Vegetable Garden- v1.0

After all the work we've done on the yards lately, I was inspired to start a vegetable garden. I'm not known for my green thumb, so I did a lot of reading up on getting a garden started. I'm hoping the studying will pay off and we'll have a bountiful harvest later this year.

Before I could plant anything in our raised bed, I had to de-weed it. It took me a day to get all the weeds out and the soil fit for the growing good things. The picture on the right shows the raised bed before I cleaned it up. It's on the south side of our house, so sunshine won't be a problem. Hopefully it won't back the vegetables too much come summer. Some of the weeds were waist high and tough little buggers. Now that the bed is cleared, we have a 3-foot by 20-foot bed to work with.

To conserve on water, I installed a drip system to irrigate the veggies. I'm hoping it works as advertised, since I don't want to be spending my evenings watering and weeding. We'll see how that experiment goes. In further experiments, our outside electrical conduit runs right behind the garden box, so I also had extra piping through to allow future lighting. It required digging a deep hole to and getting really dirty. Jon couldn't resist grabbing a shot of me in my sullied state.

The final results of stage I. After getting the drip system in, I transplanted a my first set of vegetables. So far, I have a set of sweet corn, Two different kinds of tomatoes, two different peppers and some bush beans planted. Phase II will be planting the vegetables from seeds. These will include zucchini, pole beans, and a second crop of corn. If all goes well, we'll be have some tasty veggies coming our way in a couple of months. I'll keep posts updating our progress. Advise is welcome, and very much needed.

Building fences

We've been working to fix up a lot of the interior of the house over the past year, and with the warmer weather arriving our thoughts turned to our yard. We've had a lot of people over the past year tell us that the inside of the house is a lot nicer than they expected from the outside, and we're hoping to change that. Before we started planting beautiful plants, we knew we had to do something about our fence. We had a wrought iron fence around both the back and front yard was pretty dated; the white paint on it was rusted through and looking pretty shabby.



In the front yard, we would have loved to get rid of the fence, but with all the foot traffic we get on our corner, it didn't seem practical. We decided to paint the wrought iron fence a red-brown that complements the house color. We're really pleased with the results- although it felt like it took us *forever* to get the job done and some help to get it all done. The picture above shows the old, drab white fence next to a section we finished. Lesson learned this project: when a paint product advertises "phenomenal adhesion", its probably a good idea to get it on your skin. Hopefully the paint job will last much longer than the rash...

In the back, a kluged together set of wood, wrought iron fences, as well as shrubs, were used to create a barrier and privacy. Time had not treated any of it well. The shrubs had been hacked to nearly the roots before we moved in, so we had no privacy. Rather than salvage the fence, we decided to put a new, beautiful wooden one. Our good friend Andy came down from Portland to install it for us. Its soooo beautiful!!! And it went up so quickly! We couldn't be more thrilled. We still need to stain it and treat it, which is a big job, but we're already enjoying our new, private backyard. We also now have a new drive way to park our car off the road. We keep the (broken) automatic fence from the old wrought iron fence to give us a little security.

Next step is to get the plans from our landscape designers and get started on the irrigation, hard-scaping, and then planting. It'll be a big job but so worth it!

We have a bunch of pictures posted here. Here's some of my favorites:


Upper Right: Demolition of the old fence
Upper Left: The finished fence
Lower Right: Andy and Jon thinking hard on how to get the fence to work out.
Lower Left: The beautiful gate Andy

Wild Weather

We've had some pretty wild weather in LA this week. It's rained about 10 inches in the foothill communities since Sunday. Fortunately, our little Altadena house has weathered the weather well. The community has managed well too, despite all vegetation lost during the wildfires. While all this moisture came down as rain at our home, it brought quite a bit of snow to our local mountains. We had a wonderful moment of sunshine this morning that revealed the lovely snows just above our house. I snapped this photo with my phone as I stepped out onto the porch this morning on my way to work. As you can see, we do get a taste of all four seasons up here in the 'Dena.

Stuffed Zucchini Boats

5 Zucchini
1 Red or Green Bell Pepper, chopped
1 Onion, chopped
1 Tomato, chopped
1/2 cup Mozzarella, shredded or processed into crumbs
2 slices of bread, toasted and processed into crumbs
1 lb Italian Sausage
3 cloves Garlic
1/2 cup Black Beans
1/2 cup of Parmesan crumbs

Set oven to broil. Cover zucchini with water in a large pot and bring to a boil. Cook for 5 minutes. While zucchini cooks, saute the onions. As the onions get soft, add the pepper cook until soft. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds, until fragrant. Set aside. Saute Italian sausage until fully cooked. Combine Peppers, onions, tomato, bread crumbs, cheese crumbs, black beans in one bowl to make the stuffing. Drain the zucchini, slice in half, the long way when cooled. Scoop out the inside squishy part of the zucchini, chop and add the stuffing. Put the stuffing into the zucchini boats, cover with foil and put into the oven for 10-15 minutes. Remover foil, add parmesan on top of the boats, cook for 5 minutes until cheese is browned.

This recipe makes way too much stuffing, so you can use it the next night for stuffed bell peppers or freeze to use later. Also, any variety of items can be added to the stuffing- the black beans I added just because I had an opened can around. This recipe was inspired by one I found on Allrecipes.com

Back at it

After work tonight I managed to:

• hit the pool for physical therapy
• watered all the living plants
  
• dig up the garden box on the west side of the house and add mulch. Planting will hopefully commence soon. I have to thank my neighbor for bringing us the mulch. And telling me what to do with it. And lending me the tools. I'm so lucky to have such good neighbors
  
• Clean the bathtub
• Wash, fold a couple of loads of laundry
• Cook dinner (ok well maybe it was just heating soup)
  
• Pay the trash bill
• Search Jon's birthday present
  

That may not seem exciting, but for much of the past 2 months my typical night at home was: take my shoes off, take pain pills, go straight to bed. It's hard work healing up and I wasn't capable of doing much. I'm glad my body is now healed to the point that I can return to working on the house and being a useful, helpful spouse.

Long Haitus

I know its been a very long time since I've last posted. There's a good explanation- Jon and I were involved in a motorcycle accident the weekend before Memorial Day. Jon was taking me down to an appointment in Pasadena on our motorcycle when a car suddenly pulled out in front of us. Jon suffered a cracked rib, but I ended up in the hospital with a moderate concussion and a broken leg. I've been spending much of the past 6 weeks recuperating. Needless to say, I haven't been doing much homemaking of late. I'm suppose to get my cast off on Monday, and I'm hoping to get back to working on the house, cooking, and blogging.

Soup

Jon and I receive a basket of vegetables and fruits from the local farmer's market every other week. They're delivered by Auntie Em's, and everything we get from them is fabulous. Lately I though, I haven't been cooking as much, so I was sad to see the bunch of asparagus I received in our latest basket had gone limp. It still tasted great, so I decided to try my hand at cream of asparagus soup. I love the taste of roasted asparagus, so I made up this recipe:

Cream of Roasted Asparagus Soup
3 celery stalks (chopped)
3 cloves of garlic (pressed)
1 medium onion (chopped)
1 bunch asparagus (~ 1lb) (ends cut off, cut into small chunks)
3 golden potatoes (chopped)
1 can chicken broth
4 C water
3/4 C half and half
2 bouillon cubes
3 T flour
1 T soy sauce
3 T Olive Oil + more for roasting
Salt & Pepper

Brush the asparagus with oil and roast in the oven under a high heat (500 F or on broil). While roasting the asparagus, heat 3 T of oil in soup pot on high and saute the onion and celery until onion begins to brown, stirring occasionally. Add minced or pressed garlic, saute for 30-60 seconds. Bring heat down to medium high. Add flour and cook for 1 minute, stirring to prevent burning or clumping. Add chicken broth, water, and boullion cubes to pot and bring to a boil. Asparagus should be finished roasting at this point. It should be turning golden brown in places and appear slightly shriveled. Once soup is at a boil, add potatoes and half of the asparagus. Bring down to a simmer and cook until potatoes are just tender (~ 10 minutes depending on how big the potato pieces are). Add the remaining asparagus into soup and then add soup to food processor in small batches until soup is thickened to personal preference. Add the cream, soy sauce, and season to taste. Bring to a just under a boil to incorporate the cream.

I tried the soup before cream was added and it was wonderful, so one can forgo the dairy and vegetable stock can replace the chicken stock for a tasty vegetarian/vegan meal.

It was so tasty, I couldn't bear to eat it alone. I wrapped the soup up and brought down to Caltech for a picnic dinner to Jon. Jon has been working many late hours in the lab lately preparing for the upcoming PhD Candidacy exam, so it was nice to have a meal with him last night.