2010 Garden

I have always loved getting seed catalogs even though I never had the garden space to order from them. Being twenty minutes from Territorial Seed has been awesome and I have already made two trips there. This year in the garden will be the following:

San Marzano Tomato
Austrian Crescent Potatoes
Calico Popcorn
Dakota Peas
Alisa Craig Onions
Globe Artichokes
Small Sugar Pumpkins
Jade Bush Beans
Tigger Melon
Regatta Spinach
Sugarsnax Carrots
Victoria Butterhead
Prado Red Sunflowers
Cherry Rose Sunflowers
Strawberries
Raspberries



My mother in law gave me a beautiful antique scale from the early 1900's when she visited last month. They have had one hanging in their laundry room for years and I have always admired it. I am going to use this to weigh everything we produce so I can get an idea of what this garden provides for our family.



My son and I had a wonderful time putting in the garden and he has his own garden to take care of. He filled it with soil and planted everything with very little help from me. He knows that he is in charge of watering and weeding and he has been very good about checking it everyday.

I will try and get some pictures this week of the completed garden. I can't wait until August when all of the beds are full and beautiful, overflowing with ripening fruit.

Living the Dream

I asked for an adventure and I got one. We arrived in Eugene last Wednesday and drove straight to our rental property. What a dump!! I could live with the fact that all of the rooms were so small that we would have been bed shopping for three twin beds and all sleeping in separate rooms. I could have lived with the fact that the house was extremely old and that it had character. I could not live with the fact that the house was so dirty that there is not enough Pine Sol and Bleach in the entire country that could get that house clean. My husband said it best when he said the only way to get that house clean would be to use a wrecking ball. The house still had the couch on the front porch, which made me laugh when we saw the pictures, but I assumed that it would be gone by the time we got there. We broke the lease that night and went to a hotel. The only thing that mad me sad about that house was that I was losing my urban farm on a 1/4 of an acre two blocks from downtown, but not sad enough that I wanted to move in.

We went and looked at rentals the next day and ended up in a newer development on the West side of town. The houses are six years old and it seems that almost all of the houses have kids in all age ranges. I am still in the process of unpacking as the first POD showed up on Tuesday and the other one yesterday. This process has made me realize that we have way too much stuff and we need to start downsizing it. I have a new household rule, if something new comes in the house something old will have to leave.

We went and looked at chickens last weekend and we will be getting them when I get back from our trip down south in June. I have already been looking at coop designs and once we settle on one that works for our yard my husband will start building it. The garden planning is underway. I started some pepper, romaine and pea seeds on Monday and the only seeds that haven't germinated are the peppers. I bought a little Burpee greenhouse for the counter and it seems to work quite well. I am learning that I am in a completely different gardening zone than I am used to. My peas that I planted in January were four feet tall and starting to flower before we left, I left them for our renter to enjoy. It is still too cold here that people are just starting to plant seeds inside. I had already picked a couple of blueberries from our bushes before we left California. They all made the trip here in my car, but I am afraid that the rest of the fruit may suffer from the cold before they have time to mature.




Here is a new picture of the garden. My husband has stated that I can't start working on the garden beds until I have the whole house unpacked. I will be working night and day because I am very excited to get going. I layed down the boxes to try and kill the grass and weeds. We are going to build raised beds along the fence line and hopefully if I can score some free windows we will turn a couple of the beds into cold frames. Territorial Seed's headquarters is 20 minutes from here and my son and I have a date next week to go pick out our seeds.

Oregon

Let me just set the record straight, I LOVE VERMONT!!! After spending four years there in college my parents made me come back to Southern California since I planned on continueing my education and it was much cheaper to be here. After spending two months here I decided that this was not the place for me and I planned my move back to Vermont. Well, I met my husband two weeks before I planned to leave and let's just say I never left.
My husband has no desire to move to Vermont which just breaks my heart. So instead of always dreaming of getting there we decided that we would try to move somewhere else on the west coast. He tries to deny it, but his Laker's and Angel's would come on way too late at night if we lived on the East Coast. We talked about Northern California, but the places where we could get jobs just put us back into the mix of the things we hated about here. We talked about Colorado, but we don't know anyone there and once again, the places where my husband could get a job had the same issues as here. Then we started talking about Oregon, where my husband has some family.
We took a trip to Oregon to go snowboarding with my husband's cousin in Bend. We fell in love with the beauty of the area and the fact that they get snow, something that is on my dream list. We also went to Eugene to visit and we liked it, but Bend was the place to be. I flew out to go to a teacher's conference to try and get a job, which I could have had my husband been able to find anything. This is around the same time as the economy crashed and housing went to the dump in Bend.

Flash forward two years and we decided to once again try and make it out of here. My son will be starting school in a year and we figured this was the best opportunity to try and make this work. My husband quit his job at the company he had worked at for 17 years. With job prospects not very good in Southern California he started pushing for jobs in Eugene. A wonderful company called him for a second interview and paid to have him flown up there for a six hour interview. Last week they called to let him know the job is his and tomorow we will find out when he needs to report.

We have a prospective renter coming over today and we have sent out a few emails on houses that we are interested in renting up there. It feels so wierd to try for something for two years and then all of a sudden everything is happening so quick.

I am so excited for this new adventure in our lives to start.

It is official, we are moving to Oregon!!

Country State of Mind

With the goal of moving to Oregon becoming a reality, I have found my mind wandering into a state of Country. I'm listening to country music again, something I haven't done in over ten years; I'm teaching myself to knit so I can become more self sufficient; and I feel like eliminating things in my life that are not fulfilling.

I'm in love with the thought of going to Oregon because I feel like I am going to finally be living the life I dream about. I want to live in a small house with a gigantic yard. I want to grow ninety percent of our food and make a lot of our clothes.

Today it is supposed to be 75 here. Am I the only one that gets depressed in Southern California when we go a couple of weeks with warm weather and no rain? My son spent the night at Grandma's last night so before we go rescue him it is off to go get some yard work done. We are going to try and get some peas and spinach planted today, I'm looking forward to eating some fresh peas in the afternoon sunlight.

The End Of A Season

After a week of rain in Southern California I decided it was time to do a recap of the summer garden.

In June I finally decided it was time to get rid of the pumpkin that has been sitting on our doorstep since last Halloween. Instead of throwing it away I decided to bury it in the ground with hopes that we might get a new pumpkin this year. Well, the pumpkin invaded the entire front, but we received three small but beautiful white pumpkins.




We did have a successful batch of onions(that grew in a row next to the front step), potato's(grown in a whiskey barrel), and pea's which never made it into the house they were so good. We grew peanuts for the first time after receiving a plant from my mother-in-law for Mother's Day. I was quite impressed and will definitely be planting these again.




I did have some failures this year. The strawberries(growing in one Topsy Turvey, one horse trough, and three hanging baskets) did not produce a very large crop. Ethan and the neighbor girl constantly hunted down the ripe ones in the horse trough and devoured them on the front doorstep. After having a successful crop with artichokes last year I put two more in. Unfortunately only one of the plants produced fruit. The corn crop was a complete failure, but I blame myself for starting it so late.

As I get ready for fall I am going to need to transition into a container Gardener. We are currently preparing to sell our house so that we can try and make our dreams of living in Oregon a reality. I do not know how fast the house will sell, but there are two things I am sure of: the new buyer's probably won't appreciate artichokes, onions and spinach growing in the yard, they will want flowers; and the second is that whatever I start growing now I want to be able to take it with us so I can enjoy the harvest.

Last week I sowed fall potatoes, onions, garlic, and spinach. This year's crop is small, but it should be bountiful enough to make me feel closer to my dream.

First Edition

I am a hippie at heart that just feels like I am not living the life that I dream about. My husband and I want a farm that will raise chickens, vegtables and some goats to go with the name. We hope to raise our two year old in enough space to run around in and to know that carrots come from the ground, not the grocery store.

We currently live in a townhouse where we try to grow as many fruits and vegtables as possible. We fight the HOA over growing corn in our front yard, and worry about enough strawberries from the backyard.

Some day we will own Wisegoat Acres, but until then, I just hope to learn and grow from starting from a small place.