Fall Maintenance

The tomatoes are almost wrapped up, but there's still a few green (and ripe) ones on the Sun Gold, blueberry, and Sweet 100 plants, so I spared them for now. Almost everything else from the summer is out. I planted the pumpkin seed yesterday, but need more room for my next sowing of lettuce and cilantro. The weather is warm and sunny - predicted to hit 70 this coming weekend! My poor garden, how is it supposed to know what to do?

Chilly Halloween Fun

The day after planting a slew of new seeds, I invited a bunch of preschoolers over for a Halloween playdate, and of course we ended up in the backyard (NO WALLS CAN CONTAIN US!) and of course some of my seeds got trampled, or - let us say - worked deeper into the earth. We'll see what comes of them.

But it was worth it, because we were doing an awesome Halloween spooky ice activity - frozen hands with surprises inside. Tipped off by Anne from Left Brain Craft Brain to the post at Happy Hooligans, I prepped the latex gloves at noon, dumping a large portion of liquid red food coloring in each. I got them out of the freezer at 4 PM. They were mostly frozen and in fact if they had all been entirely solid it would have taken the kids a lot longer to harvest their toys. The project's mess was all contained in the yard, where the grass was in its death throes anyway. (The red does get all over fingers and clothes - could have used a couple of those gloves for myself!)

The three-year-old kids all loved digging in their icy hands for some period time, varying by attention span, but my big first grader may have enjoyed it the most. He didn't have any parental help (because I was scurrying around distributing supplies to everyone else), and he took the longest, extracting his toys and applying salt with almost surgical precision. He told me later that it was so much fun it made everything else about the day "boring". Um, sorry?

I was too rushed to follow the Happy Hooligans suggestion about removing the gloves carefully, so we did break some fingers and the moms amused ourselves by staging them in some unused dirt a la fresh corpses. Classy. Thanks to Anne for the photos!

I'm both glad and sad nobody got a photo of the "bloody" pile of surgical gloves left at the end. Revolting!

Fall Planting

As much as I gripe about the weather around here, we do have the potential for four-season growing. Take that, New England and your beautiful fall leaves! Yesterday, we clipped our pumpkin fruits, leaving me free to pull out the pumpkin plants from the ground, along with my potted tomato that produced a grand total of maybe 6 tomatoes over the course of the year, and one of my two remaining potted basils. I planted from seed:
Bibb lettuce
Carrots
Salad Bowl blend lettuce
Basil (ambitious, I know)
Beets, golden and red
Broccoli raab (last chance for this packet of seeds to impress me after lack of performance last go-round)

I still have four cherry tomatoes, two green beans, and a zucchini in the ground, all of which somehow managed to convince me they justified their dirt for at least another week. I also have a pretty row of leafy carrot greens and just enough cilantro for my own needs. It remains warm in the afternoons and cool overnight, hope my little seeds are cozy!

Normally I would not call myself an optimist, but you can't help it when sowing seeds... definitely part of why I keep at it.

Fall Planting

"Can I do the carrots, Mommy?"

Today is the first sunny day this week - and ironically enough, it's time for fall planting. "Assisted" by my three year old, I cleared a spot that hasn't been planted in a couple seasons (due to the previous bamboo problems). I dug in some new soil additives. My kid enjoyed mixing the two kinds of dirt together. Then we sowed beet, carrot, lettuce, and cilantro seeds. I'd like to do favas, but I don't have the space right now.

I haven't found a good plant marker I like. Or should I say, one I can put in the ground that my kids won't move. So today I just scribbled in chalk on the fence what was in each row. My daughter added some art to my notes. That should get us over the forgetfulness hump until (if) the rainy season, by which time something identifiable had better be coming up there!

Fall Colors

This year I am more attuned than ever to the fall colors all around us. Even more than when I was in college in Massachusetts - I distinctly recall enjoying the colors then, but now that I am older, that layer of recognition of the passing of time makes the fleeting beauty sweeter. We walk to school daily and I, at least, am dazzled.

Full Speed to Halloween

My homegrown Cinderella's Coach is the belle of the ball.

Second biggest holiday of the year for kids! I did not fully appreciate that until this year. My family
and I are loving the crisp morning walks to school, spotting and admiring many spooky decorations around the neighborhood, and endless chatter about costumes. (Maybe that last one is enjoyed more by the kids than by me.) Only two more days! It's so exciting to be a kid this time of year - magic around every corner.

In the garden - oh, right, the garden! - I brought myself to pull my green beans. Boy, was it time. The cilantro is doing great, the lettuce I planted at the same time - not so much. I just can't seem to get the hang of lettuce's timing. I want to plant more peas and new carrots this week, and - hope springing eternal - lettuce. We're still getting a few golden cherry tomatoes. "We" meaning my little locusts, who swarm the bush and promptly eat the fruits before anyone else can get to it. I may need to pull the tomatoes for room.

Locusts at work.

Indian Summer

Meager October harvest

 Indian summer in the Bay Area is the best. It *almost* makes up for the lack of a real summer. It's warm but not hot. The light is gorgeous. You can wear whatever you want - shorts! t-shirt! pants! jacket! - and you'll be fine. Houses are putting out their autumn and Halloween decorations. We've started playing "Count the Pumpkins" on our daily walk to school.

A good 30 minutes of entertainment

Preparing to throw away my cilantro because she doesn't care for it

This week's weather has been amazing so we've spent some time in the backyard. I pulled out the remains of the Angry Birds birthday party knockdown game, and my son entertained himself for quite a while setting it up in new configurations ("levels"), just like the real game. Tip: Used the soccer goal behind the set-up to help with picking up and re-assembly.  My husband made the components of the game from rinsed-out cans, boxes that were in the recycling, the color printer, and some kraft paper with drawn-on faux-bois (to simulate the wood in AB). We definitely have gotten our money's worth out of his effort!

 Lots of cilantro going to seed because it's hard to use it all up when the kids don't eat it and my husband doesn't like it anywhere near as much as me. Sadly, very little else to pick. I still can't bring myself to yank anything, but Plantapocalypse is coming....

Fall Craft Mayhem

The inspiration and the perspiration

Oh, Family Fun magazine. You really are the parent's Martha Stewart Living. I cannot resist attempting your cute owls, and now my kids cannot resist whining for them every single day at snacktime.

We've also gathered lots of fall leaves on the daily walk to school for a variety of craft opportunities, including painting, glueing, and simply sorting and discussing. Endlessly fascinating in the array of colors and shapes. As per Martha in the October issue, I obtained glycerine at great personal effort in order to give our collection a glycerine-water bath, thus preserving their colors.

Look how I follow directions! Hmph

Maybe I cheaped out on the amount of glycerine (they're not giving the stuff away) but the result was sort of hit or miss. (My son sorted some into a new "do not use" pile.)  I even weighed down the bath in order to evenly distribute it. Oh well, it's good enough for a first try, and me and my family's - erm - level of crafting expertise.

How's the garden coming along, you ask? Um.... yeah.