Field Tripping Through Google Images: Veggie Edition

I'm preparing myself for the Winter veggie season and by preparing I mean obsess over my Seed Savers book and dream of having a neat, orderly set of plantings (really this time!  I mean it!)  I keep picturing a little knot garden, but I would substitute boxwood for lettuces or radishes as the delineating boundries and filling the remaining spaces with squares of perky Carrots, Golden Chard and sweet little leaves of Mache, not to mention a bevy of cutting annuals such as red poppies (last photo), Baby Blue Eyes and Collinsia heterophylla.

My favorite method of instant inspiration these days involves sticking a phrase in the Google and clicking on images to see what comes up.  Many times I get quite relevant images, such as this one from the Better Homes and Gardens site:

And sometimes I go careening afield, to wonderfully unexpected places.  This morning, I landed onto Instructables.com to find my next "brilliant" installation against the fence of my triangular vegetable bed.

I picture getting two or three of these to grow the diminutive Mache or maybe even some Nasturtium 'Empress of India' to trail down the sides.  Can you just imagine all the possibilities?!  With a shoe rack of all things!

Harvest Year In Review

Harvest time has come upon us and what a strange season it has been!  While peppers and tomatoes have suffered our el Nino year, I've received a big bag of green beans from one neighbor (ah, the taste of summer!), a big bag of apples from another (which I made into apple pie last night and have eaten two slices so far today!) and this incredible jar of homemade pickles from homegrown cucumbers from another.  So the season wasn't quite a crap-shoot after all!  I'm using this post to record my season, but please feel free to chime in about your experience in the veggie garden this year.

Tomatoes:  I finally gleaned a colander full of Sunsweet tomatoes yesterday, but most seasons I run out of people to give them to after I've been exhausted by making sauces, jams, and throwing them in the oven to sun-dry.  The Thessaloniki tomatoes were planted later in the season and are just turning now.  Hope they're tasty!

Cippolini Onions:  these did great!  I'll sow more for the winter to see what happens.

Scarlet Runner Beans:  Funny, I don't remember the beans being fluorescent pink in past years...  These really didn't thrive, perhaps were shaded by the sunflowers? 

Peppers:  Wow, these sucked.  I had glass cloches on these for most of May to keep them warm and between the sweet pepper and Habanero, no flowers, no peppers, no growth and sickly yellow leaves.  And this is after a top dressing of worm compost.  In my world this treatment is above and beyond 5-star hotel-spa vacation so I'm pretty disappointed these freeloaders didn't pay their bill.

Sunflowers:  the success story of the year!  These made the rest of the garden look at least a little more respectable.  Growing 12' high, the flowers gave us sun on foggy days and as the picture shows, some little birdie is eating very well.

Misc.:  Red-heart radishes and lettuces are reseeding in time for the Winter (hooray!) and the Patty-Pan Squash really outdid itself with giant yellow flying saucers making their way into soups, the frying pan and over the fence to grateful neighbors.

What happened in your garden this season?  Anything contrary to what I experienced?

Seed Savers: It's Here! It's Here!

Oh happy day, my Seed Savers Exchange catalog has arrived!  It's so nice to sit with a steamy cup of tea, a kitty on your lap, "helping" you turn the pages of this veggie porn catalog,  and dreaming of the possibilities while the rainstorm germinates the wildflowers outside.  It doesn't matter that melons rarely develop in our powdery mildew infested coastal climate, just reading the descriptions keep me falsely optimistic:

"Charantais:  Considered to be the most divine and flavorful melon in the world.  Smooth round melons mature to a creamy grayish-yellow with green stripes.  Sweet, juicy salmon flesh.  Typically the size of a grapefruit and weighs about 2 pounds, perfect for two people.  Ripe melons have a heavenly fragrance."

By the time I'm at the end of the description, I am hypnotized.  I must have that melon!  These sorts of purchases never exactly turn out well, although my Dad in Sacramento celebrated an enormous warty French pumpkin from seeds I bought a few years ago.  Mine was a quarter of the size of his.  No fair!
 

At the very least this will jump-start my progress on creating a series of raised vegetable beds.  Then I can buy my seeds and support this amazing non-profit farm which works to collect and save our heirloom seeds.  Seeds can be purchased from the farm on their website, but members receive access to the Yearbook, which is basically a phone book for heirloom seeds collected and distributed by other members.  And for the first time, it's now available online!  While building raised beds can be daunting, I think the hardest part of all this will be deciding which seeds to buy!