After spending most of the year at home, we finally took a vacation earlier this month. Dakota, Nigel and I loaded up the car and drove up to Portland to see family and friends. We were gone for over a week.

Since Nigel came along, we only needed someone to come over every other day to check on the chickens and grab the mail. A chicken-sitter was surprisingly easy to find. I guess the fresh eggs are totally worth it.

To keep my indoor plants alive without creating additional work for the chicken-sitter, I decided to try something I saw on the Craft Magazine blog a while ago. It's a simple house plant wicking system involving a bowl of water and some strips of cotton. (Full instructions at the link.) The whole thing took about 10 minutes to set up.

Here are my plants the day we left on our trip.

And here they are 9 days later, when we arrived home.

The houseplants look just as green and healthy, if not more so, than they did when we left. The strips of cotton--in this case cut from an old undershirt--wicked the water out of the bowl and kept the plants' soil evenly moist.

The large bowl seems to have just lasted the 9 days in a relatively cool house. I am guessing that in the summer the water might go a little more quickly. Still, I recommend this method for the next time you go on vacation. It's much nicer than coming home to dead or dried-out plants.

When I was visiting my family in Texas a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sort through trunks and bins filled with fabric and sewing notions that belonged to my grandmother. She died in 2000, but her stash was so massive--and awesome--that we're still finding new treasures 9 years later.

My grandmother was a wonderful seamstress and needleworker. I have a wall hanging of embroidered sandpipers she made sitting over the fireplace in our living room and a personalized quilt with squares hand-embroidered by my grandmother and her mother tucked safely in my linen closet. Not only was she skilled, but my grandmother had good taste, in a 1960s & 70s way. Jonthan Adler would salivate over her needlepoint pillows. I just wish I had learned more from her when I had the chance. Instead, I am frequently inspired by her craftmanship. I still have baby bags she made for me 32 years ago, with not a single loose stitch!

Always the bargain-hunter, my grandmother collected a massive stash of fabric, embroidered linens, thread and sewing notions over her lifetime. My mother, my sister and I have been giving it away, selling it and using it ourselves for the last 9 years, and we've still got so much left. This time, I brought home rolls and rolls of decorative ribbons, elastic and seam binding. Plus, my sister helped me find some pre-embroidered panels, some made by my grandmother and some she purchased at antique and vintage stores, ready to be made into pillows or bags. My sister also threw in some vintage fabric she found at various thrift stores.

I arrived back in LA with a bag stuffed full of cool fabrics and inspiring supplies. Now I just have to figure out how to use it all.

Last Sunday, after spending the previous day canning, I decided to keep with the homesteading theme of the weekend and plant some seeds for my winter garden.

For the first time, I staked out sections in the larger raised bed and planted my crops in little chunks. I guess this is sort of square foot gardening, although I have never read that book. I mainly did it to stay better organized and to see how different crops like different spots in the garden. I also hope it will help manage bugs, but I'll let you know how that goes.



In this section, I planted fennel, lettuce, radishes, turnips, beets, chard, bok choy and fava beans. I have seeds for spinach, artichokes and collards as well, but I wanted to plant in stages. Plus, spinach, chard and collards work well in pots, so I may end up growing most of my greens in my container garden.

After planting, I mulched with a light dusting of straw and then covered the whole section with garden netting. Netting is essential, as I have lost countless seedlings to curious squirrels and skunks. Last Fall, skunks tilled my upper bed so many times that only two beets made it to maturity. So far, the netting seems to be holding them off.



I'll plant another section in a week or two. If all goes well, I'll be able to continuously harvest throughout the winter. That's a big "if," but I choose to be optimistic.

Last weekend, I finally got a chance to do something I've wanted to try for ages: home canning. Canning seems like the perfect marriage of all my favorite hobbies: gardening, cooking and making gifts for people. Dakota got me a bunch of canning supplies for my 31st birthday, and, a year later, I finally got a chance to try them out.

The first step was shopping for supplies, which was more difficult that I expected. I picked up some cases of Ball canning jars at Orchard Supply Hardware. They had several sizes in stock, although not the pint jars called for in most of my recipies. I just decided to make do with the three sizes available. OSH also sells cheese cloth, which you'll need to make a spice bag. The spices I needed were more difficult to track down. I went to three different stores, including Whole Foods, looking for pre-mixed pickling spice--or the all the spices that go into pickling spice mix--and finally found it at a Jon's market in Glendale. (LA Cooking Tip: If you're looking for an unusual ingredient, try a grocery store that in or near an Armenian neighborhood. This Jon's had three different spice sections: typical American, Middle Eastern and Latino. And the Super King in Glassell Park has all kinds of interesting fruit syrups to use as marinades.) For the fruits and veggies, I woke up early and hit the Pasadena Farmer's Market. That place is great, although they didn't have any "dill heads," so I had to go with baby dill.



Once all the supplies were assembled, my friend Merete and I began the pickling process. This is when I learned that prep work is the most time consuming and labor intensive part of canning. We chose three things to pickle: beets, peaches and peppers. All the recipies--and canning guidelines--came from my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. The beets needed to be pre-cooked and skins removed, the peppers needed to be chopped, and the peaches needed to be peeled, sliced and soaked in a solution of water and lemon juice to preserve their color.



Luckily, I had a friend to help me. Canning is definitely more fun--and less exhausting--with two people. I don't think I would have been able to pickle beets, peppers and peaches in the same day without Merete's help.



By the way, I recommend keeping that lemon water you soak your fruit in. It lives a second life as a refreshing and delicious beverage. This was Merete's idea. Not only is she an excellent kitchen companion, but she comes up with brilliant new beverage concepts like peach water.



Once the prep work was complete, we started canning. First up were the pickled beats, and we learned a valuable lesson after we ran out of pickling juice half-way through filling the jars. We followed the recipie to the letter, so at first we were confused. Then we realized that we hadn't cut our beets small enough. If we'd sliced them smaller, they would have taken up more space in the jar and needed less pickling juice. Oh well, we still got four jars out of it. And for our very first canning project, I think that was a fairly minor error.



Next came the Dilly Peach Pickles. I cannot wait to try these when they're ready. Some people may turn up their noses at pickled fruit, but I think it sounds amazing. Plus, the peaches and dill look so pretty in their big jars. Merete and I sliced the peaches into sixths to avoid the pickling juice issue we had with the beets.



I'm skipping over the details of actual canning, because I think that's best explained by an expert, or the authors of Ball Home Preserving. I found the directions in that book very clear and helpful, and the recipies were interesting without being overly complicated.

I can comment on the tools I think are most necessary, though. They include: a jar grabber, a lid lifter (a plastic stick with a magnet on the end so you don't touch the sterilized lid), a funnel, a good ladel, a slotted metal spoon, a metal rack to set your jars on while they boil and a giant canning pot. These all appear to be essential to the canning process, in my admittedly limited experience.

After following all the canning and boiling water processing directions, we ended up with seven jars of pickled peppers, three jars of pickled peaches and four jars of pickled beats. It took us all day to can everything, but this was our first time. Happily, after the required 24-hour cooling off period, I checked the the lids and each and every one seems to have sealed properly. I really like the way they look in my new pantry.



Overall, I found home canning to be interesting, fun and satisfying. It's kind of like doing a science project that you can eat. Having a friend with me definitely made it more enjoyable. Hopefully I can have more friends over for canning parties in the future. For my birthday this year, I received The Joy of Pickling!

These odd white insect pods are attached to the vine that grows on my chicken run. I noticed them a couple of weeks ago, but haven't had any luck identifying them with Internet searches. Yesterday, I decided to take a picture with the hope that someone reading this blog might know what they are.

The long, bumpy blobs are quite small, maybe 5mm, and they're brittle to touch. Most of them are clustered around one stem, but there is one sitting alone on a leaf. The pods do not seem to have harmed the plant in any way--at least not yet. The plant they are attached to is a vanilla trumpet vine.



So, any insect experts out there who can identify these weird little white things? I am so curious to know what insect emerges from this particular incubation chamber, if that is indeed what these are.

Back in June, I tried growing potatoes in specially-made grow bags. Unfortunately, after a promising start, the stalks started flopping over. Eventually, all my potato plants died. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong.

I suspect I may have over-watered. It was very difficult to tell how wet the soil was deep inside the bags. On closer examination, I think they hold water really well and don't need to be watered that often. I also think I should have planted the seed potatoes sooner. Next time, I will buy seed potatoes from a Southern California source. I have a feeling they'll be available earlier around here than they are from Seed Savers in Iowa. (Does anyone know where I can buy seed potatoes in Los Angeles, preferably somewhere east of Vermont?)

So, this year was a complete potato-growing failure. On the bright side, when I dug into two of the bags I found this:


The bag was chock full of healthy, wiggly worms--and their highly-prized poop! While failing to grow a single potato, I managed to create a surprise worm farm. There were a few in the compost I added to the potato bags in June, and in the warm, wet, composty environment of the bag, those worms multiplied.

I took this rich mix of soil, worms and their poop and spread it on one of my garden beds. Hopefully the worms will be happy there, and continue to poop and procreate for years to come.