gardenopolis

i don’t know jack about growing dry beans, but i thought i’d give it a try this year. being of the vegetarian persuasion (at least most of the time), a certain number of beans are consumed around these parts. today i planted these beans.

The speckled brown beans are speckled bays (open pollinated) and the black beans are black turtle (organic). I planted them at the back of a deep bed along the fence and added some old trellis supports for them to grow up.

I figure that they can grow for the next three months and then i’ll just have to work my way back there once to pick them. The instructions on the package read “harvest the whole plants when 90% of the leaves have yellowed and hang up to dry, then shell the pods”.

sounds manageably low maintenance and will contribute to my fall/winter menus! genius.

i also baked another four loaves yesterday. my multigrain bread is getting better and better - a few more iterations and i should be ready to post it.

i’ve got stairs on the brain.

they are troublesome. they take up a lot of room.

i don’t know where to put our stairs to the basement. in the meantime, i’ve been browsing stair galleries (apparently other people obsess about stairs as well). i would really like to have a wall of built-in bookcases down one wall, and recessed lighting in the opposite wall.

another harvest! i know it’s silly to get so excited over some leaves and a few bulgy roots.

but dammit, they’re MY bulgy roots and leaves. the radishes are “easter egg”, which is why some are red and some are not.

here is a lovely black tulip i’d forgotten about planting.

and my strawberry bed is starting to bloom!

the lockheed lounge by marc newson (1986).

there were 10 made and madonna writhed around on one for a video. fancy a personal reenactment? the most recently available chair for sale was auctioned last year by Christie’s for $1.5 million.

Your best bet for owning one is Vitra’s miniature edition - a cool $725.

spinach, getting all carried away and crying out, “eat me, before it’s too late!”
so we did.
and, mighty tasty too.
(does anyone else know free to be you and me pretty much word for word?)

on other fronts, i optimistically transplanted some pumpkin and squash seedlings into the garden yesterday, as well as planting some (sprouted) edamame seeds by the trellis. i have no idea how much to plant for a family of five. i’m going to fill all available spaces with edibles and whatever there is too much of will be redistributed to the neighbours or local foodbank. Is 20 tomato plants overkill? i guess we’ll see…

there were green things growing, but i didn’t garden a lick yesterday. we sat and played in the sand while the weary marathoners trudged past.

i have a lovely crop of dandelions, sad grass, stunted bushes and a transplanted camellia on the verge of death. not pretty or functional. the plan was to do something like this in phases:

it currently looks like this:

i have a few restrictions on what I can do this year, namely budget, time, and impending renovations, which will chew up most of the yard anyways. if we raise the house, the front entry will change significantly, so it doesn’t seem like the best idea to focus on landscaping that area.

What to do in the interim? since i have to avert my eyes whenever i approach the house from the front, i have to do something. realistically, we won’t start the actual construction part of the reno until fall, so i have time to get a growing season in.

because we’re on a corner lot, the yard along the sidewalk is a favourite message board for the neighbourhood dogs. which is fine (except for those unspeakable owners who do NOT clean up after their pets), but i don’t want to plant anything edible along those edges.

maybe i will relocate the small runty bushes in a line along the outer edges of the yard, move the three miscanthus grasses to where they are supposed to go (along the property line with the neighbours), and just dump a load of topsoil in an L-shape on top of the horrible grass. or do i need to rototill that sucker first? hmmm…

this way, i could plant my veggies for this year (southern exposure, albeit with a large maple tree casting some shade), improve the soil and start building it up for leveling the front yard at some point.

in the meantime, i shall continue to browse some of the wonderful front yard ideas here:

Gardening Gone Wild: Front Yard Design Workshop
Fine Gardening: Six Front Yard Gardens

there is something about this elegant chair that sends me to a good place. it is gorgeous, dynamic, curvy, sinuous, wasp-waisted.

designed by norman cherner in 1958, the chair has been reissued by his sons and is sold here for around $1000.

i think the only problem with owning it (apart from the cost), would be that i would want to sit across from it and visit, and if anyone tried to actually use it, i would need to shoo them away. i suppose you could mount it to the wall and call it art…

in spite of another rainy grey drizzle, it feels like things are happening in the backyard.

the baby spinach is ready for harvesting.

the scallions are running amok.

brussel sprouts are doing what they are supposed to (i guess - i’ve never grown these puppies before).

my fabulous father-in-law built doors for our little wood shed (which has now been upgraded to “the tool shed”, by virtue of its lockability).

i painted the other side of the trellis (less than a year after the first side was painted!) - you can see my 1-year-old rhubarb flourishing on the other side.

and finally, beautiful tulip. it has survived many attempts on its short little life to give us this bloom.

i don’t know if it works this way for everyone but when i have a new project, i fixate on it until i feel like i’ve worked through most of the kinks. we’ve been talking about doing a reno since we moved in (almost 3 years ago - ack!). Now that it has moved to the top of the priority list, i have been in the throes of reno obsession for the last few weeks, and have left a trail of battered home magazines in my wake.

After much measuring, we have produced this drawing of our basement (please excuse the coffee splotches). The sticky-out bit at the top is the living room on the main floor and the bottom right corner is an outside set of stairs to the basement door.

Clutching this and my numerous sketches and photos, i trundled off to the city planning department to meet with a lovely guy to discuss all sorts of nasty things like “by-laws” and “building codes” and “restrictions”.

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