Fall Garden

The fall garden was planted today. Hooray! I "weeded" a good pile's worth of sunflowers that had blown over in a freak microburst that came through yesterday. I think we had gusts of about 60mph for about 5 minutes which toppled our sunflowers and broke branches all over the neighborhood. Weird.

Along with the preexisting tomatoes I planted the following seeds: parsnip, turnip, rutabaga, 4 varieties of carrots, 3 varieties of beets (including Bull's Blood), a lettuce mix, collard greens, spinach, tatsoi and red kale. The trick now is keeping it moist and watered. I'm so glad I was able to get these seeds planted today. Last year I missed the planting window and missed out on from-the- yard produce, which was a bummer. In other good gardening news, our neighbor across the way has agreed that we will co-garden his large lot this spring! I see corn, more tomatoes, peppers, beans and eggplant in our future...

Today we also met a lovely couple from this part of town. They have several fruit trees and will be out of town for a few weeks. We're going to keep an eye on their house in exchange for the fruit (pears & apples) and whatever is ready to harvest from their garden. Lucky us!

Yesterday I harvested at least 5 lbs of peaches from my school's orchard. We've been eating them out of hand all day and I made this incredible peach crumble. This is why we will never be able to truly go vegan--the butter made it all the more delicious! I went on a cooking spree yesterday baking two baguettes, two pizzas, roasted eggplant & tomato spread for the baguette and hummus. We'll be eating well this week!