My FarmVille: Week 20

The first ripe tomato has arrived:

The first sunflower opened:

The first (and still only) pumpkin is now bigger than my head:

The corn cobs are plumping up:

The first butternut squash appeared:

The first pickler looks about ready to throw in the brine:

As always there are more garden photos in our gallery.

My FarmVille: Week 19

Those pole beans are climbing so fast I can hardly reach the top of them. The butternut squash vines on the sidewalk trellises are getting pretty big too.

We have our first zucchini!

This pumpkin is growing very quickly as well. Hopefully this year we can carve a full-sized design on it.

Ready to eat this week are green beans, zucchini, broccoli side shoots, beets, and carrots.

My FarmVille: Week 18

The peas are done. No, really this time. I got a few more handfuls off the vines this week but they are really slowing down.

You can see the garlic drying over there on the table. This week I pulled 17 heads out of the ground along with 10 bunches of shallots. This is my garlic harvest, about to be pureed in olive oil for convenient cooking:

The green beans and cucumber vines are rocketing up the trellis (behind the umbrella), and we now have a few tiny beans and cucs coming forth. The corn tassels are pouring out of tiny ears, and we have our first pumpkin (now bigger than my fist):

More garden pics are in our photo gallery.

Grilled Quiche

When it gets this hot (94 today) you'll do anything to not turn on any heat generating appliance, so for dinner tonight I baked a quiche in our gas grill on the back porch.

I just made the quiche recipe as I would for the oven. Instead of my usual glass pie pan, I poured the filling into a heavy square metal baking pan that fits my grill top.

I got out the oven thermometer, lit one side of the grill, and placed the pan on the unlit side, so it wouldn't be directly over the flame.

It took about the same amount of time as it would in the oven and it turned out great! I'm thinking brownies might be the next experiment. :)

Basic Quiche:

6 eggs
1/2 cup cream or whole milk (whatever I have around)
pepper and salt
1 cup chopped fillings (veggies, bacon, etc.)
1 cup grated cheeses

Beat the eggs, cream, and seasonings together, and pour the mixture into a buttered baking dish. Arrange the veggies and cheese over the egg mixture, and bake at 350F for about 45 min.

My FarmVille: Week 17

Remember last week when I said the peas were about over? Well not so much. The vines look terrible and spotty and brown but the peas just keep coming!

There are a few new things this week...

1) As the fruit was ending, I pruned the currants and made that area nice and neat:

Now I just need to figure out how to dress up the space under the bushes. I'm thinking it might be an excellent place for summer lettuce and a backing trellis of brown-eyed susan vine.

2) I made a new compost pile:

The black bin was not cutting it. Not only was it woefully undersized for the amount of organic waste in my home, but nothing was decomposing in there. I noticed that the pile of old hay stacked up next to it was rotting faster so I made a big pile out of both, and enclosed it in a 4x4 foot wall of cinder block.

3) We have garlic:

The stalks have been getting kinda fall-overy, so I decided to see what state they were in, and Voila! there is a giant head of garlic where a single clove once was... like magic!

4) Imagine my surprise to find this hibiscus bush blooming behind our garage:

I thought it was a tropical plant but it seems to be doing quite well next to the alley.

5) The corn is blooming!

Yesterday the neighbor's landlord came over to mow their grass and commented how surprising it is to see corn growing in the city, and I noticed that the flower had started to open. We are well past knee-high and it's not even July 4 yet. :)

I posted more pics of blooms and tiny fruits growing in our garden in our photo gallery.