Port Potager

As you can see from these photos, Hurricane Sandy did an excellent job of bringing down lots of leaves in a short bit of time. That's why the back lawn looks brown: Those are oak and maple leaves, not dirt! We'll get to raking them up later this month. We also haven't put the plastic back up over the tunnels since the storm came through, but we'll definitely need to do so by Saturday, as we are supposed to have nighttime temperatures back into the 30s by then.  Other than these very minor inconveniences, we had no real problems from the hurricane, and consider ourselves very, very lucky. The biggest changes here are that all of the summery plants like tomatoes, melons, sweet potatoes, and okra have been pulled out, leaving lots of empty spaces. Many of these spots have been filled in with new shoots of winter rye, though, so it still looks like there is a good deal of green in the garden because of our cover cropping. Bigger plants include cool-weather thi...

...are now laying! In all the quasi-excitement of Hurricane Sandy yesterday, I forgot to mention it, but when I went out to gather eggs, there were four: We knew for a few days that Abigail was laying now, but yesterday was the first time we've had all four chickens lay on the same day. Maybe the howling winds scared the eggs right out of them? Anyway, our flock is small enough that we know which eggs belong to which chicken. Dolley lays the dark brown ones, and Sally lays the light brown, sometimes pinkish ones. The green ones are from Martha and Abigail. Abigail's eggs are ever-so-slightly more tan than Martha's (it's the one toward the top of the photo), and hers are more likely to be under the nesting box rather than inside it.  So there you have it: 6 months and 11 days after arriving at our door, our chicks are all grown up and laying lovely eggs for us. Success!

No school today for me or for the kids thanks to Hurricane Sandy, so we settled into a Monopoly marathon (which I won) and some snacks. We (so far) have managed to keep our electricity, so we took advantage and had Tiegan's popcorn : This is all we ended up with from Tiegan's corn planting, and it was picked early to save it from the squirrels — the rest of it was eaten. These kernel are small, but we thought we'd give it a try anyway. We put the cobs in a brown paper bag in the microwave to pop: Tiny kernels, tiny popcorn. It mostly tasted good, except for the burnt pieces. I hate making popcorn in the microwave because it burns so easily, and then all you taste is the burnt. This popcorn would obviously have been better if it were up to size, but it was ok. Tiegan said she wanted to give it another go next year and is hopeful that Fletch can keep away the worst of the squirrels. If we have popcorn in next year's harvest, I'll definitely take t...

Yesterday was a beautiful day — sunny and warm. Perfect day to batten down the hatches, right? By afternoon the fog rolled in, but we picked up all of our tools, stakes, and brought in the outdoor furniture and other loose things. As you can see above, we also took down all the plastic sheeting covering our fall veggies. That stuff flaps around in far less windy conditions than we are expecting, so we just went ahead and took it down. We left the PVC stakes in place, but may have to gather them up from other places in the yard if the wind pulls them out.  By mid-morning today, it was already misting, and Kirk took advantage of our last chance before the real rain to clear out the gutters. Most of the leaves are off our big maple tree now, so this was good timing anyway. We skipped the raking, hoping to get lucky and have the wind corral all the leaves in a corner of the yard — preferably next to the compost bins! Fletch is one nervous cat today! He is lurking...

Happy Halloween! I know I'm early, but I wanted to get a picture of our chrysanthemums before they are potentially crushed by Frankenstorm Sandy , or whatever they're calling it now.  I know these don't look like those compact balls of flowers that we usually think of when we talk about fall mums. These are more like their giant, naturalized selves, obviously happy in their spot.  The bumble bees love them. They don't smell like much, but they're the only game in town right now if you're a bee, so every bee in Newburyport makes its way over here, I think. We've had a really nice week of sunny, warm weather, and they've been covered in bees. Good thing the kids mostly use the back door. As for Hurricane Sandy , the latest headlines are still full of hype, but this latest rain forecast from the Weather Channel doesn't seem so devastating: 1-3 inches I can totally live with. Still, I'm going to postpone planting my fall...

A little over a week ago we had our first light frost, and I had to bring in all of our peppers . There were tons! (Okay, there were many pounds.) Instead of eating them green, we kept waiting for the them to ripen into their pretty colors. But when frost beat us to it, I had to bring in a lot all at once. Many of them have ripened to yellow and red on the counter, and we've been eating then just as fast as we can. Best use so far: Kirk made these excellent stuffed peppers in the crock pot. They are filled with rice, spicy Italian sausage, a bit of egg to hold it all together, and (of course) some more peppers. They were cooked in plain tomato sauce in the crock pot for several hours, and the result was really delicious. I think Kirk scooped up the remaining roasted pepper-flavored sauce to use later on some other Italian delight. Another major portion of the pepper harvest was our jalapeños and serranos: Kirk spent the evening last night slicing and dicing to...

Back in the spring , one of the perennial herbs we chose for the garden was a small bay laurel plant from  The Herb Farmacy . I think it had about three or four leaves on it when I planted it outside. It's been pretty much forgotten all summer as everything around it got bigger, but before frost we remembered we had to bring it inside: Bay laurel is a Mediterranean plant that just won't make it through freezing temperatures, so it will spend the winter in the southwestern exposure of the living room window. We can plant it back outside in the spring when it warms up, or we can just keep it as a container plant for the patio.  As you can see, bay is a pretty slow growing plant. I think it put on maybe four inches of height this growing season. We haven't harvested any bay leaves from it at all yet because of its small size. Maybe in the spring, if we prune it to encourage some branching, we can have some leaves to dry and use for cooking.  I have read tha...