custom egg carton, first tomato blossom, and seed swap goodies

 i spent a good portion of my president's day holiday making this custom egg carton label. i'm not selling the eggs, i just want special egg cartons for giving them away.

the ladies are each laying one almost every day now, so they're stacking up fast.

 i made a second label that isn't personalized, just in case anyone else raising chickens wants one for their eggs. most dozen-egg cartons are approx. 10" long, so if you set the print size to 8x10 it should fit.

 first tomato blossom of 2013 opened today! i have 5 little baby hahms gelbe plants growing...was planning on just 2, but thinning the seedlings turned into carefully dividing and repotting them.

 i also bought another aloe and divided it. i'm really into succulents right now! maybe just because it's winter and i'm starved for green growing things. i like that they don't grow very fast, so you can keep them in small containers.

 beautiful springlike weather this weekend. damn near 60 degrees on saturday. i went on a couple walks with the dogs and saw lots of bulbs popping up, and i found this little grub friend.

 my haul from the seedy saturday seed swap. it wasn't the best swap, not a lot of people brought seed and the venue was small and cramped. worth going though. i'm excited to try calypso beans (the yin yang looking ones) and jerusalem artichoke.

 my contribution to the swap was a ziplock bag full of forellenschluss ("freckles") lettuce that i saved last year. it's a romaine heirloom, green with brown speckles.

 last year i also saved a ton of golden sweet peas. it's the best variety of sugar snaps i've grown (see my post from last june for more info). unfortunately, a major garden fail happened, in the form of a bunch of little beetles that ate the heart out of nearly every pea i saved. luckily this seed was in its own sealed glass container so nothing else was infected. i found about two dozen peas that look like they might be ok, but i'm going to germinate them indoors just in case there's beetle larva inside. bummer. :(

 mardi gras cauliflower! i wish i didn't have such bad luck growing cauliflower, i'd try some of the purple.

 i spent mardi gras at a reading with my mom, one of my favorite authors (who happens to be local) read a couple of his essays at the egyptian. it was outrageously good, and it put me in a deeply happy, appreciative mood.

 potato wanted to add something: thanks for the new flappy, circus!

2012 garden plants

i don't think i've ever posted a comprehensive list of all the plants i'm growing in a season. i'm a total plant nerd, so this might only be interesting to me. the varieties in italics are starts or seeds that i haven't planted out yet, and the varieties with astrisks are ones i haven't grown before:

tomatoes:
black and red boar
black zebra cherry
brown berry*
chocolate cherry
chocolate stripe x2
cream sausage
fuzzy wuzzy
green zebra
hahms gelbe
japanese black trifele*
lemon drop*
lime green salad*
monkey ass*
orange flesh purple smudge*
OSU blue x2
reisetomate
roughwood golden tiger x2
snow white cherry*
tiny tim
vintage wine
whippersnapper
white currant x3
zapotec pleated*
+ numerous volunteer mystery tomatoes

non-tomato nightshades:
eggplant, listada di gandia
eggplant, casper*
eggplant, shoya long*
eggplant, udmalbet*
ground cherries
naranjilla* x2
pepper, big bertha*
pepper, black hungarian
pepper, cherry bomb*
pepper, choricero
pepper, corno di toro giallo
pepper, fish
pepper, joe's long cayenne
pepper, nepalese bell*
pepper, sarga cseresznye*
pepper, whitney*
potato, all blue*
potato, russian banana fingerling*
tomatillos, volunteer/mystery variety x3

beans & peas:
dragon tongue bush
golden sweet pea*
purple queen bush
rattlesnake pole
royal burgundy bush

cukes & melons:
cucumber, jelly melon*
cucumber, sweet marketmore
watermelon, blacktail mountain*
watermelon, moon and stars*
watermelon, orangelo*

squash, pumpkins & gourds:
gourd, bule*
gourd, dinosaur*
pumpkin, rouge vif d'etamps*
pumpkin, triamble/shamrock
squash, black magic zucchini
squash, peter pan* x3
squash, ronde de nice
squash, straightneck yellow

non-potato root veggies:
beet, chioggia
beet, detroit dark red
carrot, cosmic purple
carrot, solar yellow
carrot, lunar white
garlic, purple glazer
onion, sweet yellow*
radish, french breakfast
radish, sparkler white tip
radish, purple plum

greens, brassicas and herbs:
basil, dwarf greek
basil, holy/tulsi (red & green)*
basil, opal
basil, sweet
basil, thai
broccoli, purple sprouting
calendula
cumin*
kale, dinosaur*
kale, red russian
kohlrabi, purple vienna
lettuce, flame
lettuce, freckles
lettuce, red oak leaf
parsley, italian flat leaf
rosemary
sage, bicolor
spearmint
thyme

other:
aloe, fire ranch*
asparagus*
corn, blue jade dwarf
fuchsia
strawberries, eversweet
strawberries, quinault
strawberries, white alpine* x3
sunflowers

a grower not a show-er

sometimes after i upload and look through a batch of garden photos i’ll go back outside and look around, like, where is all that stuff? all those plants and flowers and veggies i just saw...where did they go? from a distance much of my garden is barely visible.

when i give garden tours to friends i feel ridiculous, because in my head it’s this wonderful place, but looking at it through the eyes of a visitor makes everything look unimpressive. the garden isn’t all out in the open--there are huge trees and shade and xeriscaping to work around, so it’s mostly tucked away into corners and small spaces here and there. you really have to look for it.

tomorrow jeanne and i are touring each other’s gardens for the first time. i’m curious to see what her whole yard looks like and to be able to walk around and look for myself after having seen so many pictures. and since we live just a few miles away from each other it will be great to compare notes on the growing season so far--neither of us has been very good about garden blog updates lately.

my corn is silking and tasseling. it stayed dwarf, as advertised, only about three feet tall, five of them growing happily in one large container.

i have actual oranges growing on one of my dwarf citrus plants! after the plant finished blooming the tiny fruit started to swell. there are four, and the biggest is about 3/4” long now.

i wanted to have a large quantity of something other than sunflower seeds to bring to seed swaps next year...

so i collected all the seeds from two red russian kale plants.

snowy eggplant is my favorite. it never stops pumping out delicious fruit.

turkish orange eggplant is even more productive, unfortunately. these things are nasty. small and incredibly bitter. i’ve tried picking them young and leaching the bitterness with salt, but they’re still awful.

i don’t know what to do with them other than use them as decoration. and eventually compost.

fish pepper is pretty cool, but the variegated foliage isn’t as decorative as i expected. it looks like the plant’s been shat upon by a flock of birds.

i made scrambled tofu with diced black hungarian and mild jalapeno peppers. both are much milder than i thought they’d be, which is good because i don’t like a lot of heat.

i’ve only gotten to eat one raspberry and two blueberries so far.

here are some recent harvests:

lackluster "laissez-faire" potatoes from across the creek. sometime soon i need to post an update on the yardshare garden--we’ve gotten so many potatoes that just pop themselves up out of the soil, pounds of them without any digging yet.

ronde de nice zucchini on dave’s killer bread with tempeh, roasted bell peppers and homemade hummus...drool. i could eat zucchini every day. lately i have been.