Friday, my boss asked me if I was going to start gardening this weekend.

“Start?” I said. “I’ve been gardening!”

That is the glory of Northern California… veggie gardening is a year-round project.

In addition to the sea of favas and crazy-kale, the cabbage and cauliflower (behind the cabbage) has been particularly lovely this year.  Except, you know, I also bought a cabbage at the store the other day, and was literally confused at how it was so perfect.  How are there no bugs?  Nothing raggedy?  And the farmer grows gagillions of them?  Oh, right, chemicals.  That’s how.

With this crop, I’m hoping to attempt my first sauerkraut.  Woo hoo!

While I was at the store picking up cabbage, I discovered this:

Oh, New Belgium Beer, you know me too well.  Digging is my favorite hobby!  I like New Belgium stuff anyway, but this one could have been made from dirt and snails and I still would have bought it.

They’re crafty, those marketing people!

Aah, three day weekend.  There are no words for how thankful I am for an extra day off.  On the downside, Sunday afternoon I started to panic that I only had one more day off.  Ugh.

Back on the positive side, I did a lot of gardening Saturday and yesterday.  My spinach plants were ready to be moved out of the greenhouse and into the garden, so I had to clear out some insanely old radishes.

I don’t really have an explanation for that.

I also got my first carrot!  Hooray!  I have a hard time growing carrots for some reason.  These guys I actually started in the greenhouse and transplanted.  I know transplanting carrots is a no-no, but I put them out in the garden when they were really tiny, and they seem to be okay.  Last weekend I direct-seeded a patch of carrots in another garden plot, and I’m crossing my fingers for good results there.

Purple outside, orange inside.  Fancy!

I planted a bunch of potatoes, weeded some areas, thought out where the new beehives are going to go, saved some spaces for tomatoes, and generally puttered out there with the chickens.  The chickens discovered a chair yesterday:

They were up there for a good, long time, eventually settling in and claiming it as their own.  I took about 100 photos, but I like this one the best since they look tough and gangster chickens are highly appropriate for my neighborhood (and the graffiti on the fence behind them).

This has been a crap week.

Monday afternoon, I discovered that someone filed federal taxes using my name, date of birth, and social-EFFING-security number.  That no good punk got their refund wired directly to their account today.  How nice for them, right?  You know what I get?  An estimated 77 clock hours trying to reclaim my own identity.  So far, I’m on day three of paperwork and phone calls to government agencies. YAY!

The biggest thing I’ve learned?  Nobody cares about this.  When I spoke to the IRS on Monday, they said that they had no plans to stop the deposit into the account that was fraudulent.  When I said to the man on the phone: “But they are STEALING!” He replied: “Well, it isn’t your money.”  This did not comfort me.  Plus, it IS my danged money!  I pay a shitton of taxes, and maybe I wouldn’t have to pay so much if the IRS wasn’t GIVING MONEY AWAY TO THIEVES!!

Today I spoke to social security (as I was instructed to do by the IRS), and they said that they couldn’t do anything about it, but I that I needed to contact the Federal Trade Commission.  I’m going out on a limb here, but I have a feeling they don’t care, either.

On top of that, work has been a real peach.  UGH.  I can’t even get into the crazy of that place, but there may or may not have been some door slamming on my part today.  Which helped, actually. And possibly prevented me from ripping someone’s face off with my bare hands.

On a good day, I can channel my rage into productivity, and having hit what I hope was rock bottom mid-morning today, I’m expecting to clean house tomorrow.  Figuratively, obviously.

Whew.  Okay.  I’m done now.

In happy, sunshiney news, check this out:

Look who grew two oranges!!

Back in December, my kale plants looked like this:

In the words of Camille: “They look like something out of Dr. Seuss.”

Since December, the plants have grown even taller and even crazier.

They’re starting to grow side shoots, and are over five feet tall.

Behind the tallest of the kale-trees....

Just when I was convinced that these were going to become everlasting kales, I noticed this:

They’re starting to flower.  I was planning to just hack off the flowers on top to see what would happen, but flowers are starting out of every joint and branch on them.  Super sad.  I’m trying to eat all of the remaining leaves while I can, and then I’ll just hope that my kale seedlings hurry up and grow!

Yesterday, I FINALLY made it to the Petaluma Seed Bank, a Baker Creek Seed Store.   They are closed on Saturdays (who closes on Saturdays?) and have strange hours, so it took me several tries to make it out to Petaluma when they were open.  PS- Downtown Petaluma is super cute!  But having finally visited the store, I can attest that that place is freaking amazing.  I tried to show restraint, and came out with the following:

I specifically went in there for: mangel beets, small tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, and kale.  In addition to all of those (including two kinds of kale), I also came out with cowpeas, leeks, onions, kohlrabi, sweet peas, calendula, and they threw in some morning glory seeds as bonus.  How nice!

I’m particularly excited about the mangel beets.  These guys are giant, huge, crazy beets that you grow for livestock feed.  I’m hoping that they are easy to grow and that the chickens like them.  I planted a few up today, and we’ll see how they do.

I also planted up the tomatoes and more kale in the greenhouse.

I had a bit of a tragedy in there that required some attending to (slugs! NO!), but things still seem to be moving along.  I ran out of recycled seed six-packs, so I turned this flat into a fancy planter for my onion and leek seeds:

Yep.  Lined with cardboard, filled with soil, and then planted up with onion and leek seeds.

Hopefully, everything will be as happy as these spinach seedlings in no time!

In many of my garden photos, you might notice random tomato cages.  I use the flimsy kind of tomato cage to protect plants from dogs.  More delicate plants might get their own tomato cage, and I plunk them in the centers and edges of garden beds to prevent the dogs from running through at top speed.  They have been strangely successful.  Whenever I plant a new bed, like the one above, tomato cages are used both upright (anti-dog-running) and horizontal to prevent chickens and neighborhood cats from digging in the soil.  Tomato cages certainly don’t animal-proof the garden, but they are surprisingly effective for what I need!

I planted a ton of fava beans this year.

Fava beans are great because they grow in the winter, are a nice cover crop, produce beans I can eat, and are also super easy to collect seed from.

Oh, and they’re super pretty.

Yesterday I planted up a few more seeds to get a head start on early spring planting, and my little greenhouse is starting to fill up.

My current, preferred method of seed starting:  potting soil plus vermiculite mixed up, plus leftover six-pack plant things, plus masking tape labels.

They’re all shelf-ed up in the greenhouse.

My greenhouse is a little pop-up tent, basically, made of clear plastic.  The only photo I could find of it from the outside was from when I was taking it down last spring, so this is what it looks like partially disassembled:

It fits perfectly in the corner of my “patio” against the garage wall and next to the door.  Inside, I have shelves on either side.

The above shot is pre-seedling, but you get the idea.  It is jam-packed in there right now, since the seedlings have joined all of the plants that do not enjoy the freezing temperatures we’ve been sporadically having lately.

Yesterday I also attempted to dig up a former potato patch, looking for possible seed potatoes for the new potato patch.  I have proven to be a terrible, terrible potato farmer so far, so I’m hoping this attempt goes a little bit better.  Even though my potato plants never made it to the point of flowering, there were quite a few potatoes hidden in the soil!  I got tired of digging before the job was done, and now it is back to pouring rain, so the rest of the potatoes will have to be tracked down later.

That reminds me, I have a little patch where I grew a couple of tomatoes last year, and then after they were gone, tossed in a couple of seed potatoes.  There is now some borage growing like crazy in that area, so I was planning on leaving it up to nature to see what comes up there in the spring.  Sadly, potatoes and tomatoes are not supposed to grow well together, so we’ll see what happens.

In other, unrelated news, this is one of the dogs I walked at the Humane Society yesterday:

Besides the one brown, one blue eye situation, she had a puffy tail that really looked like a raccoon tail.  A raccoon dog!  She was a really nice dog, and whenever I walk the particularly beautiful and/or nice dogs, I think: “What kind of ass would give this dog to a shelter??” since most of the dogs there are “owner relinquish.”  So sad, right?  Two of the other volunteers were talking yesterday, though, about a man who had to bring his dog in last week.  He had a whole string of horribleness, including his wife leaving and his house foreclosing, etc.  When he brought his dog in, he was apparently crying and crying that he couldn’t keep her anymore, which in the current mess of an economy, is a pretty common reason for the animals to be brought in.  Ugh.  So sad.

It is that time of year, and all of the garden blogs I read are talking about seed catalogs and planning.  I’m thinking about it too, but in a much lazier way.  Last year, I carefully planned out where things would go, and planted the appropriate number of seeds, and long story short, my garden fell flat a bit flat.

I did make myself a few notes last year, but overall the main questions I’m asking myself for garden planning now are:

* What do I actually eat?

* What do I want more of?

I started this planning yesterday while picking some kale off of what are now two year-old trees of dinosaur kale:

As I was picking the kale (for this delish dish of pasta, kale, brie, and bacon by the way…yum), I was thinking to myself: “I need a whole TON of kale plants next year!”  I do eat a lot of kale, and whatever I don’t eat, the chickens will.  So, item number one on this year’s garden plan:

An absurd amount of kale.

I’m also going to give up entirely on lettuce.  I don’t really like lettuce, and prefer arugula, which is not only easier for me to grow, it can be cooked or used in salads.

I grew a lot of tomatoes last year, and a lot of basil, and I’m going to step up both of them this year, including a patch that I’ll be able to cover with my greenhouse, and make an attempt at year round tomatoes.  I also need to remember to grab some cherry tomato seeds, since little tomatoes somehow slipped my mind last year.

I also want lots more sunflowers and pumpkins.  Because they are awesome.

Oh!  And ornamental corn, because I am totally going to enter it in the county fair this year.

I grew amaranth, but didn’t end up eating either the leaves or the grain.  However, I think this year I’ll grow it as an ornamental plant (so beautiful and easy to grow!), and if I do end up eating any, it will just be a bonus.  Lagniappe, if you will.  The quinoa is in a similar boat, but even though I never finished processing it, I have it in a bag in my kitchen cabinet, so I suppose I still could.

Also, Scarlett Emperor beans will be grown everywhere.

Twice, now, I’ve failed with potatoes, so I think I’m going to plant a patch of them in the back corner of my garden, forget about all of this piling up the soil nonsense, and just see what happens.

I will be making another attempt at cucumbers and melons, neither of which went anywhere last year.

Mostly, I’ll just try to use up the seeds I already have, and then just pick up anything that catches my eye.

After my shift walking dogs at the Humane Society, the remainder of Saturday was spent doing a glorious lot of nothing.

Well, not nothing… but lots of reading.

The weather has been very strange– it gets down to freezing at night, but is almost 70 during the day.  The plants are very confused.  My favas are getting super tall.

But the most confused of all is the sunflower patch.

My sunflowers dropped a lot of seeds, and in, I don’t know, November, maybe?  They all started to grow.  A bunch of cosmos popped up as well, but the frost eventually killed most of them.  The sunflowers have been strangely hardy, and now the biggest ones are getting ready to flower.

Fascinating.  I wonder if they’ll actually flower and produce seeds?

In other Saturday news, I found some baking chocolate in the back of my cabinet and made some delicious and super easy chocolate cookies yesterday.

They are the perfect snack for compulsively reading the Little House on the Prairie series!