The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Poppy Fair Farm

Nurseries are like crack to me.  Throw in some bluegrass music,

cute goats, 

wonderful vending booths with native plants,

great art,

hand made soaps,

specialty plants, home made beauty products and jewelry, beautiful original paintings, and cool crafts then you have Poppy Fair Farm.

 

And Happiness.

My friend Erin, who owns Native Revival Nursery in Aptos, put on her first annual Poppy Fair Farm last Saturday. I went over to be a part of the festivities, and they did not disappoint. There was something for everyone—and their five senses.

The bluegrass music—banjo, mandolin, guitar, and bass fiddle—was particularly good. 

When Erin was asking for information from the lead in the bluegrass band, Jimmy Chickenpants, for the poster, this is what he said: 

"Some people make the mistake of spelling Chickenpants as 2 words. That's just plain wrong"

 

Perfect.

Cream of Roasted Tomato Soup—With Too Much Flavor

My son waiting for his mac and cheese

Here’s THE LIST of food my 12-year-old will eat:

• Mac and cheese (the kind from a box)

• Hamburger with ketchup ONLY (he won’t eat turkey burger)

• Cheese pizza (must be homemade)

• Pork potstickers (ONLY from one particular Japanese restaurant)

 

That is his entire food repetoire. His list hasn’t changed for about nine years. He uses all sorts of excuses to describe why all the other food in the world just doesn’t work for him. Like:

 

“It’s too salty.”

“It’s too sweet.”

“It’s tastes weird.”

“It’s too hard.”

“It’s mushy.”

“That’s gross.”

“It makes my nose itch.”

“It makes my lips tingle.”

“It makes me fart.”

“It makes me burp.”

“It hurts my tongue.”

 

Whatever.

 

I gave up a long time ago.

Well, that’s not true, it just doesn’t bother me the way it used to.

 

So I made this killer tomato soup the other day, what with the end of tomato season and all and with tomatoes coming out my hoohaa.

 

I served my son a bowl and this was his critique:

“Mom, this soup is really good, and I would eat it, but it just has too much flavor.”

 

Just shoot me.

 

Cream of Roasted Tomato Soup—With Too Much Flavor

3 T olive oil

1-2  small/medium white onions

1-carrots peeled chopped

2-3 cloves garlic - minced

Handful basil - julienned

3 cups homemade tomato sauce

1 cup roasted small tomatoes (I used pear tomatoes)

course salt

2 cups chicken stock

½ – ¾ cup half and half

Sauté onions and carrots until tender

Add minced garlic and sauté for 1 minute (don’t let it brown or burn)

Add the tomato sauce, the roasted tomatoes, the basil and the chicken stock.

Cook over medium/low heat stirring frequently until carrots are

very tender.

When everything is cooked through, use an immersion blender to make the soup smooth.

Then add the half and half, warm it back up add the salt to taste Serve it with a sprig of basil floating on top. 

Here is the part where I take a picture of the soup and make it look delicious. But I forgot to take the picture and we ate the soup so here's a different photo:

 

BTW Gerard Butler is filming a movie in Santa Cruz and I'm looking for him so if you know someone who knows him, tell him I make great tomato soup.

My kids (well at least one of them) like to eat my soup with these cheesy biscuits that I make but you could serve it with any kind of cheesy bread.

Happy Ending For Lunch and Dinner

My friend Ruth asked what finally happened to the roosters, so here’s their story:

Here is the reasons why I couldn’t keep the chickens.

When we first took the roosters in, people asked, “Why can’t you keep them?”

I even had someone tell me to keep them because ‘they’re fun.’ I couldn’t smell alcohol on her breath but then I remembered you can’t smell hallucinogens.

Roosters? Fun? Sure, why not, if you like big birds waking you up at dawn, slashing at you with their spurs, and trying to peck your eyes out, they are a barrel of laughs.

Even if I wanted to keep the merrymaking roosters—I can’t—see?

  My dog stood like that for fifteen minutes straight just waiting for their cage to disappear.

So, as much as I wanted to keep those amusing roosters, a nice man named Richard adopted them. He picked them up two days ago and took them home to be with his family of hens to make pretty babies.

I want to believe that Richard didn’t eat them. The reason I think he didn’t eat them is that when I asked him if I could take a picture for a story I was writing, instead of telling me that he was in the witness protection program, and holding a folded newspaper in front of his face, he agreed and posed happily.

  Note my dog still hoping for lunch and dinner

Before the roosters left, I gave them names. I named the one on the right, Lunch, and the one on the left, Dinner.

Bye-bye, Lunch and Dinner.

Roadside Roosters

I dropped my son off at Los Gatos Rowing Club. 

I turned right toward the upper side of the Lexington Reservoir. Most parents live in town and make a left toward the freeway, but we live in the hills so I take the road less traveled. 

I love to drive this way. The road is windy, so I pretend I’m Grace Kelly maneuvering my convertible Sunbeam Alpine through the French countryside. 

I see a lot of wild animals along this route, deer, bunnies, bobcats so today was no different I rounded the first hairpin and there they were—two roosters. WTF? Yep, someone decided that they didn’t want their roosters anymore, so they donated them to the local predator roadside diner. 

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor little guys. They stood huddled together in the rain as if they were waiting for whoever left them there to come back—or like they were waiting to hail a taxi. One of them might have been saying to the other, “Hey wait a minute Bob, this is all going to make sense in a minute or two.” 

I kept driving my pretend Sunbeam, and then called my husband to tell him about the sad sight I had just witnessed.

My husband put my youngest son in his car and went back to get the roosters. What? As I was nearing my house, I received a call: “Mom, we got the chickens.”

“What are we going to do with two roosters? We tried this once before and it ended badly.” 

My husband chimed in, “Call Simon (our neighbor), I’m sure he will take them.”

“Are you sure?” 

“Sure I’m sure”

I called him, but he wanted nothing to do with the feathered castoffs. 

My husband drove home and plopped the roosters in our garage, went into the house and back to work.

There they were, two roosters in my garage, my dog and I staring at them in their little cage. Her eyes were dilated; she wanted to eat them so bad that she was shaking. She was shaking so much I thought I should give her a shot of whiskey or Demerol. I looked at the roosters again and decided I should be the one to get a shot of whiskey and/or Demerol. 

My son was already attached to the roosters and he was working on a letter to the newspaper in the hopes that they will publish it and save the roosters. 

Here’s his letter:

FREE to a Good Home—Beautiful Abandoned Birds!

 

Yesterday afternoon, my mom found two gorgeous roosters walking on the side of the road, abandoned.

She was busy, but I wasn’t. I was happy they weren’t dead. But I was worried about leaving them there on the road.

So, my dad and I went and caught them. But we can’t keep them because my mom has a dog sitting business.

Dogs and roosters don’t mix.

We would hate to see them get eaten, hit by cars, or starve.

So we’d like to find a good place for them to live. If you know of one, please let me know by contacting my mom through The Patch. 

Thank you very much for adopting them.

 

 

 

Thanksgiving

I am thankful for my family and my friends and the place that I live. These fill me with joy every day.

Stumble It!

Bubblegum Alley

My idea was to take my son on a little vacation, and spend some quality mom/son time with him before jr. high school.

And of course, I wanted to do activities that he liked. So, there were times during our three-day adventure when I ended up in places that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself.

Like Bubble Gum Alley.

Bubble Gum Alley is located between 733 and 734 Higuera Street in downtown San Luis Obispo, California. It’s pretty self-explanatory. But I’ll go ahead and explain it, even though when I think about it, I throw up in my mouth a little. It’s an alley 15-feet high and 70 feet long that is completely covered in multiple layers of chewing gum.

Used chewing gum.

Now to me, this “tourist attraction” would be way better if it was completely erased from my memory bank. But my son loved it, of course. He read about it and came prepared with two pieces of bubble gum, one for him and, gulp, one for me.


I dutifully chewed my piece of gum, as did my son. I bravely approached the alley, holding my breath, because if I had caught a wiff of some unexpectedly bad odor I’d have hurled on the spot.

I pulled the gum out of my mouth and attempted to stick it to the alley wall. I couldn’t get it to stick, so I started squealing and dancing around, not in a good way but in a manner very entertaining to my son.
I finally got it to stick and ran in the opposite direction from the alley.

 It was my son’s turn, and he seemed almost as disgusted as I was when it came right down to applying his gum to the wall. After the sticking ceremony was complete, I couldn’t wait to get away from that particular tourist spot.

And wash my hands.

Stumble It!

Waste Not Want Not. Yes, Mother.

 
I was walking through the forbidden ranch the other day, and I saw strange yellow bumpy fruit dangling from a gnarled old tree.

They looked—sort of—like lemons. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the fruit was covered with fuzz. Were they furry lemons? No, but they looked just like large fuzzy apple-lemons. I was pretty sure there was no such thing as fuzzy apple-lemons and yet something was so darn familiar about them. I knew what they were. I had to do a little traveling down my (now dusty) memory lane.

Then I remembered they are quince.

My mom used to make quince jam. I think it was jam, at any rate, if I remembered correctly, quince really wasn’t edible and that you had to make something like jelly or jam out of them before you could actually ingest them—and even then it was sketchy.

I don’t know if it was the way the sun hit the tree or the fact that I was in one of my favorite places in the world or it could have been my mother’s voice echoing in my ear. “You can’t let all those perfectly good fuzzy apple-lemons go to waste, there’s a recession going on. You should pick them and make quince jam like I used to do.”

Mothers can guilt you into anything, even when they no longer inhabit this earth.

Damn it.

Stumble It!

Memories of Mom

Mother’s Day is bittersweet for me.

On the one hand, I get to hang out with the three men that I love most in my life.

On the other hand I don’t get to hang out with my mom because she passed away several years ago. I miss her terribly and I miss the fact that she can’t see my sons grow up. I have a feeling she’s kind of pissed about that, too.

There is a place where her ashes are buried but I don’t go there anymore. I used to bring fresh cut roses there and feel sad and cry.

Now I go to her house and tend her roses because it makes me feel happy and close to her. Then I cut some roses and bring them back to my house.

It’s like bringing a little piece of her home with me and my family.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Stumble It!

Oh Christmas Tree Farm, Oh Christmas Tree Farm

On Dashiell on Dancer, on Prancer, on Vixen,
on Comet, on Cupid, on Donner, on Blitzen.

On Dashiell?

Wait a minute; you’re not a reindeer.

Even though I’m an avid gardener, I still take my kids out to
One of the many Christmas tree farms in my neighborhood to cut down a tree instead on using a live tree. Or buying one cut two weeks ago at a big-box lot.

First, I think it’s a fun tradition.

Second, we go to little family-run farms that only sell a few trees per year.

Third, we always cut our trees so that we leave a ring of branches at the base where a new tree can sprout.

This year my son found a chunk of trunk that some one had trimmed and left on the ground. My husband told him that we could grow a tree from it. So my son picked it up and hauled it back to the car.
When we came home, we put it in a big saucer of water.
My son has been checking its progress everyday since.

Another great thing about the little Christmas tree farms we go to is they give away bulbs. Yippee—bonus!

Merry Christmas everyone from Gardeners Anonymous.

Stumble It!

How to Get Your Kids to Do Their Homework.

I know now why my mother said I gave her grey hair—and why I used to call her a nag.

Homework.

I read this great book the other day called The Case Against Homework. I’m convinced that the person who invented homework never had 3rd and 5th grade boys.

I am sick of dealing with the nightly tantrums. There have been many, many nights when my 8-year-old has spent 4 ½ hours or more sitting at my kitchen table staring at his math facts—one 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet with 100 multiplication problems. Is he lazy? Is he stupid? Is he stubborn? Well let’s see—he IQ is upward of 130. He is in the gifted and talented program at school. He knows his schoolwork forward and backward.

I can understand that kids who had been held captive in school for seven hours don’t want to spend any more time chained to a desk. I imagine they would rather find an outlet for the energy. Maybe they just want to unwind, decompress, and do something that they are in control of. Even though I don’t like to hear the whining, I do understand the reason for it: He just needs a break from school.

One study shows that having dinner with their families is way better for kids—and a better predictor of educational success—than is doing homework.

My husband always tells his friends that if there were no women “men would still be living in caves.” Then he loves to add, “And we’d be happy.”

A week or so ago I was trying to prepare myself mentally for the nightly homework tantrum when an idea came to me.