A Video Tour of my Garden

I made a video of my garden and posted it on my June's Tarot Journey You Tube channel. Here it is if you want to see my one year old, in progress, garden.

Today I spent over an hour just planting 3 more of the Hollyhocks I started from seed.  The soil here is hard clay and without any natural rainfall in over a month, or more, I had to wet it down repeatedly just to get a hole started. Then I hit and disconnected a drip line and had to get to the garage and turn that part of the system on to find where it had disconnected from. Fortunately, it was an easy fix and I got on with planting the last of the 3 I had room for in that bed and headed back in the house to cool off.

With a big fire covering North of us 18,000 acres that is only 25% contained, bringing smoke into this valley starting around noon every day and not moving out till around dinner time when the winds shift, and the high 90s temperatures, morning is the only time I can work in the garden with some level of comfort.

It's been a bad year for tomatoes - worst I've ever had in my 56 years of gardening. Until a couple of weeks ago when my oregano came into flower, I hardly saw a bee in the garden. I don't know if all the constant summer fires the past couple of year is the cause or the poisons that people and growers are using on all the plants, decimating the population, but it's definitely concerning.

Hope all my fellow gardeners are having a good summer.

SPRING PLANTING UPDATE

Yesterday was a marathon plant buying day and today It's been another marathon day of planting, and other garden chores. All but two of my larger tomatoes are planted, (Planting 7 this year) as well as the serrano chiles, sweet roasting peppers and bell peppers, my lone Eggplant, cantaloupe, parsley and basil.. I also got two hanging planters and a wall planter cleaned out and planted.

The early planted lettuce is ready for harvest, snow peas are looking good broccoli and the spinach are doing well.

After lunch I put my bean seeds on damp hand towel paper and in a baggie for a few days till they sprout. The bean tower is in place and the soil turned over and amended.. There is still some kale, summer squash,carrots a couple of herbs and a lot of flowers to plant.

A while ago I planted some snow peas,cilantro, lettuce, spinach, scallions,and brocccoli and the leaf lettuce is now ready for harvest and everything else is doing well. Most of it is planted in my large raised bed, using the square foot gardening method again.

If I can still walk after dinner I might get out and move some things out of two large planters I want to use for those two large beefsteak tomato plants, and put some new soil in there so I can plant those last two big tomatoes tomorrow.

The last couple of days I've bought a lot of flowers - some for planters and some to add to a recently enlarged flower bed, and and a couple more herbs and veggie starts, so there's still a large amount of planting still to do in this heavy, rocky soil. The weather looks good for the rest of the week, so if my back holds out I will be able to get a lot done in the next few days.

It looks like most things did well over the winter except a jasmine that didn't make it. My other jasmines in large pots always seem to do well, but some of the jasmine varieties can't take our cold winters. If I decide to buy another one of those, it will go into a pot and get moved to the garage or hour for over wintering. Meantime, I have a nice, new gallon of a Nelly Moser clematis to plant in that spot.

Hope everyone is enjoying some good gardening weather now.

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Same day Jim Lahey No Knead Sour Dough bread

This morning I started around 7am on this Jim Lahey one day, no knead sourdough bread and I'm happy with how it turned out even though I made a couple of mistakes! I forgot to mix my starter in the water and put the starter in the bowl and put the flour on top of it; but I guess I mixed it enough at the beginning that it didn't make a difference. But by 2pm I had a finished loaf of bread.

As usual for this type of no knead bread, the crust is firm, but the bread inside is soft. His recipe call for all purpose and whole wheat flours. Next time I do this same day recipe, I'll use white whole wheat which I've read makes a lighter loaf.

But I'm very happy with this one pound loaf. It's great to know I can get a decent loaf of sour dough  bread  the same day. Next sour dough I make, I'll try one of the overnight night recipes which I imagine might give a bit more flavor. 

Ooni oven arrived and is put together

The oven arrived a few days ago and I had no trouble putting it together. I swear, it took longer to unpack all the parts than it took to assemble it. But our weather has been horrible since it arrived, so pizza making will wait a bit. Plus, I still have to get a table for it.

Bi-Mart had a sale on the perfect sized, folding table with adjustable height legs, but after driving a half hour to buy one, they were sold out. So I got a rain check and will have to keep calling and go back when they get more in.

Meantime the bad weather continues. This morning it was below freezing, and alternating between rain and snow and at times a mixture of both. But I spent some time with the pizza calculator at pizzamaking.com, and printed out a Neapolitan dough recipe for 1, 2 and 3, 10? pizzas using the same bakers percentages. I'll probably make enough dough for 2 for the maiden firing.

I also found some you tube videos to watch made by some owners of this Ooni 3 model. It looks pretty straightforward as to how to get it started. The trick with baking the pizza will be to turn it about every 20 seconds which involves having to remove the door; but since it only takes about a minute or so to bake, that shouldn't be a problem.

Now I want to research a recipe using my Ischia starter.

Sour Dough starter and new Ooni wood burning pizza oven

I was up refreshing 3 jars of sourdough starter at 6am this morning. It's a rainy day with more cold, wet, and maybe snowy days his coming week, so it's a good time for thinking about making breads and soups.



This week I bit the bullet and ordered a small pizza oven. It's the Ooni, which can get up to 932 degrees F, and can be fueled either with wood pellets or gas. I opted for the wood pellet version, figuring that I could always buy the gas burner attachment at a later date; but frankly, for the once or twice a week at most, I might make pizza, I think the wood pellets would work fine. Plus, I think they might impart some extra flavor to the pies. Also, I have a 500,000 BTU weed burning torch that I've used to fire a small raku kiln, and I should be able to use that to fire this little kiln if I had to.

It enroute and  should arrive sometime next week. I've already purchased a 25 lb bag of mixed wood pellets for it. Now I just have to figure where I will put it. It needs to be on a wood or metal surface, The unit only weight 25 lbs. I can temporarily put it on my outdoor wood table until I can find some kind of used wood or metal table of appropriate size for it.

It takes less than a half hour to get the oven up to temperature and only 6o seconds to bake a pizza. The unit can also be used to cook steaks and their other, larger unit, can be used for roasting larger cuts of meat, making stews, etc.

I'll have to put it together, but that shouldn't be a problem from the look of it.