Asparagus!

It's suddenly spring on the Palouse!  Actually the weather the last week or so is more summer than spring but we'll take it!  Life is busy, busy in the garden.  Seedling are sprouting, trees are blooming, and flowers are dancing with color.  I love spring the most.

Last spring I planted a small asparagus bed.  I carved out a little nook of the encroaching prairie for 6 plants.  One must be patient to grow asparagus.  There is no harvesting until the plants have been in for an entire year and then one can harvest only for two weeks.  The next year you can harvest for about 4 weeks.  The following year for 6 weeks.  After that you can harvest an entire 8 week season!

See what I mean about being patient?

Anyway, this is the first harvesting year for my tiny patch and look what I picked today!  I'm so excited.  It's not going to be much of a meal but I bet they are going to taste wonderful.

I recently read that 24 mature asparagus plants will yield about 10 pounds of asparagus in a season.  Obviously, at 6 plants, I have under-planted!  I am already making plans to expand the asparagus bed and put in more plants next spring.  We love asparagus around here!

Starting Over

Life is full of do-overs, or times when you wish you could do-over, and gardening is no exception.  There is the occasional plant that turns out to be disappointing or dead once the winter has gotten to it.  There are plants that just show up in my garden that I didn't put there, remnants of a former life...for instance the Shasta daisies.  Around here, Shasta daisies are an invasive species, no kidding.  I thought I could control them but, they were voracious and I had to pull them all out before they took over the entire flower garden.

And then there are the things that just don't turn out the way you had planned.  The latest, for me, were my raspberries.  They are my favorite berry and I really look forward to first ripe ones eaten right off the cane.  Unfortunately, the type that I planted here turned out to be a rather late ripening variety.  In my defense, I ordered a different kind but these were substituted by the nursery (it was an online order) because the ones I wanted were all sold out.  I figured that would be okay and that they probably knew what they were doing.  Now, I'm not so sure.  

The problem with a late ripening raspberry here is that we have a rather short growing season compared to many other places and these berries often did not get ripe until late August or early September.  Our first freeze is often mid to late September which means a very short raspberry season.  Not good.  So I made the decision to dig out the raspberry patch and start over.  This was no small feat.  I agonized about this decision over the winter.  It's hard for a gardener to pull out a perfectly good plant but I finally decided that having a longer raspberry season was more important.  

About a month ago, I dug out the old canes and cleaned up the bed.  This week we added some compost to the soil and I worked it in to give the new berries a nice place to grow.  Today the new raspberry canes went in.  This time, instead of ordering plants from somewhere, I got starts from my friends Diane and Michael who live over in Potlatch, about 8 miles away.  Diane doesn't know the name of this variety.  Her starts were given to her by another local.  She calls them "Prolific Potlatch" raspberries.  I figure these are all good omens that my raspberry bed will produce some really yummy berries.  Thank goodness for do-overs!

Sweet Hearts

It's Valentine's Day.  At our house, we don't make a big deal out of Valentine's Day.  Oh, we have our traditions but they have nothing to do with store-bought cards and gifts.  Our philosophy is that, honestly, every day should be like Valentine's Day.  It feels like that to Paul and me.  However, we do like a little celebration just as much as the next couple so we celebrate the day of love with some lovely rituals. 

The first is that we always make each other a Valentine.  Sometimes they are goofy, sometimes serious but, always, made by hand.  

The second is that I always make shortbread hearts.  Shortbread is a favorite around here.  Maybe it is partially because Paul has Scottish heritage.  Maybe it's just because it tastes so darned good.  Either way, I make them as a Valentine's treat.  This year is no different.  This year's batch looks just like every other year's.  Big shortbread hearts drizzled with a little pink glaze.  There's no better way to say I love you than a good cookie!

Winter harvest

It's winter on the Palouse.  This means cold temperatures, rain, snow, and wind.  It means snowy, icy roads and bundling up before heading out anywhere.  It's wool socks and sweaters and a fire constantly burning in the woodstove.  It's certainly NOT gardening weather, that's for sure.  Well, except for this.  The carrots and parsnips we left in the garden bed last fall finally got dug up today.  I was afraid they might be mushy by now after all the hard freezes and snowy weather but, they were beautiful!  

It sort of amazes me that we can still get something from the garden at this time of year, especially here.  When I lived in warmer climes, winter gardening was not unusual at all.  Lettuce in December?  No biggie.  But here, not so much.  That's why digging up these root vegetables is kind of a thrill.  They look great and taste even better.  Homegrown carrots have a flavor unknown to those store-bought carrots.  So good.  

Now we are brainstorming about what wonderful carroty things we will make in the next few weeks.  Some will get roasted, along with those few parsnips, with either a roasted chicken or a pork roast.  Some may become part of a risotto with carmelized carrots that I like to make.  Paul has requested some be set aside for him to make Zanahorias Picante (a Mexican spicy pickled carrot salad).  Yep, we'll have no trouble at all eating up our winter harvest!

Man's Best Friend

I had never lived with a dog before I moved here to live with Paul.   Oh, we always had dogs when I was growing up on the farm but those dogs lived outside and never came in the house.  They were farm dogs.  I was only really attached to one of them, Buddy.  Unfortunately, Buddy had a roving eye and a yen for the female dog across the highway.  Late one night, it became his undoing. He was hit by a car and killed.  It took me days of crying to get over it.  I think I was about 12 at the time.

However, part of the Paul package was Gracie, his border collie.  I was a bit apprehensive about living with a dog that came indoors.  Would she be in the way, leave dog hair everywhere, be a nuisance?  Well, she was all those things but she was also an amazingly well-trained and intelligent dog.  She grew on me.

Gracie was smart enough to know what certain words meant and so we had to either spell things or use alternative words when we didn't want her to get excited...like perambulate instead of walk, flying disc instead of frisbee, or European football instead of soccer.  But she still had ways of figuring things out that we couldn't understand.  She seemed to know before we did that we were planning a walk down the road.  She would start to get excited if she heard my noisy sock drawer upstairs (where she wasn't allowed to go) assuming I was putting on socks and shoes for a walk.  Even the times she was disappointed because I was only going out to work outside, her enthusiasm for my putting on my socks and shoes never waned.  She was always hopeful. 

As you may have guessed by my using the past tense, Gracie died about two months ago.  She was getting to be a bit of an old dog.  She had blown out her knee last year and limped a little now and then.  She didn't always move as fast as she once had.  However, she seemed to be doing okay for a dog of a certain age.  Until one day, after one of her beloved walks down the road, she just didn't seem to have too much energy.  As the day wore on, she seemed less like herself, not wanting to come inside from the rain, panting and just lying around.  We knew something was really wrong when she didn't even wag her tail when Paul talked to her and petted her in her "den" behind the couch that night.  We decided we would have to take her to the vet the next morning.  She died in her sleep that night.  Blessedly, it was fast and relatively painless.  She was home with her pack and in her den.  A good place to be.  

That was two months ago and we all still miss her.  It's often at funny times like driving in the driveway and not seeing her run down to meet us.  I notice it most when I come downstairs in the morning.  Gracie had decided some time ago that I was the person who would let her outside in the morning and she would greet me, excitedly, at the bottom of the stairs and do her little jumpy run ahead of me to the front door.  I still expect to see her there sometimes.  

Gracie is buried out in our prairie.  This spring we will plant a Ponderosa pine over her.  Gracie was a good dog. 

Turn, Turn, Turn

Time is turning into another season.  This weekend has been beautiful warm Fall weather, the kind that's perfect for getting a few things done outside.  

We've already had many nights of freezing weather so the garden has pretty much died as you can see from this picture of what used to be our tomatoes.  Sigh. 

 






So my job this weekend was to take out all the dead garden plants and get them into the compost bins.  It's not a difficult job but it takes a little time.  It always makes me a little sad, though.  It's the end of our fresh garden food.  Oh, there are still carrots, beets, and parsnips for Fall food but it's time to move on.  

 Of course, like every other task around here, it became complicated.  Paul has been talking for a couple of years about making new boards for the compost bins.  The old ones are breaking and have gaps that are too big and stuff falls out of.  He decided that this weekend would be the time to take them on.  

 
Now we have lovely new boards that resemble Lincoln logs.  They are made out of old cedar siding that Paul had stored in the barn.  They really do look much better and are sturdier. 

The other offshoot of redoing the compost boards is that we had to turn over the compost and found lots of lovely soil to spread on the newly bared garden beds.   It never ceases to amaze me that all those kitchen scraps and dead plant parts turn into such beautiful dirt!  It's the ultimate recycling!

Naan

Paul is a wonderful cook.  He likes to make ethnic food...Mexican, Thai, and especially, Indian food.  Some time ago, he showed me how to make naan, an Indian bread similar to pita bread.  Now I make the naan and he makes the rest of the meal.

Naan is really easy to put together.  The base is flour, salt, baking powder, and yogurt.  This is all kneaded together and sits to rise for a couple of hours.  Once the dough is ready, it is cut into pieces and rolled out into rounds.  One at a time, the rounds are slapped onto a hot cast iron skillet for a few minutes until they begin to puff up.

Then the whole pan is stuck under the broiler for a few more minutes until the top starts to color.  When you take it out, you have a big puffy pillow of naan.

It's the perfect foil for spicy Indian food and  the leftovers make great "pita" sandwiches.
As Paul always says, "It's a naan starter."