Brownie hangover

...it can happen. At least, I'm pretty sure. I made these dulce de leche brownies the other night and ate some last night, and I swear they ruined me. It took a LOT of very loud dance music to get me going this morning.

Normally, I like silence or quiet ambient rock in the morning. I realized desperate measures were in order when, in my zombie-trancelike state, I accidentally ate a brownie for breakfast. Love that Lady Gaga Pandora radio station.

They are amazing and I highly recommend making them. Next time, I'll be adding some not-melted chocolate chips to the mix, because I like brownies with chocolate chips. Adds nice texture.

On the other end of the food spectrum, my lettuce seeds are coming along nicely, despite the fact that there was SNOW in the forecast this week.I'm excited for fresh lettuce. Like most produce that's home grown, it's just a lot better than grocery-store lettuce.

We're headed to Medford this weekend, and I'm excited to dig into some projects. Like a table for our grill I want to build. Maybe "stand" is more accurate, but something to lift it up a little. I need to take some measurements. Our neighbors have been gardening, so it'll be fun to see how things are coming along there. And, of course, yardwork. YAY!

Lastly, I finished my lemon wreath a while ago and it makes me happy every dang time I look at it (which is frequently, since I spend most of my time in a very tiny apartment).

BE SPRING!

It's springtime in Medford. I posted about it in our house blog a few weeks ago. It is NOT spring in Bend. Spring has dementia: it was late, then showed up for a few days, but not realizing it was in the right place, left. And now it's November again.

Anyway, not to be deterred, I constructed a self-watering vegetable container based on this plan and planted tomatoes, basil and oregano. I also built a nifty little cart to wheel it in and out at night, because tomatoes are temperature sensitive and won't produce if they get too chilly.

That's the plant collection, taken from 20 feet above looking over our ledge. The pot on the right is 18 inches at the top. It's big. (It also probably needs a reservoir fill-up, too, eek...)

Other crafty news: I found a blog post somewhere about a lemon wreath. I love wreaths that don't look like trash, and I love lemons, and I especially love being crafty and creative. So...I copied the idea. But mine's better.

Or, you know, it will be, once I finish hot-gluing the lemons in place and can hang it up. Still maybe a bit sparse in the 6 to 9 o'clock areas. Hmm.

ALSO! I am propagating rosemary and basil, and my little seedlings (Gloriosa daisies, which look like black-eyed susans, my favorite!) are coming right along.

Oh, I love gardening so much.

Scrambled updates

Been a busy few weeks! I've been working on two websites, and I've been meaning to post a link to my own company, Paraphrase Media, for about a month now. I finally finished it (mostly...there's always room for improvement) and am excited to be official!

It's been such a busy few weeks that I haven't done any projects, other than baking. Also, I've taken up being a full-blown nerd, playing COD Black Ops (mainly to kill the zombies). If video games weren't bad enough, Todd got me a headset to wear while we're playing, so I can be told by the friends we play with not to shoot the crawler...right before I do. Oops. (Sorry, nerdy digression.)

I have been doing some really awesome things with eggs lately, that I'm going to share. That is a rosemary-onion-spinach scramble, seasoned with cracked black pepper, kosher salt, green onions and plenty of Tillamook Colby Jack. (Secret: the "onion" part is actually powdered onion soup from a packet. Surprisingly versatile stuff.) The rosemary was grown in my windowsill herb garden (in which I am unfortunately, and so far unsuccessfully, battling aphids. I'm buying ladybugs today.)

There have also been some very successful stir-fry experiments, but I don't have pictures, so I won't mention them yet.

Plans are also in the works for my summer garden, which is going to include:

• tomatoes
• basil
• oregano
• possibly zucchini
• lettuce (more for springtime)
• petunias
• geraniums
• dahlias

and I am excited for it.

Faking my spring garden

Begonias are one of my favorite flowers. Not so much the ones that come in six-packs at the nursery, but tuberous ones, with big fat flowers. Like this one, which I picked up at Trader Joe's last weekend. LOOK at that red. It's incredible.

I needed to clear out those forced bulbs, that had been in the process of croaking on the windowsill, and TJ's is a perennial favorite for finding new plants.

Begonias are pretty easy to care for and propagate easily. They like part sun, regular water, and some humidity. If humidity isn't possible, mist the leaves.

Though that's a closed pot, the plant is in a separate pot inside and there are some packing peanuts at the bottom to facilitate drainage. (Nobody likes wet feet.)

So now my little windowsill garden looks like this:

I repotted the geranium that had been sitting in a jar of water for a few months (that's the two bare-looking sticks on the right sill) and it has some very teeny leaves sprouting. Here's hoping she recovers; I love those hot pink blooms.

Nature override successful

Just thought I'd report that my forced grape hyacinth bulbs are starting to bloom! The color's not as intense as it would be if they were in the ground, but hey...flowers on the windowsill. No complaints here.

Forcing bulbs

I really am a gardener at heart. This I realize after my last clump of posts has been about creating a garden in two square feet of windowsill, in pots the size of a shot glass. (Not quite, but still...)

We went back to Medford for Thanksgiving on these lovely but treacherous roads -- this is your idea of a clear road, ODOT? I spent one glorious half-afternoon playing in the garden. I do mean playing, since I spent part of my time hurling frostbitten vegetables at the fence. (One zealously thrown honeydew nearly ended up in the pool. I'm kind of sorry it didn't.) In between playing, we raked leaves, dug dahlia tubers and ripped out the dead plants. Catharsis.

I also dug up a few clumps of grape hyacinth bulbs, which infest our yard like a plague. Thought they'd make a nice addition to my growing garden.

I also saw the opportunity to get the geranium, the leaves of which had been turning red (due, I suspect, to the coffee grounds I dumped on it a while ago) into a new setup. Currently, that's a jar of water, but I'm going to get a new pot for it soon.

Acceptance

I propagated a begonia a while back, and finally potted it in this super-cool terrarium I bought few years ago under the belief that it was a lantern. (And then once I realized that it wasn't, I thought I could turn it into a lantern. I have since accepted it's a terrarium and decided to use it as such.) Now I'm rooting some geranium cuttings in it and letting the little begonia grow in the most humid environment I can make for it. Cool, huh?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (minus the parsley)

My little windowsill garden has been plodding along, and yesterday, I started finishing it. This already-started trio of herbs (sage, rosemary and thyme) came from Trader Joe's (LOVE!).

All three plants were growing in one pot, so I split them into separate pots so a) they'd fit better on my windowsills and b) I could use the pots I recently found. The herbs were fairly densely rooted, so I used an old butter knife to work the roots apart.

The smell was intoxicating while I was working on separating them, and I am quite pleased with the results.

I don't like thift stores. Sorry.

I'm not really a big fan of thrift stores. I don't particularly like digging through piles of other people's unwanted crap without the guarantee that I'll find what I'm looking for, plus they always seem kind of...unsanitary. And one that I went to smelled. This is probably very elitist of me to say.

(I'm also completely amazed by the plain old junk in these places. I know all about the concept of trash into treasure, but WHO buys these tacky little statuettes of cats playing with balls of yarn or garden gnome pitchers in the first place? And is there anyone out there who wants used Tupperware? Ew.)But I'm in need of a few items, and resale shops were/are my best bet. Items needed: a dresser for the apartment (those under-the-bed boxes ...I'm over it. Especially since mine don't fit under the bed.) and some trays for those little pots I got for the windowsill.
Being very picky, I struck out on the dresser. (I'm still stalking Craigslist daily.) But I did come up with some nearly perfect metal trays for those pots. So now, I just need some plants to complete my sweet little windowsill garden!

Items not needed: this silver-plated Paul Revere bowl. But for $4... It's amazing what a little silver polish will do. (That's the "before.") Right in time for Christmas decorations. Also, there was a lady who saw me eyeing it and chatted me up for 10 minutes about how she'd gotten one as a wedding present, it was perfect for everything, blah, blah, and I felt guilty about putting it back after that. So here we are.

Flower pots + pound cake

Last week, I went with a friend to Pack It. (I've been sitting here for three minutes starting and deleting sentences, trying to describe this place.) It's kind of like a junkyard/salvage lot, with a pinch of garage sale, and a dash of antique store, if you're lucky and you know what to look for. On steroids. An acre or so of the most unlikely and utilitarian and just plain weird junk I've ever seen. Anyway, I found these pots among the heaps of pre-owned toilets, unwanted industrial air conditioners and old furniture.

Well, the terra cotta ones, except for the one in the saucer...I had that already. Vestige from my past (brief) life as a cubicle dweller. The whole collection was only a few bucks, and they're the perfect size for those southwest-facing windowsills.

My little begonia that's rooting in water is almost ready to be planted. Some geranium cuttings and other to-be-determined plants will fill out the rest. Just goes to show, you can take the gardener out of the garden, but you can't take the garden out of the gardener.

In other news, we've eaten three pound cakes in the last five days. Wow, that's really bad. The cakes were really good, though. (This is what remains of the last one.) I meant to freeze at least one, but I kind of ate it instead. These things happen. I make no apologies.

Indoor gardening

While it 100% sucks that I don't have a 30-by-40-foot garden anymore, it hasn't stopped me from propagating ...houseplants. That I technically have very little space for. It's just so fun, to make things grow, and also free. This particular one was a necessity, because my begonia (a gift from Todd) was starting to get one stem that was too long.

It hurt my heart to just snap it off and toss it, so I put it in a vase of water to see what'd happen. A few weeks later, roots!

Still not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I have a while to figure that out. It needs more time in the water to sprout plenty of healthy roots. I'll pot it in a few weeks. I don't think it's possible for a reasonable person to have too many potted plants.