This is the story of our adventures -- every day and extraordinary; our dreams -- tiny and grand; our gardens -- ornamental and sustaining; this is the story of our journey.  We are a family of four living a mindful, simple life here in Los Angeles County.  We are green, conscious, and forward thinking.  We keep an eye on the past because some of the best things have already been done and bear repeating.  Walk and talk with us, have a glass of wine, taste a peach or a tomato, blow some bubbles and watch them drift up over the canyon ridge.  Enjoy!

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Hoppiness is

I owe this blog much more than just a bunch of pictures of my not too fruitful garden after 6 weeks of silence but with the girls in the middle of the second week of K and 1st grade and me still trying to get a handle on our new "lifestyle" I'm not sure I can deliver tonight (I'm hoping to get this all loaded while the chicken strips coated in pastured egg, ground flax seed and panko oven-fry in some walnut oil...)  Lunch tomorrow for the Bubbles will be the aforementioned chicken strips, spaghetti squash (that I roasted earlier with some walnut oil and sea salt), crostini, and melon chunks.  Hopefully arranged artfully in their bento-style boxes, with a flower!  Maybe I'll remember to take a picture of that too...  But in the meantime, I am really really really proud of this picture (and not just the picture, of the subject too!):
Click on it - see it up close and gorgeous!  Happy happy hoppy hops!

So, another garden thing I'm feeling really happy about (because honestly, there isn't much this year -- tomatoes have wilt, carrots are lovely but few and far between, something ate the broccoli, something LARGE, not aphids or such, the cucumbers, well, typical cucumbers for me, etc etc...) is THIS!
OMG a PUMPKIN!  From the volunteer plant growing in the morel habitat (not the new plant I actually PLANTED).  So far I have SEEN one single female flower and I rather, um, forced her to do the deed.  So, I think I made this!
Other things that make me hoppy, I mean happy...
My magnificent ever growing rainbow chard.
Chive flowers with honey bees.
Everbearing strawberries.
Ripe strawberries.


Self seeding arugala.
A broccoli sprout from????  There are actually a dozen or so of these!  Volunteers always seem so much stronger in my garden so I'm hopeful this might become something great.

Yeah, like this crazy pumpkin!
Under the pumpkin, there grows some lovely baby chard!
More baby chard!




And all is not lost up above, in the sunny beds.

Figs!  I picked (and ate) two yesterday!  A dozen or so to come!
Bell peppers.
Dahlias!  Loaded with honey bee tho I couldn't capture a picture that way.
Yellow bell.
Banana peppers -- hmm, are these the sweet or the hot?  I never know until I cut in!
The blackberries have made an arch across the tipis.
And we do have SOME tomatoes.
Yellow crookneck.
I was hoping to find another rogue pumpkin back here, where the planted pumpkin has spread into the hops, but no.
Pumpkin-hop jungle.
What I found was this lovely spider!
And just one more time: