Garden update

How things look in the garden right this second:

This is the lettuce I planted in March that took forever to grow. It's chilly early life may have had something to do with it successfully withstanding bolting on our 100 degree days in August.
I used my other raised bed as a seed starting bed for some fall crops. Here are some different kinds of Swiss Chard and a weed.
One of the two apples on my columner apple tree. I'm hoping next year will be the year for the apple trees.
As the zucchini plant continued to grow (and grow and grow) it's main stem started reminding me of a dragon.
It just took over, that zucchini did.
I had a lot of problems with my pepper plants. They all developed holes in their sides and were very slow to change color. I will not grow peppers for a few more years until I am a more experienced gardener.
More troublesome peppers.
My five varieties of tomatoes had varying success rates. The ones in the front of this picture were my favorite.
I made sure to take a picture of their tag so I can get them again next year. They were so perfectly formed and I got a lot of them. Love-er-ly.
My Brandywines kept falling over and I eventually just let them be. I kept waiting for them to finish ripening and turn red before I figured out that they were yellow Brandywines.
These were good Romas, too.
My corn didn't survive the ravages of the pole beans very well but I had some very delicious beans. Next year: No corn. More pole beans.
I got some good collards started, but the bugs also are enjoying them. Hopefully they will leave something for me.
I'll plant herbs in the spring in my herb bed. Right now I've got four kinds of winter greens. The back row is kale and collards. The middle row (not super visible in this picture) is alternating red and yellow chard. The front row is alternating red and yellow beets. I also planted my sage plant in the corner of the bed. That poor sage plant has lived in a too-small pot for two years. After I put it in the ground I think it grew 6 inches in a week. It is much happier to be able to spread out.
Here was my attempt to put something green in the corner of the front porch. It didn't work out quite as planned. Winter squash goes crazy on the ground, but I think there wasn't enough direct sunlight for squash crazyness out front. I did get one little squash.
Here's the squash in the backyard. It was very productive in its growth, but not so in it's production of food. I had a lot of tennis ball sized green squash, but they would inexplicably wither away. More reading will be done on squash over the winter.
My squash and apple harvest.
Beets planted for winter.
Two more varieties of tomatoes. Oregon Spring gave me my first tomato then seemed to do nothing until recently.
These are the famed Early Girl tomatoes. They are very popular around here, but I didn't get one edible tomato off of them. Alas.
More pole beans strangling that corn.
Now to plan next year's garden...

The last of the "catching up" posts.

Multiple new entries back in the past have been published. Use this handy blog post to find them. This ends the catching up posts. From this point on, posts will be published in order, no matter how far behind we are.

Herb Garden Bed
Incredibly Hot Day
Clothesline Part II
Harvest
Quarter of Beef
Chef's Knife

One more new post.

We're up to the first of August.

Read our newest post here:

http://8004theorangedoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/john-joans-wedding.html

Chef's Knife

I wanted a chef's knife for Christmas and someone was kind enough to oblige. I don't use it a ton, but I found a good non-knife use for it. Do you have a cookbook that won't stay open, no matter how much you coax it? Use this handy weight to keep the pages open.
Also, it would be a bit safer if you turned the blade in toward the middle of the book to avoid accidental scraping.

Three new posts.

These posts are from the summer and I just put them up today. Find them here.

Pea Pie
Local Dinner
Laundry on the Line

I've got some more posts from the summer which I will link to when I finish them. Then it's posting in order from there on out, no matter what.

Quarter of Beef

Matt and I bought a quarter of beef from a rancher in Eastern Oregon. It was delivered last week.
What did we get with our quarter of beef?

• 13 1-pound packages of ground beef
• 2 packages stew meat
• 1 rump roast
• 2 sirloin steaks
• 1 arm roast
• 2 ribsteaks
• 2 chuck roasts
• 2 t-bone steaks
• 2 cube steaks

Before our beef was cut into edible chucks, it was a cow of the breed Corriente which is a breed that can be traced back to the 1400s. As beef, it is quite delicious and we are also happy to support an Oregon Rancher.

Slow time on this blog.

It's happened again. School has started which reduces my blogging time considerably. Not to mention that there are still posts to draft from this summer. I've just completed one from July 12th (Mark and Amanda's Wedding).

From now on, I'm going to do my best to publish in order, but when things get out of order I will post a catch-up post so you can easily read the new posts from the past. Matt may do some posting too, but he is also pretty busy. Alas.

Lone Wolf enters the Orange Door

I will go super-geeky in this post. Sarah, April, and Felicia, you can skip this post.
When I was younger, I loved the Lone Wolf series. They were so popular that they are on online in their entirety. They were written in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format, so now that they're online, you can just click on the links.
Anyway, I'm rereading the series and I came upon this:
http://www.projectaon.org/en/xhtml/lw/02fotw/sect122.htm
Lone Wolf finds the orange door. Click on the links to enter the door or to use Sixth Sense.
The author of these books is pretty funny. I imagined that, based on the blond warrior vs. evil and blond Texan vs. terrorists nature of the books, that Joe Dever would be pretty conservative. Imagine my surprise when I read page 6 of an interview he gave and find him bashing Bush.
http://www.projectaon.org/en/pdf/misc/FW_Interview.pdf

gingerbread houses, sort of

Hey, this is a really old shot, and it's technically not even in the orange door, but it's pretty cool. Patricia and I made gingerbread houses one Christmas and I built mine in the non-traditional, dragon-themed way. Um, you can kind of tell it's a dragon. See, those licorice are the flames. The chocolate oranges slices are the eyebrows. The wings are gingerbread and the scales are lime slice candies.


And if you look closely, you can see the brave licorice knight who had a chunk of his head bitten off, and his chocolate orange slice shield could not protect him.