Weedy Wednesday: The Garden Before & After plus Free Book!

It has been a strange spring, weather-wise, and getting the garden in has been trickier than usual. (It has either been way colder than usual or way hotter than usual, and we haven't had our usual spring rains until just last week.)

But as of last weekend, everything is finally in the ground and about 70% mulched (I have to buy more straw later this week before I can finish the rest). I'm a lazy gardener, really. I tend to do a lot of work in the beginning so I don't have to do much later.

Here's what it looked like a few weeks ago:

Garlic was about the only thing growing, since it gets planted in the fall.

A tiny patch of spinach that overwintered.

Yes, that says 90 degrees F. In early May.

The peas are one of the first things to sprout.

Here's what it looks like now:

The garlic!

Spinach patch with new planting of spinach & lettuce and a tomato.

The peas, mulched with straw to keep the soil moist and keep weeds down.

Another finished bed.

Who can tell me what I planted in the bed above? I'll give you a hint: there are two varieties of one kind of vegetable on either side of something different in the middle. The first person who guesses right gets a free signed book! (Or his or her choice, even.)

Belated Weedy Wednesday: A Lovely Pile of...Poop?

Okay, yes, it is late Thursday night and by the time most of you see this, it will be Friday. What can I say, it has been a long week. Now that I'm back in the garden again, I'm hoping to start posting regular garden and yard pictures and updates on, you know, Wednesdays. For now, just work with me, will ya people?

As usual at this time of year, there is a mad dash to get everything in the ground in time to take advantage of the limited growing season we get here in Upstate NY. But this year the process has been complicated by Extremely Rude and Erratic Weather. It stayed cold long past the time when the planting season would usually have begun (there was still snow on the ground in early April, when I'd normally plant lettuce, spinach, peas, and such) and then it got insanely hot. Before getting cold again. (We've had a frost warning this week and there is another one for Friday night.) So the planting has all been compressed into an even smaller window than usual, and I'm just hoping for the best.

On the bright side, I got a huge truck load of 2 year old composted horse manure, which will give my garden a much needed boost (and no, it doesn't smell at all). This made me ridiculously happy. And since my garden is across the yard from where the pile was dumped, is negating the need for any visits to the gym anytime soon, as I shovel a load into a wheelbarrow, push it across the yard, then shovel it back out again inside the garden. I'm so happy about the manure, I don't even mind the hard work. Yes, I do realize this means I need to get a life.

Ye Olde Pile of Poop and a yellow wheelbarrow

Manure pile to the left by the barn. Garden to the right.

In we go

And a happy raised bed topped off with manure

The strawberries, and the garlic behind them, get sidedressed, which means that the manure is spread between the rows.

Some other early sights in the spring garden:

A handsome frog, sitting on the pond filter, looking unimpressed by my efforts

Fish, ditto

The big green patch is spinach that overwintered and the little bitty things are spinach and lettuce started this season. The long tomato in the cage has already had to be covered a number of times due to frost threat, so the rest go in later.

Eggplant plants on the left and onions on the right, from the local garden center. They're still pretty spindly looking.

Do you plant a garden? Or do you wish you could? What is your favorite thing to grow?

The Herb Harvest: Basil Uses, Magical and Mundane

We are in the midst of harvest season now. The Fall Equinox (also known as Mabon, and the 2nd of 3 harvest festivals on the Wiccan Wheel of the Year) is either the 22nd or the 23rd, depending on which calendar you look at. Either way, in most parts of the country, the harvest is in full swing, and most gardens are beginning to slow down as the nights grow cooler and the days grow shorter.

One of my favorite things to harvest at this time of year are herbs, so I've going to do a short series on a few of the ones I use the most. I tend to grow herbs that have multiple purposes: culinary, medicinal, and/or magical. Many herbs fall under this category, and they often have lovely flowers that attract bees and other beneficial insects. They're usually easy to grow, and you can harvest smaller pieces all through the growing season simply by snipping off the amount you need.

One of my basil patches in the garden.

 Basil is one of the herbs that tastes immensely better fresh than it does dried, and although it can be grown in a pot on a windowsill, I've always found it does much better outside. It's very sensitive to frost, so once it gets cold, you need to do something with whatever basil you have left in the garden. For me, that means PESTO!

Pesto is a simple sauce made from a few ingredients. There is no cooking required--just put them all together in a food processor or a blender and whir them together until you get the consistency you like. If you don't have a machine, you can do it by hand, but this involves a lot of chopping...

Pesto freezes extremely well, so you can grow or buy fresh basil, and put up a big batch at the end of the season. When you pull a container out in the middle of winter, it is like having a little bit of summer on your plate.

Basil's magical properties are love, protection, and prosperity, which means that it pairs well with the other ingredients in pesto. The traditional recipe calls for pine nuts, which are actually the seeds from inside a pine cone. (prosperity, love, strength) and they impart a nice creamy taste that helps to cut the strong flavor of the basil. But pine nuts are expensive and can be hard to find, so you can either mix them with or substitute walnuts (protection, intellect). Along with these you will use olive oil (sacred in many cultures, and used for health, peace, and spirit), garlic (protection and health), grated Parmesan cheese, and salt. (I also use a tablespoon or so of lemon juice, although I've never seen a recipe that calls for it. It's my secret ingredient, so shhhh...)

All the other ingredients for pesto. Just add fresh basil.

Various recipes will call for different proportions of these ingredients, but I never measure. I just start off with a lot of basil and a little bit of everything else, then tweak it as desired. If you are working a little love, protection, or prosperity magick with your cooking, remember to focus on bringing out these qualities as you blend and stir.

The finished product, ready to toss with pasta, put on top of little red potatoes, or, anything else your little heart desires.

Feline Friday: The Busy Summer Version

Is it just me, or is this summer just whizzing by? Maybe it is because I am trying to juggle writing and book promo and household repairs and the Sekrit Project...or maybe the space-time continuum really is changing. You know, just at my house. What do you think? Is your summer whipping by at the speed of light?

Here's some of what's been going on this week, besides the (OMG!) release of the Wickedly Magical novella and accompanying celebration giveaway.

I got a new fridge, because the old one tried really hard to die on the Friday evening of the 4th of July 3-day weekend. Of course, I bought the new one on July 6th, they couldn't deliver it until this last Wednesday...and by the time I got the new one, the old one seemed to be working perfectly again. Sigh. I keep telling myself that if I hadn't bought the new one, the old one would have died for sure. Interestingly, I got exactly the same model, so it is almost as though nothing changed. Except this:

See how CLEAN and organized it is? That will never happen again. (If you look closely, you can see a bottle of champagne on the far right of the bottom shelf on the door. I'm opening it on September 2nd. Who's going to join me?)

Things are blooming like crazy in my yard and garden. No, I am not even remotely keeping up with it.

 The garden.

 Black-eyes Susans in the yard.

The perfect summer dinner: sauteed new potatoes and onions with homemade pesto (all out of my garden), corn, cukes, and tomatoes (a few of which were mine, although most of them are still green) and my own basil and parsley. Yum.

I've got a Guy, who is helping out with the yard and garden, and also staining the decks (I tried doing it myself last year, and my tendonitis was Not Happy). He explained to me this morning that when he was staining the side deck earlier this week while I was at work, he had to reach the top bits by standing in my wheelbarrow. (WTF?) It turned out he had a good reason not to use the ladder. (Don't worry; I showed him where the step stool lives.)

 Yes, some bird built a nest on top. Silly bird. (No, we didn't touch it.)

Of course, cats REALLY know how to spend the long summer days.
Reading:

And relaxing, preferably in a patch of sun:

Mystic. No, the window isn't small. The cat is just very large.

Minerva, enjoying the patch of sun on the couch

Mystic and Magic, napping on the bed. More sun.

Magic wanted to know why I was disturbing her nap.

Of course, at night, they have to supervise my writing. It's not as though I could do it without them.

I hope your summer is going well, and that you are finding time to read and relax, with or without cats. Are you doing anything fun this summer? The cats wanted me to ask you. So, are you?

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Okay--it isn't technically summer, and three days isn't actually a vacation, but it is likely to be as close to one as I get this year, so here's what I did over the three-day Memorial Day weekend...

Saturday was Work Day. First I cleaned the house (including the upstairs cat room, which doesn't get much attention over the winter when it is cold up there). I always clean on Saturday mornings, but I did a deeper job than usual this time and managed to get some of those "clutter spots" cleared up too. I'm getting ready to start work on a new novel, and I do my best work when the house is clean and free of too much clutter (it is never perfect). Then I went to the locally-owned garden center and picked up the last of the plants for the garden, including tomatoes to replace the tomato plants that got walloped by a late frost (BOO), along with some herbs.

With my friend Ellen's help, I got the last of the garden in (except for the broom corn seeds and some flower seeds, which I still have to figure out placement for).

And I discovered about a gazillion pollywogs in my garden pond!

Sunday was another work day. I finished writing up a Mystery Proposal for a New and Different Project. (I could tell you what it is, but then I'd have to kill you.) I can't go into specifics until I find out if the proposal is accepted or not, but I can tell you that it is for something I have never done before, and I'm kind of excited by the possibility...

Then I went outside to rescue the front flower beds from the weeds. Here's the large bed on the right, after it got cleared out. (If you look closely, you can see my supervisor sitting in the window.)

 Here's the smaller bed on the left (which, ironically, actually has a lot more real plants in it, although a lot of that greenery is weeds, too). I ran out of steam, so that one is still waiting for me. Oh, the joy.

Here's a close-up of Angus, doing the tough job of keeping an eye on me while I work.

The rest of Sunday was spent making jewelry, since I wanted to get a bunch of new items in for the summer before I dive into the writing.

Freshwater pearls, mixed gemstones, fluorite with a chaorite dangle, sugalite, rose quartz & cloisonne

Fluorite chunks, aventurine, lapis, and lots of lapis earrings

It probably doesn't look like much, but that's about ten hours of work there. (A little bit of it got done Monday night.)

Monday was mostly a fun and relax day. I did take care of a few small tasks in the morning, but then I went over to my friend John's house and he cooked us up an amazing BBQ (he's a great cook--can I just say "bacon-wrapped onion rings"?) and we both ate WAY too much. The weather was just perfect; sunny and high 70's with a little breeze, and it felt wonderful to sit outside and enjoy it after the long, bitter winter. The we went inside to digest and watch Frozen, which he's seen  multiple times and I hadn't gotten around to yet. It really was a lovely as everyone had been telling me.

All in all, it was a good weekend. Yes, I worked my butt off for much of it, but a) many of the things I worked at were things I enjoy doing and b) I was able to tick some pretty major items off my "to do" list, which means I feel way less overwhelmed. I got to spend time with friends, and be outside. All in all, I have no complaints.

I hope you had a nice weekend too (whether or not it was a holiday where you live). Tell me, what did you do this weekend?

Back in the Garden(s)

As usual, I am already about 3 weeks behind on the garden. This time, however, it can mostly be blamed on the weather, which has been unrelentingly cold and rainy. At least on the days when I had the time to be outside. Thankfully, yesterday was sunny and 60 degrees, and since it was Wednesday, I wasn't working. So I went back out to the garden. Well, gardens, really. Yay!

I started by planting new herbs (rosemary, lavender, dill, and lemon thyme) in the herb patch I started last year by the back door. All of those are perennials, and I should have still had them from last year, but the brutal winter killed off everything except the chives and the chocolate mint. Still, I was pretty happy when it was done, and I pulled my Mickie Mueller magical cat flag out of the mudroom an "planted" it too.

Then I moved on to the main garden, where I finally got peas and onions into the ground.

 If you look really closely at the picture above, you can see the tiny green shoots of the onion plants. Of course, the peas below just look like an empty bed. But I know it's not!

That's one of the things about gardening that reminds me of writing. In the beginning, a garden is all about potential and hope. You put the seeds in the ground, and they don't look like much. Hell, to anyone other than you, they don't look like anything. But if all goes well, four or five months down the road, you will have a bounty of vegetables (or words) to reap. And maybe even share with others.

Speaking of others, I had some company out in the garden. The goldfish in the little pond are feeling perky (and got even more agitated when I started cleaning the pond and stirred things up).

 I also had a garter snake hanging out by the pond. (Did you know snakes can swim? Yes they can.) I'm not a big snake person (they still make me jump if I come across them unexpectedly) but garter snakes are actually very useful in the garden and outside, keeping down small pests and loosening the soil. 
[Look away if you don't like snakes!]

I was out there for about 2 1/2 hours (which is as long as I can manage without falling over) and feel like I got a reasonable amount accomplished. Now I'm only two weeks behind :-)

How the Harvest is Like Life: A Weedy Wednesday Confession

Gardening is one of those things you do because you love it, not because you expect a perfect result. It is sort of like life that way. You plant things, tend to them, and then you harvest the results. Some years the harvest is fabulous; abundant and lush, with glorious colors and aromas that lift the soul and overflow the plate. Sometimes, things go wrong--stuff you could have fixed if you'd done something differently, stuff that was completely out of your control.

We're in the middle of the harvest season now--both in mundane life and the pagan "Wheel of the Year," where harvests are so important, we have three holidays or Sabbats dedicated to them: Lammas (Aug 1st), Mabon/Autumn Equinox (coming up on the 22nd of this month) and Samhain, also known to many as Halloween. I often use this time of year to assess how I'm doing on my goals (both mundane and spiritual). This year, even more than most, my garden reminds me of the imperfections in my own life, which is generally going quite well, but has some places where I could have wished for a different result.

The thing is, I tend to try and accent the positive--other than the occasional falling tree or lightning-killed router--so I suspect there are people out there who think my life is perfect, just like my harvest. Because most of the time, I only show you the pictures of the pretty stuff.

So today, I'm fessing up. This year's garden harvest has been...well...not so great. Yes, I have had some successes. But in general, at least in my area, the rollercoaster weather has conspired to make for a lousy harvest.
The storms over the weekend knocked down much of the corn. Sadly, it doesn't much matter, since it didn't seem to be doing much of anything anyway.

 My tomatoes have the blight. You can see that there are very few leaves left on the plants, and the ones that are there are shriveled and brown. The tomatoes are also suffering from cracking, due to the weather changes, and simply rotting on the vine. I have plenty to eat fresh right now--one of the great pleasures of the summer--but not enough to put away for the winter.

 And unlike the other things, which I didn't have any control over (or at least, which would have taken fairly Herculean efforts to prevent), the bed below shows where I just plain ran out of the energy and time to fight the weeds. There are still carrots and eggplants struggling along gallantly, but the harvest won't be nearly as good as it would have been if I'd been able to keep up.

 For every plate of gorgeous tomatoes

 There are just as many that look like this

Because, you know, that's gardening. And life.
Still, success comes in all sizes and shapes--

And like gardening, whether we consider our harvest a good one or not depends at least partly on attitude.

Yes, this has been a frustrating year (both in the garden and in a few areas of my life). But really, I am quite blessed. Not only am I getting some wonderful food out of my garden, but unlike my ancestors--or people who farm for a living--neither my life nor my livelihood depend on my having a good harvest every single year. And for every blight or storm, there are plenty of things that have come up in abundance, and my plate is still full of wonderful gifts.

Hopefully, I will have learned a few things from this year's disasters, and will be able to prevent a few of them next year. But mostly, I'm just happy for the good tomatoes, both actual and metaphorical. My life isn't perfect, any more than my garden is (can you say GIANT RAVENOUS MOSQUITOES?), but it is still darned good. And I'll probably go on showing you  mostly the pretty side, because I like it when y'all have delusions about my perfection :-)

So--how was this year's harvest for you?