Time to start up the garden 2010 filter!
First things first, I guess. Meatfest was a success–we assembled my fire pit, which is just like this, only woodburning. Then we roasted a truly ridiculous number of sausages (off the top of my head, I think we had Hungarian hots, chorizo, sweet Italian sausage, cheddarwurst, Serbian sausage, bratwurst, and probably at least one other kind that I’m forgetting.) Then we had s’mores, and then we had cigars. It was basically awesome.
The weekend-long meatfest continued the next day when we played badminton, sang karaoke, and ate some really phenomenal ribs. They were ripped straight out of Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, which is one of my comfort books. When I’m sad and depressed and the world is a bad place, I read Home Cooking, More Home Cooking, Lord of the Rings, and The Doomsday Book. Apparently, I find food and death cheering. Go figure.
Anyhow, the ribs marinated for a day and a half in half a cup of olive oil, half a cup of soy sauce, a quarter cup of rice vinegar, half a cup of lemon juice, a quarter cup of honey, a little sweet chili sauce, and about three heads of garlic. (That’s per rack, should you be doing this at home. You don’t have to bother peeling the garlic–just slice it a few times so that you’ve got a lot of exposed garlic flesh and toss it in.)
On the second day, they got wrapped in foil, topped with a little of the marinade, and baked at 300F for four hours. Before we ate them, we dragged them through some more marinade (fresh, obviously). They were incredible. I don’t like most barbeque sauces, because I think that they taste like corn syrup and red dye, and this neatly avoided that while still giving the ribs that nice, saucey feel you expect from delicious ribs. I’m told that some people munched on some of the rib bones, too, though I didn’t go quite that far.
Meatfest concluded on Sunday–no friends that day, but Nick, Maura, and I went out to my parents’ house, where they promptly grilled some steak for supper.
To be honest, I’m pretty sure that I’d be okay not eating meat again for a few weeks. Not that that’ll happen, just that it could.
To balance all the meat, we decided today that we’d head over to the garden center at Home Depot and pick up some seeds! I also bought two of those little seed starter things that has a plastic lid. Last year we waited on starting seeds until pretty late, and we didn’t start getting any sort of crop until late August. This year we’re starting them earlier and keeping them inside for a while, and faced with the option of cleaning up dirt every time the cats knocked over my little peat pots or buying a crappy plastic tray that has a lid and can be taped down on a chair or something…well, obviously I went for the latter. I hate cleaning; you guys know that.
This year’s garden is shaping up to be quite ambitious. Last year I flipped a couple of pallets and filled them with dirt to form a sort-of raised bed. This year, I think that I’m just digging holes in the ground and adding nice soil and hoping for the best. Last year’s beds will get used too, of course, but this will let me spread things out and hopefully get a bit more variety.
How much variety? Well, like I said last year, I have a brown thumb–not as deadly as a black thumb, but it’s a good bet that half of anything I start will die. That said, this is the seed list from today’s shop:
Watermelon (Orange Tendersweet–apparently these can grow up to 35 pounds, which is insane and obviously will not happen as long as they’re in my care.) (Because Maura will eat them well before that.)
Peas (Sugar snap, edible pod)
Spaghetti squash
Carrots (Kaleidoscope mix and sweet treat hybrids. Looks like we’ll get red, white, and purple from the mix and fat, short carrots from the sweet treats. Technically you’re not meant to start these in pots, but I did it last year and it was just fine, so whatever.)
Mesclun mix (Ashley lettuce, salad bowl lettuce, red salad bowl lettuce, arugula, corn salad, endive, radicchio, and chervil. I’m hoping to find a largish planter that I can grow this in.)
Lima beans! (Fresh lima beans are dreamy.)
Swiss chard (Rhubarb chard, so pretty red stems.)
Greencrop beans (I’m hoping to get enough to make dilly beans in my new pressure canner.)
Spinach (Baby’s leaf hybrid)
Fennel (Which I’m newly keen on.)
Eggplant (The packet has a mix of applegreens, rosa biancas, millionaire hybrids and snowy hybrids. I love eggplant and have had luck growing it before, so I’m really excited about this.)
Sweet corn (Two kinds–sweet perfection hybrid and ruby queen hybrid. The ruby queens, as you may have guessed from the name, will be red! If, that is, we can get them to grow.)
Tomatoes (Super sweet 100 hybrid and best boy hybrids.)
We also have some seeds from a friend of Nick’s. She sent:
Peppers (A mix of red, yellow, and purple sweet peppers.)
Red beefsteak tomatoes
Absinthe tomatoes
Yellow romas
A tomato mix of various sorts
Hot banana peppers
I’m crazy excited for the (potential) glut of tomatoes. I also left a few tomatoes rot in the garden last year, so hopefully we’ll have some volunteers, as well. At some point when the frosts have stopped, we’ll hit the garden center again and pick up rosemary, thyme, and basil–my luck starting herbs from seed is bad to the point of worthlessness. I’ve literally never managed it. We’ll probably grab a few more tomatoes, too, because it’s nice to have some that start giving fruit in late June or early July, and the store’s plants tend to be hardier than mine.
People who have specific knowledge about any of the above are welcome (and encouraged!) to pipe up about it–Livia? Tracy? Amanda and Andrew?
I think we’ll get most of the seeds in dirt this week. This year, I’m going to be all wild and crazy and find some way to mark what I’m planting. Last year, we just stuck things in the ground and hoped that some of them would grow. It was sort of exciting to be guessing what we were growing! The things that we thought for weeks were [crappy and stunted] melons turned out to be [failed] cucumbers. The excitement around here never ends.
I wish I liked lima beans and eggplant. Maybe I’ll tackle those down south, where I was converted into adoring salsa and all sorts of non-lima beans.
Meat fest was amazing! But I’m with you on the meat thing. My parents are going protein+veggie of late, which works for me, even though the protein is a lot.
Now I’m hungry, thankyouverymuch. Miss you. Want to sing with you more.
I bet I could convert you to eggplant, given time. Possibly also to mushrooms. Mmm, fungi.
Okay…
First, Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm sausages, which I know I already said on twitter, but I think it totally bears repeating.
Secondly, The Doomsday Book? As in the survey of Britain after the Norman invasion? Cause I’ve heard a great deal about it. I know it’s a fantastic source of history, but it sounds so very, very dry. If you enjoy it, however, I will give it a shot.
Lastly, can I come live at your house once the harvest starts? ;) Cause Mmmmm that sounds like some nummy veggies! I’m being less ambitious this year since we’re starting to try for baby 3(and last!) this summer and the idea of crawling around on my hands and knees in the hot sun with morning sickness is sooo not appealing, so unless all the compost I dumped in my bed over the winter volunteers something then we’re just doing herbs and a few flowers Nicky insisted on. I can’t wait for the basil to be out! Fresh basil is just one of those all goods.
Good luck with your garden!
Oh! Sorry for confusion. The Doomsday Book is also a novel by Connie Willis, and it’s one of my favorite books. I recommend it to pretty much everyone, really–it has mild time-travel and futuristic elements, but it’s so character based that even people who don’t like that sort of thing (my mother, for instance,) tend to really like the book. I can’t say enough good things about it.
We should see how many of these plants I manage to kill before we start making harvest plans. That said, we do have a spare bedroom…
Good Luck with the veggies. We are going to try to plant some this year, but I don’t have a very green thumb either. If you haven’t thought about fertilizers or don’t have a compost pile, you might want too, as it can add plenty of nutrients to the soil. Mom and Dad always put about a wheelbarrow load of “compost” in each of the gardens every year.
Hey Meghan! Glad to hear sickness is leaving your domain.
I have always gardened mostly from plants from the nursery. But the last couple years, all seeds. Man, you have to watch the frost and baby plants. Lettuce, cabbage, peas, potatoes, and scallion onions should be in now or soon. Some say bell peppers also.
I keep trying to google when farmers put out seed, because i don’t have room to start everything in house.
When i start seeing over night temps over 40 – i plant – things don’t grow until at least 40 well in the garden. Learned this when i worked as a farm hand.
I will let you now how mine goes, hope you do the same!
traci