Miscellaneousness

I was going to post about making bagels, but I'm feeling too lazy.

playing with the camera

finally seeing the results of the mystery seeds we planted

Sun ripening

Propagating

While looking up whether impatiens are annuals or perennials, I discovered that you can cut off pieces of the plant, put them in water, and they'll grow roots and make new plants. Of course I had to try it... And after about 7-10 days of thinking they're going to die at any moment, the cuttings are all getting a decent little root system started. Maybe in another week I can plant them and have new little impatiens, which grow like crazy here.

Growing tomatoes

Our 12 tomato plants - split up between three pots - are doing very well now, although I had my doubts for a while about whether we'd actually get any fruit from them...they spent an awful long time in the flowering stage. But after eating a couple and with plenty more on the vine, I feel like that worrying was completely unnecessary (as it usually is).


What I've learned about tomato gardening this year:

• These plants like their roots covered up, and their roots start surprisingly far up on the stem, so we've had to add more soil to re-cover them as the old stuff got matted down. Apparently you can bury them right up to below the first leaves when you plant them. (read that too late.)
• Last week Jason cut the tops off the plants so they don't grow too tall, and did a little more pruning so that non-producing branches are gone. Since then several more little tomatoes have appeared and we're even getting new flower buds, which I didn't think would happen. Tomatoes like having resources directed to them rather than wasted on the whole plant!
• Even on cloudy days, I'm amazed how you can literally see the tomatoes ripening. They get several shades of orange darker every day.

And tomato plants just smell really good. Even if they didn't produce, that would almost be enough reason to grow them. :)

Gardening

When I was a kid living in Louisiana, we had a small garden that mostly just grew herbs and maybe cucumbers, but I thought it was a lot of fun. During our two years in Houston, we had an even tinier garden and the only thing I remember growing there is some kind of weird lemon squash that was inedible (and was planted accidentally?), although one day we had a great time digging moats and roads in it and then adding water.

In Laurel we had a huge garden out of necessity (using the square foot gardening method) and my liking of gardening diminished when I had to weed it....

Jason likes gardening, too, so this year we went all out, or at least as "all out" as you can with a balcony instead of backyard. (Maybe not as all out as you can go -- sometimes i do a google image search for "balcony gardens" and that always turns up amazing results.)

We started early this spring with ordering a set of herb seeds & pots from Johnny's Seeds online. Jason had to remind me a few times before i finally got around to planting them. And they started to sprout just at a time when I needed the encouragement of little green plants budding up.

Once it got warm enough, we also bought tomato plants and a red geranium and then when those seemed to be doing well, went to K-Mart and filled up a cart with a couple basil plants, thyme (the basil & thyme we grew from seed never made it past sprout stage...I do not exactly have a green thumb with everything!), a strawberry plant, cayenne peppers, a jalapeño, lavender, savory, and some flowers, plus a rosemary plant from Trader Joe's. All of which, amazingly, are still alive.


That's pretty much my new theory on gardening -- if something fails, go to K-Mart and buy more for cheap! And the more plants you have, the more likely you are to succeed. 

Why Beer & Basil?

My husband brews his own beer, and since our apartment balcony is pretty much covered in pots of tomatoes and herbs, it's not surprising we decided to throw some basil in one of the last batches. Of course, the basil we used wasn't actually from our garden -- it was cheap, store-brand dried basil. But it still tastes good.

I'm becoming partial to Jason's experimental beers. He doesn't just do all-grain brewing now (where you extract the malt from grain yourself rather than buying the already-processed malt sugar), but he also makes his own recipes. I like the basil pale ale that's on tap now, but one of my favorite beers ever is his pale ale with lime, lemon, and grapefruit peel. The grapefruit and hops had a surprisingly taste: a burst of tartness/hoppyness at the beginning and then a smooth, non-bitter finish.

We like basil in more than beer, too. Our $2 plants from K-Mart are growing like weeds and we have to trim off the biggest leaves every few days. So now fresh basil goes with everything from pizza to lemonade. The only thing that hasn't turned out is when we tried making infused olive oil with it, but the leaves were covered in white stuff (mold?) after only a week, even in the fridge. Some experiments are just doomed to fail, I guess.