Tag: adventure

Food. Delicious Food.

Between my self  and Mrs. Di over 400 pictures were taken of our New York City vacation.  The vast majority of those are of museum exhibits.  Really awesome museum exhibits but the reality is that they’re not the best taken pictures, and to anyone besides us they’re just not that interesting.  That doesn’t bother me, they perfect for what they are a chronicle of our vacation.  I’m not going to plaster pictures of every little thing at the Metropolitan Museum that I thought was great here, because chances are you’re not interested as interested in Roman Egypt as I am (but you should be!)  What you will find is something that everyone is interested in:  food

Despite all the food I ate in NYC I didn’t take as many pictures of it as I should have.  You’re not going to see the delicious spicy tofu soup I had in K Town, nor the incredible spread that accompanied it.  I don’t have any pictures of the delicious doughnuts we ate at Doughnut Plant; creme brulee, apple cinnamon, vanilla bean, etc.  Also missing is all the wonderful food bought and eaten of the streets.

“So what do you have to show us already?”

The thing that I was most envious of during my trip was the sheer variety of ethnic cuisines to be found in the city!  I’m sure that you could eat at a different restaurant featuring a different food style every day of the week for the entire year.  I feel lucky living where I do, in a college town with a racially diverse population that enjoys ethnic cuisine that’s close to two major metropolitan areas but it doesn’t hold a candle to New York City…

PS – I forgot to mention the bars… There are a lot of them.  They stay open ’til four in the morning.  I only went to this one:  McSorley’s.  They have good ale.

How My Garden Grows!

It’s been just over a month since we first planted the garden and I figured it was time to give all the readers an update.

It’s been just over a month since we first planted the garden and I figured it was time to give all the readers an update.  First, we might have planted things a little too early as there was some rainy/frosty days in April that took a toll on the plants.  The eggplants seem permanently stunted as do the peppers.  Second, slugs really like to eat tender plants and eat them they will!  We’re giving the eggplants and peppers another week or two before we pull them and put something else in.  The nice thing about growing things here in this part of northern California is that you can get in two or three “crops” per season!  One of the small perks, I suppose.  The slugs were a different matter and we lost several of our pole beans, cucumbers, and soy beans to the little suckers before we looked up how to deal with them:  beer traps.  The traps worked great, though just to be careful we spread used coffee ground around the younger sprouts to keep the slugs away, these two measures appear to have worked.

The plants that look best right now are the tomatoes and zucchinis which are growing at a great clip.  I already mentioned which ones looked the worst.  The cantaloupe never came in.  We replaced the cucumbers that were eaten with some cucumber and bean sprouts we picked up at a local nursery store and put them in.  Our chard is just about ready to be harvested and we’re hoping to have tomatoes and zucchinis by the end of the month.

Sadly, the vegetables that we planted in the front of the house (tomatoes, onions, beans, and peppers) were all either devoured or simply failed to thrive in the front yard.  The beans sprouted and then were promptly eaten, the tomatoes grew a little, turned a sickly green color and then immediately bloomed, the peppers and onions seemed to simply wilt away.  I don’t know if the plants weren’t getting enough nutrients, they did have to compete with a tree and several large hearty hedges, or if we didn’t transplant them with enough compost and fertilizer.  In the end, we ended up pulling out all of the vegetables in the front and planting annuals.  We won’t be able to eat anything growing in the front but at least the yard will have a little more color in it.

I also discovered that wild strawberries are growing in the backyard but they’re competing with the lawn grass and a fruit tree.  I don’t know whether to pull the plant up or try to clear the ground around it and see if it thrives.  Are wild strawberries any good?

Garden Planted!

The soil arrived bright and early last Saturday and I spent the first part of the morning moving it from the front driveway to the back and into the box.  I don’t own a wheelbarrow and so was using a tarp to haul all the dirt back, until one of my neighbors came over and volunteered his wheelbarrow!  With the added technology the moving went much faster.  Once all the dirt was in the box I spent the next 30 to 40 minutes getting the soil saturated with water.

After a trip to the local ACE garden section and we picked up a number of things:  Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, onions, parsley, leeks, cucumber seeds, yellow cucumber seeds, pole bean seeds, edamame seeds, kale, zucchini, and cantaloupe seeds.  I’m hoping to see some of the seeds push through the surface in the next 3 or 5 days.  When we planted everything it was sunny and the temperature was trending up to the 7os… But, this week its been cold and overcast… I’m hoping the weekend brings the sun and warmth and we start seeing some seedlings.  Then, of course, I’ll have to worry about birds something already tore one of the peppers in the front out.

So, a purchase of some wire mesh cages is on the horizon.  This is my first attempt at home gardening.  I’m hoping it turns out well, but we’ll see.  There is so much space in the box, and much more on the other end (See picture below) because many of the plants we put in can get quite big (zucchini and cantaloupe especially) we wanted to make sure there was going to be room for everything and that no plants choked out any others.

Once these plants are growing and (hopefully producing) I’ll write more.  Alternatively, if they all die I’ll let you know too, I’m not expecting that outcome though…  What an adult-like adventure I’m having!

Planting Gardens

So the clouds have finally parted and Spring is coming to northern California, I can’t say I’m not excited to see it.  I’ve missed the sun terribly since I saw it last sometime in late November.  Not everything about spring is great, my allergies have returned with the Sun and I’ve had to go back on a cocktail of drugs in order to breathe through my nose and see through my eyes.  Time will tell if this price is worth paying for.

With spring here, it was time to finally put my thoughts on gardening into more than just lines on a paper:

This turns out to have been a little too optimistic about what I could fit into the side yard and so I settled on a single 4’x10′ box instead of the two smaller ones, there just wasn’t enough room to move around with the original plan.  A quick trip to Ace Hardware, a realization that my automatic drill wasn’t up to snuff, a return trip to Ace, and a little bit of sweat and:

Soil arrives tomorrow to fill the box up, and then there will be one last trip to Ace for seeds and seedlings.  D and I plan on putting in eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, melons, beans, and basil.  Give or take.  Since this is the first time we’ve done this some experimenting is on order and so we’ve planted tomatoes, beans, and peppers in the front yard too, where they’ll get more direct sunlight than the box on the side.  It only required my butchering one of the hedges (I’d like to remove all of them and put in some sort of sage grass, but I’m only renting.)  Hopefully, between the two I’ll get something to show out of this work.

Once the box is in place, filled, and planted I’ll take some more pictures.  If everything works this site should soon be full of the garden’s progress.  If you don’t see anything else about it, I’m merely hiding my shame.

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