6 weeks!!!

I'm getting super-excited about Hallowe'en this year. I've spread out some of my boxes and unpacked one or two of them. I'm getting nervous about having everything done in time. You know, grand plans and all.

As I wrote earlier this month, my theme for this year is "Something Wicked".

I got the cauldron I was looking for and I'm waiting until next weekend, the 28th and 29th to unbox a couple of fun props I bought last November in the post-Hallowe'en sales. Yes, they've been sitting under my desk, still in their wrapping for almost a year.  I'm a very patient woman.

I also got some eyeballs in the mail this week.  Fun!

As you can see from the sidebar on the right, I am participating in Countdown to Hallowe'en this year for my 4th year. I am represented this year by Post's Yummy Mummy!  Throughout the countdown, I am going to try to post 3 times a week throughout the month of October. We'll see how that goes. I recommend searching through the rolls over at Countdown as there are some super fun Hallowe'en bloggers over there.

In the meantime, I have had my first pumpkin spice latte of the year, though I have not yet indulged in any pumpkin snacks.  We'll see how long that lasts!

Also, in garden news, these are my 4 latest gleans. Aren't they just gorgeous!

Home grown book review - part one

As you all know if you've read here at all, I'm growing my own veggies and I have been for quite a few years now. Last year I had my first bumper crop of tomatoes.  Not enough to can, but enough to make plenty of sandwiches, two quiches, a few salads, eat with melted Cowgirl Creamery's Mt. Tam cheese and fresh baked bread for a week, eat right off the vine and make two batches of marinara that was eaten immediately. I've grown lettuce, peas, weird mutant carrots, zucchini, strawberries, cucumbers (poorly), pumpkins, and peppers.

I am a researcher in real life, so, what I do when I want to know more about something is read EVERY FREAKING BOOK I can get my hands on. Fortunately, this includes some gems. Unfortunately, it also features some books that are not as helpful, or you can find the information better elsewhere. I have owned or borrowed each and every one of these books. Some I bought at the now-extinct Borders, some were found on Amazon and some are from libraries, yard sales and second-hand stores. I have DEFINITELY not been compensated in any way to review any of them.

If this is the year you're going to build your raised bed and join me in enjoying fresh-from-the-vine tomatoes and peas this year, here's what you should look at (or pass over) - but remember, it's only my humble opinion.

My best and most valuable advice in gardening is, START SMALL!!!! The best way to ruin a career of harvesting fresh food from your garden is to try to do too much at once. If you think you're suddenly going from zero to be raising enough veggies to get you through the entire summer without going to the farmer's market, you might have a little gardening fever. Scale back. Plant two types of tomatoes and some carrots, or peas and lettuce. If you enjoy it this year, you'll be back for more next spring and then the spring after that. It took me 6 years to get to chickens, and I've actually lived on a farm before!

All New Square Foot Gardening  I will go on and on about Mel's book, given half a chance. Mel's a little crazy, bless his heart.  He is super-passionate about his system and I'm a follower, but he's a little rigid for my tastes. I can't plant in squares. Everything just grows out of them and gets messy and then it's out of the lines.  I'd rather have no lines at all.  I'd love to be neat and orderly about my planting, but that's just not how I roll. More than anything, Mel taught me about soil. Good, healthy, living soil.  I would have been quite content using bags and bags of planting mix if I hadn't read this, but I make my own soil per Mel's technique and since I started, I have fertilized so rarely, it's crazy. I add compost every year and it's fluffy, soft, good loamy soil.  Yay! Some people get very angsty about Mel's use of peat moss which is not a sustainable resource. You can use coconut coir in place of peat and it's cheaper.

Western Garden Book of Edibles: The Complete A-Z Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits
If you're going to plant anything in Southern California, Northern California or the Pacific Northwest, BUY THIS BOOK. It tells you basically everything about everything (except loquats -- why doesn't any book ever have loquats!?). Pests, soil, diseases, how to plant, when to plant, harvesting, etc.  Love this book.  Must have.

The Urban Homestead (Expanded & Revised Edition): Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
For a while, I was carrying Erik Knutsen and Kelly Coyne's book around with me like a bible. It had everything I wanted to know about permaculture, composting, backyard farming and they're in L.A. so I felt like I could trust that what they were growing would be appropriate for my area as well. I don't carry it around anymore, but I do refer to it quite often.

The Garden Primer: Second Edition
This book is comparable to the Sunset book above, but it's so damn hefty and has so much good information, I just can't seem to part with it. It's also very good if you don't have the pleasure of living on the West Coast.

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide: Banner batches, grow heaps, comforter compost, and other amazing techniques for saving time and money, and ... most flavorful, nutritous vegetables ever.

After reading the Square Foot Gardening book, it occurred to me that I would be going out to buy quantities of compost. Instead, I could use our food scraps, our trimmings and our dryer lint to make it ourselves. So I bought this book. It's honestly a bit overwhelming in terms of the amount of information but it's all in there and if you want to compost, I highly recommend this one. It's got a bunch of different techniques, so you can try one until you find one that you like. I've still had to buy compost since I can't seem to manage to turn it often enough.  Eventually, I'm going to have a literal shit-ton of gorgeous compost, especially with the chooks coming, but until then, I'm adding as much veggie scraps and straw as I can.

Monday, I'll post the rest of the reviews since I just kept writing and the post got too long!!!

It's Spring

Spring sprung! And I've already fallen behind on my plans for this year! By now, I was supposed to have

1. 1 chicken coop
2. 5 chickens
3. 6 raised garden beds teeming with peas and tomatoes and lettuce

What I actually have as of this weekend:

1. 1,320 square feet of sanded and stained wood for raised beds (includes front and back for those of you counting).  
2. 8 dying pea plants ready to go into said raised beds
3. 4 wilting tomato plants waiting to go into raised beds
4. 30 seed pots of basil, dill, and tomatoes that never sprouted or got eaten by birds/bugs/squirrels/feral cats/opossums (opossi?)
5. 10 beautiful Italian cypress trees for privacy along the back wall

My coop was, I thought, being built but it turns out I hired a scam artist who flew the proverbial coop, and while I am unbelievably disappointed, I have found another person to do the building and I am supposed to be meeting with him tomorrow.

My schedule for this week is:
Tuesday: meet with new contractor, lay down the weed barrier and hopefully move the soil into the beds
Wednesday: it's supposed to rain :)
Thursday: Finish moving soil and move still living seedlings into the new beds
Friday: Move compost piles into their new home

Hopefully I'll have a new post next week to update y'all on how this went and some before and after photos!

Oh, P.S., the loquats are just beginning to get ripe so next week is going to be the beginning of canning season!

Home cookin' - zucchini bread

The zucchini season has begun!!!  This is one half of a zucchini. Not kidding. It is 6 inches long. No exaggeration. I didn't check on my zucchini for two days and it went from a normal looking size to this monster. These are some others....

I've been getting some serious zucchs, so what does one do?

Bake zucchini bread!!!


As far as I'm concerned, this is the best recipe for zucchini bread ever. It's both simple and not too terribly sweet and you can add and amend as needed. I do not eat nuts, so there will never be nuts in my recipes. Feel free to add them if you want to RUIN everything (ok, maybe that's a little dramatic...). But really, it's the season!  Bake a loaf!




Zucchini Bread
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen
Makes 2 loaves

3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 cups grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsps. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt


Preheat oven to 350°F.
Grease and flour two loaf pans.

In a large bowl or mixer, beat eggs. Mix in oil and sugar, then zucchini and vanilla.
Combine flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
Stir this into the egg mixture. Divide the batter into prepared pans.
Bake loaves for 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Super yummy. I'm bringing a loaf to a meeting tomorrow. Hope it's well received!

The Carrot Conundrum

In mid March, I planted carrots.  Last year when I planted carrots, some bold squirrel came along, dug them all up and ate the hell out of them. This year, the squirrels oddly left them alone so this week I decided it was time to check on my crop of carrots.  See if they were ready to be made into some yummy treat like a carrot cake, or just a dinner side.  I cleared the dirt off the top of one, just to see what it held and the future looked bright. It was a gorgeous round top of bright orange.  I immediately grabbed onto the base of the leaves and gave it a good yank as if I was pulling out a root from the earth, which I thought I was...

Here is what I got.

I laughed out loud!

My beds are a foot tall and the soil is super soft so it's not as if there wasn't room to grow. Not sure what happened here but it was hilarious!

I thought, maybe that one is a mutant. So I pulled out the rest. 

They're like a bunch of stubby toes!!!  I have no freaking idea what I'm going to do with these. Anyone know a recipe for carrots that are as fat as they are tall?  I have a feeling I'm just going to end up eating them raw with a side of ranch tonight...

Ah, the joys of farming!

Word Wednesday - Sustainability

A trend is afoot called the sustainable living movement. It has noble goals of reducing our use of resources, not buying so much, using less. Less water, less oil, less packaging. I believe in this.  I think there are things that we can do to make ourselves less dependent without suddenly becoming granola-eating, prairie skirt-wearing, kombucha-drinking*, kumbaya-singing dirty hippies (my apologies if you do any of these things!). There is a middle ground.

Kelly Coyne, in the New York Times article profiling her and her husband and their new book railed against "lentils and gloom". I tend to agree. (Note, Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen do not know me, I just love their books).


I didn't get into the "sustainability movement" because I felt I was too dependent on oil or because of factory farming or because I read something horrible about chicken McNuggets.  I got into this lifestyle because I grew a tomato and I found that getting my hands dirty made me happy and at the end of a couple of weeks, I could eat a tomato. I liked coming home from my desk job, putting on a pair of work pants and digging out weeds or sitting at the dining room table julienning orange peel for 4 hours in complete silence.  I also didn't jump into everything at once.

I think this is key.  I think if I had tried to plant a huge farm immediately because "zomg we are killing the earth!!!!1!!!  I would have completely burned myself, not to mention bummed myself out. It would have felt like a chore. Who wants to do that?

On the other hand, what I did is far more sustainable in a personal way. I started with zucchini. I'm now up to 10 different crops and working on the rest of the farm. It is becoming more and more enjoyable instead of being a chore. I look forward to coming home and looking for projects to do in the yard.  Some days I'm freaking exhausted though. I get up at 5 a.m. for work and when I get home in the afternoon, there are days that all I want to do is take a nap.  Thankfully, the way I've built this up gradually has allowed me to figure out how to work at my job, work in the garden and then take a nap, if necessary. Soon I'll be adding on more chores, and I'll just fall into bed every night. But I imagine I'll be pretty happy about it.

Last night I came home from work looking forward to my afternoon. I pulled out the peas (done for the season), weeded a bit in the tomatoes, picked some zucchini and spread some straw in the basil. Then I made a zucchini, bacon and gruyere quiche, ate it and fell into bed exhausted and happy.

I'm not doing any of this because of the big, bad industrial food complex, but it has the effect of being good for me and good for the earth. But I'm not getting rid of my car just yet, and let me tell you, she's a damn guzzler.

Hopefully in the next couple of years, I'll be able to get a hybrid.

*Kombucha is not safe for people with immune deficiency. 

So what's a bluestocking?

The term was first coined around 1790, in reference to the blue, worsted wool stockings that were considered "casual wear" as opposed to the more formal black silk stockings. It traces to a London literary salon founded circa 1750 and led by Elizabeth Montagu and was used as a derisive word for a woman considered too educated or with a scholarly, literary, or intellectual ability. 


I've loved this term since the first time I heard it and always identified with it. While it used to be somewhat akin to calling someone a "strident, harpy feminist", which I've certainly been called in its various forms, I'd always hoped to use the term in some way.  

Farming too, has been ridiculed and maligned. While we used to understand that we relied on farming for our very sustenance, most of us have become so far removed from the sources of our food as to believe that everything is picked clean and waxed from a sanitized patch of air. 

Making has always been something appealing to me. Whether it's farming, baking, sewing, crocheting or building.  There is something so wonderfully rewarding about planting a seed and being able to use the results. Starting from scratch and eventually having a finished product. Building beds, hauling straw, amending soil, harvesting vegetables and serving them to the people you love is so satisfying to me.  None of this takes me away from feminism, but closer to it. When reading, learning, studying, I am in my head.  A place I am infinitely comfortable. When planting, digging, making, I am in my body; a place I am lacking familiarity, but I learn with every shovelful.  

The best part about it, is it makes me giddy. I laugh when I accomplish something and you should see how hard I laugh when I screw something up. It's all a journey.

When we last spoke...

Well, actually, I skipped a bunch of stuff in that first post. I skipped how I rented a sod cutter, cut up all of my grass in preparation for a gorgeous new yard and our sewer line broke to the tune of all of the money we had saved up for the yard and then some.

Then I decided I would put in a new sprinkler system myself and dug trenches through the back yard. It took me a day of really sweaty work to dig one trench. But I kept going for another couple of days only to realize that I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about sprinkler systems. (we looked on Google Earth yesterday and you can see the trenches from space...it looks like freaking half-finished alien crop grids. Awesome.)

At some point in all of this, I realized that the tree in the front yard wasn't a chestnut tree, which seemed sentimental in a Currier and Ives way but is totally useless to me as I don't eat nuts. It was a loquat tree. Lemme tell you, that shit is good.  Loquats are lovely, apricot-like fruit, but they don't really last more than a day off the tree, which is why you never see loquats at the market. So, if I was going to pick the loquats, I was going to have to do something with them.  I bought a ladder. I bought a fruit picker. I flung loquats jai alai-style into every neighbors yard within a block of me.  I eventually PUT. DOWN. THE. FRUIT PICKER.  I started canning.

Throughout it all, the Mr. was, for the most part, exceptionally supportive of my efforts. If he minded the sugar-encrusted walls in the kitchen and the awe-inspiring chasms in the yard, he didn't say so (much). He was also very supportive when I started picking up drills and saws and shovels and hoes (he he), as long as he didn't need to take me to the hospital. Toward which, I might add, I have a propensity. 

Now I have a beautifully planted side yard with 4 gorgeous raised beds producing snap peas, tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries and Kentucky beans. The fifth bed is in the main section of the yard where the entertaining patio will eventually live. It accommodates a sizable herb garden with oregano, sage, dill, rosemary, thyme, and basil. Separately, I have 4 pots of mint, each one a different kind, I think it's grapefruit mint, chocolate mint, peppermint and pineapple mint.  I'm going to experi-mint...ha ha.  Finally, there are pomegranate, peach, lemon and lime trees.The lemon and lime are doing poorly.  I can't quite figure out what I'm doing wrong with these, but that's another post.

Sounds good so far; but the farm is FAR from complete. I have that 60' x 24' patch of weed that was once the lawn, which I am turning into the core of the farm. The plans are drawn up, now I just need to start. It all begins with water. I can't really have a farm without it. So we're back to the sprinklers; which, I believe I might actually have to pay someone to install. It just seems like it's too important a job for me to screw up (I'm sorry, use as a learning experience).

I read. I love to read. When I find something I love to do, I read about it. I go to the library and check out books, I find magazines, I spend hours perusing Amazon for the best reviewed books. I started reading and doing, more reading, more doing.  Pros and cons. Horror stories and success stories. I read them all. It started with just a few books and a few raised beds. Then a composter. And another bed. Then a worm bin. Then another composter.  Eventually, I found my way to The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. It's a good book. Funny. Clever. Well-written. They encourage getting backyard chickens.......

More tomorrow. :)

First farm post

Well, here I am again, back on the "blog wagon".  It's been a few years and I've made a bunch of life changes. One of which is that I found out how much I enjoy my little 0.14 acres of land in Burbank.

When the Mr. and I moved to Burbank in 2006, there was a pile of junk on the side of our new garage that was about a foot and a half high. When I cleared it out, it turns out there were these adorable little garden plots. Of course, it wasn't as easy as sinking some seeds and starting to grow.  The soil was compressed beyond comprehension.  I could barely get a shovel into it at all and I finally managed to plant a few things that promptly up and died on me.

Plan B.  I decided I would need to learn a new way of gardening so I went out and bought Square Foot Gardening (Mel doesn't know me and I don't know him, I just really like his book).  I read and read, and then I went to the hardware store and had lumber cut and shoved into my PT Cruiser.  I got out the drill and started drilling things together and the next thing I knew, I had two 8x3 raised beds.  I filled them with Mel's mix and planted some pumpkins and zucchini.  Lo and behold, I got pumpkins and zucchini!  Woo!

With some success on my side, I waited a few months and built another raised bed.  And then another raised bed.  I planted tomatoes.  I got slugs.  I ringed the beds in copper tape. I cut the hell out of my hands with it. I learned to use gloves.  I got tomatoes. I forgot to water.  I killed everything.

Another winter passed and while riding my silly trike through the alley behind our house, I saw an old, broken bookcase.  It looked like a raised bed to me. I persuaded the Mr. to help me drag it home.  He is very afraid when I drag stuff home. But, that very weekend I put on a 4th side and filled it with Mel's mix and planted strawberries.  Hence, begins the story of Bluestocking Farm.

I am really looking forward to writing this story and hope you enjoy it as well.  More tomorrow.