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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Since You Have Nothing Better to Do

Exactly 2 months ago, I planted my first garden.
I had (and still have) NO idea of what I'm doing but I do know that in New Zealand, veggies are on "auto-pilot".
I haven't done much in the past couple of months except for throw some compost around and hoe around...That's it.

Now I am in harvest mode.
Which is also stress mode.
How much lettuce did I plant and what am I going to do with all of it?
Why is the broccoli getting so big?
and my usual..."What the hell is that?"

What is even more embarrassing is me giving a tour of my garden to real gardeners. It is hilarious when they point out stuff that either a) I thought was a weed and was about to kill or pull up or b) show me something that I totally saw but didn't recognize.
I had a friend come over last week. She is a veggie gardener and knows her stuff. In fact, she was able to plant and maintain a garden in a small backyard in San Francisco! She comes to my house and says:

"That is an amazing artichoke plant you have there"
Me: "Where?!" I should have sounded cool, like I KNEW there was an artichoke plant in my garden but I didn't
Then she wanders off and shows me the strawberry plant that I thought was a weed that I had been hacking at just days earlier. Thank God the strawberry plant forgave me and thought I was ignorant cause it kept growing...and big.
I'm just not cut out for this "identification of plants" thing.


I totally didn't see it...

OMG! It is an artichoke!!!!


So I decided to give you a little update on my garden.
We harvested our first "crop" of mescalin lettuce from my garden and had salads....for days....it was a lot of lettuce and that's not all of it. I blame Bruce. I sent him out with the shears and asked him to "get some salad greens". He came back in with enough to feed eastern Europe.


My lettuce!!!!! I made that!!!

Can't let it go to waste so we had salads for lunch and dinner 2 nights in a row. I still have lettuce growing. I don't know what to do. We don't have any pests that are eating it and since the sun shines for about 100 hours a day, it is growing at an alarming rate.

This is lettuce...after harvest...I swear I cut it!


Oh and it rains, a lot. That doesn't help with the overgrowing thing.
I used to have a problem with killing innocent green things. Now they are laughing at me. I pull things up and they drop seeds and grow a foot overnight. The next day, I'm trying to figure out how that happened.
I have given up reading about gardening.
I don't know the best way to harvest lettuce or broccoli. I just pull stuff up or cut it with scissors. Whatever I'm doing, it seems to like it. It grows back, stronger and bigger.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with broccoli this big...

Looks like we are going to be eating good....for a while...

Oh, and since you have nothing better to do, I have a bunch of  "Before" and "After" shots of my garden
(Can you tell I'm a proud mama?)
Before...(actually about 4 weeks ago)

AFTER! Just add Water!!!

It was big before...but now...



More adventures gardening coming soon!!!

Vampires Have it Good

Please don't think that I am complaining about something...I'm not. I'm just making an observation of something that is nice but has made my life a little harder.
I'm talking about the summer.
Spring is almost over here and now we are about to enter summer. Summer in New Zealand is peak travel season. Time to get out, barbeque, visit friends and family, hike, bike, row and swim. Everything outdoors. I knew that these people loved their outdoors but now I see why.
Summer has some nice long days. When I say long, I mean LONG!
I can't complain about pretty, sunny days, birds singing and balmy temperatures.
I can just make a couple of  minor "comments":

WAAKE UP!!!!
It is pretty hard when the sun comes up and burns a hole right thru your eyelid at 5am. I can't close the shades because it is so warm now that we have to sleep with all the windows open (Air conditioning is unheard of in most houses in New Zealand). When you rely on breezes to keep you cool you don't want any curtains or shades to be in the way! This isn't too different from when we were living in Phoenix. We had incredibly early sunrises, usually at 5-515. It makes you feel energized and ready for the day. Unless....

Is It Dark Yet?
There is a psychiatric disorder called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Basically, there are people so affected by chronic darkness and lack of sun in the winter that they develop a chemical disorder in the brain which causes them to be depressed. That must be the rarest disease in New Zealand in the summer.
I have lived in the desert in the southwest US. We enjoyed long summer days. Days where the sun would set around 8pm during the height of the summer. I thought that was a long day. Phoenix has NOTHING on New Zealand! I don't think I noticed that the days were getting that much longer. I just knew that all of a sudden, we seemed to have a lot of time off after work to go out and do things. I just thought it was because we were getting a "second wind". I found myself having enough time to come home, go to the store, cook dinner and watch a movie and it would still be light outside after all of those activities. Sometimes we would go for a walk! Here I thought we were just using our time more efficiently. It wasn't until an entire week of feeling exhausted all day that I made the mistake of looking at a clock during one of our long afterwork days.
We were sitting on the couch, after dinner, deciding what DVD to watch and I glanced at my watch. It can't be right.

Baby, what time is it?
I dunno, what does your watch say?
Its broken, it says 9:45pm but its still light outside.
Its not 9:45, the sun is still up, see? as he goes to pull up the shades that we had to pull down to keep the sun off of the TV. We'll get you a new battery for your watch tomorrow.
Ok.
What 9:45pm in New Zealand looks like....


We selected a movie to watch.
Two hours later, we are getting ready for bed and I realized the awful truth. It really is midnight!!! It really was 9:45pm!!! OMG! We had to be up for work by 6am...We were cutting into our sleep time! Now I'm really concerned because I know Mr. Sunshine likes to come up and hit me directly in the forehead at around 5:15am. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a "reverse vampire". I have to get up when the sun comes up. As long as the sun is in the sky, I must be up. I cannot sleep during the day, no matter how tired and exhausted I am. I can only sleep when it is dark. That is becoming a bit of a problem.
Now, I watch every day as the sun seems to climb higher and higher in the sky and sit there all day and most of the night. Currently, the sun sets around 9:40 pm. Doesn't get dark enough for a respectable sleep until around 10:15...that is so past my bedtime. So by default, I am tired.

Slightly darker at 1030pm...

I'm starting to wish for the winter again.....

Sunday, December 5, 2010

I'm Sorry I Killed You

I think that I have committed a form of plant-icide. I have murdered a group of little innocent seedlings. They never saw it coming. They expected me to care for them to take care of their needs....But noooo...I tore them from the fertile earth just when they started to grow. What can I say? I'm an idiot.

I thought I was a smart person. I was so wrong. Anyone that has to go online or to the library and get a book called "Gardening for Idiots" is an idiot. Who knew that this was going to be so damned hard?!
I don't know what possessed me to think that I could grow anything. I have a black thumb. I kill anything green or plant like. Something is wrong with me. Maybe I secrete plant poison from my pores? (Hope FBI/CIA/X-files doesn't come looking for me) All I know is that I had no business trying to do a vegetable garden after the "Incident"...


Killer Instinct
The "Incident" has to be the single most indicting piece of proof regarding my poisonous hands.
When I lived in Alabama, I had a friend (Elizabeth) that I met working. We worked everyday together and became inseparable. She and I were close. When I was leaving, Elizabeth got me a orchid bulb, wrapped in burlap fabric and I promised that I would plant it and keep in on my window sill and think about our good times in Alabama. Well, in the craziness of the move, my delicate orchid got packed away and moved to our new home in Houston. I didn't find it until 2 months later when I was unpacking the last of our boxes. I felt terrible that I had forgotten such an important gift. What was amazing about my orchid is that it had actually sprouted! No water, no sun,  no soil. Packed away in a box with little to no air..in darkness, my orchid started to sprout! I immediately took it out, carefully unwrapped the fabric around the roots/bulb and followed the instructions on planting it. It died. Seriously. After 2 months in a box with no sun, water or soil, I touch it and it dies. That's me. The Green Killer.

So here we are in New Zealand and I am confronted everyday with the black gold that these people have for soil. I have heard that you can throw a nail down and get a nail garden. Anything will grow!
So now, about 6 weeks after my backbreaking work to till my garden and sow my seeds, I have started to see the fruit of my labor. Not actually fruit but gigantic things. Unfortunately, I have no idea what is a weed and what is a plant. I did everything by the book. I removed all weeds to prep the soil, mixed in compost and something even nastier called "blood and bone" (it is EXACTLY what it says it is!!!!). I watered the soil and then carefully planted every seed EXACTLY how the package said. I'm sure I looked like an idiot out in the garden with a ruler, measuring the exact depth that the seeds were supposed to go in. I even had to call my friend, Amanda to ask her "How many seeds go in a hole?" Who has to ask that? I'm terrible at this!!
Anyway, I got my garden all planted. The only thing I was able to salvage from the prior garden was a carrot and some celery.

Garden...BW (Before Weeding)

Garden, after the "Great Weeding"
See my 3 celery plants I was able to salvage? And my ?turnip, collard, mustard green at the back right


In the Beginning, there was Nothing
Oh, what a difference a month makes.
One week after I planted my seeds, I had sprouts. Not little sprouts but pretty big sprouts. That can't be from my planting, right? The package says 2-4 weeks.


One month after planting...wow!

Three weeks after, I had a mini jungle. I had no idea what was growing. Yes, I carefully labeled each row and used garden twine to mark off individual veggie rows. But what the hell was growing in them?
Before you laugh, how many of ya'll city slickers know what the heck a young zucchini plant looks like? Or a cucumber plant? or any vegetable plant for that matter? I don't!

They're growing!!!

The Survivors of the Weeding...(Near to Far)
Broccoli, Mescalin Lettuce, Red Onion

So about 4 weeks after I "sowed my seeds" I had to weed the garden.
It started innocently enough...I started pulling up....uh, stuff. Then I realized that some of the stuff I was pulling up was stuff I have meticulously planted last month! Dammit! I killed half a row of carrots and lettuce before I realized that they were not weeds! I also pulled up two potatoes (by mistake) thinking they were weeds. In my defense, I didn't think there was any way that something that I JUST PLANTED could be that big!! What the heck is in this soil? Nuclear waste? Steroids? My potatoes grew from little potato-lings to plants just like that!!!

Oh, and the celery...

I'm going to call and see if I qualify for the biggest celery in New Zealand...

The celery was here when I got here. It was obviously celery. It had been overgrown by weeds and I carefully pulled away all the weeds and cleaned up around the roots. I guess the celery just needed that little boost to shoot to the sky. I am pretty convinced that what I have is not celery but a tree that looks like celery. Unfortunately, the celery will be sacrificed to the Celery Gods on tomorrow. Why? Two reasons...
1) It has grown so big that it has "flowered" and according to gardeners that know something (not me),  once the plant flowers, the fruit/vegetable is past its harvest. How was I supposed to know that?! I'm letting the dang thing grow to the sky. I thought that is what you wanted? Big, giant food!
2) The celery is now a whopping 6+ foot tall. Who in the heck would eat over 18 feet of celery? And the celery is blocking the sunlight for the poor little broccoli seedlings next to it. Its not fair for the broccoli. The celery has got to go.

Should celery be bigger than you?

Now all I need is a chainsaw...


My mom, trying to select from the 1 foot or two foot celery. When do you ever need that much celery?!