While watering the garden today, I discovered that I have real live tomatoes growing! Roma, six of them, to be specific. I’m so excited!!
Everything else is still growing well too (except the broccoli), and I’m planning to eat some of the romaine this weekend! I’ve also decided to plant zucchini and green beans once I harvest the broccoli and romaine, so hopefully I’ll continue my garden success so far with those.
Lesson learned – in Houston, plant your broccoli really early! Apparently it starts to flower quickly if forced to mature at temperatures above 80F (thank you Aggie Horticulture Website), and it’s been just over 80 during the days for the past week or so in Houston.
Here’s what the broccoli looks like now:
Next year I’ll have to plant it when it’s actually still chilly outside!
I’m having so much fun checking the garden every other day or so to see how much it’s grown! Here are some new pictures!
My roma tomato plant has a small flower, which means that I should have a tomato soon!
And, in case you’re wondering, everything I learned from gardening came from my dad, whose garden seriously puts mine to shame!
With all the basil I’m growing, I’ve been looking for some good recipes so that I can use it – we can only eat so much pesto chicken and pasta!
I love hummus, and I have a wonderful new food processor, so I decided to try some pesto hummus. I started off with this recipe from allrecipes.com, but it seemed to be missing something. So, I decided to start modifying it, tasting it after every addition until I was happy with the outcome.
I ended up adding extra basil (probably about a cup total), a lot of extra olive oil (didn’t measure, but keep adding until you have a smooth consistency), two extra cloves of garlic, about 1/8 cup of pine nuts and shaved parmesan, and probably 1/2 tsp of salt and lemon juice.
Now that I’ve finally finished some belated Christmas knits, I can finally group them all into one post. I went a little crazy and knit a lot of gifts in the month before Christmas, but I’m really excited with everything that I was able to complete!
With so many beautiful shawl (or shawlette) patterns on Ravelry, I finally decided I could be the type of person who wore them. They’re also great for fingering weight yarn to mix things up from knitting a lot of socks – and they’re perfect for warm climates like Houston with freezing cold indoor areas.
The first shawl I knit was Traveling Woman – I’m just starting to wear it more, and I purchased a simple but beautiful shawl pin from RubyVegas Designs on Etsy to complete the look. I made it with the absolutely delicious Dream in Color Smooshy in Lipstick Lava. This is also one of the first projects that I properly blocked, and it made all the difference in the world!
In December, I was able to get my hands on a highly sought-after skein of Wollmeise from The Loopy Ewe. I’ve had my eye on the Citron pattern for a while, and I’ve seen so many beautiful Wollmeise Citrons that I knew it was the right pattern for the yarn. The rich green color, Petersilie (parsley in German) was perfect for a March St. Patrick’s Day project. I started it at the beginning of the month as part of a KAL with one of my favorite Ravelry groups, and I finished it after just a week! I lightly blocked it – just enough to even out the stitches and flatten the ruffle some without completely losing the rippled texture. I finally got some great pictures, with Jake’s help, including one modeled after the designer’s shot.
Posted in knitting
Tagged citron, dream in color, knitting, pictures, shawl, shawlette, smooshy, traveling woman, wollmeise
It’s been at least a week since all of my garden has been planted. I put the broccoli and lettuce in about 3 weeks ago, the broccoli is actually growing! This is what it looked like today:
I also planted the cucumber seeds about 2 weeks ago, and I discovered that I have seedlings! I was worried most about these, because I haven’t had good luck in the past growing herbs from seeds.
I can’t wait until I can actually eat something from the garden!
Historically, I have always had somewhat of a brown thumb. Plants and I have not gotten along well. However, my dad is wonderful at gardening, and I have grown up eating freshly grown vegetables. Now that we have a house and a yard, I really wanted to grow my own garden.
Over Christmas, Jake and my dad built me a nice little 4’x8′ raised garden. Now that it’s mostly warm in Houston, I got to planting. I decided this year to try broccoli, romaine lettuce, cucumbers, and a few varieties of peppers (bell and jalapeno) and tomatoes (better boy, roma, and grape or sweet 100, TBD). It seems that everybody else decided to plant gardens this weekend too, because the tomato options were limited. I found out that the Bonnie man delivers to Lowe’s on Thursday, so I’ll have to to go back then for my small tomato variety.
So, here’s what I’ve got so far:
If you click on the picture, you can see hover over the notes to see what I’ve planted. If you don’t want to, I’m going to explain it anyway.
The taller stuff is in the back row so that it doesn’t block the sun from the front row plants (I’m told this is important). On the left I’ve planted some cucumber seeds that will grow up each of the 3 vertical poles in the tomato cage (hopefully – I was too lazy/cheap to get a better system, and I couldn’t pull apart the bigger cages).
To the right of the cucumbers are my tomatoes – better boy, roma, and then small TBD.
In the front row are bell peppers and jalapeno peppers in the cages, then romaine lettuce and broccoli. I actually planted the lettuce and broccoli last weekend, and they’ll supposedly be finished harvesting pretty early, so maybe I can put something else in there later?
I’ll try to post updates as I hopefully keep these plants alive and grow some food. And if I am successful, I’m going to need some good salsa and pico de gallo recipes.
I’ve also got some herbs growing – in one planter I’ve got cilantro, rosemary, and parsley. In the other, 3 basil plants:
The basil was starting to get a little big, so I actually used this recipe and the food processor I got for Christmas to make some pesto.
I’ve used Google Analytics to monitor site traffic for a while. Every once in a while I find some really interesting stuff. For example, I know that my most popular posts are my Cruise Review and my Zotero Style posts.
I also find the keywords used in web searches that land on my site very interesting. The current top ten:
I know that most of these weren’t looking for me or my personal site, but it makes me curious about Allison McCoy the painter, or Alison McCoy from Millbrook, Bedfordshire. Or why anybody would want to kill a hipster (here are 5 ways though). And I’m glad that I’m not the only one who has needed to use up leftover velveeta – I hope they found my Easy Cheesy Taco Pasta yummy! 🙂
Obviously I enjoy making baby blankets for friends! Here are some that I’ve made in the last year:
The first blanket I made was for some friends having their second baby, and they weren’t planning to find out the sex. I didn’t want it to be too boring, so I chose a few different gender neutral colors and fell in love with this pattern. I made a few modifications, which you can read about on Ravelry. This is one of my all time favorites, and I think I’ll end up making one of these for baby McCoy, if and when that day comes.
Honeycomb Stroller Blanket
Pictures:
The next blanket I made was for some friends who would appreciate something really unique. OpArt is one of the most beautiful, intriguing blanket patterns that I have seen, so I thought it would be a great fit. I chose red because I wanted to start knitting before the couple had found out the sex of the baby, and it really did the pattern justice!
OpArt
Pictures:
Finally, a friend was having a baby girl but decorating in bright primary colors. For some reason this beautiful orange sherbet colored yarn called out to me, so I chose it and picked out one of my favorite fun patterns!
Curlicue Blanket
Pictures:
