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September Update (Matt's home alone edition)

So welcome to this update on our plants and how they are progressing and how we are progressing to eat them. First and certainly the best is the tomatoes. We have tons of them, more than I can eat. I was just outside taking pictures and scarfing down cherry tomatoes so good they make your skin tingle. Nothing can be bought at a store that even comes close to this experience.

Since Shanna is out of town with the camera, I had to take these with the built in camera on my computer.

We also discovered that we have hops growing in the yard. It was a big vine that was always growing out of control and we thought it might be a kind of grape but no grapes ever came. Then recently we started seeing these funny looking flowers and what do you know its covered with little hops things.

We have two kinds of peppers, cayenne and bells, the bell pepper plant has only made one pepper the whole freaking year! but it looks like there may be a few more starting now so it wont be a total failure. the cayenne plants were sooo slow to start, we planted them from seed in February and they didn't start making peppers until around August. That said, they are now covered with peppers, heaps and heaps of them, but they are all still green and we were told that they don't get really spicy and delicious until they turn red. If anyone knows, feel free to comment.

Now the summer is almost over. It is the last nice weather before we have to start wearing unreasonable amounts of clothing to ward off hypothermia. the sunflowers are in full bloom and some have started to fall over. I took one inside to brighten the apartment while Shanna is away. And of course me with the tomato harvest of the day.



Cheers.

Urban Vertical Farming

I have been reading about this for a while. I'd love to see someone try it... I guess so would this guy

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/opinion/24Despommier.html

Windmills in the North Sea

We saw these wind farms off the coast of the Netherlands right before landing in Amsterdam.

Visiting the Andres in Michigan [Part 2]

The neighbor's wheat field. Beautiful.

Visiting the Andres in Michigan [Part 1]

My sister-in-law grew up on a farm in Michigan and during our trip to the States we were lucky enough to hang out with her wonderful family (the Andres) on their farm. We had a great time and learned some things too. Below is the view from their home of their soybeans.

Soybeans on the left, barns in the distance. (The red barn was remarkably rebuilt by my sister-in-law's dad and brother. We saw the slideshow of the whole process. It's pretty amazing).

Beginning our walk around the farm. Corn on the left, soybeans again on the right.

Close-up of soybean plants.

Close-up of soybean flowers.

Matt.

Matt standing amongst corn.

We learned a lot about corn. If we can get our hands on some seeds, we'll try to grow it in our yard next year. 

We learned that the above part of the plant needs to pollinate each strand of the husk pictured below. Each strand is actually a tube that is attached to a single kernel of corn, and each tube needs to be pollinated in order for it's kernel to form. 

We learned that corn roots are very shallow...

... and very funny-looking.

Back from Vacation!

You may have noticed we haven't posted anything in a month. That's because we were in the good old US of A visiting friends and family, going to weddings, and of course checking out gardens. We had a great time and we took lots of pictures. We'll share those photos in upcoming posts, but for now, here's the update on our garden. A lot happened in our garden while we were gone, especially the (over)growth of weeds which I spent hours pulling out today. Good stuff happened too. We now have string beans, potatoes, many tomatoes (still green unfortunately), a cayenne pepper, a beautiful red sunflower, and blackberries. 

Above: String bean plants. Below: Close up of the beans growing on the plant.

The potatoes are the highlight for me. I was so excited to dig them out of the ground that I forgot to take photos of the process. But here they are.

Some are very small. We'll have to do some more research and improve our growing methods next year. All in all, I think this was a big success. I'll try for a second potato planting this summer, and then next year we have a big section of the yard picked out to grow only potatoes. We'll try several different varieties.

Below is a photo of all the potatoes cleaned and drying to get ready for storage. My hand is there so you can gauge the sizes of the potatoes.

Below is a photo of some of the tomatoes. The plants grew very big and had to be trimmed back a little to expose the tomatoes and flowers to more sunlight.

Below: our first cayenne pepper. There a a lot of flowers, so we should have more peppers soon. These grew very slowly, and my only guess as to why is that it wasn't hot enough for them.

Sunflower! This is the first one, but there should be more soon.

Here's a photo of the growing blackberries.

It started to get dark out, so I only picked a few.