It isn’t often that many of the things in which I’m interested, collide in such a way that easily wraps up into one tidy and squeaky clean post (local food, sustainable farming, garden updates, etc). In our house, the advent of each major familial holiday is spent pouring over cookbooks and old archived blog posts in an effort to come up with plans for the next big meal. Of course, the variables aren’t always that expansive—Thanksgiving is obviously turkey, and Christmas is usually a ham of sorts, but lately Easter has become the experimental holiday. Last year, after reading through a post by Anita at Married…with Dinner, we tried Judy Rodger’s (Zuni Café) Mock Porchetta. This year, again, I decided to go in a different direction.

The River Cottage Meat Book

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Elaine had her Big Salad.  I have my pink salad.  This will serve as my unintentional breast cancer awareness post.

Salad for the Cure

In Houston it seems like the fruit trees, azaeleas, and vegetables have been blooming their hearts out for weeks now.  Our peaches and apples set fruit in the latter part of February, after putting on quite the floral show.  We had almost 100% of our seeds germinate and our tomatoes already have blooms popping out.  So what the heck is wrong with the Black Mission Fig and especially, the Santa Rosa Plum?  If there was one tree in all of our garden that we were looking forward to, it was the Santa Rosa Plum.  After this and this appeared, I felt like we had no choice but to buy one.  Here we are now in the advent of Spring and it seems like nothing can coax this guy out of hibernation—at least not any blossoms.  Yesterday though, I did notice a tiny hint of green.

Signs of Life-Santa Rosa Plum

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I just thought I would throw a quick link up about a short piece that appeared on the Bitten Blog in the Times today—rings a little too close to home, I’d say [uncomfortable laugh]. “What to do with all of the leftovers?”

*Slenderette Bush Beans

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In doing research on High Density Home Orchards, I kept running across a term that I felt deserved an explanation.  The word “pleaching” seems to be a catch-all for several similar techniques that were implemented in the formal gardens of the ancient Roman Empire.  Generally speaking, pleaching is yet another tool at the urban gardener’s disposal.  Like espalier, pleaching is a method used to train normally unruly trees into visually striking, and space defining features.

For our purposes, a more laid-back approach to pleaching was the perfect solution for the citrus trees that we wanted to plant on the west side of our home.  We have a long, blank wall that opens up to our neighbor’s parking lot. As exposed as it is, it comes off extremely dull and boring.  To give an idea of perspective, we have roughly four feet from the side of our home to the back of our neighbor’s curb.  Closest to the curb, we have an espaliered fence consisting of apple trees, plums, and peaches.  At its highest point, the espaliered fence is three and a half feet tall.  In trying to bleed this property of every bit of it’s plantable space, we had the idea of planting our citrus trees behind the espaliered fence, and train them to grow straight up before we let them branch out and into each other, similar to to the below picture.

Pleached Trees

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Being incredibly busy over the last week, I have not found a whole lot of time to do any serious writing. I did however, find a couple of minutes early in the morning before work, to snap a few pictures of the goings on in the garden. As soon as things slow down a bit, I’ll get into more detail about what we planted, what we planted in, and how we planted everything.

Heirloom Tomatillo Seedlings

It is hard, in my opinion, not to say enough great things about catchy, technical buzz words or phrases. I can’t get enough of them. Besides being efficient forms of communication, they make people sound smart when talking shop with others. Just think about it. You and I may be sitting in a restaurant talking about our various landscaping projects…riiiight. Because we are excited about the topic, we’re speaking a little bit louder than is probably acceptable. The couple at the table next to us can’t help but eavesdrop on our conversation and oh how impressed they are when they hear us drop phrases like “High Density Home Orchard.” We’re very special people.

Barn Wall Espalier