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Half of my first planting of carrots were ready to be harvested last night. I’ve posted previously about the few little guys that I’d pulled for thinning and apparently it paid off. Most of my carrots were long and straight and picture perfect. While I was pulling them I noticed a few were still bunched together with others, and sure enough, those are the ones that weren’t so pretty. I figure this is about 25% of my total carrot crop.. which means we are going to have a lot of carrots.

	Here is the bed before I pulled them.
	And after. Hard to see because it was really getting dark and my phone doesn’t have a flash. I was out harvested around 9:30pm last night because it hit 106.6 degrees at our house yesterday, and being in the pacific northwest, we don’t have air conditioning. The carrot patch looks a little ravaged, but that’s because all of the big greens were attached to the big carrots which were harvested. They’ll keep growing and fill back in. Little tidbit.. until yesterday the hottest recorded temp was 100 degrees. That shows you just how crazy it was yesterday.  We all survived, including the two little furry feline children.
	Talk about a handful.. I can’t even get my hand around the tops.
	Here they are all washed up. We plan to eat these, not store them, so they were all washed and trimmed of their tops. After being processed they weighed in at 3.5 lbs. Best be eatin some carrots!

My bok choy is definitely done. I am surprised it grew as much as it did considering it is a cool weather crop and it’s now the end of July. I harvested the last bit of it this evening. The remaining two lettuces in that same area are still growing. They all survived Day 1 of the 90s. 3 more days to go.

	The empty spot on the left is where the bok choy was. The flashy oak butter lettuce and the paris white are both growing. I thinned out the paris white after taking the photo to give them ro0m to develop larger heads.
	To the left of the lettuces are the carrots, still growing away. The white flowers are the volunteer cilantro that came up in the carrots from last year that have started to bolt.
	On the right side of the lettuces are the rutabagas and the winter greens. That sounds funny being it’s mid 90s right now. See my previous posts for the varieties.
	On the other side of the house is the one bed that is still going strong. This has the san marzano and roma tomatoes as well as the summer one ball squash and the winter spaghetti squash.. and my onions up front there.
	Here is my biggest squash. I put a little plastic piece under it because it was sitting on the ground and i didn’t want it to rot. It’s about 3 inches across.
	The same variety but on a different plant. I noticed that two of my little squashes had been apparently chopped off right at the squash level and just left on the ground. No idea what’s going on. I’ll have to ask around and see if I can find out what’s up.
	The winter spaghetti squash are a vine type of plant so they were running all over my other squash and up through my tomatoes. I was walking through the garden the other day and my lovely wife asked why they weren’t on a trellis. Ding! Great idea babe! Now they are. I made this little trellis out of an old door jam and some remesh.. nothing like recycling!  I have another section that I can add on if it needs more vertical room, and it looks like it might.
	You can see it already has fruit starting to set. The squash are small ‘one serving’ size fruits, so I’m hoping I won’t need to do anything special for them on the trellis. I might have to break out the old trick of hanging them in a pair of lady’s hose, tied to the trellis for support.
	If you remember all of my basil and pepper plants sitting on my flower bed out on the front of my house from one of last week’s posts.. this is where they ended up. My flower bed doesn’t get sun all day, but there is a good section of my backyard that does get sun all day long. This little tree is one of those spots. I don’t really have any pretty containers, and I didn’t want to add my precious compost and soil to the ground and ‘lose’ it, so I used what I had. The pink container was filled with dirt and rocks when we bought the house.. no idea why, but I cleaned it out and now, along with a sanitized cat litter bucket, is a great little temporary planter for my basil and bell peppers. I don’t think the peppers have enough time to mature.. with only 60 days left til Frost.. but, we’ll see. The basil is doing great and should have plenty of time to mature though, and it’s delish!

I seem to have developed a habit of touring the garden as soon as I get home from work everyday. It is a great way to relax and lower the stress levels. I was going about my leisurely tour when I suddenly received a shock! My horribly undergrown and nearly abandoned jalapeno pepper plants had blooms on them! What’s more, they actually had a few baby peppers as well. I was totally shocked. So shocked I forgot to take pictures, but I will take care of that later.

I was about ready to add peppers to my ‘do not grow’ list for next year. At least not in the garden anyway. The front of the house gets all day sun and up against the house gets really warm. I might throw a few into a black pot there next year. I think I planted these out too early. Steve Soloman says peppers will stunt growth if nights get below 55 degrees. I might have to resort to clouching my peppers year round next year.

So after recovering from my near pepper induced heart attack, imagine my surprise when I discovered that my other black sheep vegetable, my runner beans, suddenly had 5 inch bean pods on the vines. What is going on in my garden? Did the vegetable fairy just hop ‘round to my garden and tell everyone to get crackin’? If so, i need to figure out how to bribe her to come back more often. I’ve heard that fairies like honey and pizza.. crazy fairies.

	Here is the bean pod. You can see another one behind and to the right of the main pod. I might get half of one serving before the season is over. Not exactly worth it.
	Here’s a shot of my earliest tomatoes all starting to ripen. I picked 4 of them.
	Here is my harvest for the day. I am always in a state of thinning on my greens, and this is the flashy oak butter lettuce. I also thinned my second planting of carrots. Aren’t they just so cute!? Flashy Oak butter lettuce: 8.5 oz Carrots: 1/2 oz Tomatoes: 2.5 oz My new kitchen toy is a ceramic paring knife. It’s supposed to hold an edge for nearly forever. I’m putting it through its paces and so far it’s holding it’s own.

Yesterday, July 20th, I harvested my first ripe tomato! It wasn’t Pico either, although he is about to get ready as well. I believe this was a Northern Delight, and i think Pico is an Oregon Spring. I really should have paid more attention to where I planted them. Anyway, the one i harvested is pretty small. About the size of a large cherry tomato.

	There she is.. isn’t she a beaut! The photo includes my second green onion, and 8.5 ozes of rutabaga greens. I sliced open the tomato, added a little salt, a sliver of fresh basil and a drop of balsamic.. and it was super tasty. We had the greens in a stir fry and threw the onion on top.
	This was how it looked in the garden. As you can see it has a few siblings that are getting ready too. I know I’m ready!
	This is my front yard flower bed that lines the drive way. Along the middle tier there in the center of the photograph are my basil and bell pepper plants. I don’t really think my peppers have a chance, but we’ll see. I have 10 basil plants that are about 8-10” tall and pretty busy. I’m hoping to get a couple of good harvests from them all before frost.
	This really has nothing to do with my garden yet, but it will soon! This is my homemade pizza that is a favorite at my house. It has a nice yeasty homemade dough, topped with a white sauce (mayo, garlic, basil), basil, turkey pepperoni, tomatoes, emmentaler and mozzarella cheeses. All I need next year is to grow my own wheat and turkeys and it will truly be a garden meal!  I’ll have to write up my recipe sometime. Maybe I’ll do that after gardening season.

I wroke previously about my automated watering system.The problem with it was it was all run by water hose, so every time you needed to mow the grass, you had to unhook, move, mow, put back and reconnect. Not exactly automated.

This weekend I fixed that. I ran in-ground irrigation pipes and hose hookups to each of my garden areas. I was too busy working to take a lot of pictures, but I did take a few.

	This is the ‘before’ picture, where we left off with the earlier project. The green gadget is an electric water valve used in sprinkler systems, followed by a brass splitter with each outlet going to a water house the runs to my two different gardening areas. The white box and cables are the automation controllers that turn it all on and off by computer control.
	Here is some of the pipe in the ground. I had to hand dig all of the trenches, about 175 feet worth, so I went 8 inches deep. I’m probably not up to code, but oh well. I have valve drains at the lowest point in the system so that I can drain the water each fall. I shouldn’t have to worry much about freezing and bursting the PVC. Oddly enough, after I took this photo I decided that this design didn’t work. The left Tee drops down hill and the right Tee goes uphill.. so naturally all the water would just flow out of the left Tee. I went back and ran two separate runs from the faucet. Now I have two long Ls instead of one Tee.  Since this made the lowest point for the right L, this is where its drain valve is.
	Here is the final product up by the house. I’m using my same automated sprinkler valve to turn the system on and off, but now instead of connecting to a hose, it connects to two in-ground pipes. I had to offset the pipes away from the faucet due to a concrete support for my deck being in the way, so for now I have a little water hose connecting the faucet to the pipes. I’m going to cut a hose down so that its an exact fit, about 3 feet long. It is fine as it is now, since its all tucked under the deck and out of the way, but it would just look nicer if it was the right length.
	This bed didn’t have any automated watering before I finished this project. My automated system turned on the water to the hose over here, but I just had a regular hose and a fan nozzle. I’d come out and water every so often, but now I don’t have to. At the very far end of the bed you can see the new nozzle that is at the end of my new pipes. I have one of my T-Tape hoses connected to it, but I have the hose upside down so that instead of soaking it sprays a fine stream into the air. This gives me a lot more coverage but doesn’t provide as much water down deeper. That is ideal for this bed because I only grow greens here. I have a lot of them so having a wide area soaked a little shallower should be just fine. This was a lot of work, but it looks pretty good now that it’s all finished. Much better than having hoses run all over the yard.

Yesterday it felt like my work was all paying off. I went out and harvested all of the salad greens we needed for our dinner. All in all I harvested nearly two pounds of produce and berries!

	A half pound of bok choy. These were mostly thinnings but I grew a lot more than I needed especially to eat early. I had some on my sandwich for lunch today, they are so crisp and juicy and sweet.
	A half pound of mixed salad greens. A combination of flashy oak butter lettuce and paris white romaine. We ate the entire basket full for dinner! It was so tasty.
	I picked blueberries for a half an hour last night for this half a pound. They are so good, it’s easily worth it.
	This was dinner. A ‘wing salad’ as we like to call it. 6 oz of diced chicken breast tossed in some wing sauce and served over a salad with ranch dressing and blue cheese crumbles on top. Hard to beat! I’ll have to post up my own wing sauce recipe later.

Things just keep growing this time of year. This weekend I harvested another 4 oz of blueberries and my first canoe pea! My newest round of greens have all sprouted and my squashes are blooming.

	This is the first canoe pea. It could go a little longer on the vine, but man was it tasty. I ate the peas raw right out of the shell. I even chewed on the shell, and it was sweet too but too fibrous. And yes, I garden barefoot. You can take the boy out of the south….
	Look at all of those hopefully-soon-to-be baby squashes! This is the One Ball squash. I’ve never grown these before (then again, what have i grown before..) so I’m curious to see how they turn out.
	The boy choy, flash oak, and paris white lettuces are all growing nicely. This bed grows greens so well it is crazy. I’ve had boy choy and lettuces growing all over the yard already and none of them are this size and have been growing for months. I honestly dont’ know why this bed does as well as it does. It has roughly the same soil, and gets the same amount of sun and water as my other garden. The only thing I can think of is the concrete blocks. This is the only bed created with blocks. My theory is that they absorb a lot of warmth during the day and keep this bed a lot warmer for a lot longer. My flower beds out front have the same blocks and they too are doing very well.
	When I planted the lettuces I mixed in a good 2 inches of my own compost. I just started composting this year so it all hasn’t broken down completely (but enough to smell nice). I’m guessing that some of the store-bought tomatoes were in this compost because I have a volunteer tomato growing in my lettuces. It’s way too late in the year for this guy to produce anything, but I might just let him grow for the fun of it.
	The newest round of greens in this bed are Fizz Kale, Rainbow Chard, and Giant Winter Spinach. I decided to do a fun alternating row planting because this bed is visible from the house and it adds some interest. The giant spinach there in the middle is the one I’m letting go to seed. The first planting of rutabagas are against the fence. It wasn’t worth taking any pictures, but I currently have 52 tomatoes on the vines.
	As I mentioned above, my flower beds are doing very well. I haven’t really watered them at all this year so they are doing it all themselves, which is how I prefer it to be. Three of these are perennials. I can’t recall the name of the plant on the top left, but the top right is lavender, bottom right is yarrow, and bottom left is an annual. These flowers are gorgeous, but they were put to shame by the smile on the face of my beautiful wife when she saw them.

If there is one thing gardeners are addicted to, it’s seed catalogs. Those little books of joy you get a few times a year from the seed companies. Just because I’m new to gardening doesn’t mean I’m any less addicted to buying seeds, if anything it’s worse for me because I don’t have experience to tell me I won’t get around to planting that. So, I’ve quickly amassed a small treasury of seed packets. Most of them I’ve used to do a few plantings around in various spots in the yard, so I am using them. I had them all in a big bowl in my office and that was quickly getting unruly. This weekend I did a deep clean on my office. I spent 4 hours redoing everything and finding random bits a permanent home. One of those bits were my seed packets.

Maybe there are some really cool ways of cataloging seeds out there already, but I came up with an idea I thought was clever enough to share.

Back when CDs were the thing to have, I had a few hundred of them arranged in one of those folding ‘trapper keeper’ type of CD carriers. It’s been sitting in my closet collecting dust since around ‘99 when I got my first MP3 Player (a Diamond Rio PMP300 with a whopping 16 megabytes [mega- not giga-] of flash storage I uploaded via the parallel port. It held 6 songs. I kid you not).

	Isn’t it glorious? It’s modern lines and sleek web netting speak to the minimalist soul of true design.
	As you can see, it’s meant to hold CDs, but it easily holds folded-in-half seed packets. Most of my packets are 1oz or smaller, but I have a few packets with large bean seeds with 3-4oz and it works just fine.
	It holds 8 packets to the page and there are around 100 pages. Wow.. I just realized that means I can buy 760 more seed packets! Where did I put those catalogs….
	I didn’t intend for this front label to be so loud.. but I guess I was just so excited about my SEEDs!

This is a project that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I made my own ginger ale several years ago and vowed to do it again, but never have. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of ginger ale, so the need wasn’t that pressing. Root beer on the other hand, is probably my favorite soda. I don’t drink much soda at all, maybe 1 can a month, but when I do, I want it to be good.

Ginger ale can be made with stuff you probably already have in your house. Fresh ginger, bakers yeast, sugar and water, and a few days to ferment. The yeast turns the sugar into alcohol and gas. A two liter bottle will have about 0.4% alcohol content, so unless you are allergic or have strict religious restrictions, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’d give it to my kids.. but I don’t have kids, and cats don’t like ginger ale (but my boy cat LOVES regular beer, and white wine.. but not red wine, he’s a girl like that).

Root beer, on the other hand, requires at least 1 special ingredient, root beer extract. You can buy it online for $5 a bottle or so, but then you spend $10 shipping. Each bottle will make 4 gallons of root beer, so $15 isn’t a lot of money, but there’s just something about spending double on the shipping that kept me from ordering all these years. I could buy a case of the stuff for about $20 or so.. but do I really need 48 gallons of root beer.. unlikely.

As luck would have it, we have a brewing and wine supply store pretty close by. I stopped off there after work yesterday and sure enough, they have all sorts of home soda making supplies, including root beer extract. They also had a ‘Birch Root Beer’ extract, but the owner didn’t know what the difference was. If I like the regular root beer enough to use it all I might have to try the Birch next time.

I was talking to the owner about making the root beer and he confessed he hadn’t made it himself, but had done some research on it and found that using Champagne yeast was supposed to work better than regular bakers yeast. It was only $2 for a package so I decided to try it. I’ll make a batch with it, and a batch with regular baker’s yeast and see if I can tell the difference.

The process is very simple and straightforward. A recipe is included in the box of the extract and for the first time around I stuck right with the recipe. The only change was to cut it in half, which made 1 2-Liter batch instead of 2 2-liter batches.

	Here are my special ingredients. The extract is just a little bottle of very very black liquid goo. It’s hard to explain. It’s as dark as tar but as fluid as water. The yeast is just like a package of bakers yeast. Even looks the same on the inside.
	The recipe is included in the package, but here it is again for reference: Mix 1/8th teaspoon of yeast into a cup of warm water. My water was 104 degrees. Make sure it is well dissolved. The yeast does smell different than bakers yeast smells when you bloom it like this in water. The champagne yeast smells more pure somehow, fresher and lighter.
	Next pour 1 cup of regular old sugar into your plastic two liter bottle. When the yeast starts to eat the sugar it will expel large amounts of gas. This is what will carbonate our root beer. It is also what will explode your glass jar if you use it. So don’t. Go dig that empty plastic soda bottle out of the recycling bin outside and wash it well. Don’t worry, we won’t tell. Next pour in your water/yeast mixture you made previously. Add 1 and 1/2 teaspoon of root beer extract. Fill to the neck of the bottle with cool clean water. If your water is really chlorinated, you should use filtered water. You don’t want to hamper the yeastie beasties from working at an optimal level.
	That’s it! You’ve just made root beer. Wellllll, almost. Your beasties need some time to party. It takes 4-6 days on average. I taped a little sheet of paper on mine that had day’s date and 4 days from now. I’ll check it each day after that to make sure its ready. How do you know if its ready? The bottle will be firm to the touch. The pressure building up inside the bottle will be pretty high when its ready. We’ll move it immediately into the fridge to chill overnight once it is ready. Cold drastically slows down the fermentation, so the pressure should not build any more once we chill it. Having said that, if you just leave it sitting on the countertop for two weeks, it will continue to build until you find yourself with a large sticky mess (the bottle will explode). I’ll let you know how it turns out!

UPDATE: 8/1/2009: Well, it did not turn out at all. I waited for two weeks and got ZERO carbonation. I did some more research online to see what was up. My only guess was my yeast got too hot. I made a second batch on 7/18 and started with water at 90F. I waited another two weeks.. NOTHING AGAIN. Very frustrating. No carbonation again. Not only that, but it tastes like cough medicine. The flavor is not good, and carbonation doesn’t have much to do with flavor.I think it might be that there is too much extract (even though I followed the recipe).

I might try it one more time with regular old bakers yeast, instead of the champagne yeast, but if that doesn’t work, I’m throwing in the towel. I don’t drink soda enough to warrant ‘fixing’ it.