed over our form and our check this morning to become members of the Port Hudson Organic Farm CSA. The weekly bushel distribution officially begins on June 6, but since we'll be gone one weekend in late June, we decided to go ahead and get some stuff today that would count against the week we're missing. We brought home 4 pounds of baby red potatoes and 2 dozen (well, baker's dozen) ears of corn! We also got to take a nice stroll around the farm to see all the ripening vegetables. The green beans looked beautiful, the tomato plants were staked and were bursting with green tomatoes just waiting for me to eat all of them, and the rest of the plants were just beginning their forays into fruit- and veggie-making.

Kent got to sit on their parked John Deere tractor for a minute, which was the highlight of his day and the thing he wanted to keep reminding us about when we got home. He has a John Deere tractor book, and I've learned that making things in his books come alive to him is one of the most fun things we can do with him right now.

We walked past the strawberry patch, and I knew it was just about the end of the season so I asked whether we could pick some and take them off their hands, hoping to get a bargain. Will, one of the owners, told us we were welcomed to try but that a lot of them were rotten already, but he said we could have them for free if we managed to find any, since he was about ready to pull the plants out. His wife, Thais, got us a basket to pick with, and Kent, Jack, and I hunted through the strawberry patch and managed to find a couple of pints' worth of delicious, sweet, perfect strawberries.






Here's a sign of how far I've come since my gardening has begun: there were bugs and worms all over the place, including crawling out of some of the berries as I turned them over, and I didn't freak out or shriek or anything. This is a major step for the woman who won't even pick up a dead cockroach off the floor, instead covering it up with something and waiting for her brave husband to get home. I sort of forgot about the bug factor when I signed on to help out and eat food from an organic farm, but it turns out not to matter quite so much as I would have thought.

I washed the berries as soon as we got home and stuck them in the fridge, knowing how quickly they can become overripe at this point in the season. After a nice lunch out with our engaged friends Jennifer and Brett, we all came back to our house so that Kent could nap, and we shared our berries with them over ice cream. There are still a bunch in the fridge that will be devoured tomorrow morning. I wish Kent would eat more than one berry at a time, but someday, he'll eat more normal food. Right?

Taking care of the corn has been a multi-stage process today that still isn't quite complete. I cut off the ends, soaked them, roasted them in batches of 8 (all that would comfortably fit in the oven at once), and am now about to go slice the cooked corn off the cob, some for freezing and the rest for some sort of corn salad that will be gracing us this weekend. Jack gets the special job of shucking, which is so easy when the corn is already cooked and the silks just fall right off.




Another sign of my progress: when I was shucking the ears that we ate for dinner, I found a tiny worm at the top of one of them (yes, a cooked worm — eww), and Jack found another. Again, I didn't freak out, and I had warned Jack about it so he didn't freak out, either. Worms are a natural part of growing things, and I get that now. Once I cut off the end where the worm had been, everything was just fine.

Kent, Corn Fiend Extraordinaire, dispatched two ears of corn by himself. He adores this stuff, and he does a great job of getting all the kernels.

I'm not sure yet what we'll do with the potatoes. My favorite way to cook potatoes is to dice them and roast them with olive oil, salt, and herbs, but I'm not sure whether we'll eat all four pounds that way or end up doing something different with the rest. Potato salad might be called for, since it is Memorial Day weekend and something inside me wants to have summer picnic/cookout food.

Off to take care of the corn before I fall asleep. 5:30 wake-up calls are not fun, and I need to catch up.

Labels: flora, greening, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 5/23/2009 09:08:00 PM
•  8 comments

Yogurt is good.

Yogurt with fresh berries is better.

And yogurt with local blueberries AND homemade granola? THE BEST!!

I used Alton's granola recipe here and was thrilled with the results, though be warned that it takes only about an hour to cook, instead of the hour and fifteen minutes he calls for. I pulled mine out of the oven just as it was on the verge of burning. Despite being a little darker than I would have liked, it's still delicious. Kent loves it, and I'm already thinking that yogurt, berries, and this sweet granola is going to be our go-to summer dessert. If only we could get Kent to eat yogurt again, like he did when he was a baby... alas.

I also used one pint of blueberries to make blueberry jam from the Joy of Cooking recipe, lest you people think I only use Food Network recipes. I can't wait to spread it on toast tomorrow. I think it might be way too sweet, but maybe it won't be. I just love that book, though, and I don't feel bad writing notes to myself in the margins, like to use less sugar next time.

In even more exciting food news, we're in the CSA! I know, I know — you've followed the saga, you've hoped and prayed for us... and today, I got an email from the farmer saying that they had a family unexpectedly move to Oklahoma (!) and that they had an opening for us. We're going to turn in our form and our money on Saturday morning, and in return, we get to take home all the corn and potatoes we could possibly eat, plus whatever else is ready by then. Yum. And huzzah!

I'm already pumped about finding new ways to use common ingredients, and each year, I get a little better at making sure most of our produce is seasonal. For example, we hardly ever buy strawberries unless they're from around here, which means January through June and supplementing with frozen ones from our local produce place, because California strawberries waste too much gas getting here and don't taste anywhere near as good when they've been picked early and ripened on a truck. This is pretty much my problem with all produce that's had to travel too far, though I do make an exception for avocados, because I love them. I make exceptions for all kinds of other stuff, too — I'm definitely not an ideal "eat local" person. I just think it's important for us to be aware of where our food is coming from and the resources used in getting it to us, because man, that's a lot of gasoline and manpower that could be used for better things.

I'm looking at our freezer space and thinking it might be about time to get a small chest freezer to hold stuff we want to store for later, like the pesto I'm going to make from our garden, and all this corn we're about to find ourselves swimming in. I guess I can make do for now, since I managed to find places to store all the cubes of baby food I was making this time last year.

One more bit of news: to replace the cilantro plant that was just taking up space in our garden and being annoying with its flowers and lack of edible leaves, I bought a Little Lucy okra plant (a dwarf variety). I get to be an okra farmer now!

Yes, I am totally geeking out on farming and produce.

Labels: flora, greening, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 5/21/2009 05:13:00 PM
•  3 comments

The sunflower is ready to pop open any day. I can barely reach it now — I actually had to stand up on the corners of the bed (which is two feet high) to take this photo. Kent has sort of forgotten that this is his plant, but I'm sure that once the flower pops open and he sees all the sunny yellowness, he'll remember to be excited again. Something I want to figure out: when the sunflower opens up and starts making seeds, how do I harvest some seeds to plant next year? I'm guessing that if we want to eat some, we just roast them with some salt, but I need to know how to preserve some of the others so that we can have a whole cluster of them next year.

The cherry tomato plant has several green clusters, with more to come. The Superfantastic tomato (seen here) has a few tiny tomatoes and one huge one that gets bigger each day. The Brandywine has yet to produce any fruit, but it has flowers all over the place, so I'm hoping they'll start coming out soon.

The flat-leaf parsley and basil are doing incredibly well. I've already harvested a giant pesto recipe's worth of herbs and put some of it in the freezer (I like Tyler Florence's recipe here), and I'm thinking it's about time to strip more leaves so that I can make another recipe. I just need more pine nuts, which I'll get when we go to Whole Foods in a couple of days.

I haven't talked much about the potted herbs, but I am absolutely loving the curly mint. The taste of fresh mint can't be replicated by anything else, and I hate spending $3 or $4 on a tiny package of fresh herbs at the store, so this is the first time that I've really been able to make a lot of stuff with mint. We made mojitos a couple of weeks ago, but they didn't quite turn out right. I couldn't figure out if they were too sweet, or not limey enough, or what, but they were sort of nauseating and they made me less excited about trying again. I'm excited to make Giada's dessert ravioli with orange-mint dipping sauce tonight. And now that we can get peaches, strawberries, blueberries, and watermelon from local farmers, I think we have a lot of minty fruit salad in our immediate future.




The onion stems are getting taller each week, leading me to wonder how I'm supposed to know when they're done. Do I just dig one up and taste it, or wait until they've reached a certain size? I put them in the ground a month and a half ago, and I think they were supposed to take about 2 months to mature, but of course I didn't save the package so I can't remember for sure.

Eggplant and bell peppers are still growing and making flowers. No vegetable-like activity yet, but I'm optimistic.

The one disappointment of the growing experiment is my poor cilantro. I pinch or clip all the flowers off every few days, but it seems to be putting all its energy into producing more flowers and has yet to grow any leaves that are worth eating. All the leaves are really thin and spindly and have never filled out. I've started thinking that maybe I should just let it make flowers and harvest some coriander (the seeds) instead... but I'm sort of giving up on it.

I also bought a dill plant at the market last week that has already turned brown, but I think it was the plant, not me. I've bought most of my plants from the nice plant people at the market, but I had to buy dill from the not-nice people because the nice people didn't have any, so I'm blaming the not-nice people. That's right, I'm shifting the blame.

We're definitely going to need more lumber to make a second raised bed next year. I'm already full of ideas.

Labels: flora, greening, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 5/20/2009 09:45:00 AM
•  4 comments