Flowers are bad in potted vegetables, right? I’m pretty sure I read that. Plants busy pushing out flowers aren’t busy pushing out edible stuff, so you clip the flowers off.

Here’s one of my tomatoes (one still in a small pot) desperately needing a bigger home:

Continue reading Flowers?

Overall, The Farm is doing quite well:

Continue reading Updated pics, and a colossal failure

Arugala grows fast!

We’re not supposed to let the leaves get longer than six inches. Oops. Here are the shaggy boys before their haircut:

Continue reading Second harvest

It is time. I took my two biggest tomatoes and put them in the big pots I bought two months ago. Each took 1 1/4 big bags of soil. I buried them up to their necks, which is what the book (enough reflexive Amazon links, don’t you think?) says to do.

Before:

(after pic inside!) Continue reading Tomato Repotting

There are good spiders and there are bad spiders. Good spiders eat bugs off my plants. Bad spiders are too fast to be eaught without ninja reflexes and are the size of a child’s hand.

This is a bad spider. (A grass spider, to be precise.) I did manage to catch him and dump him out by the river. I’m glad he was on the outside of the screen.

I can’t believe that 60 days ago these guys were just little tiny pellets in a bag. *sniff*

Aren’t they gorgeous?

I swear I didn’t stage this landing. Perfect, right in an arugala leaf’s palm.

My little basils were scraping the top of the incubator thingy, so out they come. Six in this one and four in another; the two peat-pots holding the basils that didn’t come up got an oregano sproutling each instead.

I was going to put all ten in one and just do a tight basil forest, but I thought they might be fighting with each other too much, so we’ll see how these go in here.

Too beautiful outside this morning not to kick the macro lens around a little for this completely pointless close-up:

Mint tea in larval stage.

Today there was strange blue stuff in the sky, and some very unruly arugala plants made wild by a week of hard rain and wind. It was time for a haircut, and time for the first harvest of the Farm.

You wouldn’t believe how good fresh arugala is. I had forgotten. Wow.

After harvesting these (and applying same to tasty sammiches whipped up by and shared with a friend), I read the back of my seed packet which said leaves should be harvested once they’re six inches long. I equipped my handy, brand-new 3.5" paring knife from the Alton Brown Kershaw knife set I recently treated myself to, and bravely went out to turn this:

into this:

resulting in this (picture taken at night by yucky light bulb light, not showing the beginning of the stunning beauty of these leaves, nor capturing their unbelievably potent, spicy, nutty, hot flavor):

This stuff is so good it is not to be believed.

And just 45 days ago or so, these were just little dry seeds in a packet.

These fellows have company on the way – there are nine more planted and just sprouting now. I should have a rich harvest all through the summer, with some luck.

Now if only my rosemaries would get it in gear.