Umm, so it's been a year....

I've been gardening, just not blogging. I do still find my blog useful occasionally though, so I'd like to try to keep it a little more up to date.

For instance, this week I noticed my chive plants were finally blooming. I thought for sure they were about a month late, and I remembered that two years ago I'd kept notes on harvest times. So I looked back at that list, but lo and behold, they were right on time. Amazing how your memory can be so wrong!

I'm still living in the same home, although hoping to move. For a variety of reasons, we just haven't put the house up for sale yet. My son is now 2.5 and keeping us busy. Therefore, I'm continuing to go light on gardening and trying to keep things simple.

Here's a few pics I've managed to take so far this spring.

On March 31st I had my first harvest: some baby chives that I used on potato salad for our Easter dinner. They really put this humdrum side dish over the top!

     

And this is my strawberry bed on April 21st. Unfortunately you can only see 2 strawberry plants, and the rest are romaine and buttercrunch lettuces that I'd just planted. The triple digit heatwaves last summer burnt my poor strawberries to a crisp, and this is all that came back. Compared to this photo from 2010 it really is so sad. Hopefully they'll survive and send out some runners for next year. 

I also planted a few flowers in the back, along with some wild violets I'd successfully transplanted from our lawn last summer. 

That's it. Not very exciting, but at least it is something! We'll see how much I can blog the rest of the season.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

Happy New Year everyone! It was a wonderful holiday season for the grow peace family. I hope you enjoyed yours too.

Winter has been especially mild so far, especially compared to the last two years. So we were able to enjoy a salad on Christmas day with fresh cut arugula from the garden! It was very simple, just the arugula, red onions, oranges, almonds and a vinagrette made mainly with fresh squeezed orange juice and mustard.

 

We also had vegan 'goat cheeze' crostini, with fig balsamic jam, topped with fresh garden sage. It wasn't just a pretty garnish - it really did taste better with the sage. Our roasted potato side dish was flavored with fresh rosemary from the garden. Easy yet delicious.

I was really happy we were able to have a few treats from the garden for our holiday feast. It just makes things so much more special when you're grown them yourself!

Happy Winter Solstice!

OK, so it is actually tomorrow but I wanted to make sure I got something posted in celebration of the shortest day of the year. It is tough to think about, since we have two or three more months of the coldest weather to endure, but at least the days will be getting longer from now on!

Above is a picture of some of my holiday decorations out front. I made these trees out of the tomato cages I used in my garden the past two seasons. I figure I might as well use them for something in the off season! I got the garland on super sale after last xmas, so it was just a few bucks to make these cute decorations. Then I'll just unwrap and save the garland for next year, and use the tomato cages in my garden again over the summer.

You can also see we got a huge snowfall yesterday! Well, huge at least for this area. This is the most snow we've gotten in years, although I do remember getting this much quite often when I was younger. The neighbor across the street was so nice, and helped us (and our other neighbor) with his snowblower. Now that's teamwork in the holiday spirit. :-)

It is also the most snow my dog has seen yet, by far. He was completely buried to his belly, but once he got used to it I couldn't get him to come back inside! We played ball for so long my nose was frozen.Here are a few more pictures of my decorations.
The house outside:
And below is the Frasier Fir we cut from a local tree farm. Most of my decorations are hand me downs from my mother, which just makes them all that much more special to me. You can kind of see the set of soft handmade animals I still remember buying from a church bazaar in the 70's.

The rest is rainbow ornaments my partner gave me, peace decorations & disco balls. I love the tree so much! We keep falling asleep under it every night, with JJ the dog curled up on our comfy couch. This picture does no justice to how warm and festive it looks here in my house. I wish this season could last through March!!!
Now I've got to make several batches of Christmas cookies and food for my work potluck tomorrow (peanut butter soba noodles and morrocan carrots).

I wish everyone has a warm peaceful holiday and happy new year!

Indoor Winter Setup

I have two plants I needed to bring indoors for the winter - the bay tree and an orange thyme. As you can see above, I set them up in front of a sunny window, and added two regular desk lamps to give them some additional light. The very bright desk lamp to the right has a full spectrum lightbulb to mimic natural light. They seem to like it, and are doing well. I decorated them with some holiday decorations so it makes a nice display.

Here's an indoor plant I have in my front window too. Just because I like happy snowpeople. Haha My mom got me the one on the right because she thinks it looks like my dog JJ. :-)