Garden Mice and Musings

 

ground cherries grow wild

little lanterns of delight

loved by child and mouse

 

 

I have noticed fairly recently that we have a large influx of small animals in our yard this year...especially of the rodent variety. I have seen more rabbits than I have in a very long time and the mice! Holy cow....we have a lot of garden mice this year. One day the Squirt and I even saw a little mouse gather a ground cherry, shuck it and nibble away. Of course it ran away when I went to get the camera...but trust me...it was cute.

 

Today, while on the phone with a friend I caught, out the window, little mice climbing my Black Eyed Susans, nibbling off the flower heads and hauling them away. It was hysterical.



 

 

As for the rabbits...well...apparently the word is out...the Loaf has retired.

 

 



The Great Preying Mantis Release 2011

On the last day of school, my good friend SweetDani* and I ended the school year with an outing to a local garden store while the girls were at school. We found quite a few lovely plants, and I'm pretty sure we'll both be going back...but I digress. While we were checking out, SD found some preying mantis pods at the cash register. They came in a pouch of 2 and asked if I wanted to split it with her. Not being a huge fan (but I'm not a killer though either) of insects I was a bit hesitant but agreed to it as she said her lovely daughter had such a great time with it last year.

Well, today while having my coffee I noticed that there was something crawling around it the container...THEY HATCHED!!! Oh my goodness, there were SO many crawling around in there! I retained my composure as I didn't want to alert CiBaby to the goings-on until I was prepared with my camera. Once I was ready I told her to come and see something really cool.

After looking outside at them, in their container, I was ready to release them...BUT WAIT! CiBaby really wanted her bestie to be there too...another bug lover. So we called up J and told her the pod had hatched and that we would wait until she got to our house to release them.



It was so neat to do, we will most likely do it again next year.

*Did you know there was a lemon basil named Sweet Dani? Me either!

Note: A quick word of caution, next time I will put them in a mason jar with a screen...some lost their lives in the tape. :(

A Spring Delicacy

Most people associate asparagus with Spring. Here in the CzaMama house, while we love asparagus, CiBaby goes crazy when these lovely little lawn ornaments start blooming!

I believe her eyes rolled back in her head when I showed her today's harvest...1/3 lb dandelion blossoms! Dandelion fritters for dinner!

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There's no doubting...

Spring is sprouting!!!

(sedum, tulips, giant allium, grape hyacinth and iris)

Good fortune

Tonight, after a quick dinner, CiBaby snatched up one of those unclaimed fortune cookies from a previous take-out night and excitedly awaited to hear what it said. Her fortune read:

"Today is an ideal time to water your personal garden."

Her take on the message? "Mama, that means we are suppose to teach people how to garden."

That's my girl!

Well...why not?!

I look out my big picture window...and there they stand. Bright and glowing in the sunlight, taunting me. "Ha ha! I got into your flower beds and there's nothing you can do about it!" Until a light bulb switched on. Oh yeah? Watch me.

So today I took my trusty bowls out into the wild blue yonder and harvested...dandelions. "Huh?" you say? Well...why not?! Dandelion greens are high in Vitamins A and B, Potassium and Iron...and the flowers taste darn good when you fry them up. Of course T-Daddy said, "We're eating weeds??" and proceeded to tell CiBaby that her Mama is silly.

I fried up a little bit of bacon with a clove of minced garlic then added the dandelion greens (just the leaves, mind you) and stir-fried them up like you would any southern style greens. The flowers were dipped in a little batter and fried to a golden brown and topped with a little kosher salt. Those were gobbled up instantly.

So in the end I guess I'm not so silly after all.

Please note...if you are going to do this make sure that the dandelions you harvest are clean of all herbicides and pesticides. I picked mine out of my organic gardens which do not see any of the forementioned "cides" and are fairly protected from passing dogs.

Eating locally on a budget...the dollars and sense

With all this talk about eating locally, I thought I should touch on the dollars and sense of it all.

The other day, while at the gym working out on the elliptical machine, I caught the last half of an Oprah re-run. It was about kids and obesity.* One thing a mom of one of the kids said really got me thinking. She said they were on food stamps and that it was not always easy to pick the healthier option when on a tight budget. Really? While I can see how that is for some things, I am having a hard time believe that as a blanket statement.**

So I've started to do a little research on the subject of eating healthfully on a budget AND eating locally. I hit the grocery stores, co-ops and the farmers' markets. I won't bore you with all of the prices, but I will sum it up with you will, on average, spend less on locally produced food when comparing like foods (organic to organic and conventional to conventional).

First, if you have anywhere to plant anything edible...do it! Be it a few large pots on your patio, whatever, it's a start. It's as local as you can get...and quite inexpensive. The same day I saw the Oprah show I went to my monthly Master Gardener meeting and it was on Superabundant Small Gardens. In 2005 the presenter decided to really see how much her organic garden produced, not only in pounds but how much it would have cost her to buy it all at the time it was harvested.***

Her garden's expenses included: manure, other fertilizers, seeds and plants, potting soil, electricity and water, pots and supports and her community garden plot rental fee. It totalled up to be around $253.50. Her crop was valued at $1,408.65, minuses expenses...for a total value of $1,155.15. WOW! Now she follows a few simple rules that I personally abide by for my own garden...When you have a small space to garden, produce what you love and costs the most to buy. Of those things look at what takes up the least amount of space, grow up verses out. Love beans but you don't have a lot of room for a large crop? Plant pole beans! Have a fence and love cucumbers? Plant the vining variety and have them climb up your fence. Find compact varieties. Interplant your edible plants into your flower gardens. Eggplant are not only beautiful, but their purple flowers are gorgeous too. Peppers, especially the hot variety add a splash of color (habanero for fall, what could be better???)

Second, if you have access to a Farmers' Market...GO! Not everyone has the room or the time for a garden (or in my case I cannot grow as much as I use) but everyone can visit a farmers' market. Not only do you get the freshest fruits and vegetables picked at their peak, you also get contact with the people who grow your food and support your local community at rockin' prices! I did overhear one woman say, "If I wanted to pay this much for X, I could just go to the grocery store." I think she's missing the big picture, don't you?

Some of my purchases at the Farmers' Market included:
Red bell peppers - 16 lbs for $12 ($.75/lb)
Green bell peppers - 8 lbs for $4 ($.50/lb)
Eggplant - 21 lbs for $5 ($.24/lb)
Tomatoes - 60 lbs for $18 ($.30/lb)
Fresh onions - 5.5 lbs for $4 ($.73/lb)
Beets (red & golden) - 8 lbs for $4 ($.50/lb)

What did CiBaby and I make with all of this (and from our garden) food, you ask?

We made salsa...lots of salsa!...(both red and green...which we eat a lot and is an easy/good thing to bring to parties), pickled beets, ketchup, spaghetti sauce, raspberry jam, pear butter, tomato sauce, eggplant parmesan, moussaka and ratatouille. I also put away roasted eggplant, roasted red and yellow peppers, green peppers, zucchini, corn, sweet potato leaves, green beans and tomatoes for future cooking use...which saves me a ton of money and everything is still peak flavor.

You don't have to be a foodie, like me, to see why this works. It just makes [dollars and] sense.


*Ironic???
**Long ago I was a check-out girl at a grocery store and saw the "food" come through on food stamps...let's just say that a good majority of it was not what I would consider good choices.
***I forgot to ask her if it was just at the co-op/grocery store and didn't factor in the farmers' markets' prices.

*FM* - Fabulous Miraculous

Farmers' Market

What a year.

Turn off the lights...

summer is over.

Yes, that's right...the harvest has come to an end (at least in my garden). Yesterday afternoon I heard that we were going to have a hard freeze during the night so that afternoon I went out to gather the rest of the fruits. Much to my dismay, we'd had a freeze the previous night. Some things were protected enough or hardy enough to have made it through, but others were not so fortunate.

I gathered up all of the herbs to be dried or frozen, tomatoes (red and green), a big bag of arugula, most of the bunching onions and the rest of the zucchini.

And this is what we woke up to.

While I'm never all that thrilled to see the first snow, CiBaby couldn't wait long enough to get out of her jammies in order to get out there!

A morning at the market

This morning I had my first go round of the year at a Q&A table answering gardening questions.*

I love this time of the year. The hustle and bustle of the market. The flowers, the veggies, the sights, sounds and smells. And the people. I love the people. There are your Average Joes and Janes, burb dwellers, urban folks, your very "outside the box" people, kids and babies. But my favorite people are the farmers. I love leisurely strolling the aisles and looking to see whose new and whose back for another season. Thinking back to what I bought from each stand last year, what creation I came up with and what I'm going to do this year.

There's just something about it. Call me nostalgic, call me old fashioned, call me a farm-girl at heart (but born and raised in the city), but to me there's nothing better than soaking in and utilizing all of the sustainability that our city has to offer. It's just really cool.

*It was fabulous, by the way. Of course I didn't know every answer to every question, but knowing where to look or where to send the question-asker for the answer is almost as good.

Crazy dream

I had a crazy snippet of a dream last night/this morning.* I was living in a small house with T-Daddy and the kidlets. We had a beautiful backyard, much like the one we have now. Small, but lovely. We spent all of our time out back.

One day I was walking a friend out to their car and I noticed our front yard...like I'd never seen it before. It was HUGE! and all grass. The yard was surrounded by a very tall privacy fence, making it a little more believable why I hadn't seen it before, sort of. All of a sudden the thoughts of planting it full of fruits and vegetables was swimming around in my head. Oh the canning/preserving I would do!

What do you think I've been doing a lot of lately? I guess it's kind of like when you dream about your job. hehe


*My memory was jogged when I picked up the November issue of Martha Stewart from the mailbox this afternoon.

Tomato picking

It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it...

otherwise we wouldn't have wonderfully yummy,

homemade CzaMama salsa!

We be jammin

Do you recall the raspberries I talked about back in July? I'm not sure that I mentioned at the time that these particular canes bear fruit twice during the growing season - mid-summer and late-summer/early-autumn, with the later producing much more.

Last evening, on one of my daily gathering of produce from the garden, I came back with over a pound of raspberries! Now, we could have gorged ourselves that evening, but I decided that was as a best time as any to try my hand at raspberry jam.

So this morning, with a chair up to the counter, CiBaby and I made jam...5 - 4 ounce jars of it. It was delicious! The offical taste-tester thought so too, she got to lick the spoon and cooled pan.

Now we will be able to savor the fruits of our labor this coming winter. I love having a farm in the city all to myself!

Give us this day our daily...

Bread? Who needs bread when you can have VEGGIES!

I'll forgive your trespasses, just don't trespass in my garden.

*All veggies shown were harvested from our garden this morning.