How my garden grows

My garden has been making slow progress. A lot of the plants have really started to take off while others don't want to grow at all. We haven't gotten any vegetables yet, but the squash and tomatoes have little babies on them!!

I'm really excited about how big a lot of the plants have gotten! I fertilized with fish emulsion a few times since we planted the garden and it made a huge difference in the growth of the tomatoes! They just loved it! It really got a lot of the slower plants to take off also. The okra, cantaloupe, and jalapeños just really don't want to grow though. We may end up having a few bald spots in the garden this season.

My little doggies really loved the fish emulsion! It was so smelly! I had to keep an eye on them for a few days to make sure they didn't try to dig up the garden looking for fish. Yuck!

I've also been growing a few herbs and flowers on the back porch. The impatients and the begonias have been doing great, but the purslane have been doing especially well. Purslane look kinda like a succulent because of their thick leaves and stems and they grow really pretty flowers (mine are pink and yellow!). They get really long stems that hang down so they look really pretty in hanging baskets and draped over the side of a flower pot!

Bread and a Blog

In my last post I mentioned that I was growing a sourdough starter. After I let it grow wild yeast for 2 weeks in a mason jar, I finally got to bake my first loaf of bread today. The starter smells a lot like alcohol which kind of worried me, since the book I referenced only mentioned it getting a sour smell. Mine didn't smell sour at all! I couldn't smell anything but beer! But, amazingly, my bread turned out awesome! It tastes like real sourdough bread! Even though it is kinda weird to leave fermenting flour and water on the counter for a week, it really works! I grew my own yeast, it rose, and it contributed to a great sourdough flavor.

I referenced The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen for making the starter, but this book had an overly complicated recipe for actually making the bread. Sourdough Baking: The Basics by S. John Ross has an awesome recipe for sourdough bread. He also lays out how to grow a starter (I just let mine grow for a lot longer than he suggests).

Also, I'm really excited that one of my best friends included Parker's and my gardening endeavors in a project for one of his journalism classes. I feel really interesting to have a friend want to write about me! He did a project on the slow food movement in Austin and included us in his Backyards segment.