Fall Harvest and Market visits – long & picture heavy post

November 6, 2017 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

It has snowed over the last three days, so I guess that our fall harvest season is officially over.

Our Garden this year was planted a bit late – like a month and a half, due to me having hip surgery and the complete rework of the back yard. Consequently, our sweet corn never fully ripened, but the hot weather and sunshine this summer made for great tomatoes, peppers, and squash. To add to our bounty: our grass is Ireland-green and we are set up great for next year 🙂

The yard – old and new:

We got real figs for the first time ever from a small fig tree on our south fence line. It has been in the ground for 5 years and this was the first year that it really produced fruit, which we enjoyed with breakfast. Our two cherry trees were not as productive as last year, but some of that had to do with the weeks-long battle we had each evening with the snails and slugs climbing the trees and the ants that came later.

The apple trees produced fairly heavily as well, though no thanks to an “arborist” that screwed up the pruning and set our yard on fire with an errant cigarette butt – seriously.

The apple trees:

Squash and Veggies:

The Lapin and Stella Cherries:

Stamps-With-Foot really came into her own this year with the flowers she planted and cultivated! The houses next door and across the street were for sale at the same time and we had a couple of people comment on our “beautiful” yard and our “amazing flowers.” It made me proud of her, and of the front yard for the first time in years.

A few of the flowers:

Next year my bride has spectacular plans for more tulips, lots of lilies, dahlias everywhere, more lavender, and other bee-attracting flowers. We will also plant the garden earlier, with starts that have been hot-housed, have a 3’X4′ plot of garlic, lots of carrots, parsnips, and some more roma tomatoes. We are going to bag the apples to keep the apple-moth at bay and can/bake/press/ferment them next fall. A row of blueberries will go on the south-side fence where the firewood used to be. Raspberries will go in in a sunny spot and I am builting in 2 more garden boxes (pending Stamps-With-Foots approval) along the garage. Until then, we are blessed with a year-round farmer’s market in our neighborhood. It is full of local fruit, veggies, pasta, bread, honey, berries, cheese, fish, and meat. The offerings are seasonal and we have gotten to know some of the folks that grow our food, which is awesome.

Scenes from the West Seattle market:

Weekend Activities

July 12, 2017 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Seattle is in early summer full bloom. The sun is out and the temperature is perfect! These conditions led to a really good weekend:

Slept had friends stay with us Friday night and Saturday morning
Big yummy breakfast
Picked three big bowls of ripe Lapin cherries
Ate a lot of cherries
Went over to my mother’s house
Took care of house projects for her
Had a yummy dinner
Nice bottle of red wine was opened and mostly consumed
Read American Gods aloud with Stamps-With-Foot before bed

Brunch with Friends
Went to the Sunday farmer’s market
Bought cheese and honey!
Went to the garden store
Bought a bunch of flowers for the yard
Walked the puppies
Planted flowers
Scattered weed&feed in the 1/3 of the back yard that is void of Ireland-green grass
scattered and raked grass seed.
Murdered dandelions
Picked up a mountain of puppy-made landmines 🙁
Mowed the yard
Installed new tire cover on Jeep spare
Put Jeep on the car lift – also now refereed to as “The Jeep Sex Swing”
Changed oil and filter
Only 42 more Oil Changes and the lift pays for itself!! 🙂
Lubed the chassis
Checked and topped off all the fluids
Made happy noises
Had a Coke and smile afterward while sitting in the shade
Printed out GAINT ’84-’86 Jeep Maintenance Manual
Let my internal OCD monster out to play
Custom labels and tabbed separators were made…
Added folders with Maintenance Manuals to shelf in the garage
Watered the garden, yard, and newly seeded dirt patch
More reading
Sleep

Making the yard pretty for 2017

May 26, 2017 / Matt Talley / 1 Comment

Our back yard has been a mess for over a year: Stacked with left over construction debris, seriously over-grown raised garden beds, unturned compost bins, blackberries along both fences, piles of landscaping stones, weeds, etc.… The front yard was presentable, but only just barely. 2016 was the year of house and garage construction and 2017 was meant to be the year that we focused on the yard. Surgery delayed that a bit and the state of the grounds at La Maison du Talley was getting embarrassing.

I had a couple of guys come out and take a look at our mess to see what it would cost to get it back in home-show worthy shape. I didn’t like either answer. Without going into too much detail about the different bids, the low one was $3500 and the high was almost $5000. There was no way in Hell that the frugal DNA coursing through my veins, passed down from both the Talley and Webster lines, would biologically allow me to spend that kind of money on grass, mulch, and a few flowers.

After I was well on the mend and cleared by my physical therapist, I did some planning, logistic estimation, material cost math, and decided to do it myself with a bit of casual day labor. I also decided that the mature ornamental cherry trees I wanted for the parking strip would have to wait, that I didn’t need to bring in topsoil and plant grass seed. I scaled back the dream a little bit, bought 86 rolls of sod, 19 bags of mulch, 8 bags of garden soil, some boxwood shrubs, 15 Spanish lavender plants, and let my sweet wife buy all the pretty flowers that her heart desired.

In two days, the front and back yards were transformed! I hauled away 1600 pounds of yard waste, made one dump run for trash, one run full of recyclables, and we spent less than $1000. We will spend the next few weeks watering and fussing over little details, but by July 4th, we should have Ireland-green grass, pretty flowers, healthy fruit trees and the BBQ grill roaring. Money and time well spent.

Spring has Sprung!!

May 4, 2017 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Holy Crap, it has been sunny and over 70F for two solid days here in Seattle for the first time in 6 months! Flowers and trees are blooming. Mason, bumble, and honey bees are flying about. My grass is green. This all makes me sooo happy. In a couple of weeks, we are taking a little referral bonus from my J-O-B and doing a front and back yard makeover to include a little fruit tree planting, grass for the back yard, and veggie garden.

Footnote: I cursed us all. 12 hours after I posted this, there was a huge thunderstorm in Seattle. Lightning, buckets of rain, power outages… Probably all my fault.

Camping Weekend

September 1, 2016 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

We spent the National Park Centennial camping near and walking in Olympic National park. Not a bad way at all to make the occasion, spend the weekend, bring summer to a close.

The Bees in Our Back Garden – 2015

August 24, 2015 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

The lavender is in full bloom in our backyard. Last year I counted five different types of bees that visited it during the late summer. So far, I have counted seven different types, but I think one might be a type of yellow jacket. I looked online, but it is inconclusive. I went full-nerd and ordered a couple of books: Bees of the World by Mitchner and Bees of N. America (Princeton Guide). I will take some more pictures and see how many types I can find every couple of weeks. As a side note: I often wonder given my nerdiness how I have both managed to procreate with the female of our species and how I have a wife that is so damn adorable…

Our French Jardin

June 27, 2014 / Matt Talley / 1 Comment

With my J-O-B and all that we have going on here in France (work, travel, guests, work, work…) there is NO WAY that I can have a proper garden. To scratch my farming itch, I have been medium obsessive over the grass (I have not found the desire to begin a campaign of slaughter for the dandelions as yet) and have made our outside living space as nice a possible. The prior occupants of our house planted rosemary, sage, lavender (we have 5 different bee types on it right now), a couple of fruit trees and some bulbs that we are nursing a little the the color and life help with my primal need to make stuff grow.

We eat outside in the evenings a couple nights a week and I bought a sweet masonry grill from an English couple that were moving to Spain. The thing weighed a ton, but it works and looks great. In addition to grilling on weekend afternoons, I REALLY like to have my coffee in the shade of the porch out back if my schedule allows and the hammock has an assign spot in the shade. We see our back yard here as more of an outdoor room and have furnished it with a teak table set and the Adirondack lawn furniture that I made for Stamps-With-Foot a couple of years ago – she insisted we bring it from Seattle 🙂

Stamps-With-Foot’s Garden

January 30, 2013 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Seattle has suffered through a weeks of freezing fog, stagnant air, flu season, and intermittent rain. The weather has me longing for long September evenings in our back yard….

2012 was a great year for us outside and in the yard. Stamps-With-Foot had her greening thumb put to work and our garden was crazy plentiful, in part because of her planting of mutant green squash and her nightly wine sipping/watering regimen. She moved dirt, turned the compost, picked berries, planted, harvested, pruned, cut bushes, dug in the dirt, and even removed a slug or two. I was very proud of her!

That hard work and spent energy was put to good use and we traded our bounty of veggies with the neighbors, she froze raspberries and blackberries that we both toiled over and my sweet wife made countless spinach and arugula salads from plants that we grew. To top it all off, she turned some of our tomatoes into chutney that was canned to make Christmas gifts. She is turning into quite the little homesteader.

Our Summer Garden

August 16, 2012 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

It has been a sweet summer in our small garden. Stamps-With-Foot has really stepped up and has been planting, weeding, watering, picking fruit, staking dahlias and has even once turned the compost and added chicken manure. I have been both shocked and impressed. She even talked me into having some corn planted in the raised boxes this year. She bought the starts, planted them, made sure they were well hydrated and is now about to harvest 15+ ears of yellow sweet corn. Her squash has been prolific and we will have more soybeans this fall than we will know what to do with. Happily surprised at my bride’s greening thumb…

So far this season, we have harvested 25 heads of garlic, 10 sweet yellow onions, 30+ yellow and green squash, a few Roma tomatoes (still very early in the season), 4+pints of raspberries (late summer crop just starting), 3 pints of wonderfully sweet blackberries, figs, apricots, 1 apple (more to come), a gallon+ of cherries, spinach, 5 beets, more Swiss and rainbow chard than I care to remember, 2 pints of small strawberries, a pint-ish of blueberries, and we have supplied three households with rosemary, sage, pineapple sage, thyme, basil, Thai basil, Moroccan mint, and spearmint. We have been trading produce with some other members of our family for eggs and with two sets of neighbors for veggies and flowers. Stamps-With-Foot mentioned the other day that she felt like Marie Antoinette with her little Austrian Hobby farm in the shadow of Versailles.

The amazing amount of flowers (except for the lavender and roses) have all been cared for by my sweet wife and a neighbor from across the street. Both front and back yards have been perfumed since early spring.

Our yard is in bloom – Spring 2012

June 3, 2012 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Magical Spring has finally come to Le Maison du Talley. Our rhododendrons are back and in full pooping bloom after they were hacked back last year. The tulips, daffodils, and poppies have all decided to bloom at the same time. The Spanash, English and Provence lavender has taken root and flourished along the front fence. After a two year struggle with blossom-rot, the two cherries up front are full of flowers and green cherries. We have Mandarin orange blossoms, apple blossoms, apricots, figs, raspberry buds, a fence line of blooming roses, and 3 Meyer’s lemons on the dwarf tree in our backyard mini-orchard.

Stamps-with-Foot and I planted garlic and onions in the fall that are close to being pulled and we spent an afternoon planting tomatoes, squash, corn, and zucchini in two of our raised beds. After in initial problem with early blight last year, our two full beds of tomatoes went NUTS! and we had more that we could use or give away. We were more selective this year and planted just a couple varieties and only 7 plants. I hot-housed a bed of spinach, Swiss Chard, and beats all winter that is now in full production mode.

I plan to be home more this summer and really spend some time tending and harvesting, although one wouldn’t know it from all the traveling so far. I can’t wait until mid-August when I can sit in my cotton hammock, gently swinging over my Ireland-green grass, drinking a Dunkel Weissbeir, snuggling my wife, and patting our puppy while gazing out onto our yard and garden.

It is 71 BLEEPING degrees outside – WOOHOO!!

April 9, 2012 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Spring has finally decided to show up in Seattle! I am all giddy. Yesterday was Easter and the sun was out, birds were singing, my flowers are blooming, and my grass in Ireland green. I spent the morning, edging, mowing, raking, reseeding and assaulting my hated foe, the dandelions. I spent ALL DAY outside working on projects, fixing stuff that has waited for me all winter, working on a bookshelf for Stamps-With-foot’s sewing room, sharpening garden tools, and soaking in as much sunshine as possible. Brodie took up residence in his favorite patch of grass and alternately munched and napped. The end of his short snout got a little pink. I think that he is happier than I am about the sunshine. I am sitting inside at my J-O-B and I can see a little sliver of sunshine. I want to make a break for it!

As for Easter celebrations: There were chocolate & peanut butter eggs from my pretty wife, a Cadbury egg from my sister, and I purchased a hollow chocolate bunny, which I savaged, starting with its cute bunny ears… Brodie and I had a wonderful lunch of ham and ham, oh and more ham at my family’s place. Pork is bad for both of us and I was careful not to have any open flames around the house last night. Stamps-With-Foot is in Northern California visiting her sister and best friend in the world, so she was spared.

Driven Outside

Tag: flowers