A sodden mess is what we have here

What happens when it rains for eight days straight? Well you cannot weed and the weeds proliferate. Here is a photographic example of the kinds of weeds that are growing in this garden. Patches of grass, basically. I think since I killed all the other kinds of weeds with the Roundup, the grasslike stuff is able to come up. Unfortunately it does not grow in the rest of the yard, where the crabgrass chokes it. The yard is revolting and not grassy at all.


There are other types of weeds growing, but unfortunately they are covered in mud. We got out there and valiantly, for the first time we were able to in over a week, attacked them in tandem for about two hours.

The sad part is that a lot of the plants I started from seed are not growing, they are being choked out by the constant rain and no sun. Plants need sun, this is a basic concept. In addition, their roots will rot if they are overwatered. In addition, if weeds proliferate (the weeds seem not to mind the constant rain and minimal sun) around them, the weed roots will choke out their roots.

Take the bibb lettuce, for example. This is what it looks like these days:



Pitiful. You can barely tell it's supposed to be something. It's supposed to rain all weekend, too, and I just hope it can hang on until next week. Take a look at our ONE lonely pea plant:


To you it looks like it's flourishing, to us, though, it's at the end of the muddiest part of the garden that does not drain well, surrounded by encroaching weeds. If you notice in these photos the mud is really churned up - that is a result of a couple of hours of hard labor digging up weeds. Weeding in mud is easy, by the way, although no weeding feels good on the back. Well, anyway, it is interesting to note that the one surviving pea plant IS at the muddiest end of the row. I wonder if they like really wet flooded soil . . .

There IS some good news in all of this: the bush beans!


Some of them that you can't see, are a little withered and sad, but most of them are towering and gracious. I hope they continue to do well. The zucchini look the same as last time i posted, and I thinned them out to two plants per area. I am supposed to thin them to one plant, but with more rain coming over the next few days, I will wait to see if any die off naturally. I am kind of scared.

The basil - no sign of it.

The container of dill has sprouted and I am overjoyed, finally! The container of Early Girl tomatoes had begun to develop white fungus, and i pulled it out of the rain on Thursday. The white fungus is receding and it got some sun today. That is my insurance policy for tomatoes so I am trying to tend to it better. Too bad it took me so long to remember I could pull it out of the rain! Duh!

Send me photos of YOUR gardens and plants so I can post them!!

Even better!

The zucchini is really coming up now, I am basically jumping for joy. Mister Siren came out and took some great photos in the garden on Saturday and then we took some more today. The problem is only that it has been raining for five days straight. I am getting worried that this garden is not getting enough sun. I think it needs at least 6 hours a day. The basil, dill, and cilantro are not appearing and they are probably too soaked and need more sun. In addition, if the water does not have time to burn off, the tomato plants will develop fungus (I think.)

The Zucchini seedlings on Saturday:



And today, Sunday:


Here are what the beans are looking like (really cute!):

Saturday, just poking out their wee heads:


And Sunday, totally showing their stuff!


Also making a showing were the beautiful mesclun greens in a row:



And I think these are the sugar snap peas, but won't be able to tell for a few more days, i guess:




My grandma told me to put down newspaper as mulch, and I was meaning to do this this weekend, but it rained all day! I need to do this, because the weeds are REALLY proliferating! Photos of weeds will be up soon for your viewing pleasure.

They live!

Take a looky here!

Well, zucchini are supposed to look like this, according to the internet:


In my garden I found this near where I planted the zucchini:


It was weird, thick root-like things sticking out of the ground in all directions. Now as mentioned in the last post, I planted three zucchini seeds in each spot for a plant - i was a little over-eager. So it is possible that these seeds are just going crazy. But it is also possible that these aren't even zucchini. There were a lot of weeds in that garden before i planted these other seeds. And from the photos I have seen, I haven't seen things like this! I am confused! I did not pull them up.

Next: bush beans. Is this them?


I don't know, but I think they might be, because this sort of thing is coming up at regularly spaced intervals in the bean row. :)

Sugar snap peas? Hard to tell!! What about this? Could this be it?


Everything is brown in the evening, covered in dirt . . .

Then there was the row of mesclun greens, the pride of the garden so far! Look at it! :)


We have Bibb Lettuce, but by the time i finished all my weeding and took photos, the little sprouts had closed up and gone to bed. You can kind of see their green-i-ness amidst the clumps of dirt though. They look like alfalfa sprouts, Very Cute:



Okay but here comes two weird ones. Arugula. Arugula was definitely showing some greenness, but on the other hand we have weird rootvines in the immediate vicinity of each clump of evenly spaced greenness, making me wonder if the emerging thick root-like vines belong to and are part of the Arugula. Does anyone know if this is teh case? I tried to dig one up to see if it went back to the arugula and it went deeper than i wanted to mess with w/out disturbing all the soil the sprouts rested on. But as you can see from the photos below, I have tried to indicate what is happening in the garden so someone can see and maybe offer an opinion on whether this is a weed i should eradicate, or the anchoring root system of the arugula??







Any opinions are appreciated. And finally: the sorrel - a very hardy, hard stemmed green, i think. The stems are coming up very brown and tough, evenly spaced, and no bulls***. Behold:



So, the only thing I am bummed about is that the basil, the plant which is supposed to emerge the quickest, I have not seen hide nor hair of. It is supposed to look like this:



but i have not seen anything even remotely like that. Booooooo!! I want basil!

When will they appear?

It's been raining for two days but yesterday after work I went out and weeded for two hours. Weeding in a garden of that size is a job of epic proportions. I need to just put mulch down in between the rows.

The good news is that things are starting to peek up! When Mister Siren loads the photos up you can all share in the excitement. It surprised me that I was seeing stuff already b/c of the expected germination times. So I made a chart.

PLANT	DAYS TO EMERGE/GERMINATE	DAYS TO HARVEST
Basil	5-7	Not stated
Sorrel	5-10	Not stated
Sugar Snap Peas	5-10	Not stated
Bibb Lettuce	7-10	57 days
Cilantro	7-10	Not stated
Mesclun Greens	7-10	40-60 days
Dill	7-14	Not stated
Bush beans	7-14	50 days
Arugula	8-10	40 days
Zucchini	10-14	57 days

We planted these seeds on Sunday, and yesterday was Thursday. I guess that is about five days in seed time. (?). So it would make sense that we were seeing the five day plants emerging. But i was seeing a few things in the camps of others . . . Definitely no dill, no cilantro. But weird and strange things with the zucchini. Nothing exactly happening right above where i planted it, but i don't really know what happens underground when you plant a zucchini. Does it grow a huge underground viney root system? Because I think it grew roots and vines underneath one of the basil plants and popped out clear on the other side. There are hard thick things emerging all around the zucchini row and also far away from it that look the same. Faithless me, when the package says plant ONE every three feet, I put in three seeds just to be sure. (I didn't want to be left with no zucchini!) i hope the entire garden is not overrun by zucchini.

Then, with the basil, which are supposed to be the earliest to sprout, i didn't see anything I could identify as basil. Unless I pulled them all up thinking they were weeds. (Forgive me, it looked like the same weeds growing everywhere else.) But then maybe i planted them too deep. They are only supposed to be planted 1/4 in deep and who knows if i did that.

I'll put pics up tonight. The long and short of it is, the lettuces, I can tell they are definitely growing. The other stuff, no. And there are way too many weeds. You'll see!

Garden 2009

Okay, what we've all been waiting for, me included.

Garden, 2009 summer edition.

Well last year i did not have the heart to post pictures of the flood plane it became after my bright idea to dig the ground up and take most of the earth out and create a big hole in the yard and call it a garden. Funny how that can cause a place to collect water and not drain well. And then, guess what. Well, a weed jungle took over and with my limited time I was not able to vanquish the weeds in the 15 x 14 area. It seemed like every day when I would weed for an hour, I would go back out and the area I had not weeded would have grown over.

Then it rained for two weeks straight, and I could not weed, and the rain beat my plants to death, and the weeds took over, and I was done.

But, look on the bright side. It's a new dawn, a new day. I have new ideas this year. I have a new plan. Live and learn. Take a lick and keep on ticking. So this is how we started.

#1: fill the low spots back in with dirt. We did that.
#2: While waiting for planting, keep weeds from growing. Plan for this was to put weed-stop plastic over the garden, as a preventive measure. Gardening books, sites, and the manufacturer of the plastic assured me that if we put this plastic down, and used stakes to secure it, it would a) prevent any weeds from growing b/c they couldn't grow high enough, and b) create so much heat they would die.

Well, behold the results of the use of "Weed-Stop" plastic:


As you can see, the weeds have grown so profusely under this covering that they are actually spilling out between the overlapped sections. Furthermore, they are lifting up the plastic itself. Finally, you can't see this, but they are pulling up the stakes used to secure the plastic.

I pulled the plastic up when it got around time to plant, to find this disappointment:

Basically a garden of weeds! yay! So, first things, first, a plan for these weeds. My dad's suggestion was to get out the hoe and start weeding. I, however, knew that there was no time in my schedule for a weeding assignment of these proportions. I went to the Lowe's and looked into their weed solutions. They have two: one is called Preen, and is granules you can put into your veggie garden once your plants are already established and growing. That's because it prevents weeds (and other plants) from growing.

The other solution is RoundUp. You can spray it on live plants and it kills them - to the root system - in a week. It says it is safe to use in vegetable gardens b/c it only kills the plant you spray it on. What about poisoning soil you have not planted yet, though? I asked the garden center guys, and they said wait a good three weeks before planting. So, here's what the weeds looked like three weeks after I sprayed them with RoundUp:


Take a goooooood look at that. Now isn't that pretty? Heck yeah, RoundUp. Forget you, Weed-Stop plastic. RoundUp has a pleasant coconut smell that reminds me of sunscreen at the beach.

So, today was planting day! I did not start seeds indoors this year. No way. I waited and bought plants at the store for transplanting, and did seeds straight into the ground for the rest.

We carefully planned out how we would plant the garden in rows, etc. by using vines to represent rows, and putting the seed packets at the end, as you can see:



Here are some of the transplanted plants:


That's a row of tomatoes, and off to the right are two bell peppers (red and orange). The tomatoes are a big heirloom yellow one called Mr. Stripey, a Big Bush hybrid, and a cherry tomato. The farthest plant is a jalapeno pepper plant. Mr. Stripey is below, pre-transplant:

I kept a few plants in containers. One of them is a tomato plant, b/c I cannot live without tomatoes and I want to be on the safe side. This tomato plant is called "Early Girl" and it bears fruit much earlier than the others, a month earlier. In the other two pots are dill, and cilantro, the two herbs which infect everything around them - so I figured they would be good candidates for containers. The cilantro was a transplant but the dill is seeds.



I planted other herbs in the garden, though. There are three herb plants at the end of the lettuce rows: a tarragon plant, a rosemary plant, and a lavendar plant:


They mark rows of leaf lettuce (bibb lettuce), mesclun greens, and arugula, and then there is an unmarked row of sorrel (a spicy lemony green).

Here is the entire garden in its present glory:


In addition to the lettuces, tomatoes, and peppers, there are the herbs mentioned, as well as a row of zucchini, bush beans, sugar snap peas, and two rows of basil.

Can't wait!!!

Another NY trip

We went back up to NY, well the Mr. and I went there for the first time together. It was really fun and was the first vacation we have taken together since being married. Whoo-hoo, alone time!!

It was so much fun!! We took the bus up there and round trip tickets are only $42.00 per person! The trip is about 4 hours but a little bit longer on Fridays when you hit traffic (about five hours if I'm being honest.) On Monday when we returned it was a four hour trip. The bus was great, it had wireless internet, it was clean, free bottled water, and showed a movie. Plus my best friend was beside me. :) The company is called DC2NY.

Well we stayed in a hotel that we got a deal on from Travelzoo Top 20, a weekly email subscription service I get with travel deals that are really useful. The hotel was called Shelburne Murray Hill and was in the Murray Hill section (also fondly known as "Curry Hill" for its great Indian Food!) The hotel was very nice, recently renovated, but weirdly, we did not spend much time there. Normally we like to spend a lot of time relaxing in the hotel.

The first thing we did was go up on the Empire State Building to kill some time. At night, we went to see Mary Poppins on Broadway - we cannot recommend this show enough for adults or kids. It's co-produced by Disney and the sets were mind-blowing, not to mention the talent on this show. We walked everywhere and met my friend N, who was still living there, for Chinese Hot Pot dinner/lunch. Warning, too many chilis in this bowl!!! I don't know what's happened to me lately but I can't handle the chilis like I used to! This is a big bowl of broth and then you order all the different foods you want to put in there to simmer/boil - then you all dip in, pull it out, and eat them. Sort of like fondue:


Annnnd, we went over to Rockefeller Center, and watched people ice skating, but did not do so ourselves . . .


And went all the way to Brooklyn to have what is considered the "best" pizza in the city, from a place called Grimaldi's. Now, this place is in competition with a spot called Lombardi's so we will have to try that place next time. Personally i loved the spot in Little Italy we went last time. And Little Italy, although touristy with all the street cafes, etc., would be a great place to have a meal outdoors, touristy though it is. What can i say, i am a sucker. BUT, Grimaldi's can turn out some slices. The line was down the block and we just got in it b/c we knew something good was inside. I watched them making the pies and they weren't making them like i had ever seen a pizza made. The crust was a little juicy when ours came out but it was wonderful.


All in all, we missed a few things I would have loved. We didn't lay around in Central Park b/c it was too cold. And did not make it back to the National museum, a lot of things in which I wanted to share with the Mister. But we did get foodstuffs from Little Italy to bring home - 20 yr old balsamic vinegar and dry sausages which we have already dipped into. Not to mention an eclair which i stuffed into my face on the spot and risotto balls they heated up for us in the deli which we ate as a snack. AND we brought home a heavy bag of NY bagels which we are still munching on the weekends!

Whoo-hoo!

Inaugural Ball

Yes it has been awhile, but life has been busy! For me and for the good old USA. One good thing about living up here is that I get to do a lot of cool things that just weren't available in the places I lived previously, such as Florida, California, or my hometown Atlanta.

For instance, when history was made and Barack Obama was sworn in as President, everyone in the country wanted to be part of the party. But my husband actually got tickets to one of the balls - the Commander-in-Chief's ball, in fact. We got all fancied up and hightailed it down there to see Mr. "O'Biden" (as Sarah Pailin calls him) and Mr. President himself greet us and greet the troops on a big screen.

We were close, very close. You can see in these photos. Their speeches were good. Bon Jovi sang. So did Jordin Sparks. I think she was on American Idol or something. I did not take her photo because my morning show plays this one song by her every day at the same time and I wasn't going anywhere near the stage b/c I can't stand that song.

I present to you our new Vice President, smiling like a million bucks:


And the new Mr. President:


So close, I could have thrown a shoe. Now that's access!

The Commander in Chief came out with Michele and they danced together. They also danced with the two luckiest enlisted people in the armed forces. Don't get too familiar, buddy!! ha ha.

Trip To New York

I went to NY to visit N!! It was my second time in NY city but my first time as an adult. What an energizing trip! I wanted to share everything I saw with Mr. Siren so i snapped, snapped away with the camera, returning with 186 photos. I rode up on the bus which went straight from Dupont Circle to Penn Station, no stops, and it was only $42 round trip. N came to meet me at the stop and I waited for her for about 30 minutes. It was 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night and the city was ALIVE, people out walking in big crowds, lights flashing, traffic buzzing around- I was activated and ready to go after the 5 hour bus ride . . . whoo hoo!

We had so much fun, walking around all weekend nonstop. N lives in Harlem and she taught me how to ride around on the subway although I don't really understand it yet. But I do have a level of comfort with it, at least. On Day 1 we went to Chinatown. There are lots of things to see in Chinatown, such as:
1) TONS OF FOOD ON THE SIDEWALK, Like fresh produce (weird stuff, too), and FISH of all kinds



2) CHEAP KNOCKOFF sunglasses, handbags, jewelry, etc. etc. (I got a $5 pair of sunglasses, a new purse for $20, and some nice gold leaf earrings for $5. See how much you can afford in NY when your bus ticket was only $42?)

3) BUCKETS OF FROGS


Then we went to Little Italy! I had heard about this great place for pizza from a coworker and was looking forward to a slice and a glass of wine all day. We thought to confirm with a shop owner that the recommended place was not a tourist trap and he sent us to a spot called Sal's pizza instead. It was like something out of a Billy Joel song- not touristy at all, no cafe street-side tables, just a hole in the wall joint with red-checked table cloths and a buncha photos on the wall. 2 slices each, a salad to share, and a carafe of house wine = $40 total. Can't beat it! We made friends with Enzo the baker and I think I have to go back there every time I visit NYC.


But before we ever got to rest our weary feet and get tipsy on wine and sated by slices, we took a nice little tour around the neighborhood. Little Italy has all kinds of shops with meat hanging up and cheese hanging up.


One window even had a little display with ships made out of cheese wheels and rinds. In one of the shops I got some amazing 12 y/o authentic balsamic vinegar- not the fake stuff- for under $20, imported direct from "the boot." We also got some little rice balls with meat in the center for a snack. Mmm.

And then we were off to see a Broadway show. A Chorus Line, starring Mario Lopez! You will not be able to see it, as it was the final week of performances and it is never to return. How lucky we were! We had great seats up in the balcony. On the way we passed the usual policewoman on horseback and stopped into the Mariott for a $15.00 MARTINI! I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.






Next day was lounging around in Central Park. Now, Central Park is strange. To me. It is really a "grass beach." No, i did not hear anyone there call it a grass beach, i thought of that myself. I'm sure someone else has called it that, though. Because everyone in the section we were in was stripped down to their bathing suit, laid out on a towel, and had a friend or loved one rubbing suntan oil all over them. There were groups of scantily-clad folks engaged in athletic activities. And there were plenty of perverts to go around, delighting in the opportunities to pretend to read books while staring up every available crotch in sight.

Then in the evening we both experienced something wonderful: DIM SUM! A little place in Chinatown called Nice Green Bo restaurant. We walked past all of the same stuff from yesterday, except this time, the shopowners were tossing fish juice on our feet as we passed and we had to wipe them off once or twice. Ick! At Nice Green Bo we had tea, chow fun with cabbage and pork, some incredible sauteed or fried green beans, pork soup dumplings, and scallion pancakes and guess how much it all was? Guess? $20.00 TOTAL!!! I love NYC!!!

The soup dumplings were just ok, in N and my opinions. According to reviews when the restaurant used to be New Green Bo they were incredible and they have changed, and I think that fried dumplings would have been better, but you can't really pass up soup dumplings when offered. Still, next time I would pass at this place. Everything else was truly, truly amazing. The best scallion pancake I have ever had in my life. The chow fun we got was not on the menu. The green beans were out of this world if maybe a tiny bit too salty. Made ya thirsty for that tea!

The next morning we hit the Museum of Natural History before I boarded the bus back to D.C., but I'll post that in awhile since this post has taken forever!!

The Novel

I am still writing the novel. I have done the synopsis and the character outlines for the two main characters. It has been good to bounce ideas off of the Mister, my dad, a girlfriend, a coworker, and a friend serving time overseas, so far. I have approached everyone that I know who writes or knows someone who writes or is in publishing for advice! But a lot of it is dead ends. I'd really like to sign up for a class; the local arts center seems to have great writing classes for adults who are doing this exact thing, at all levels. No extra money right now, but I'll put a little aside and hopefully keep amassing enough material to join the more advanced group by the time I can sign up :)