{harvest} for the end of July!

Our first sizable harvest of the season: jalapeno peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, okra, green peppers, and more mellow star peppers. We'll be using some of these to make this delicious recipe for dinner! Yums.

Finishing up at Star City

Last Sunday evening, I joined Zach at Star City Coffee and Ale House to finish up the painting and pasting he started a couple of weeks ago.

We stopped in the studio first to finish up some prints and last minute tweaks. After that was done, we went to Star City and started pasting ...

Zach also painted in the bathrooms,

adding our cat in the women's,

and a rooster in the men's.

Haha.

Garden Update: July 2014

We're almost at the end of July! That means we've survived 208 of 365 days. Zach tells me time feels like it passes faster the older we get. So the fact that I feel this year has gone by way too fast means?!!

I was in Singapore the first half of July, so I missed that spectacular phase where baby plants shoot for the sky and turn into full-fledge mature plants. Just for comparison's sake, this was the picture I took before I left (at the end of June):

and here's the picture I took when I got home on July 16th:

Plain amazing! I have to thank Zach for doing such a great job with the garden while I was away. There were times when we spoke where he would ecstatically share with me that the eggplants were flowering, or that the bell pepper plants were loaded with fruits. Other times, his frustration and disappointment would be evident when he told me he had to take off tomatoes that were showing signs of blossom end rot. He said he must have tossed over 60 tomatoes because of it.

a tomato with the dreaded blossom end rot. anyone knows how to treat this condition mid-season?

We have a lot to learn about blossom end rot. If you have tips, please share them! Thankfully though, we still have some healthy tomatoes left.

San Marzano

Bonny tomatoes

Minibel tomatoes. This plant is only a foot tall!

black vernissage tomatoes

We have our 15 tomato plants packed so tightly together this year that it's been hard to monitor for pests. Luckily, the parasitic wasps have been so helpful at seeking out the hornworms we miss.

Our pepper plants feel like they are a little behind this year. I looked back at last year's garden update for July and saw that we were harvesting a lot more peppers by this time of the year. I can't wait for this present batch of peppers to catch up!

bell peppers

Carmen peppers

Chili peppers

Mellow Star peppers

The biggest surprise for this year's garden has to be the eggplants. All 6 plants (tha we started from seeds!) survived the early onslaught of flea beetles, and are now big, beautiful, and bountiful. We have 2 of the Japanese white eggplants:

2 "Astrakom"eggplants:

"Little fingers":

"Violet Prince":

The herbs we have are looking good too, except for the dill.

Our basil plants are looking a little yellow, but they are thriving!

We didn't grow any summer Chinese veggies this year, but we did attempt to grow some molokhia (Egyptian spinach) again. The molokhia we had last year loved the 90-degree weather. The ones this year are growing a tad slower in this mild and unpredictable summer.

Something else that's craving for 90-degree weather? The okra.

I thought I would miss out on much of the berries when I was gone, but we still have strawberries,

raspberries,

and blueberries left to eat!

But fruits and veggies aside, there's also plenty of flowers blooming around the garden this year. There are always plenty of cheerful zinnia blossoms to brighten the mornings,

and calendula to pick. Since I am harvesting the calendula for their petals, we are growing the "Triangular Flashback" (from Johnny's Seeds) this year:

We also have a dwarf teddy bear sunflower that's insanely adorable:

and another one on its way!

Finally, we sowed a round of beets in anticipation of fall.

I'm eager to see what this garden does in August!

"community": a mural for the Monticello Library

in may, i began discussions with a group four local art-focused students for a mural at the Monticello Library.  the library received a matching grant to commission the piece, and the kids and i brainstormed ideas and images, themes and metaphors.  what you see above is our finished product, entitled, community.  we wanted to depict diversity in a changing rural community, and not just racial diversity, but rather, diversity of ideas, cultures, and personalities.  

Yesterday, we started by chalking in a few silhouettes, then lightly spot primed the images.  For all of these kids, it was their first experience painting with spray paint, so we used chalk to sketch in the images before going over their chalk with lines of spray paint.  By the end, a couple of the kids had a pretty solid handle on what they were doing with the cans. I am excited to have been able to teach them a new paint medium!

The mural took us all of one day to complete. We painted during the library's Broadway Art Show and Biergarten, so there were several people in, out and around the library the entire time we were painting.  It was funny when one of the library's board members came out early in the morning and asked if i really thought we could get the whole thing done in one day.  He then returned after lunch with his metaphorical jaw on the floor at the amount of work that had been completed already.  He said, "i didn't believe it when they told me you'd be done in one day, but now that i see it with my own eyes..." The weather, thankfully, held off most of the day.  We had a little rain in the morning and few minor sprinkles while we were working, but the cloud cover kept the heat at bay, and we slugged through the piece until we finished at around 4:30 in the afternoon.  Two of the kids had to leave after lunch to get to other committed projects, but two stayed and the three of us cranked out the rest of the mural through the afternoon.

tristian, emma, edgar, and fernando adding their ideas to the mural.  a huge thank to all four of them for not just showing up to paint, but for helping to develop the mural for the library.

getting closer to completion with Fernando and Edgar

In all, we got about 30 different characters on the wall, each one an individual, mashed together as part of a whole community.  The kids added their own styles into the piece, but everything looks really consistent and works solidly together.  I love the bright colors on the brick wall.  they really pop.  I'm really happy with the results of this piece.  I hope the kids that participated, the library, and the city of Monticello agree!

the west side of our north facing wall

in the middleish

also in the middleish

the east side of the mural....who doesn't love an purple alien in a pair of chucks.