Gardening – Page 4 – The Creative Salad

A Garden To-Do List

We haven’t touched our front garden in four months and you can tell.

After our hard work last summer, this mound of weeds is a terrifying sight.

The winter rains have helped the weeds take over the yard. We never pruned back our perennials (plants that will grow back again this spring). We never yanked those bare cosmos plants, annuals dead because of frost and in dire need of being removed. The yard was a mess:

We’ve had a string of gorgeous (gorgeous!) summer-like days, so my daughter and I spent two hours starting to whip that front yard into shape. We’re all about telling that clover who’s boss.

(Especially when it’s 75 degrees out and super sunny; we HAD to be outside.)

After our mama-daughter clean-up party, the yard looks a little bit better:

We still have lots to do. Here’s our list of garden tidying tasks for the month:

1. Take down and dissemble holiday wreaths.

2. Remove rotting pumpkins from porch and place into compost bins.

3. Tiddy up kids toys so we don’t come close to breaking our necks every time we enter the house.

4. Find a pillow and sew a cover for the porch chair. This one has been on my to-do list for two years. We’ll see if we get to it this year.

5. Finish weeding. Cause we have three feet tall giant purple allium bulbs set to arrive in this exact spot soon. Like next week.

6. We also need to lay down a layer of compost and mulch to prepare for the long, dry summer ahead.

We have a little bit of time for the last task because even if it feels like summer with these atypical hot and dry days, it’s really just February, right?! Oh, wait, it’s February in Northern California and our last frost date is a month and a half away!

My to-do list just got longer.

It appears I need to get our veggie beds ready too. Time to start those cool-season crops on our windowsill because spring is just around the corner.

I’m so excited! Stay tuned!

Purple Potato Harvest

This fall we grew potatoes for the first time. We messed up every step along the way: we planted them too late; we didn’t buy starts, instead relying on sprouted potatoes from our pantry; we planted the potatoes whole instead of cutting them up; and we were away for the first frost and didn’t insulate our potato crop with the frost cover.

Coming home from vacation, we found our potato plants completely dead. Could we even still harvest the potatoes? We had no idea what to expect below ground.

To say we were pleasantly surprised would be a gross understatement:

The toddler was gleeful as we found more and more potatoes:

In true Miss Leyba fashion though, she was completely focused on the task at hand and wouldn’t consider smiling for a photo. Removing potatoes from the ground is serious business!

See, a lovely little purple potato crop.

Now my daughter is talking nonstop about dinner and how tasty these potatoes will be!

Too bad we’re having Noddle Salad with Ginger Peanut Dressing tonight instead. (Already prepped and ready to go!)

I suppose we’ll be eating potatoes with dinner tomorrow…

Goodbye to the Summer Garden

Yesterday a frost warning flashed on my phone! Thank goodness for modern conveniences like weather applications; I’ve been so busy reacting to our pseudo Indian Summer that I’ve neglected to notice that it’s almost November. I guess it’s time to say farewell to our summer veggies (oh, how I love the mild weather here in California!) and get ready for the first frost.

So we headed out in our pajamas before bedtime to gather up all the ripe tomatoes and zucchini, and to then wrap up the potatoes in a frost cover. (Keeping our fingers crossed they’ll make it!)

We’re leaving dozens of green tomatoes on the plants, chard, lettuce and carrots in the ground, and several baby zucchini, still too small to pick.

We wonder, “Will it frost tonight? Will the frost cover insulate the potatoes well enough?” We shall see.

What we know for certain is that fall is here and winter is on its way.

I’m already planning out where I’ll plant the kale.

Garden Tour

It may be the end of September, but the weather has finally gotten HOT and our garden is responding! Flowers blooming, vegetables growing and ripening, weeds taking over the place…

First some pictures of the flowers and then a quick video tour of our itty bitty yard bursting with plants.

Before I give you a tour of our garden this year, let me remind you of what our yard looked like last year when we moved in (more info here):

Here it is now, a year and half later:

Movie: Garden Tour from Carrie on Vimeo.

(Sorry if I sound a bit breathless. I had a cold while filming, which we’ll now remember forever. Sigh.)

Gardening Friday

Today, being Friday, we did something new. After weeding, removing less-than-beloved plants, enriching and turning over the soil (all activities most certainly considered to be OLD), we planted bulbs.

Evidently Spritzer-Leyba’s are not ones for planting ordinary things like daffodils or crocuses. Miss Leyba and I had to choose the three feet tall giant purple allium.

They will look like this:

(photos from flickr)

I know, they are gorgeous, gigantic and insane!

I desperately want them to transform the front garden and add a giant burst of color. I think this should do it! (Fingers crossed!)

I just can’t believe we have to wait six months to see if we planted them upside down… ;)