Things a-growin'

So life, as always, got in the way. Lots to report from the garden/kitchen front these days...garden first. 

I decided to go big this year, both in crops and in containers. After years of attempting to grow vegetables in small pots intended for nothing more than flowers and herb bushes, I broke down and bought whiskey barrels this year - well, plastic facsimiles, but what can you do. I then proceeded to....completely overcrowd them. Here's the deal - as I wrote last time, I had bizarrely high seed-to-start rates this year. (That last cherry tomato plant eventually sprouted for a 100% rate.) I then promised the 2 extras of each to my friend so her kids could play in the dirt productively. After THAT I was a flake, forgot about that, and planted all five of each start in the barrels. So to recap: my friend got no starts and my barrels have more plants than they should because I can't bring myself to yank them back out. (Note: the tomatoless friend situation was remedied when my mother found herself in the same situation as me and brought her extra plants over to said friend.)

Next up I direct-planted zucchini seeds and corn kernels, again planting more than I needed. Every single one of THOSE sprouted and is now growing rapidly. If I can keep them fertilized and fed so they can get maybe enough nutrients I'm going to have a bumper crop this year...but offsetting the low soil nutrients resulting from the overcrowding is going to be tricky. [Side note: I've never grown corn before. There is only one breed of corn specifically intended for containers, and it's only on the Burpee website so is more than I'm willing to pay for a seed experiment. Pinterest tells me that others have grown many kinds of corn in tubs, though...so this may be a Pinterest Fail writ large.]

Also of note is the fact that one of the plants that came from a seed in the Black Krim packet is....not a tomato plant. I don't know what it is, but my guess is a pepper of some variety. So this leads to another conundrum: how to feed that and the tomatoes in one container, especially when I'm not really sure what it is. 

In other kitchen-y news...our oven has died. Due to travel schedules between us and our landlord, we have been sans oven for about a week and a half now and will be for probably another week and a half to 2 weeks. The landlord has been apologetic and is skipping the try-to-fix phase and going right to the buying-us-a-new-one phase, so it's not a bad deal - especially as the stovetop works and it's now warm enough to use the grill, so we've only missed the oven a few times. It has been a smidge complicated, though. But I've learned how to cook fish en papillote on the grill, and EPH has been tweaking his steak-searing for the grill (this is a strong suit for him, steaks, so this is not a bad thing). It's times like this that make us very glad we chose a gas grill! I've also recently experimented with cooking an entire chicken in the slow cooker, which was suggested by my cousin and is easy and delicious. So we've got enough workarounds, plus cooperative weather thus far, so it's hard to complain too much.