FIMBY

Ugh... the first week of August, the pinnacle of summer, has been a wash out, literally. It's rained, rained and rained some more. Those beautiful beet juice pictures were taken on the one sunny day this week. Crops are rotting in the fields at the farm, my bean plants were floating this morning in my yard and my beautiful tomato plants that I've mulched, staked and lovingly pruned are all ravaged by blight - AH!! It's been a frustrating gardening week.

The artistic prompt today at Shutter Sisters is abundance. Specifically, "where is the too much, too little, never enough showing up in your camera lens". That's easy to answer today.

Too much green (or should I say purple) beans. I don't like canning but I had no choice when we got our 5 lb bag of beans yesterday from the farm. With last week's 5 lb bag I blanched and froze, gave away and of course ate. With yesterday's bag I made 7 jars of dilly beans this morning, and I still have beans left over!

Canning beans takes forever. All that rinsing, washing, boiling, and stuffing each individual bean by hand into the jars. So not my thing... but neither is wasting food I've paid for and I know on a snowy January day the kids and I will appreciate those dilly beans with our lunch.

We also have too much rain. Way to much rain. This morning we tramped through the swamp, also known as our back yard, rescuing drowning slugs and arthropods of various sorts. So I guess you could say we have too little sun.

Too much rain, too much beans (a blessing I suppose), too little sun and never enough fresh tomatoes. That about sums up the first week of August.

As you know I'm taking a break from writing long philosophical rants and soap-box posts. But I have so much to say about local and organic foods being for everyone, not only those who can afford to shop at Whole Foods (we certainly can't), that sticking to this writing break is killing me...

Oh well, the photos will have to speak for me. The kids and I attended the Local Foods Festival at our farmer's market this week, organized by our favorite community organization, Lots To Gardens,

That pretty much says it folks. Oh, and my kids learned their first parade slogan this week "We want local foods. When do we want it? NOW!" My children are community activists and I'm darn proud of it!

Thanks to a recent butterfly post at the lovely blog, gardenpath, the kids and I were able to easily identify this weekend visitor to the garden. Vanessa cardui, commonly known as Painted Lady.

Yay, finally a "preserves on a sunny window sill" shot

I don't can, except dilly beans (pickled green beans, so delicious) when we get inundated mid-summer from the farm. Should be any week now I guess.

But I do make refrigerator pickles. No bubbling, boiling water and finicky sterilizing needed. Well, the jar should be clean of course...

I dare you NOT to make these. They're my kiddos favorite cucumber treat, trust me that's a lot of white sugar in this house!

Refrigerator Pickles

8 c thickly sliced cucumbers
2 small onions, sliced
2 tbs pickling salt (I use less)
2 c white vinegar
1 c sugar (more or less depending on taste for sweet pickles)
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp celery seed

Combine cukes, onions, and salt in large bowl. Mix well. Combine vinegar, sugar, celery seed and mustard seed in saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently until sugar is dissolved.

Pack cukes & onion mixture fairly tightly into jars (to minimize floating in liquid as much as possible). While still hot, pour vinegar mixture over vegetables.

Let cool to room temperature. Screw on lid and put in fridge. Let pickles age 7-10 days in fridge for best flavor.

Will keep for several months under refrigeration. Ha, like that ever happens!

Picture shown is a half batch, fits in a quart Mason jar.

Is that kind of like "Ebony and Ivory"? (You are a blessed individual if you can read that and not hear the song in your head)

Enough eco-friendly orientated posts.

What I want to know is what's summer like in your backyard these days? If you care to share, leave a comment with a link to a blog post or flickr photo (my latest photography foray). Oh, and please share something sunny. Because summer in my backyard these days is, in a word, wet.

But I did manage to take this cheery photo at the farm yesterday after I gleaned peas. Today when I went for our weekly share pickup these beautiful strawflowers were all closed up from the rain (notice those foreboding clouds in the background). And what a rain we've had. Today, every hour or so the sky simply opens up and lets down literally sheets of water. And booming, bone rattling thunder at 9am, what's that all about? Weird.

But honestly, I'm glad for the break from the intense pace of summer sun worship. We live in Maine so when the weather's warm we grow food, harvest food, go to the beach, hike, camp, come home again and harvest some more. I needed a break, and this week I got one. Just don't tell any other Mainers I've enjoyed the week of quiet indoor weather.

I gleaned peas from the farm this morning. No altruistic motivations here (wish I could say I donated them to less fortunate folks), just taking advantage of stocking the freezer with free, organic veggies. This isn't the norm though. Obtaining local, organic and sustainably grown foods costs, sometimes a lot. So why do we do it?

Basically, our family has made the choice to value the health of our bodies, community, planet and the farmers who grow our food. Incidentally, these are also the reasons, more or less, for us choosing a plant based diet.

But the health benefits of sustainable foods aren't just physical. Knowing your farmer is good for your whole health and well being. Buying food from local farms is spiritually grounding and a return to our roots. I am connecting myself to a person, not a corporation, brand or store. That person is directly connected to the land - blood, sweat and tears. My connection to them connects me to the land, albeit somewhat vicariously, and returns me to the original Divine mandate to tend the garden, the task we were created to do.

Valuing everyone's health and "returning to the garden" is all fine and dandy but let's get down to the nitty-gritty, what about the cost? I'm not even going to address the long-term environmental and health costs of eating a fossil fuel dependent diet, that's a book. But if I did the cost question would be blow out of the water. However, I know most people think of cost in terms of next month's paycheck so I'll stick to the here and now.

Is it possible for a bean blossom to blush?

I'd say so. Seems to me the barely pink blossom is almost hiding behind the leaf but in spite of "her" best efforts is being "exposed" by the sun. Oh My!

I didn't even notice the bean pods already growing (I was so caught up in the blossom's veiled beauty), despite being only inches away, until I downloaded and looked at the photo. Such sweet surprises a garden patch holds.

A week or so ago I promised to post the next day about nasturtiums. Here I am a week later...

The kids are in bed, the kitchen is clean and the floor is mopped for the second time this week. Once it's clean I'm easily bothered by every sticky drip of watermelon juice and dirt smear. After a week or so "this too shall pass" and it will be another month before the floor gets a good washing once again. (don't panic, my house isn't a sty, I'm very handy at spot washes).

Anyway, I'm now ready, finally (sigh of relief) to sit down and finish what I started... a post on why you should plant nasturtiums in your garden.

Firstly, I'm assuming you are interested, even slightly, in growing something in your yard, balcony or windowsill. But maybe you don't have much time, very little space, no money for plants, can't grow a plant to save your life, whatever. Even if all those apply to you I'm fairly certain you can grow nasturtiums and here's why you should:

Nasturtiums (Tropaeolum)

• Are pretty. Vegetables can get away with not being pretty, although I prefer my veggies pretty as well. But in my garden there is no space for a less than lovely flower, who needs 'em. While we're talking about flower types nasturtiums are an annual. Annuals only live for one season (mostly) but bloom the whole time and tend to be very eye catching. But I find annuals' showiness sometimes too... showy. Too pink, too orange, too red, too look-at-me. The nasturtiums I planted this year are more subtle and luscious than that. Be warned though there are construction pylon orange nasturtiums out there. Last year's vegetable garden nasturtiums re-seeded themselves and bloomed this can't-help-but-be-noticed shade.

Black Velvet and Peach Melba

surprise!: Must of been some different seed mixed in with my Peach Melba and Black Velvet

• Are edible. Maybe you only have room to grow things you can eat. Hey, you can eat nasturtiums. Put the peppery greens or pretty blossoms (blossoms are mild flavored) in salads. Better yet, bake a cake, ice it with whipped cream, top with nasturtium blossoms and bring it on over (just forget I'm mostly vegan here for a minute) for tea!
• Don't need great soil. In fact they blossom better in poor soil - how great is that! If you have a patch of yard that you'd like to grow something in but the soil hasn't been enriched yet with compost (you are composting right?) nasturtiums are a great pick. Better soil results in more foliage, less blossoms.
• Are inexpensive and super easy to grow. They grow best from seed which means you might not find them at a greenhouse. I honestly don't know I haven't looked recently. I buy my seeds at Pinetree Seeds here in Maine. Nasturtium seeds are big like peas, they are some of the easiest to plant. Two packages of seeds, $3.42 including tax, filled the space I had for them.
• Do a great job of filling in a future perennial bed. My flower gardening goal is to have almost exclusively perennial beds, to that end I am building a perennial bed between our driveway and our neighbor's house. Our neighbors let us use this space for our purposes thinking we might want to pave it for more parking space. Ha! Pave a possible garden space, like over my dead body! It's a fairly long space but time, money and friends with perennials (lots of my plants are donations) are limited so it's a slow go. This season I filled in part of the space with nasturtiums.

Nasturtiums in "perennial bed"

• Can grow almost anywhere, except maybe really wet and shady spots. You can plant them in window boxes, containers and as mentioned already, poor soil. I've seen them in blazing sun, mine get only morning sun and afternoon shade and are thriving. Oh, and they re-seed themselves but may not come true as was my experience with the pylon orange nasturtium in my vegetable garden.

disclaimer: nasturtiums can have aphid problems, as I experienced in last year's garden. This year, planted in a different location they are, knock-on-wood, aphid free. Instead the aphids are all over my Anthemis - grr....

There you have it folks. The why and some hows of growing nasturtiums. Happy gardening.

It's late, I need to go to bed. Story of my life. But I can't help but taking a few minutes to post my favorite photos of the day. Summer is simply heavenly some days. Even though no day is perfect, summer (at least for my garden, farm, beach, woods, mountains, outdoors happy family) tends to have more perfect "moments". Trying to live more in those moments. These are those moments of my day.

Morning Nasturtiums

Stay tuned for tomorrow's garden tutorial on growing nasturtiums. Short of it is, if you haven't yet grown nasturtiums you should. Come back tomorrow to find out why *smile*.

Blueberry Farm Hand

Picked these for snacking at the farm today. Unbelievable to have blueberries already. I was weeding the Pick-Your-Own flower bed earlier so my finger tips are grimy with good ol' fashioned farm dirt - love it.

Ragamuffin on farm swing

Yes, I know her hair is kind of obscuring her face but this is my wild child and this is simply how she looks - on her better days. She's my ragamuffin and by the looks of it in bad need of a haircut. And I'm in love with her just the way she is.