Composting

I turned the compost today and I found two of the utensils: the fork and the "taterware" knife. There was no evidence of any decomposing yet.

more seeds

A week ago I planted another bed of seedlings right next to the first one. This time there are beets, lettuce, more onions and three more pumpkin seedlings!

tomatoes

I've been reading Animal Vegetable Miracle, which btw everyone who eats food needs to read. There's a big discussion of canning, including mentions of how botulism can grow in the cans, so I don't think I'm ready for that. I think maybe I will buy a ton of tomatoes at the farmers market and make a bunch of tomato sauce and freeze it. This recipe seems doable.

I love composting. Now, maybe you're thinking, "Um, isn't that just storing garbage in your yard?" No, I say, it is turning garbage into fertilizer! Throw some seeds and dirt into the fix and you've got food! How cool is that?

But it also allows to experiment with flat ware. Those ones that look like regular plastic but supposedly biodegrade. So I'm taking a "biodegradable" fork, knife and spoon, and regular plastic knife, and throw them into the compost pile. When I turn the pile again in three weeks, we'll see how they're doing.

We'll start with this knife I got today at the Oakland Zoo, because it has a cool web address on it: taterware.com:




Here's a spoon I got at the Monterey Bay Aquarium a couple weeks ago with my clam-chowder-in-a-bread-bowl (it says "Eco-products" on one side and "Made from Plants" on the other):



A fork, also from the Oakland Zoo cafe; it says "dispoz-o USA" on it, and the web site claims that company's products are biodegradable:



And here's the plain, plastic knife:



So my assumption is that the stuff that is supposed to biodegrade will compost in my pile, since I have successfully turned a bunch of other stuff (kitchen scraps, paper plates, egg cartons) into compost. Tune in three weeks from now to see if anything happens...

Seedling success

Observe my lovely seedling patch:



The tomato cages are actually for sunflowers; most of the seedlings in the center part of the bed are carrots.





These two big-leafed beauties are PUMPKIN seeds. Yes, very exciting. This is a dwarf variety called Baby Pam -- only about five pounds per fruit.

Urban farming

This weekend was highly productive all around the house, including the garden. I turned the compost, which I have been doing every three weeks, and in the process scooped out three 5-gallon buckets of finished compost! I've been working on this compost pile for well over a year and I finally figured out it needed to be turned a lot more often then I was before. To use the compost, I created a small raised bed with some bricks and rocks we had sitting around the yard. I soaked the dirt and turned it a bit, then mixed the first 5 gallons of compost in. I got a bag of potting soil and put half of that on there, mixed it some more, dumped the second batch of compost on, then the rest of the soil, then the rest of the compost. Yay Garden Weasel!

So what did I plant? Seeds of sunflowers, columbine, statice, onions and carrots. Tonight I already noticed a couple holes in the bed so I put some netting over it to prevent future sampling by squirrels and birds. Hopefully the compost will turn out to be effective and the seeds will turn into something great!

Ah, the smell of melting Velcro

I just found that the plasticy grippy side of the Velcro melts when you iron it on the highest setting! Woo! It actually didn't smell like anything, thank goodness. But I do have to figure out how to clean that off my iron. (I was ironing a patch next to some Velcro.)

Cooking dinner

So, I don't care for cooking. It's a lot of work, and you have to clean up afterwards. So I've been leaning on the Sous Kitchen crutch a lot lately. But it's not cheap. So my new goal is to cook two meals each week and the other nights will be leftovers, pre-mades or eating out. The plan is to schedule meals out a month in advance and do one big shopping trip a month, and then get the fresh stuff I need as needed. For the next month I've scheduled Fajitas, jambalaya, Jamaican Jerk chicken, lasagna, chili, and Moroccan vegetable stew. We'll see how it goes.

Pizza dough

I just made a batch of pizza dough from a Wolfgang Puck cookbook Linda loaned me. I like to make it well ahead of time and put one pizza's worth of dough in the fridge and the other pizza's worth in the freezer. It's easy then to take it out of the fridge an hour or so ahead of dinner, knead and stretch it, and put on some toppings. The dough is sufficiently superior to store-bought to make it worth the effort of home-making.

Project Runway fabrics

These prints are so fabulous! I may have to go to the city to check them out. (I'll also have no problem remembering the name of the designer since it's the same as my husband's uncle.)

This shirt is my nemesis!

I found this pattern on the JoAnn web site. It appealed to me because it's customized -- you enter your measurements and they email you a pattern designed for you! But the instructions are minimal in the extreme, with no diagrams and terminology that professionally-trained dress makers in my class at Eddie's hadn't heard of.

After months of working on it on-and-off, and much help from the instructor at Eddie's, I finally finished it, only to find that the ravelly fabric I bought at JoAnn's would literally be the shirt's undoing. I'm in the process of going back over every seam with a tight zig-zag stitch.