Sidetracked Artist

I harvested the last of this year’s vegetables from the garden last weekend. This final harvest consisted of a couple of overgrown scallions and a patch of lettuce, all of which has been cleaned and stored in the refrigerator. The last of the tomatoes are ripening on the vines hanging in the garage . The previous summer’s vegetable garden was kind of pathetic. The area had been covered with grass when we bought the property in November 2009. It was spring before we were able to work in the yard and prepare a small garden plot by removing the sod and working a little compost into our poor quality soil. Ideally, raised beds filled with good garden soil would have been a better choice to produce a higher yield of vegetables, but I wasn’t willing to spend that much money. We had some nice spring salads, a few tomatoes, and a handful of zucchini. Since our chickens reside in a moveable coop, they were moved around the garden area all winter. We were also able to easily expand the...

Summer in Bellingham is lovely.   This year it was slow in coming, so we’re appreciating it that much more.   We’ve only had one day above 80 degrees so far, but daytime highs in the seventies is just about perfect as far as I’m concerned.   We've been eating outside garden every night, enjoying the flowers and the antics of our pets: dog, cats, and chickens. The vegetable garden is doing well.   We enjoyed several weeks of fresh salads during the spring and early summer, and I’ve just replanted those areas with lettuce seed again. The zucchini took off for awhile but are slowing down.   Too bad, we've all been enjoying my gluten free chocolate chip zucchini bread .  There are several little pie-sized pumpkins on the vines, but I haven’s seen any acorn squash yet.   There might be one or two hiding in the foliage, though, which is really thick. The beans really took off on their teepee-like structure.   Several tomatoes have set and are...

It’s been a cold, wet Spring here in Northwest Washington state. In Bellingham we’ve only had a handful of days above 60 degrees so far this year. We haven’t seen 70 degrees since sometime last year. At least the temperature has been staying above freezing for the past couple of weeks. I finished planting our vegetable garden over the past week. Now we just need some warmer weather so we can harvest the summer vegies before first frost. Fortunately, we like salads, because the garden has produced lots of lettuce these past few weeks. There really is nothing like fresh, crisp, delicious lettuce. The broccoli heads are forming, and the few sugar snap pea transplants have been blooming. Most of the sugar snap peas I planted from seed didn’t sprout. I think it was just too cold and wet here. There are carrots, both orange and purple, and green onions just coming up. We’re still waiting on the pole beans to sprout. To make use of space as much as possible, I’ve been planting n...