We spent 2 of the last 4 weeks in California. That’s not exactly what we planned on doing originally, but that’s how it turned out. Seedlings don’t take kindly to not being watered for 10 days in a row. And now we have a bunch of starter pellets with dead sprouts in them. Only the tomatoes survived, and several of them may yet die. I dumped a ton of water on everything the night we got back, but I’m 99% sure most everything is dead.

Oh yeah, we’re moving to San Diego, so I won’t be re-sprouting anything. Most likely, we’ll give away whatever happens to be alive at the end of the next week or two, and that will be that.

The peppers are really starting to come on. Barring some unforeseen tragedy, we’re going to have a lot of peppers this year.

For the past few years, every time it rained, the side yard would fill up like a lake. I didn’t like it. This week we had Lambson Landscaping fix that problem for us. They put in a drain, adjusted the grade, added sod to about half of it, a weed blanket and bark to the rest. We’re still waiting on the finishing touches, such as the curbing, but it’s already looking really good. Now we need to get some more trees.

In my attempt to become of better cook I am using more fresh herbs in my cooking.   The nice thing is that the food tastes better. The crappy thing is that fresh herbs excluding cilantro are very expensive at the store.  $3.00 plus for a little basil.

This year as we brought out the lights to start the plants for outside and I started the kitchen window container garden.  Our kitchen window does have one problem.  It hardly gets any sun light.  I’ve thought about hanging a light down from the ceiling but that would be ugly.  I’ve looked on-line at a few different products such as aero gardens and some boxes with adjustable lights.  If what I’m doing right now doesn’t work I will have to try one of the other methods.  I’m hoping that has the plant get big that they will do ok in my kitchen.  I have also plants a bunch of herbs to start the herb garden outside this year.

The other things that I’m trying right now is cold weather veggies.  I thinking about planting them on the side of the house this year.  I think the micro-climate over there is a bit cooler than the main garden.

We have also started our tomatoes and peppers and they are coming along just fine.  It would be really cool this year if we could start all of our vegetables and  flowers from seeds.  Then the only thing that we will need to purchase from the nursery this year is a few replacement trees and a few more bushes.

Now that the garden is in full swing we are in the process of deciding what to do with everything that we have grown.  This week we bottled peppers, and tomatoes.  It’s only our second time bottling and our first time with our own stuff.  It’s been an interesting learning process,  reading, buying items and reading some more.  I’m not sure if bottling is any cheaper than just buying can goods.  The initial investment it’s that bad but it does take time and energy to produce a bottle of tomatoes and big can of tomatoes at Costco is so cheap.  The real test will be it they taste any better than the can tomatoes.

Today I decided to use a bunch of the tomatoes to make what we call tomato cook down,  I also made jalapeno cheddar bread.  I just bought a new enamel dutch oven to try baking it in and it work out really well.  The only issue with the dutch oven is that I had to remove the handle to the lid.  The handle can only be heated to 350 degrees which is a problem when you are baking bread at 450.  I can understand having a plastic handle when cooking on the stove top way less likely to burn your hand but for me it doesn’t work.  After some research on the internet It appears that a lot of other people have had to same problem.  The dutch oven that I purchased was only $55,  prices for the oven range from 50-70 depending on the store that it is purchased at.