garden

Missing: One Garden Worth of Produce

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Remember how I bragged back in July about how our garden was growing like crazy, and we were harvesting a ton of lettuce and strawberries? Well, not a lot has happened since then.

Our tomato plants and beans grew and grew and grew like crazy, consuming our entire garden to the point where we have to hack our way in every time we go to water it. The bean plants in particular are constantly grabbing onto our tomatoes and the tomatoes in the garden next door, like some kind of hungry tentacled monster.

This seemed like a good sign, but where’s all the produce?

I believe 2 of our 12 tomato plants (8 planted tomato plants and another 4 or so naturally occurring) have actually made tomatoes. And even those are hardly producing. The beans have just offered up a handful of beans, but I’m hoping that’s because we started them late.

Why aren’t our tomatoes producing? We currently have 2 theories. The first is that it was just too hot at the wrong time. My sister said that the plants won’t produce flowers when the temperature is over 100. This could explain it, since we had a heat wave right at the time that the plants should have been blowing up. The other theory is that we seem to have some aphids this year. We also have ladybugs, so the situation seems to be controlling itself, but one gardener posited that perhaps the tomatoes were worried about growing defenses rather than fruit.

Luckily we got 13 pounds of tomatoes from my dad, so we spent 3 1/2 hours on Sara’s birthday canning 7 quarts of tomatoes.

The only things that seem to be going well in the garden right now are the peppers (and the eggplant). Specifically, our jalapeno plant is going like gangbusters. I picked 15 large jalapenos the other day, and there were still more coming. This was after we had already frozen about all that we would probably use (I have to admit, we don’t use a ton of jalapenos in a year, especially since we haven’t canned any salsa so far this year).

I’m still holding out a little hope that the tomatoes are just delayed, and we still may get some kind of tomato explosion. Then we can all look back on this post and have a good laugh together, as we try to give them away to anyone who will take them.

Please?

The Dangerous World of Illicit and Illegal Gardens

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Okay everybody, check this one out. A woman in Michigan faces 93 days of jail time. Why? For planting a garden of course.

Long story short, the lady’s yard was destroyed for some sewer work, so she decided to build some raised-beds rather than re-do her grass. Seems very reasonable, and looks pretty nice to boot:

Unfortunately though, such gardens are apparently outlawed by city ordinance.

I know you’re probably thinking what I was thinking: there has to be more to this story. But there really doesn’t seem to be anything else (well, there is in the sense that she wouldn’t stand down, not that she should have, but you have to wonder what exactly her attitude was like). However, the weird thing is that gardens are not specifically outlawed (and why would they be?). The rule says only:

“suitable” plant material is allowed on the lawn area of residences. When local media asked city planner Kevin Rulkowski what that meant, he said suitable means “common:” lawn, nice shrubs, and flowers. However, the city ordinance does not specifically state that those are the only allowed plant materials.

So, even if she was being petty, the city was obviously being *more* petty.

This is so horrible, I don’t even know where to begin. However, I am not surprised in the least. I used to think that draconian property restrictions were the domain of fancy-pants subdivisions (where I wouldn’t want to live anyway), but I’ve recently discovered this is not the case. Who would have thought that it is nearly impossible to find vacant land in the middle of nowhere which allows you to build a tiny house? Through an endless supply of township regulations, such as minimum square footage, roof pitch angle, and land usage restrictions, such as no trailers, you have practically no say over what you do on your land.

The supposed justification for this is multi-faceted:

  1. We have to keep out the hordes of drifters.
  2. What you do on your property can bring the value of my property down. So you can’t do whatever you want on your land, because now its affecting me.
  3. You pay property tax based on what your property is worth, so if you have a crappy property but you still use the same amount of services, you’re somehow gaming the system.
These reasons are a load of crap because:
  1. Drifters? What is this, the 1950’s? This only makes sense if drifters is a euphemism for poor people or certain targeted races, which is about as illegal as it gets.
  2. So what? You always run that risk. I can build a mansion and shoot holes in it or paint it puce, or put up signs saying, “This neighborhood is full of dog-rapists” and you don’t have laws against that (although that would be less oppressive than some of the “grass length” rules I’ve seen) (and now a bunch of townships are probably enacting these laws as we speak).
  3. This one has a little merit on the surface, but if that’s really the problem, then pass laws on property tax reform. Besides, if I have crappy property that isn’t worth anything, then my punishment comes when I try to sell it and I can’t.
I think this garden story really highlights the fact that 1) your stupid rules prevent reasonable people from doing reasonable things, and 2) your rules are stupid to begin with (and possibly racist or classist) because you can’t make a rule that says, “I want to stop people from doing things that I personally don’t like.”
Link via Sara.

Garden, 2011 Style

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I realize I have been slightly remiss in my garden posts this year. I mentioned what we had planted, but haven’t given any updates on how things are going. (Thanks for reminding me, Alexis!)

We’re midway through the growing season, and its going pretty well. So far, we have had a good crop of strawberries, lettuce, and our eternal chive plant.

As we expected, year 2 of the strawberries was much more productive than year 1. We got somewhere around 100 strawberries, and it seemed like we never failed to find more every time we went over there. Unfortunately, the ants also learned of our wonderful strawberry bounty, so we had some stiff competition for those berries. It’s actually kind of interesting; the ants locate a ripe berry and then mound up dirt all around it and sort of suck it into their home, whole. It seemed like it was going to be disastrous, but actually, the ants didn’t really get all that many berries. So we didn’t really do anything to try to control them, but it worked out okay. Maybe next year we might put some straw down so they can’t suck the berries underground. Overall, it was a very successful crop!

A few years ago we planted lettuce, and we had more than we could ever possibly use. This year is the same, however, we have one major improvement: no slugs! Our last lettuce was so sluggy, that it discouraged us from planting lettuce after that. However, this year is totally different. I don’t know why that is exactly, but there are a number of things that are different: we’re in a different location now (the other lettuce was at the old garden), we’re picking more in the heat of the day, rather than dawn or dusk, we have a different variety of lettuce, and it’s just simply a different year. The year we had the slugs really bad we had heard that everybody was having a slug problem. Maybe it was just a little more damp, who knows. Anyway, this year’s crop of lettuce has been amazingly successful, and we’ve been chowing down on some awesome salads.

Our other plants are looking good. Our tomato plants are growing out of control, and our peppers and eggplant look like they’re going to do well. Unfortunately, we did lose one tomato plant (that Mortgage Lifter I was so excited about). I’m not really sure what happened there, it just never took off. Maybe we didn’t water it enough right after we planted it. I think we were gone for a few days around that time.

We hadn’t gotten around to planting the pole beans, even though we had the poles in place for them to climb. We lost the seeds somewhere and never did find them. Finally we bought some new seeds and planted them. We were worried we were planting them late, so we used my grandma’s trick of soaking them for a few days first to get them to sprout before planting them. They are just coming up now, so hopefully we weren’t too late on that.

The only thing that didn’t grow were the sunflower seeds we planted all over the place by the train tracks and the fence in the back. We figured it would be a cheap way to spruce the whole place up. We planted two packets of seeds worth, and I don’t think a single one came up. Certainly plenty of other enormous weeds came up, so it’s not like the area is infertile. I don’t know what happened there, but it doesn’t look any worse than it did before, so I guess we’re not out much.

So, with the exception of the sunflowers and one tomato plant, everything is going well!

(By the way, I know a garden post is a little lame without pictures, but I don’t actually have any! The garden pretty much looks the same as it has the past few years, so it’s not exactly inspiring me to take pictures. I could have gone over and taken some for the post, but it just didn’t get done in time. Sorry! Maybe I’ll post some later.)

Travelin’ Man

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I have been traveling a lot lately.

In the past few weeks, I have spent 3 days in Detroit, 1 day in Indianapolis, 4 days in D.C., and another day in Indy. Detroit and D.C. were for work, and they were a little rough. It was hard for me to be away from the kids, and (somewhat ironically) it was hard for Sara to be stuck with the kids (though Anna did come and help her get through the week when I was in D.C.).

On the weekend in between, I hit up a bachelor party (congrats Chad!) and played paintball at White River Paintball. It was definitely the coolest place I have ever played! They have some really awesome courses, including one with derelict cars and house trailers and two story buildings, and another that replicates Omaha Beach, including a shipping container “drop boat” that opens up into the teeth of bunker fire. The place was huge and busy, but very well run, and we never had to wait for a course.

Of course, the following weekend we were back to Indy again to see Rachael get her Masters’ degree (congrats Rachael!). We just went for the day, and we experienced some of the most inept parking garage management I have ever seen. An hour and a half sitting in the parking garage, unable to move! We almost spent more time stuck in the parking garage than the actual graduation ceremony! And at the end of it, there were actually cops directing traffic, and doing a terrible job. Oh well.

Sometime in there we also managed to plant the garden. It was super hot and sweaty the day before (85 degrees), but the temperature dropped precipitously in 24 hours, so we ended up doing it in a light drizzle, freezing our butts off in 46 degree weather! Evie and Oliver had to sit in the car because it was too cold.

Last year we had 6 tomato plants, so this year we decided to do 8. However, after we got them planted, we went to the farmer’s market and saw a Mortgage Lifter, which is our favorite variety. So we decided to squeeze *one more* tomato in, bringing us to 9. I should mention though, that really one of them is actually a tomatillo, not really a tomato.

In addition, we have lettuce, basil, strawberries, an eggplant (hopefully as good as the one last year), a jalapeno, and 3 red peppers. We have also constructed a pyramid over the strawberries for beans to climb. This will do double duty, saving us space in the garden by not having the beans taking up extra room, and also providing a little shade to the strawberries. Unfortunately we lost the bean seeds, so we haven’t actually planted them yet. The strawberries have around 20 flowers or so, so we’re looking forward to getting a slightly bigger crop this year!

I mentioned that we hit up the farmer’s market. It was the first weekend of the year, and the rain and cold temperatures didn’t leave anybody thrilled with the opening. I’m very excited that it’s back, and they’ve added some new booths for this year. Evie is excited too and is insisting on getting her basket moved from her tricycle to her balance bike.

So I think the traveling is over for a while. Hopefully we can get into more of a routine as the summer rolls along. Hopefully there will actually be a summer this year, considering it is the middle of may and it’s getting down in the mid-30’s tonight!

The best Easter egg hunt ever

/ Shane / Leave a comment

On Saturday we signed up for an Easter egg hunt over at the community garden. We thought Evie would have a good time. We had no idea.

So it turned out that only one other kid showed up for the Easter egg hunt, besides Evie. There were 50 eggs hidden around the neighborhood park. For those of you following around at home, that’s 25 eggs per kid. This is WAY more eggs than you usually get to grab at a thing like this. There were eggs everywhere, and Evie could hardly pick them up fast enough. And there was no competition for the eggs, no egg tug-of-wars, no big kids abusing little kids, more eggs than a 3 year old could imagine.

Another kid showed up about 30 minutes later, and I’m not sure if  he was there for the egg hunt or not, but we felt bad for him watching Evie gloating over her hoard of colored eggs like a dragon over treasure. When Evie wasn’t looking, we would take them out of her basket and re-hide them for this other little boy to find. However, this boy was not prepared for the egg-finding force that was Evie. We would practically hide the egg in his pocket and he would miss it, but not Evie. Her usual focus and determination apparently applies to egg hunts as well. She would re-find them as fast as we re-hid them. So she probably found at least 40 eggs when all was said and done.

After this we had to play Easter egg hunt for the rest of the day at our house. Alternately either hiding eggs from her, or finding eggs that she hid. The eggs contained such treasures as rubber bands or candy that you weren’t allowed to eat. After playing this game with her for a while I discovered A) she’s better at finding eggs than I am, and B) she has a pretty sophisticated idea about where to hide eggs.

An interesting side note, the other kid that showed up for the egg hunt is actually going to be in her class at her new school next year. So that was interesting, and I’m glad to see they got along well.

You can contrast this with the other Easter egg hunt of the weekend, which I think was a pretty typical egg hunt experience. In other words, it was pretty crummy. This egg hunt was after church on Sunday, so first off, Evie is forced to sit through the entire service looking at eggs hiding all around her, but not able to touch them. Naturally, she spent the entire time cataloging every coordinate of every egg in range of our position.

Here’s where the trouble really starts.

Afterwards, the directions were for kids to come to the front and get instructions before looking for eggs. Poor Evie, who’s the most perfect, mature child on the planet who also has terribly mean parents that make her follow the rules, had to go to the front to get the instructions as the rest of the children raped and pillaged all of the eggs in the rest of the church. Second off, people can’t stop trying to hand her eggs during church, which she knows is wrong but is quite a temptation to offer a 3 year old. And might I add that the fun of getting the eggs is finding them, not having them handed to you by and adult.

I know this is something on me, because it’s one of my personal pet peeves, but FOLLOW THE RULES! Who are you that are so important that YOUR precious little monster doesn’t need to follow the rules? Go ahead little Timmy, you’ve waited long enough, you can start a little early. Here little girl, it’s just one egg, what could it hurt. Yes, I understand that it’s just an egg hunt and who really cares, but it is a series of these little things over the course of the lifetime of your child that teaches her that rules don’t matter because she is special and above the rules for some reason.

So naturally, Evie follows the rules and is devastated to find out that all of  her carefully cataloged eggs are gone before she gets back (except for the one I was sitting on and another one I was defending through sheer intimidation). She ends up finding 3 eggs (so one other one that I wasn’t personally defending), even though they planned about a dozen per kid. And kids are walking by taunting her with their piles of 20+ eggs. Most of this stuff went over her head, and she was actually somewhat happy with the ones she found, but she was a little disappointed and it’s only going to get worse as she gets older and becomes more aware of what is going on.

You can see why I liked the first one much better.

As a side note, is there some kind of inflation of candy hidden in Easter eggs? Everywhere we went, the eggs had 2 or 3 pieces of candy in them, basically as much candy as could fit in the eggs. I only remember there being one piece of candy per egg! I had to sneakily go through Evie’s found eggs as quick as I could and remove a bunch of the candy, so she wouldn’t have candy overload (total she had something like 30 eggs with 2 or 3 pieces of candy per egg…I think that’s a little excessive for a kid her age).

Aw man, I just realized, the reason I only remember one piece of candy per egg was that MY parents probably dug through my eggs and removed extra pieces. Oh well, I guess I’m just part of the parenting circle of life.