General Update

So we think we planted things a little late. Although we have brocolli, it grew out in long stalks like it was reaching for the sunlight (as opposed to growing in a head down near the leaves.) I haven't really seen brussel sprouts grow before so I am not sure if they are acting right or not. They don't seem to have made little sprouts at all. The beets are growing slowly. Ah, but we did get a big good chunk of normal looking celery, so that's exciting. I think we need to start a month earlier next year. There has been a lot of sun this past weekend, so maybe that will help everything get moving a bit?

PEAS!

We got four pea pods off of our huge bush of peas. Does life get more exciting?

We ate our first bits of the garden. This made a huge cesar salad for Christmas Eve (with Briana's Asiago Cheese Cesar dressing- Delicious) and then we still had a huge bag of leaves to take to my sister's for Christmas. There wasn't anything especially spectacular about the taste, but it was still wonderful because we grew it ourselves. I think we are going to pop over a little later today to see how things are going.

Almost all the plants and veggies just seem very happy this year. I just read in the paper that we have had 7.14 inchs of rain since July which is more than normal. So that is really exciting. We have had a few freezing nights to contend with, but nothing seems to have hurt the plants so far too much. (We did have some spider plants that look sad, but maybe they'll come back.) Keep growing guys!

Peas

Our peas are looking AWESOME!!! I can't wait to eat them. Though really I can't wait until I get to grow a whole bunch of shelling peas in the spring.

shift in focus

So the original intent of this website was for me to document what we are growing in the New Era Community Garden and what I am learning about growing vegetables. In the meantime though I realized that I am just as excited about the various flowers and plants we have been growing around our yard. When we moved into our house 1 1/2 years ago, all we had was a big weedy, dirty piece of ground surrounding our house. It has been very exciting the changes we have been making to our landscape. This process has been going on ever since we moved in and will be ongoing for years. I am jsut as excited about this as the vegetables, so I am expanding the scope of what I will be documenting here.

bamboo

So, our backyard goes right up to an apartment complex. Honestly, it isn't the nicest complex either. All of the bathrooms look down on our yard and the owner just doesn't take the best care of it. It is a very interesting experience. Well about a year or more ago, Jason discovered that bamboo might be just the thing to screen our backyard from the apartments. We have just been kind of putting off buying it because I think it seemed like an overwhelming project.

However, in the paper last weekend there as an artile about a guy up in Rocklin who has a bamboo nursery and was having an open house. We figured we would just go up and check it out and, if nothing else, learn a little more about what type of bamboo would work in our backyard. We had already determined that we wanted clumping instead of running bamboo. With the running bamboo the roots go crazy and grow all over the place and can ruin the foundations of buildings.
Tangent aside, we drove on up to Rocklin and ended up in a residential neighborhood. It seemed an odd place to have a nursery. Well it turns out that it was this guy's house and he was selling bamboo out of his backyard. There really were a lot of people there, most likely due to the newspaper article, so we really didn't get to chat with him much. However, we did end up bringing home our first bamboo to start our screen.
We got an Alphonse Karr bamboo. It is clumping, likes full sun, and should grow to be 20-25 feet. It has a really pretty stripe going up the stalks(?)/shoots(?). So project "screen our backyard from neighbors bathrooms" has begun. Here is a picture.

bulbs

This probably isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but I am just tickled. We put paper white bulbs in the ground last year. They grew nice big green leafy stalk things, but never flowered. I was concerned that maybe they didn't get enough sun, or just didn't like it where I put them. But this year, there are a ton of buds, and....voila, we have flowers!