Our Green Life – Page 9 – The Creative Salad

The Garden Has Arrived

To refresh your memory, here’s what our garden looked like a month ago when we planted the fall veggies:

We used lots of composted manure mixed into the soil and planted organic veggie starts/seeds from our neighborhood nursery (chard, two types of lettuce, carrots) and cupboard (purple potatoes that sprouted). We then covered the ground with mulch to help retain moisture and heat.

And here is it today, not quite four weeks later:

Hello, leafy green vegetables!

I find it hard to believe that it’s grown so much in such a short period of time! Our veggies have easily tripled their size and we’ve been busy harvesting too!

We still have around a hundred green tomatoes (because of our cool summer), but everything else is growing beautifully.

Once we get tired of the lettuce or give up on the tomatoes, I’m pulling them out and planting kale. Stay tuned!

Laminated Cotton: a less-toxic alternative to oilcloth

I love the idea of oil cloth, but hate that it’s made out of PVC (polyvinyl chloride). So I’ve never bought any. And my table looks like this:

Terrible, right?!

I’ve been trying to figure out a reusable, washable, and easily wipeable tablecloth for craft projects.

Enter laminated cotton. It’s fabric that is laminated with a polyurethane coating, rather than made out of vinyl or PVC. It’s also free of phthalates and BPA!

Thanks to the brilliance of Amy Butler designed fabric, it’s gorgeous too!

I ordered one yard and it fits our table perfectly.

Now I just need to order two more yards to use when company come over. :)

Lean more about laminated cotton here.

What Summer Harvest?!

We’ve had a very cool summer here in Northern California. For the most part, it’s been in the 60s and (occasionally) 70s during the day, with the temperatures dropping down to the 50s at night. This is highly unusual. David absolutely hates it.

While it means we’ve rarely been overheated the last few months, we have had to bundle up every morning cause I refuse to turn on the heat (hello, it’s August!) and our garden is lush green, green, green…

with lots of stems, leaves, and flowers, but no harvest to speak of!

We’ve had 6 cherry tomatoes, all of which Miss Leyba has eaten, and ZERO of the other two types of tomatoes we planted. (They’re there, they’re maybe growing, but they’re not ripening.)

One strawberry consumed by, you guessed it, Miss Leyba.

One zucchini with more on the way.

And lots of cilantro (though it’s going to seed as I type this).

Usually we’d start planting our fall crop now, but instead we have no choice but to wait it out and hope for warmer weather to increase our crop. I tell you, our plants are teasing us right now!