Ravaged by slugs

With all the rain, the garden has become a buffet for the slugs. I went out Saturday morning and the little blighters were everywhere. They have eaten most of the lettuce. They have eaten the radishes. They're slowly taking down the cabbage. They were all over the scallions. Now they're working on the peas.

My beautiful peas which were so thick and lush back before the rains came are now spindly and sad and covered in slugs. I picked picked slugs out of the peas until my glove was slimy and saturated in mucus and didn't get them all. With the forecast predicting rain until Thursday at least, it's time to step up on the slug-battling front.

Since the garden is rife with the slimy creatures, I'm using every trick I can find. I started by raking up any leaves that were hanging around the vegetable boxes and pulling all the weeds. Slugs like weeds and dead leaves to hide in. If it ever stops raining, I'll put out cups of beer and sprinkle hydrated lime in all of the walkways. Eventually, the walkways will have a layer of crushed stone and that will hopefully deter all but the hungriest of the slugs.

I ordered 3 rolls of copper tape from Lee Valley tool. Rumor has it that slugs don't like to touch copper, so if the rims of the raised beds are covered in copper tape, that should keep them out. Now, copper tape isn't cheap and one roll will do one of my raised beds. Since I don't know how effective it will be, I'm going to try it out on three rather than commit myself to coppering all 8 beds at once.

I'll let you know if it works.

Lastly, I've filled a squirt bottle with a 10% vinegar solution that I'm spraying on the slugs. Vinegar can damage plants though, so it needs to be sprayed directly on the slugs themselves.

Now, if only I had some ducks, my war against the slugs would be well in hand.

Rain in Maine

Apologies for no Friday craft post. I'm focused on birthday presents right now for people who have access to computers and know how to use them. Our family birthday party is next Saturday, so I'll have a late craft post then about those gifts. I am very pleased with myself, by the way.

The last two days of no rain and occasional blue sky lulled me into a false sense of hope that I might actually have weather that will allow me to paint my basement at long last. Then I woke up to another grey and rainy day. So close! I can't finish off the basement workshop until the walls are painted and I can't paint the walls unless it's dry weather (according to the paint). This is definitely a black fly in my Chardonnay; not ironic, just annoying.

While I wait for the slugs to finish devouring what's left of my garden and for the whole business to wash away, I'll sit inside and play with a new project that I can't keep away from - a cookbook.

I've been thinking about doing a cookbook based on Terri Windling's shared universe of Bordertown (a series that deserves maybe not as much fame and fortune as Harry Potter but at least as much as Twilight) for quite some time. This week, I finally managed to get a copy of InDesign and as my first InDesign act of creativity I shall cobble together a collection of recipes straight from the Border. I'm even putting together my own Blogger fan site.

Ah, sweet fangirl geekdom.

French Toast

Today's a good morning for french toast. In my kitchen, this means cutting some thick slices of bread and sticking them in the toaster until they start to get crunchy on the surface.

My egg batter is made up of two eggs and a cup to a cup and a half of milk, a spoonful or two of sugar, and healthy doses of cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. Once it's all whisked together, I soak the toast in it until it's thoroughly saturated, but not so long that it falls to bits.

I fry my french toast in a hot pan coated with melted butter. Butter just makes it better. Cook the toast on both sides until it's crispy and brown then serve with more butter and real maple syrup and, of course, bacon.

Maybe I should have started a water garden

[PHOTO of my soda bottle cloches just as soon as it stops raining]

I was up at 5:30 this morning at the soft and delicate shrieks of my little Buttercup. The sky was starting to get light but since then it seems to have grown progressively darker. This makes day 19 or so of rain.

I'm starting to get nervous about the seeds I planted last week. I realized this morning that I forgot to put the innoculant on my beans. Since the weather forecast calls for rain in varying degrees until next weekend, mold is a serious concern.

Cutworms and slugs have also been a problem for me. With all the rain, the slugs are playing merry havoc with my lettuce. Normally, I'd have set out little cups of cheap beer, but with all the downpours, I don't think it would be very effective at this time.

I wasn't expecting to have problems this year with cutworms. Since the beds are new this year, I was sure they couldn't have established themselves. I've lost a tomato and half of the broccoli to the little blighters. I've made some cloches out of clear soda bottles and that's helped keep the remaining tomatoes (and the one melon and a few of the cabbages) safe so far but with all the rain, I don't get out there enough to check on them every day.

"A garden is never so good as it will be next year." - Thomas Cooper

Perhaps it's the weather that has me thinking about next year. With all the wet, the best I can do is think about future gardens. My five year plan has us removing trees from the south side of the house so that I can move the veggie garden to a sunnier spot and add a greenhouse or coldframe. Next year though, I'm considering limiting my selection of vegetables that I grow and supplementing with stuff from the farmer's market. I enjoy celery root and fennel and such, but they are kind of a pain to grow and I don't use them like I would peas or tomatoes or even pumpkin.

Of course, it's easy to say this now when everything is green and growing. It's much harder to muster restraint in February.

Weekend Miscellany

There's been a lot of parts of luna moths around lately - mostly wings. I don't know if it's George or bats. This one is still in one piece and I did my best to grab some pictures before it fluttered into the night. I really have to make/scrounge/buy a tripod.

I don't know if it's the rain or my own fickle heart, but I keep thinking of projects that would be really cool to do. What I need to do is finish some of the projects that I've started. Preferably the birthday presents since they will be here before I know it.

Project Fridays

Yet another rainy, rainy day. While I'm waiting for my little Buttercup to finish her nap so we can run our errands, I thought I'd share one of my current projects with you.

These are almost all the parts I need for my LED Booties. They are one of the two things I'm trying to get made for the baby for her birthday. I'm still missing the conductive thread and the battery, but I can certainly stitch the booties together and do the embroidery while I wait for my next order from Sparkfun to come in.

I went with the LilyPad LEDs since they are designed to be sewn onto fabrics and I am a little concerned with the lights coming off and becoming a choking hazard. I did find this interesting tutorial by Leah Buechley on turning regular LEDs into stitchable LEDs. She gets clever with the anode and cathode wires by bending them into a spiral and a square respectively. Now I'm on the fence. I can't decide if I want to stick with the bright white LEDs or if I want to go get some softer yellow LEDs and try the bending method.

I'm also in the middle of going through the Electronics Club website to learn more about LEDs and soldering and circuits and such. Life should be one long education, after all. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Other projects at the top of the list right now:

• Birthday presents for my sister and neice (I'll share more about these after the 4th)
• Scrabble Tile pendants - I have them started, but need to finish with a topcoat and a bail.
• April Showers Hat - One of the Ravelry groups I belong to has monthly Hat-Alongs where someone picks a theme and a couple of patterns and everyone knits a hat. I got one started for the April Showers theme using a muted green and a white alpaca and some beads. Need more green though and haven't gone to get more yet.
• Buttercups Play Garden - My other birthday gift for my little Buttercup.
  

Foodie Wednesdays

I've been re-reading (for the millionth time) the Borderland series by Terri Windling, et al. They are such good books. I find myself wondering if they had been published in today's market where teen fantasy books can sell a bazillion copies, would they still be in print? Would new stories still be written? Would we have a franchise of movies to watch and complain about?

Alas, the world will never know.

So what does this have to do with food? Well, when the fairie-realms returned to the world and created an unstable border where magic and technology only work when they feel like it, life in some respects got simpler. When there's no TV, no computers, no text messaging, no cars and no reliable means of measuring time, the entertainment focus goes to base pleasures like music and really good food.

All of the authors who wrote for Borderlands mentioned food at some point or another. Huevos Rancheros is often mentioned and never fails to make me hungry. There are dozens of variations on this dish and I'm sure some of them are more authentic than others. I don't know how "authentic" my recipe is but I like to imagine this is how they'd make it in Bordertown.

Huevos Rancheros

• 4 corn tortillas
• 1/3 cup refried beans
• 1 cup grated cheddar
• 1/2 onion chopped
• 1 red pepper chopped
• 5 or 6 mushrooms chopped
• 4 eggs
• your favorite salsa
  

Spread refried beans on tortillas and top with cheddar. Heat some olive oil in a pan and fry up the tortillas until the tortilla is crunchy and the cheese has melted. Remove to a plate and saute vegetables. Put vegetables onto tortillas and fry eggs over easy. Put eggs on top of vegetables and top eggs with your favorite salsa. I like a medium mango salsa.

Serves 4 regular people or 2 hungry people.

Garden Mondays

It's just another rainy day here and while the weather is not so conducive to waking up, it does make for great picture-taking light.

The flower beds are in some serious need of weeding and I've fallen behind in my planting over in the vegetable garden. This rain really needs to slow down soon! The iris are in full bloom though and look quite lovely. I didn't think we'd get any blooms this year and yet, they've done spectacular. Even the bearded iris that didn't bloom last year or the year before have lovely light-purple blossoms.

I'm considering some yellow iris for next year. It's currently in the back yard a serene view of purple and green, but I think a splash of bright yellow is just what I need to create a more visually dynamic setting.

Over in the vegetable garden, I did get the last of my raised beds in place, but I still have two boxes that need filling with soil. Again, I point to the rain and not my own laziness for why this hasn't been done yet. Nights were getting a little cold so I took the tops off of some clear two-liter soda bottles, cut the bottoms off and put them over my tomatoes and melons. Voila! Upcycled cloches! Cutworms did get one of the tomatoes before I covered it and I haven't been out to check on the others recently. Did I mention the rain?

Hopefully there will be a bit of sun in the next few days so I can finish filling in my boxes and get some more seeds planted. Must... have... more... lettuce!

My kingdom for a tractor

If you're going to have neighbors, get the kind that like to play with their tractors.

It's convenient that my weekend falls on Tuesday and Wednesday since the rain in Maine falls mainly on the weekend. Sunday weather was pleasant long enough for my neighbor to come over with his tractor and make short work out of the lilac stump and an offending barberry bush. He also tilled the end of the garden so that I can rake it flat and install the remaining raised beds.

I love it when a plan comes together.

I need to go out to the garden and take some pictures of it's ever-changing landscape. It's come along quite nicely from the two sad boxes plopped down last fall. I think it will look even better when it's done, but it's always nice to see the evolution of things.

As a side note, the irises are in bloom and look nicer this year than last. I did take a picture of the blossoms, but I rather like the look of the raindrops on the leaves.