Tag Archives: summer

Jul 07 2023
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adventures, gardening, Housegawa

Travel, Tiredness, and Tiny Tomatoes

Hello from the Housegawa Garden! I picked my first tomatoes this week, on the exact same day I picked my first tomatoes last year! These are “advanced” Black Cherry Tomatoes (also the same variety I picked last year!) because the rest are green on the vine. I have no idea why two ripen much sooner than the rest!

I have so much to share! Naoto and I spent the first part of the summer in Japan, our first trip back since Covid! It was so great to be back to see Naoto’s family and revisit our favorite places along with some new ones. We took a fun side trip to the gyoza capital of Japan, which I can’t wait to tell you about!

Then, we caught Covid on the plane and spent our first days home sick, quarantining, recovering, and then catching up with everything we missed in June. But now, we’re feeling rested and ready make the most of the rest of the summer. Whew!

So, if you’re still around, HELLO! Please tell me what YOU have been up to!

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Aug 05 2022
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gardening, homemaking

Another Garden Update

We have cucumbers!

It almost makes up for the rabbit-eaten edamame buffet. (Almost!) These are Japanese cucumbers and they’re very tasty. So far we have eaten them in salads and hiyachuka.

We also have several tiny melons. I’m not a huge melon fan, but I’m hoping these will change my mind.

And at this point, we have a steady stream of cherry tomatoes coming in, with a few big tomatoes ripening now and then too. The tomato plants are full, so…it’s just a matter of time before it’s all caprese, BLTs, and tomato sandwiches allll the time!

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Jul 14 2022
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gardening, Housegawa

Tomato Season is Here

On July 5th, I plucked my first Black Cherry tomato harvest! Only a small handful of tomatoes were ready but there are tons more ripening on the vine. Tomato season is finally trickling in!

Our Japanese melon and Japanese cucumbers are vining nicely and have tons of flowers on them…no fruit yet. Sadly, the rabbits made a buffet of Naoto’s edamame again, so we replaced them with three new tomato plants, a Mortgage Lifter, a Purple Cherokee, and a Pink Brandywine. They were late-season plants so we’re not sure how they’re going to do, but we figured it’s worth a try. We also added four poblano pepper plants, and a tri-color sage.

The rabbits made a feast of my ranunculus, but all of the other cutting and edible flowers are thriving. I’ve already used tons of borage blooms in cocktails and ice cubes. Other than nasturtium, the rest of the flowers have yet to bloom. And now that I know how big the dahlias will get and that the borage will take over, I have a better idea of how I’d like to plant this bed next year. Gardening is such a learning process!

This bed has–as it always does–turned into a tomato jungle.

Will this bed be big enough for these giant tomatoes and these wild vines? I guess we’ll find out!

In other garden-related news, the old owners left us an egg chair stand in the garage and this year we bought an egg chair to fill it. Zero regrets. It’s so fun hanging out in that thing reading and enjoying the yard, which is what I did last Sunday. Our weather has been pretty summer-perfect this week–not too hot and little humidity. Just dreamy.

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May 20 2020
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adventures, Forest Park, gardening

Plot 6 in 2020

plot 6, forest park community garden, forest park, community gardenI am a little scared to talk about Plot 6 today because we’ve had torrential rains this weekend and there’s a ton of flooding around town…I can only imagine what our plot looks like right now. Certainly any seeds we planted on Friday have not stayed in their tidy rows! This is the “before” picture. We were surprised to find that we didn’t have many weeds creeping in. Other plots, as you can see in the background, are COVERED…ugh. We pulled weeds and then topped off our plot with some fresh compost before we planted. So far we have:

  • rosemary
  • lavender
  • Black Krim tomato
  • 2 Brandywines
  • Mortgage Lifter tomato

And we planted seeds for:

  • parsley
  • chives
  • mizuna (Japanese mustard greens)
  • onions
  • nasturtium
  • zinnias

We still need to plant:

  • edamame
  • basil
  • another tomato (I said four was plenty but I lied…)

I thought I had some back-up edamame and basil seeds but it looks like we need to go shopping for some which is easier said than done right now. I wish I’d ordered some seeds online before this whole thing started. Sigh. So many lessons learned for the next pandemic.

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Dec 09 2019
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Forest Park, gardening

The Last Plot 6 Post of the Decade

This is it…the final Plot 6 post of the decade…

Our plot went out with a whimper this year…what is it about September that makes me lose interest in gardening? Well, this year, I think it was because we had kind of a mediocre tomato harvest (and you know I’m really just all about the tomatoes.) Plus, job searching and starting took up a lot of my free time. Anyway…we let the garden die……but not before we harvested a nice little batch of teeny carrots. These guys made it through several freezes and the first couple of snows, so I was just glad to have something to pick! The carrots are designed to be sort of stumpy, but I think maybe these are small for even the stumpy size. They’re pretty tasty though! I planted them among the tomatoes and then never thinned them as directed, so that could explain things. Here’s our plot all put to bed for the season. See you next spring, buddy!

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Sep 18 2019
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celebrations, Oh Presley!, Theme Parties

James & Presley’s Avocado Birthday Bash

This weekend we hosted a little joint birthday party for Presley and our friend James. They share a birthday week. I found an avocado dress on Amazon and avocados were “on trend” this summer at Paper Source, so we decided that was a perfect theme. Presley took to wearing the dress pretty well, but we didn’t leave it on her more than fifteen minutes, as I think dressing her up is cute but I also don’t believe in torture. Naoto made an avocado corn salad and Korean beef tacos. Karen made bruschetta and a key lime pie. I made yuzu sidecars. I borrowed the giant hanging avocado decorations from the Paper Source window and used a kit to make little avocado place cards.Naoto’s was my favorite…Presley’s too…Presley ate rotisserie chicken for her birthday meal since she’s not a fan of tacos and corn salad.She is, however, a fan of her new avocado catnip toy from James. I keep finding it in different places when I wake up in the morning.

It was a fun night. We haven’t really been hosting very much this year, and I kind of missed it. Maybe we’ll have a few more opportunities to have people over this fall.

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Sep 16 2019
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adventures, Forest Park, gardening, homemaking

The Garden is Still Growing

I haven’t been to the garden as much as I’d like lately. Naoto has been running down to harvest tomatoes and basil and herbs on an as-needed basis, but yesterday, we were both home and free to go together. As usual, our plot is a jungle of tomato vines, but this year, it’s also a jungle of overgrown herbs and nasturtium! Look at that nasturtium!! I just can’t believe how the plant took off. It seemed like it wasn’t going to do much but now it’s huge and it has lots of flowers inside the big poof a leaves. I just found a recipe for nasturtium pesto, so I think we might experiment with that soon…which is good timing because our basil is done. Some of our tomatoes were slow to produce this summer thanks to the white fly infestation that plagued the garden. But we’ve gotten a decent harvest from our Juliet and a few other heirlooms. We haven’t been overloaded with tomatoes like we have in the past, but it’s definitely enough for us to feel good about plot 6 this summer. I picked a bunch of zinnias, nasturtiums, and marigolds to make a little bouquet for my desk. The zinnias are as tall as me and still going strong. And in other happy garden news, my tiny carrots are coming in! I planted them kind of late in the spring and they were quickly overshadowed by the tomato plants, so I didn’t have very much hope for a harvest, but I think it’s going to be decent! I’m not quite ready to pick them all, but I wanted to do a little test. This variety is supposed to be only 2-3 inches big. We’ve never had luck with root vegetables, so I decided to try a tiny kind and I think it worked!

How is your garden growing? Any other ideas for my nasturtium bounty?

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Aug 31 2019
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thoughts

Please Hold…

I’m having a hard time staying on task lately. I think my brain shut off this week after Garage Galleries. Hopefully I can get back on track this weekend and have some posts ready next week. Do you have any plans for the holiday (in the US) weekend? We have no plans! It’s very exciting. Right now, Naoto is at a brewery tour with some work friends, so Presley and I have the apartment to ourselves. I’ve repotted my fall mums and a new spider plant and I feel like I’ve accomplished more in an hour than I did all last week. I’m going to try to take some fresh photos of my cards for my website and finish cleaning up around here. Things are out of hand since I decided to clean out a closet AND prepare for Garage Galleries in the same week. Big mistake.

Anyway, I hope you have a good weekend!

P.S. I know Bitmoji are passé but Naoto and I really love using them when we text each other and this one was very on point for my non-productive week.

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Jul 31 2019
1 Comment
adventures, Forest Park, gardening

Mid-Summer Update from Plot 6

 

We had a stretch of very hot and humid days a couple of weeks ago, making gardening a dreadful chore. Thankfully it rained a lot during that time, so the garden was on autopilot for a couple days.The good news is the rain washed off some of our white flies. The bad news is some of our early Black Krims split due to the uneven watering they received during the huge rains. So, no tomatoes yet, sadly.Naoto is really excited about the edamame growth. The edamame has gotten really tall and there are beans on them! I’m excited because I finally have a nasturtium flower among all the leaves. (You can see the orange flower peeking out on the left.) My lavender is still not blooming so I transplanted it last week. I think it was being shaded by my wayward zinnias. (I planted the zinnias in the center of the garden but the seeds moved during the big rains this spring.)

Our dill is huge and I need to look up some recipes to use a bunch of it. We’ve harvested so much parsley and basil already. It’s pesto city around here!

And the chamomile is growing like crazy but I missed harvesting the first bloom so hopefully another will come soon. I want to dry it and use it in a cocktail recipe and maybe some tea (though chamomile tea isn’t my favorite. I am a black tea or bust kind of gal!)

I cut some zinnias from the plantings around the garden. They’re “cut and come again” so hopefully people will help themselves as I did and we will have some continuous blooms around the garden, for ourselves and for the bees and butterflies. Zinnias make me so happy! They’re all so different and colorful and carefree (which is the opposite of how I feel today after dealing with my iPhone and photo storage all day…the good news is, my phone is busy uploading pictures so I have no reason not to finish my last book of the month tonight!)

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Jul 25 2019
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adventures, Forest Park, Forest Park, Oak Park, GalaxieSafari, Oak Park, snail mail

Upcoming Summer Art Shows

August is almost here and I am breaking out the tent for some outdoor art shows! I’ll be back at Art Dans La Rue on Tuesday, August 6 from 2-9pm. I’ll be sharing a tent with my friend Alicia from Spotted Kettle Studio and we’re calling ourselves The Mail Truck because we want to buy a mail truck and sell cards on the go…but we need a truck first. (Seriously, if you know anyone with a spare mail truck…)

Last year it poured during Art Dans La Rue so hopefully this year the weather is better. In spite of the rain, it was one of my favorite shows last summer. Beignets and French wine and a poodle parade…what’s not to love? And at the end of the month, I’m returning to Garage Galleries here in Forest Park. Another favorite, we’ll be back in a Forest Park garage with other artists showing (and selling) our work. It’s such a great local event for Forest Park and I just love how casual it is. I haven’t heard where I’ll be placed yet, but I’m looking forward to meeting more new-to-me artists and neighbors in Forest Park.

As always, I update my Upcoming Shows page as I schedule them. I have two in September then I’m done until November unless something changes. I’m always looking for new shows to add to my list so if you know of anything (especially in Chicagoland or the Midwest,) I’d love to hear!

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