A Wonderful Wasted Hour

This was one of those weekends that you’ll forget in a month but was truly wonderful. The sun shone most of the time and my husband and I really enjoyed ourselves booping around the yard and garden (well I enjoyed myself, he found himself with a pitch fork and a bucket picking up greyhound droppings, all with a smile on his face!—he’s a really great guy, haha). I FINALLY got my cauliflower into the raised bed. With any luck and a little bit of patience it will bounce back. It was looking really tired and droopy for a moment. I read on some forum somewhere that if you planted its long leg down into the dirt then usually it would recover well enough. I will keep you all updated on how it does. If it does anything close to as well as the cabbage did when we transplanted it, then we are golden.

Since we put the onion and lettuce in a week ago I have been checking almost nonstop to see SOME sign of life. All I’m getting are chives returning from some past planting season many years ago. LEAVE ME ALONE CHIVES! They smell which makes them wayyyy worse than weeds!

We had to drive 30 minutes to find some 4” plastic pots! Outrageous, considering there are about a million garden supply stores in the Pittsburgh area. Maybe we just weren’t looking in the right places? Not sure! Either way, we decided to drive out t o a Tractor Supply store because we were pretty sure that they’d have SOMETHING (ANYTHING) close to what we needed without being a million dollars. We were wrong; but, thankfully we passed a cute little family owned Garden and Feed Supply store instead, and they had what we needed a great price. It felt good SO good spending our money there that we also bought their kitty litter… seems stupid. It just feels really good to know that I’m buying from a local family. Regardless of the fact that our truck drinks gasoline like its water, my husband (Adam) and I had a great time on our mini-excursion. We planned our future for the 900^th time and reminisced about how we got to where we are now. Those small and insignificant moments are some of my favorites.

When we finally got back to the house it was after lunch so we had to get the tomatoes started if we had any hopes of finishing. We pulled the little guys apart one-by-one and ended up with an ungodly amount of tomato plants. We will be canning, giving away, and freezing enough tomatoes to feed the western hemisphere. I have made a mental note to seriously consider how many plants five packets of seeds can supply.

Along with our countless tomatoes, we also have zucchini; yellow and butternut squash; celery; our own chives; eggplant; green, red, jalapeno, and Hungarian Hot Wax pepper; cabbage; and cauliflower gracing us with their presence. It feels amazing knowing that Adam and I are nursing these little seedlings to life. Life is good right now, really good.

Next stop… 

till the rest of the garden.
God help us.

Greenhouse or Dog House?

When we came to look at this house, I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew that it was in a great, well-populated neighborhood close to downtown. The street view is unsuspecting. It’s a large, lovely home but nothing extraordinary to write home about. Well, when we walked around to the back, our breath was taken away. Hidden behind some high shrubbery was a cute little green building with brick floor, a handyman special sink, and awesome heat lamps on a pully system. To the left of the door was a little sign saying “George’s Greenhouse.” We’ve decided to leave that little wooden sign as a nod to the man who spent so many years tending to the garden. We still call it “George’s” in our household… I can’t see that going away anytime soon.

Don’t pay any notice to that ugly white table in the picture. We like to 

start our seedlings outside when the sun is shining so we needed something that could get dirty and not soggy.

 The greenhouse has a wonderful storage area behind it where George kept pots, wood planks, plexiglass, and a whole world of stuff that I don’t even begin to understand—we’ve been figuring it all out as we go along. This little space also tends to turn into a huge mud puddle that our greyhounds LOVE to bathe in. Aren’t they lucky?

This cute little building also has two rain barrels sitting under its gutters. It is so great to just be able to dunk our watering can in for our seedlings and know that we’re preserving water. Too bad we can’t filter the water out of the mud puddle…

Inside the greenhouse is a perfectly engineered use of space. We have a place to roll our wheel barrow, a loft space for those awkwardly huge bags of planting soil, seed preservation, fertilizer or whatever else we just need to get out of our way (yeah, yeah, we stick crap up there, too). The ceiling is outfitted with a skylight at an angle above the heat lamps. The lamps are definitely my favorite part of this entire greenhouse. They’re on a hand-made pully system so that we can lower or raise them as much as we need to. It took us about a month before we realized that they even moved! It’s the absolute perfect place for our plant babies to come to life.

I wish the weather would get better so that we can get these plants out of the greenhouse and into the garden! COME ON SUMMER!!!

Why I Don't Understand My Ancestors

Why did my ancestors settle in Western PA? Did they think to themselves “Gosh! These huge mountainsides and bipolar weather conditions are paradise living!”

I ask myself this question more often than I should. I love Pittsburgh, I really do. It has great sports teams, gorgeous mountain and river views, the feeling of being in the city one moment and the country the next, and best of all—great neighbors (Pittsburgh Dad, for instance). Still, migrating a couple more hours south couldn’t have been too difficult after coming across the pond if it meant their darling great-great-great granddaughter could grow her produce in peace.

This past week was amazing. The sun was out; the temperature even approached 80 degrees! We got lots planted. Most of our pre-season seedlings are germinating or ready to be transplanted and our cabbage, onions, and lettuce are comfortably resting in our newly cleaned and tilled raised beds. I was responsible, I checked the forecast to make sure that it wasn’t supposed to go below 32 degrees any time in the next month and did it matter?? Of course not! Not 3 days after we planted our onion starters and lettuce seed in the ground did I hear that a cold front was coming in…AT THE END OF APRIL! The garden gods must have a grudge against me for my mass murder of house plants over the last 10 years.

So last night, me in my work cloths and my husband in his pajama pants, we took to the cold to cover our plants. With an incredible amount of luck, George left behind some type of row cover—at least I think that’s what it was. It could’ve been a very thin blanket… honestly, I’m guessing here! Either way, we went out in the mud and covered our little onion and lettuce babies.

It turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. First, we had one loooooong piece of fabric. Not wanting to rip it (we believe it was the length of the entire garden) we had to double back on it. This meant we had to stake it in the middle to keep the miniature tornado-worthy winds from blowing all of it off. Tell me, how are you supposed to know where you can walk if the seedlings are hardly popping up, and there’s a white sheet covering all of your row markings? Well, we just said F-It and tried our best not to walk on anything that looked like a bump… did I mention we have no idea what we’re doing?

Still, we got the cover on and are currently hoping for the best. The sun came out briefly yesterday evening but it’s still freezing outside. Fingers crossed that it warms up out there otherwise we may be S-O-L when it comes to onions and lettuce this summer.  

Welcome to The Tenderfoot Garden

Let me begin this blog by saying that I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m not a gardener, I’ve killed every plant that I’ve ever owned; and the idea of some insect out there having a million legs terrifies me. If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a tenderfoot gardener.

 

Tenderfoot (noun): a newcomer in a comparatively rough or newly settled region; especially, one not hardened to frontier or outdoor life

Tenderfoot is a fancy little word that I picked up while reading some great homesteading resources. Now, I am by no means a homesteader. While I do try to bake my own bread and cook from scratch, I also tend to buy most of my food from the local food co-op and I appreciate picking my eggs and cheese up at the farmer’s market. I certainly wasn't raised by a homemaker-type mother; and yet, I am drawn to trying to do whatever I can for myself. Unfortunately, thanks to my husband’s career aspirations, I’m stuck right on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. If I stand on my front porch I can see the Rt. 28 overpass and if I stand on my back porch I can see my 5 surrounding neighbor’s back porches. Yes, I am in the suburbs (how wonderful).

  

Still, I’ve made the best of our situation. With a lot of search and a little bit of pixie dust we found a great brick house sitting on a large lot that just so happened to have a quarter acre garden already good and started for us. The gentleman that lived in the house before us was an AVID gardener and apparently kept a pristine little oasis. But as time moves forward, so does age. He approached 95 and the garden went into major disrepair. His wonderfully cared-for soil became overrun with weeds, and the few raised beds, bean poles, and sand mounds began to disappear with every minute that they sat unused.

Then we came along! 

When good ’ol George finally decided to move on from this home to his next, we were lucky enough to stumble upon it.  With the resources that he’s left behind—including heat lamps on a nifty pully system, a gardener’s journal, and an old galvanized watering can—we’re ready to step into the unknown. I hope that you’ll join me through this journey of gardening and self-discovery. 

 Welcome to the Tenderfoot Garden.