Strawberries

Our strawberry plant (with a sign Nick’s mom made me!)

We got our strawberry plant on a whim in April. We had read that it was best to pinch off the flowers for the first season to encourage growth, so we did that, not expecting to see strawberries until next year. Our strawberry plant grew happily and sent out runners that started several daughter strawberry plants.

Earlier this month, we decided to leave a few flowers on the mother plant so we could try a few strawberries. We ate the first two berries yesterday and WOW! They were so delicious and flavorful! We’re so excited to let it grow more berries next year.

Pickling Cucumbers

Our first batch of pickling cucumbers

We had so much fun making our own pickles last year that we decided to do it again. We grew our own cucumber and dill plants from seed. Growing dill was a new project for us. It grew well, but we will try to time it better next year so that it’s ready for harvesting at the same time as the pickling cucumbers (it was a bit early this year, but we made it work).

The pickling cucumber plant has been happily producing cucumbers, but it’s a little crowded between the strawberry plants and our gigantic bean plant (I had no idea the bean plant would get so big and it’s still growing!). We harvested our first cucumbers at the end of July and we get more cucumbers every week.

Last year, we only had jars large enough to make pickle chips. We added garlic and dill and they were awesome on hamburgers. This year, we got jars large enough for pickle spears, so we have been making those, too. Pickles are so much better when they’re homemade! Yum!

Beans

I wanted to grow some green beans this year and since we don’t have a lot of space in our backyard, I wanted to go with pole beans (which grow tall) instead of bush beans (which take up more room). The only pole bean variety I found at the nursery was the scarlet runner bean… which I learned later is not particularly edible and is primarily grown as an ornamental. Whoops! It has grown huge since we planted it 3 months ago, outgrowing the support cage we got for it. It has pretty reddish orange flowers and long beans growing on it.

Bean plant

Bean

Bean flowers

Pickling Cucumbers

Nick and I had a lot of fun making pickles last year, so we decided to do it again this year! Our cucumber plant took a while to get going, but it has really grown in size over the last two weeks. It has yellow blossoms all over it, as well as the beginnings of a bunch of cucumbers. I think we’ll probably start picking our first cucumbers by the end of the month.

Cucumber plant

Cucumber

Strawberries

We got a strawberry plant this year for a fun experiment. We’ve been plucking the blossoms off of it to encourage the plant to grow. Next year, we’ll let it blossom and make berries. So, nothing exciting to report about the strawberry plant right now, but we’re looking forward to eating its berries next year.

Strawberry plant

Snow Peas & Raspberries

Not much has changed since I blogged about snow peas last month and I blogged about raspberries earlier this month. I think they’re both mostly done for the year, though. Our snow pea plant has continued to produce some peas, but it seems pretty unhappy with the heat wave we’ve been having (almost 2 weeks of 80+ degree weather!). We’ve had a few more raspberries since the blog post, but it seems to be done making berries for the year now.

Thai Chili Pepper

Nick wanted to do a Thai chili pepper plant again this year. If it’s like last year’s plant, we’ll get peppers in October. For now, it’s just busy growing.

Pepper plant at the end of May

Pepper plant now

Herbs

Our herbs this year are basil, chives, parsley, tarragon, cilantro, dill, and oregano. We had all but dill in our garden last year (we figured we should grow our own dill for the pickles). We grew the cilantro, dill, and oregano from seeds. The rest we either grew from starts or are plants that stuck around from last year.

Basil

Chives

Parsley

Tarragon

Cilantro

Dill

Oregano

Growing raspberries

I hope you all had a fun 4th of July! Nick, Amanda, and I went over to Dad’s for a BBQ. We watched the Brazil vs. Colombia quarter-finals World Cup game, ate some yummy food, and went on a spontaneous trip to a couple parks in Renton, where we played on the playground and saw salmon swimming in a river.

One thing I love about this time of year is that it’s raspberry season! Grandma and Grandpa have lots of raspberry bushes, so we’ve gone up there the last couple weekends to pick raspberries. We also came home with marionberries, rhubarb, and radishes. I made raspberry jam, marionberry jam, rhubarb muffins, and strawberry rhubarb crisp, all of which turned out yummy.

Nick and I got a thornless dwarf raspberry plant last spring, which has doubled in size since this time last year. We didn’t get many berries off of it last year, but we’ve picked dozens so far this year. There aren’t enough berries all at once to really do anything with them, but we like just snacking on the berries right off the bush anyway.

Snow pea plant

We got a dwarf snow pea starter two months ago on a whim. It grew quickly and we realized the pea plant needed support. We initially gave it some bamboo sticks to grab on to, but it outgrew those, so we got it a plant cage, which it liked much better.

It started flowering at the end of May and we had our first fully grown peas last weekend. I gathered the peas on Monday and we made a veggie stir fry.

The snow pea plant was super easy to grow and I’m sure we’ll do it again next year.

The peas aren’t the only exciting thing going on in our garden right now. Our raspberries just started turning red. Two of them were ripe enough to eat today, so I ate those this afternoon, hehe. We’re going to have a lot of berries this year. The bean plant just started making little red buds, so I’ll probably get to blog about those soon. Oh! And we have baby birds in our birdhouse! I heard the chicks chirping and noticed the mama bird making trips to and from the birdhouse when I was in the garden last week. I haven’t seen the baby birds yet, but it’s fun to know they’ve made a home in our backyard.

Ravenna Park

Ravenna Park

I’ve been wanting to check out Ravenna Park for a while and Nick and I finally got around to it. Ravenna Park is a 50 acre wooded ravine north of the University District, about 10-15 minutes from home. It also has play areas and tennis courts and whatnot, but Nick and I stuck to the trails. There are 4.5 miles of trails in Ravenna Park. Nick and I walked a loop around the park, which was a little over 1.5 miles. It’s pretty cool to be able to walk around in a forest in a big city like Seattle.

Ravenna Park

Mariners Game

Mom won tickets to a Mariners game in a raffle at work, so Nick and I spent Mother’s Day at Safeco Field with Mom and Amanda. The weather was fantastic, but we all got a bit sunburned. For some reason, my nose got especially burned, so I looked like Rudolph for a few days. The Mariners didn’t field the ball very well (5 errors) and lost the game 7-9, but we all had a good time.

One of the awesome things about our house is that we have great bus access. We generally take the bus when we go anywhere downtown or to the stadiums south of downtown, which is great because we don’t have to deal with the stress and expense of driving and parking.

Marrakesh

Marrakesh (photo from the restaurant’s website)

We went to Marrakesh Moroccan Restaurant with Mom and Amanda last weekend. Mom and Amanda had been there before, but it was the first time for Nick and me.

It has a great atmosphere and you eat with your hands, which is traditional in Morocco.

Dinner was served in multiple courses: salad and lentil soup, b’stilla royale (phyllo dough filled with ground chicken and topped with powdered sugar), the main courses, and dessert and mint tea. For the main courses, we ordered Tangine of Chicken Lemon and Olives, Tangine of Braised Hare, Couscous Marrakesh (couscous with lamb and vegetables), and Brochette Marrakesh (grilled lamb), which we ate family style. Everything was delicious. I especially liked the cumin, paprika, and garlic sauce that came with the hare.

Gardening

So far this year, we’ve planted basil, beans, chives, cilantro, cucumbers, dill, lemon balm, oregano, parsley, raspberries, snow peas, strawberries, tarragon, and Thai chili peppers. A lot of these are plants that we had last year, but we’re also trying out some new ones: beans, dill, oregano, snow peas, and strawberries.

Chives (lemon balm in background)

We just discovered we have a peony in our garden

The snow peas are growing quickly

The primrose we planted along the walkway is still blooming, but it requires more maintenance than we were expecting. It blooms frequently and you have to remove the old blossoms and leaves. We love the color it adds to our backyard, though.

Upcoming

Nick and I have been wanting to go for a hike lately, but iffy weather and changes in plans keep delaying it. I hope we’ll be able to go this weekend, but it looks like it might rain. Anyway, expect a hiking trip blog post soon!

This fall, Nick is going to move to a different building at work. He’s looking forward to the walls of floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a great view of Seattle.

But what we’re most looking forward to is that Nick’s mom is flying out to visit us in September. We’re already coming with ideas of things to do while she’s here. By the way, she has a shop on Etsy now, Design by Meg, in case you’re looking for some wire art to decorate your home.

We planted them in the rain (it has been an abnormally wet February), but we had fun doing it anyway. We got a few extra, just in case we had miscalculated how many we needed (we didn’t), so we planted those by the back fence.

Primrose in the garden

Primrose along the walkway

Romaine Lettuce & Broccoli

Our romaine lettuce started out well. We had 5 lettuce plants and we were able to make a handful of salads with them… until the slugs got to them. We used Diatomaceous Earth to ward off the slugs, but we didn’t know it needs to be replenished each time it rained. At least we’ll know that next time!

The broccoli just didn’t work out. We planted 5 broccoli plants and we weren’t able to harvest any of them. They started to form little heads of broccoli, but warm weather made them bolt.

Parsley & Chives

Our parsley and chives have been a great success. They’re super easy to care for and although we use them frequently, they grow back faster than we can use them!

The picture above shows half of our parsley and chive plants in a pot next to our pot of lemon balm. We had to move the lemon balm to a pot because it was getting out of control in the raised bed.

Basil & Cilantro

We planted 2 basil plants, one in a pot and the other in the raised bed. The basil in the raised bed grew really well and was super happy, while the basil in the pot stayed relatively small and wasn’t as happy. We’ve used the basil in all sorts of things from pasta to soup, but most especially homemade pizzas and pizza sauce. We’ll definitely plant basil again next year, but probably only in the raised bed this time.

Our cilantro didn’t really work out. We planted the seeds in a wide, shallow container as per some instructions I found online. It seemed to be doing well at first, but my guess is that it got too crowded. I tried to take out some of the seedlings and a few of them survived after that, but not enough to really make use of. Maybe we’ll try again next year.

The picture above shows one of the basil plants back when it was still really small (I don’t have a picture of it at its full height) and the sprouting cilantro. One of our parsley plants is on the right.

Rosemary & Tarragon

We didn’t really have a plan for the rosemary; we just planted it to see how it did. It grew, but then it started turning brownish. Not enough sun? Too much water? I’m not sure what its problem was.

The tarragon hasn’t grown a lot, but at least it’s staying green lol. Neither of us were familiar with tarragon, so we wanted to see what it was like. I found a recipe for Chicken in Tarragon Sauce, which we’ve made a handful of times already using the tarragon from our garden.

In the picture above, the tarragon is in the back on the right (behind the basil) and the rosemary is in a pot on the right. The picture was taken shortly after they were planted.

Raspberries

Nick and I had intended on experimenting with strawberries when someone at the nursery suggested raspberries instead. They had a brand new thornless dwarf raspberry plant that had just arrived that is ideal for growing in a pot outside. Seriously?!? I got so excited and came home with one. It has grown a lot since then (we had to move it into a larger pot), but there are little holes in some of the leaves that I need to investigate. It hasn’t produced much more than a handful of berries so far, but they’ve been delicious and I hope it produces better next year. It’s still working on a few last minute groups of berries and I ate one of them today.

The two pictures of the raspberry plant above were taken just under a month apart and it’s grown even more since the latter picture was taken. The third picture shows some of the berries turning red.

Thai Chili Peppers

On a whim, Nick bought a Thai chili plant in June. It started out as just a tiny little thing, but it’s grown into one of our most successful plants of the year. There are over a hundred peppers on it and they just started turning red. I have no idea what we’re going to do with all the peppers, but Nick said he wants to make a ristra. Anybody want any hot chili peppers?

Pickling Cucumbers

Our pickling cucumber plant was another of Nick’s experiments. It started out so small and we had no idea it would try to take over the raised bed, but that’s exactly what it did! We ended up taking out our sage plant (left from the previous owners) to make room for it. Next year, we’ll plan a little better.

Nick made and canned pickle chips and spears with the cucumbers, which was our first time canning. The problem with making pickles is that it takes time for the cucumbers to pickle, so you can’t taste them for a few weeks. He added garlic to the first few jars, but the garlic flavor ended up being too strong (they taste great on hamburgers, though!). We’ll definitely give it another try next year and see if we can perfect the recipe.

Before pruning (the weird gap where the rocks are is from when I was pruning yesterday)

After pruning

Now I just need to tend to the rest of the garden…