Gardens and weeds, babies and trees

This is our third summer married and I’ve noticed something strange. This is the first time I have ever pulled dandelions. Where did they come from? I started thinking about it and the weeds I pulled last year weren’t the same as the year before either. I’m wondering how big the cycle is. How many years will we have different weeds before the cycle repeats itself? And why is there a cycle in the first place?

My weed pulling philosophy is that as long as our yard looks better than the neighbor’s we’re doing alright. The neighbors to the west of us cleared their yard last week. So I need to go pull some more (the neighbor’s to their west have a small forest growing). I’ve also noticed that the areas where I physically pulled the weeds out are clearer than the areas we just sprayed. Yes it’s only April, yes I’ve been pulling weeds since the end of January.

We watched “Wall-E” over the weekend. Brett wants me to plant pizza plants. I told him other than the fact that you don’t plant chickens, I could plant the rest (as long as we go veggie style on the pizza). Although now that I think about it, we don’t use eggs in our pizza dough. But you don’t plant yeast or cows, so there’s still that problem. We definitely need cheese on our pizzas. We’ve got tomatoes. I’d plant some wheat. He said if I plant wheat though that he’ll go out in the middle of the night and sow tares. So we probably won’t be planting pizza any time soon.

We’re still eating lettuce from our garden! I love it. The temperature is creeping up though. So I’m excited every week that it keeps growing. Next year I’m planting it even earlier than the first of February. I’m still trying to get my head used to the growing season here.

Our tomato bush is getting real big and has lots of little green tomatoes on it. But as of yet none of them have gotten ripe so we still don’t know if they taste like candy. I need to get another tomato cage when we do tomatoes again. I apparently got rid of my cages when I moved to Arizona and forgot till it was basically too late. I’m keeping our tomato upright this year with some plant stakes and pantyhose. Not the best situation but it’s working.

(our garden on February 4th, March 25th, April 6th – notice the difference in the cilantro from March to April)

Whenever I need cilantro I always buy a bunch from the grocery store even though the recipe I’m making only needs half a bunch. (Cilantro comes in standard size bunches.) And then the other half always goes to waste before I need to use it again. So I bought a cilantro plant and figured then I’d have it when I needed it. The little cilantro plant got huge and we weren’t using it fast enough.

Then I saw on the internet that you can freeze fresh herbs. So I made a bunch of cilantro-sicles. Since when I use cilantro I grind it up in the blender anyway I put the cilantro and enough water to help it move around (so not a lot) in the blender and then poured the mixture into an ice cube tray. I made sure to label the bag because I probably shouldn’t mix-up the cilantro with any other herb-sicles I make. I have some leftover parsley I bought for our Easter lamb I should freeze.

And since cutting off the bulk of the cilantro plant it’s really come back strong. I’ll probably make some more cilantro-sicles soon. Next year I probably won’t need to plant cilantro. Is cilantro an annual or a perennial?

The baby hummingbirds hatched Easter weekend. They’re already big enough that we can see the heads poking out of the nest and not just the beaks. As soon as they fledge, probably another two weeks, we’re calling an arborist to straighten out what turns out to be a Chinese elm in our front yard (we learned that when we called for an estimate). We’ve tried cabling the tree on our own to get it back vertical with no success. It probably needs a proper pruning too. Then when the hummingbird comes back next year the tree should be steadier.

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