Monday, July 5, 2010

We have tiny baby cantaloupes!!!

Well, the cantaloupe vines have done gone crazy. They've been sitting there wrapping themselves around things for weeks and we were wondering if we'd have to rape them too, but a few bees showed back up and now, lo and behold...



The garden is looking awfully snazzy:















The day's vast haul.



Brio was watching me take pictures of the garden. I'm pretty sure he thinks that we are all crazy. How does one get from a racetrack in New Mexico to a place like our little red farm with the chickens in the yard?

Brio was, of course, and off the track thoroughbred racehorse. It took him a long time to wish to live outside like a horse (he still prefers to be indoors a lot of the time) and to be cool with just hanging out. Our horses do a lot of just hanging out.




See? Big horse Wings has gotten very good at hanging out and our ridiculous antics.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

In which I somehow rape a zucchini...

Well, it turns out that this whole "dying off of bees" thing sucks. That, and we're pretty sure Mark made it a personal vendetta to kill them off before they killed him off, because apparently he is highly allergic and they could kill him. Unfortunately, some of our plants are not self-polinating, which led to this unfortunate afternoon, in which I had to rape a zucchini plant, quite against it's will indeed.



Do you all see how sassy I am around our farm? It was freaking 99 degrees out today and I'd already ridden one horse, so I wet down my hair and put on a baseball cap. Whoever said that riding horses is a glamorous and elegant sport has some rather severe misunderstandings. I mean, it IS... about half the time. But when the rest of you time is spent working on things around the farm, suddenly it becomes not so elegant.

I digress. That was me with a boy zucchini flower, preparing for some unprotected pollination.



My life is no longer glamorous.



However, my peppers pollinated just fine.



These are black peppers. Don't hold out any hope. We've killed the peppers somehow every other year.



The garden this week





Look at those maters!



Starting to ripen.

And alas, BOUNTY! We have cucumbers coming up like crazy.





Victorious me, harvesting cucumbers just moments after the zucchini rape. Does anyone know how to rape a melon? I don't think they're self-pollinating either.

In which Agnes plants a victory garden...

Mark was out weed-eating the garden and around the chicken coop the other day and we were pleased to discover that our ladies had planted their very own garden. We'd fed them the cracked tomatos last year and lo and behold, plants have sprouted up behind the chicken coop.





First you plant the seeds...



Then, you fertilize like mad...












It's a bit more petite than our big garden...





And it definitely requires the supervision of a lady in red...



and a Gertrude to watch:



The horses were pretty unhelpful, having provided compost for this whole endeavor..











But Agnes is queen of all things cute.









Thursday, May 27, 2010

Potatoes and pancakes

We really didn't have a whole lot of hope when we planted seed potatos we bought at the hardware store in Catlett, Virginia. It was a whim really. We saw the sign for seed potatoes and remembered we'd read about someone who planted seed potatos, so the brother and I chopped em up and stuck them in bags with hay and compost. He was pretty sure I was delusional, in fact, never having seen someone plant potatoes and by virtue of the fact that the little things really didn't look like they would grow. I mean, they're sprouted potatoes. They don't look like fierce vines, exactly.

Wings teaches the brother how to sit on a horse.

These were the potato plants a few weeks ago:



And a few weeks ago:



And tonight:



This prompted me to think of all the amazing things that a person can do with potatoes. Like make Latkes. Latkes are a traditional Jewish Channukah dish,
given that they're uberfried in oil they really aren't exactly something you should eat more frequently than a few times a year. But they are very simple and they are wonderful.

Potato Latkes:

- A couple of good simple baking potatoes, shredded (My grandmother always said they weren't complete without knuckles in them from handgrating, I'm a vegetarian and I don't want to eat knuckles so I use my cuisinart)
- Eggs to hold them together
- Chopped parsley
- Sea salt to taste, and cracked pepper

Drain the potatoes and get all the moisture out, then mix up with eggs and salt and parsley. Fry in oil (I used a little olive and vegetable oil). Serve with applesauce or sour cream. Don't be a weirdo and use ketchup. That's just weird.

I garnished with chives, because chives are nice.

On another note, the tomatos look nice:

Thursday, May 20, 2010

39?

We started with 32 tomato plants. 32, why not, seemed like a reasonable number when Margie was in DeBaggio's and well, 32 should keep our two families fed for the summer, plus countless friends? I mean, we fed everyone on EIGHT plants one summer.

We immediately lost two plants to unknown critters of the night. It then seemed perfectly logical to replace them with nine more. You know, lose two, get nine more. Right?

Then we realized we didn't have ANY full sized yellow tomatos and how could we ever be complete without a full sized yellow tomato?

I suppose they are in the mail.



All lined up and tucked in their bales.





How could we do any of this without our helpers?



We also require supervision:



I've also successfully got some bagged potato plants growing. These photos were taken about a week and a half ago and they've grown into MONSTERS since then.

Scenes from the White House Farmer's Market

Can I just share how awesome it is that a farm market has opened up downtown by my office, and is open from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m.? I'm sorry, City of Alexandria, I love you dearly, but you're on crack if you think I'm getting out of bed at FIVE A.M. to hit the farmer's market for decent produce. On a Saturday. The only way I'll get out of bed to be at something at 5 a.m. on a Saturday is if there's a horse show, and even then I have to be bribed with thermoses of coffee and eggy cheese sandwiches.

The WH Farm Market seems a little pricier than the ones a bit further out, but it's definitely a treat to be able to take a lunch break and go or go after work. The produce is very pretty.