Click for pictures of our garden at two weeks, if you're into that sort of thing :) I planted some parsley, thyme, and basil seeds (more basil! I love basil) outside yesterday in a secondary pot. I don't have high hopes for any of the herbs surviving snails and bugs outside, but you never know!

Also, that copper tape totally didn't stop snails and slugs from coming into our planter box. But they don't seem to have done anything too bad to our baby plants so far, so I won't take any measures against them. Maybe the copper took the fight right out of them. I'll probably end up regretting being so nice to those snails.

An exciting new site, link courtesy of styro...Etsy! Crafty people can sell their handmade items, and everybody else can buy cool stuff. I especially like the name. Etsy. It's cute! It reminds me of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib.

We had spaghetti carbonara with sauteed zucchini for dinner tonight, along with a pseudo-Caesar salad composed of organic vegetables (the zucchini was organic as well--the box has really helped us eat more fruits and vegetables). I had some issues with the carbonara sauce being a little like scrambled eggs (in the recipe I chose, the sauce and pasta are cooked a little bit, and the eggs sort of scrambled during that step). Still good, what with the awesome bacon in it, but very filling. Anyway, we used up lots of perishable ingredients we had sitting around, and that was satisfying.

It's the weekend! I'm glad :)

We've had Google-fried chicken for dinner the past few nights. We fried two batches on separate days, since it's okay to leave it marinating for up to 5 days prior to cooking it.

Dinner 1 consisted of the chicken, collard greens, and Allan's biscuits. For some reason, it was really hard to find collard greens at the store (Patrick went to Safeway and three fancy supermarkets before finding them), and the collard greens in our garden are just babies, so we can't eat them yet :) The biscuits and chicken were good, but the collard greens didn't turn out right. We think it's because I got smoked ham shanks instead of hocks at Schaubs (they didn't have any hocks--what was I to do?). Patrick doesn't think they had enough connective tissue to give the collards the right texture. Oh well! Also, we had gravy issues. We ended up using gravy out of a packet instead of making it from the pan drippings. It was supposed to be sausage-flavored gravy, but it didn't do a very good job of it.

Dinner 2 included chicken, mashed potatoes (made with organic yukon gold potatoes from today's box), and long-stewed red kale (here's the recipe in PDF form; I couldn't find an HTML version). This time, the pan gravy worked, but we didn't have any chicken broth, so Patrick used water instead, and it was just really bland. It makes sense, but we were hoping it would work anyway :) The mashed potatoes were pretty good (they had sour cream, butter, and milk in them), but I think next time they'll need a little more milk and we should use the hand blender instead of the potato masher so they'll be fluffier. It's a learning process...

The kale was the best part of the meal. The recipe was from Chez Panisse Vegetables, and conveniently enough, we got a bunch of red kale in our box today! I used thick-cut bacon from Schaubs (you already know how much I love that stuff!), and an organic carrot from our box (but no organic onion; there wasn't one this week). The kale turned out really sweet and mellow and yummy! I guess Alice Waters knows what she's doing :) For dessert we had honeydew from last week's box. Good stuff!

Our garden is doing well, and the fungus gnats are either gone or in the invisible larvae stage of development (Knock Out Gnats has not arrived yet). I planted some French breakfast radishes in the empty patch in our garden, even though neither of us likes radishes (as far as we know). I'll probably eat them if they grow, but I just like watching all the plant sprouts grow. Strangely, it looks like there's a collard green sprout in the radish section (none of the radish sprouts have emerged yet). Patrick swears he didn't put it there, so I guess it was nature or something! The seed must have travelled a least a foot from where I put it originally. Or maybe it'll turn out that radish tops look like collard green sprouts.

I really like my life right now! Sure, things can be stressful, but we've got so much good stuff going on. 2005 is a good year!

I kept meaning to write something this weekend, but it was just too nice lounging around instead. Here goes with the update...

This past week, Patrick took a big step forward in organizing our triangle closet. There are still some things I'd like to do with it, but it's much tidier than it used to be. Some history--our triangle closet is built under our upstairs neighbor's stairs, so it's wedge-shaped and very long. We have to stoop to get to the very back of it, but there's a good-sized part that is normal height that Patrick has been using for tool storage. But it was getting pretty messy.

We bought some white pegboard and painted it bright red, which was exciting! I also took a picture of one of our strawberries that same day, since it was bright red too (that strawberry was already on the plant when we bought it, so I can't really take credit for growing it).

Patrick then mounted the pegboard in the closet and hung all of his tools on it. It's exciting how many different pegboard accessories there are! It made me want to put pegboard in other parts of the apartment. We may not be able to paint our walls, but we can paint pegboard and hang it on our walls. Anyway, here's our new and improved triangle closet! I think we need more tools now...

I think it's pretty snazzy, and a good home for our new Felco pruners (the Rolls Royce of garden shears). Patrick does such a good job on his projects!

We have had some gardening issues this week, much to my chagrin. There was a really hot day earlier this week, and all of our new vegetable plants got all wilty and sad. Most of them have recovered, so that's good. We found alfalfa at Petco, so now the strawberries don't have to sit on the dirt. And we've got baby collard green and pea sprouts poking their heads out, which is thrilling!

Unfortunately, we've got a few neighborhood slugs and snails, and they think baby plants are tasty. I'd prefer not to kill them (not sure why, since I don't mind killing insects, and I wouldn't mind eating snails at a fancy French restaurant), so we're trying a more humane option initially. We bought copper tape and put it all around the top of the planter box. The copper reacts with the snails' secretions, causing a mildly unpleasant sensation that should keep them out. I'm not sure if it'll work, but I figured we'd try it before resorting to harsher measures. We will be very sad if our baby greens get eaten. But I also have a soft spot for those snails, for some reason.

You know which pest I hate though? Fungus gnats! They are now in our indoor herb garden, which pisses me off so much! I guess they must've migrated over before I got rid of the baby tears. No matter how many we squish, there are tons more swarming all over the plants minutes later. It's disgusting and annoying. I'm not a good hippie. We bought yellow sticky traps, and they have done a good job at trapping the gnats, but there are still plenty more roaming free, and I'm sure they've laid their eggs and the cycle will continue. So I broke down and ordered Knock Out Gnats this morning. I'm afraid I'll promote the development of a master race of gnats immune to the stuff, but I've only read good things about it online, and it seems like the gentlest option out there. I hope I don't bring about the downfall of humanity at the hands of mutant gnats!

We had a nice weekend. We went to the mall for a while on Saturday, but then I got hungry and cranky and very ready to be done with the mall. We decided to drive over to Santa Ramen in San Mateo, and we got there right before they closed for lunch, but they let us in. What a relief! We had some good ramen, and all was right with the world.

We did a bunch of stuff today. The weather was great. We went over to the park behind our apartment and practiced batting for softball for awhile. I got frustrated since I am so not good at it, but Patrick insists that I'm improving. I'd say the best part of the day was eating dinner out on our patio and finishing with a dessert of organic peaches and nectarines from our box. Yum! We are so lucky.

It looks like our upstairs neighbors are moving out, which means that we will soon have lived here the longest out of the tenants of all four apartments. I wonder who our new neighbors will be.

We have a garden! We went to Wegman's yesterday and bought tomato and strawberry plants, plus seeds for snap peas and collard greens, and I planted everything while Patrick lounged around in the shade (it's only fair, since he built the planter). There are already a few unripe tomatoes and strawberries on the plants. I hope they stay healthy and happy!

We'd intended to plant two different kinds of strawberries, but I accidentally picked the same kind from two different growers. This variety (Chandler) is supposed to be ideal for growing in California, and the plants look healthy. I want to find some hay to put under the developing strawberries so they don't get rotten or moldy where they're touching the ground. Not sure where I can get just a little hay though--a pet store?

We bought three varieties of tomato. There's the Dona (Patrick's personal favorite for reasons that are unclear to me), Patio Hybrid F (perfect for container growing on urban patios), and the Black Krim (a Russian heirloom--I think it's the most badass of our garden plants). We also have stakes to tie them to once they're tall enough.

In sad plant news, I had to get rid of our baby tears because the fungus gnats weren't going away, and the plants were dying either from lack of water or from having gnat larvae crawling on them (I could see the larvae all over them--eww!). So I think I'm going to give up on trying to grow stuff in our living room right now. There's not enough sunlight. Instead, I think we'll put framed pictures on the shelves where the plants used to be. Everybody likes pictures!