Here I am!

I bet you thought I disappeared. Me too. Summer is coming to an end here in Seattle and there has been a mad scramble of weddings, BBQs and events. While I have loved seeing my friends and celebrating with everyone for so many reasons, I think that the end of summer has me down. I have a lot of things coming up as we transition into early fall - pickling, readying the garden for winter, last ditch yard efforts, basement cleaning and the such. I will be sure to share it all with you. 

The neighborhood my store sits in had a block party with yummy food trucks. Mr. Ramon brought these delicious items back to me for lunch. I can't remember the name of the food truck but the food was divine - some little pork taco type snacks and some type of warm sugar sprinkled donut. Mr. Ramon know just how to make me happy. 

We have been eating a lot of zucchini. I love it and am not even close to sick of it yet. One night I just sauteed one of our sweet onions from the garden in butter and olive oil then added the sliced yellow zebra zucchini and cremini mushrooms, some thyme, salt pepper until just soft. Sprinkled some parmesan on it and yum! Eating from the garden tastes so good. 

While we wait and hope that our larger tomato varieties both paste and slicing ripen before the weather turns. We have had many cherry tomatoes and they are sweet like candy. Perfect for a quick salad.

On Labor Day Mr. Ramon and I had the day off so we went to Whidbey Island again with the dogs. We took our friend Kalin and her two dogs and let them all run on the beach for a few hours. It was such a gorgeous day. It really made me wish summer would never leave. 

I hope you are enjoying the end of summer. What fun things are you doing to make these days last? 

How does your garden grow?

Of course I had high hopes when starting our garden this year. We eagerly built our beds and filled them with plants we were sure to see great results from. Wah Wah Wah! The combination of extended rain and no sun during some of our plants most important growing phases left us with some stunted plants and others just starting to take off at the end of July. 

Our pickling cucumbers never grew and are sad little plants only about 5 inches tall. Similarly our green beans never quite took off but are trying hard to produce beans on their stunted little stalks. 

All has not been lost. We have had a great run on lettuce, fava beans, radishes, potatoes and kale. We are just about to experience green beans and zucchini. Our cook neck squash and tomatoes are just setting and hopefully with the continued heat we can get to a harvest. 

I hope that your vegetables are faring better than ours. Would love to hear about your garden and what you have been harvesting! 

Outdoor Laundry

When we moved into the house in September one of the things I was excited about was being able to hang laundry outside to dry. Mr. Ramon thought it was very amusing that I requested a clothes line. In almost every home I lived in we dried our clothes outside in the warmer months. I love the smell of grass and sun on the clothes - so warm and fresh. Sheets were my favorite. Hard like boards but so soft and sweet when you climb in at night. 

Hanging clothes saves money on energy to run the dryer. We are using so much more water with the garden it is nice to cut back somewhere. 

I started with a folding clothes rack from Ikea that worked really well inside over the winter and great on my porch this spring and summer so far. I used it for delicates and dark cloths. But I really wanted an actual line outside. It slipped my mind for a couple of months until I was in Lowe's picking up some light bulbs for the store. I wandered down the cleaning tools isle - no surprise there and found a retractable clothes line by Minky. I purchased the clothes line and a bag of classic clothes pins. 

The Minky I bought is the 49-ft Retractable Clothes Reel. It gets great reviews online. I love that is closes up to be out of the way and can easily be brought inside for storage in the winter if needed. It has these benefits and features. 

• Easy to use fully retractable outdoor clothes line offers 49' of line drying space
• Weather-resistant, stable protective casing
• Unique mounting bracket allows reel to be removed when not in use
• Used to dry clothes indoors and in outdoor backyards
• Stows neatly away when not in use
• Wipe clean PVC coated line
• Plastic housing with metal mounting bracket

It was easy to hang only requiring 3 screws. I was able to hang clothes on it right away. 

Here is my first line of clothes. I took them down dry and summer smelling today. I am really excited to save the use of the dryer for things that really need to be dried. 

This type of clothes line could fit almost anywhere - even inside. I urge you to let nature dry and freshen your clothes this summer!

1 Potato 2 Potato

Growing up in Oregon everyone had a garden. My best friend Marcia's family had a big garden that we took the liberty of playing in and eating from. I loved carrots fresh from the garden all warm and still a little dirty. They were so sweet and earthy. But one of my favorite things fresh from the garden is tiny potatoes. Thin skinned and crisp. I can just brush the dirt off them and eat them out of my hand. Of course I also can think of 100 other ways to prepare them. 

This year Mr. Ramon and I have our first garden together. I have not grown potatoes since I was a girl and I didn't do any of the planting - mostly the eating. So together we picked out two types to grow. A small white potato and a small red potato. We decided to go with the method that seemed the easiest - potato bags. 

Potato Bags are nylon pots that you plant your potatoes in then add dirt continually as they grow until the dirt is to the top. They have handy little openings on the sides so you can harvest potatoes when they are young. We did not know a lot about growing potatoes so the employee at Sky Nursery told us to just us regular soil and not to feed them. Sounds about right if you think about where potatoes flourish - Idaho and Ireland. Lots of dirt. We were excited to see them grow big and bushy. 

All of a sudden while Mr. Ramon was out of town one of our plants started to go yellow. I remembered that they were supposed to flower at some point and they had not yet. This could not be good. I was worried and scoured the internet for potato plant disease. I was sure we had failed in some capacity. To much rain, not enough sun......

Well Mr. Ramon came home and I showed him our plant. He quickly said "maybe we have some potatoes?" He shoved his hand into the side pocket, dug around a bit and pulled out a small white potato. 

I was so excited!! We have potatoes - we may not have many and I am still unsure of what happened to our plant but we harvested what we had.

We took this little guy inside and washed him off. I then sliced him and sprinkled him with salt. I was in heaven. Crunchy and starchy. So tasty. 

So now we put these new potatoes to use - smashed, roasted, potato salad. Looks like there will be potato recipes coming your way!

Garden Part 3

Wishing I had a truck today. I want to fill it with dirt for our garden. Instead I will fill the little mini cooper with bags and bags of compost and garden soil. Poor little car - she is so overloaded. 

This marks the final step in gardern prepardness. We are filling these beds with Sky Nursery's planting mix and lots of local compost. We also picked up some vegetable starts. With these and the few we started in the house we will be on our way to filling up the garden with tasty vegetables!

I wanted to be organized on how we fill up the beds so I marked the first one off with tape in 12"x12" squares. We put in our few plants and some seeds for radishes, carrots and beets. 

Over the next couple of weeks we will add in more plants. So far we have carrots, 2 kinds of beets, radishes, pickling cucumbers, fava beans, crookneck squash, bush beans and bell peppers. Now all we need is sun!