Weed or Not a Weed, that is the Question

The craziness of spring classes is almost done, but the number of questions we get during the day will increase drastically. The questions that are the most frustrating are the weed id/random plant id ones. Now, common weeds and plants - not a problem. What is a challenge is when someone brings in a few leaves, usually mostly wilted, and wants to know what it is and what to do with it.

These occurrences can usually be categorized in two ways: Unknown Plants in the Lawn and Unknown Plants in the Flower Bed. Each has its own problems, pitfalls, and headaches. To be fair, 7 or 8 out of 10 samples are easy and straightforward to identify and deal with. I have a whole novel in my head about this. However, I don't feel that it is really a good idea to spew that all out onto the Internet, at least while I am still gainfully employed at my current job. Sometime in the future, do ask me about it, and I'd be happy to spew.

Adventures in Shade Gardening, Part 1

I toyed with titling this post, and potential series of posts, Adventures in Shade Vegetable Gardening. However, that is much too clunky and not nearly as romantic or exciting. In fact, it sounds downright pitiful, hopeless, and semi-delusional. The reason for that is that anyone who knows vegetable gardening knows that shade and vegetables don't mix.

The view from the sliding glass door in our apartment, over the patio. Living on a lake might seem romantic, but in this case it really isn't very much so.

Our apartment faces north, and is angled slightly toward the east. Right now our patio gets about 3 hours of afternoon sun. Here's our sad little container "garden" as it is right now.

Most of the containers are herbs, which will do okay, even in shade. The strawberry pot has thyme, one pot has basil, others have chives, parsley, cutting celery, oregano, etc. The two long tan pots are planted to lettuce mix and mesclun mix. The greens should also do fine in the shade, especially as the weather gets hot this summer. Steven's two sad spider plants have also been relegated to the patio, on the theory that they will get more sun and more water out there than in here. Maybe they will even look healthy by the time fall comes and they need to come in!

At this point you would be justified in wondering why I consider our attempt at shade vegetable gardening semi-delusional. That would be because of this:
Yes, those are tomato plants. The tall one is 'Chocolate Cherry,' and the short one is 'First Light.' Chocolate cherry is a brown/purple indeterminate vine cherry tomato. 'First Light' is a very new variety of red slicing tomato (also indeterminate) that is supposed to have excellent flavor. The recommendation is to harvest it when the bottom half of the fruit is red and the shoulders are still green. The two plants are in a 13 gallon pot, which is technically large enough to hold both of them. I'll probably prune them to keep them under control, but we'll see. The real challenge is the sunlight issue. Tomatoes need 6-8 hours of full sun. Presently we get maybe 3. I'm hopeful that by mid-June the sun will be far enough north in the sky that our poor patio will perhaps get 5-6 hours of sun. If not...well....we'll have really beautiful plants with no tomatoes!

The Easter Coconut Cake

This is the Coconut Cake I made for Easter. Pretty, isn't it? However, when I filed the recipe, I dubbed it the "Not Coconut Cake" because the only reason it is really coconut cake is because there is a handful of coconut in the batter and the frosting is covered with coconut. The cake and frosting are really more almond flavored. Tasty, just not coconut.

The Leaning Tower of Pita

Hi again. Long time, no post. Did you really expect anything different? No, I didn't think so. It's been pretty busy and work and so on, but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel...sort of. At any rate, things should be slowing down somewhat for the summer.

I took Friday off, because 1) I have the time available, and 2) because I needed a nice long weekend. (Yes, I know Memorial Day is coming up, but that isn't a "lazy" weekend, what with family things.) So we got the apartment somewhat cleaned up, restacked everything in the second bedroom, went shopping for a few things, had a meeting with our insurance agent, and generally got to where we feel somewhat in control of the apartment for the moment. (If we didn't need to eat, it would be far easier to keep things clean!)

Saturday we ran around and went to the Farmers Market, grocery shopping, etc as is the norm for Saturday morning. I also checked on the "kids" in the Demo Garden. We planted tomatoes last week, and I was afraid that the ridiculous wind (80+ mph straight-line) from early Friday morning might have broken the stems or knocked the plants over.

Saturday night we didn't want a big dinner, but we'd been craving pita bread and hummus. So Steven went through The Bread Bible to find the pita bread recipe and looked through the Mediterranean cookbook to find an acceptable hummus recipe. (For the uninitiated, hummus is basically chickpea/garbanzo bean puree seasoned with other things.)

The pita bread was very simple. (We actually made the dough Friday night and refrigerated it. Not necessary, but handy.) Homemade pita bread is far tastier than what you can buy, and very cheap! The only moderately scary part of the process (other than the extremely sticky dough to start with) was slapping the discs of dough straight on the baking stone (you can use a cookie sheet if you lack a stone), closing the oven for 3 minutes, and opening it with the expectation that the bread is done! Surprise! It worked!Mmm...tasty looking pita bread in all shapes and sizes!

Steven did up the hummus, and then topped it off with paprika, pine nuts, and the Kangaroo Paw Lemon-Myrtle Infused Olive Oil. (Yes, it would have been cheaper to go to a local Mediterranean restaurant and get an order of hummus by the time it was all said and done. So?)We sliced up some tomatoes we got at the Farmers Market to finish off the meal. Yes, we got fresh, Kansas-grown tomatoes. We bought one from a grower who grows hydroponic tomatoes in a greenhouse, and the others from a grower that grows in a greenhouse, but uses bags of soil for growing the plants. We intended to do a taste test. The hydroponic tomatoes were larger, but the soil-grown tomatoes were much tastier. I wasn't extremely surprised by that outcome.

The leftover pita bread became the Leaning Tower of Pita.
Yes, this entire long post was written with the sole purpose of giving me a good reason to post the "Leaning Tower of Pita" picture, and thus to allow using the same as the title of this post.