WEATHER REPORT
It never ceases to amaze me how the weather is so unpredictable around here this time of year. I guess it's because it was so predictable when we lived in North Carolina. There, you could always count on Spring coming about the same time each year, and once it came, it usually stayed. Not so here in the Northwest! We had a couple of really nice days with 80-degree high temperatures during the first week of May, and we thought Spring might be here. But it has fooled us like this before. Sure enough, after those couple of days the highs went back down to the 50's & 60's. And of course, we had quite a few dreary days with drizzle and no sun. It is for this reason that Linda and I have learned not to put our electric blankets and throws away until Memorial Day. Just as an illustration of how the temperatures can swing around here, below is a picture of Snoqualmie Pass this week. (Photo from Washington DOT website).
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| Surprise Spring Snow |
For those of you wondering, Snoqualmie Pass is the main way to get from Eastern Washington (where we live) over the Cascade mountain range to the Western side of the state (where Seattle is located). Fortunately, we had not planned to go over the Pass, but a lot of people did and had to contend with this surprise snowfall. I checked back in my journal, and on May 17, 2007 when Linda and I came out to Yakima to go house-hunting, I noted in my journal that there was still snow by the roadside on Snoqualmie Pass. So while it isn't necessarily unusual for there to be snow on the ground during this time of the year, it is unusual for it to be covering up the roadway and creating havoc.
RECIPE OF THE WEEK
Last week I mentioned that I was going to make pizzas using a new type of flour. I am happy to report that I may have found my favorite thin-crust pizza dough! Of course, the dough recipe is from my favorite baking site, King Arthur Flour, and can be found by clicking the link here. I found the 00 Italian flour at Walmart and it wasn't too expensive, so I decided to try it.
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| Italian 00 Flour |
The wonderful thing about using this flour is that the dough does not snap back the way other dough does when you try to shape it. So it was very easy to shape the dough into two pizzas. As toppings for the pizzas, I decided to try something different. I wanted to duplicate my all-time favorite, the Taco Pizza from Godfather's Pizza in Lumberton, so I followed this blog post here (also from King Arthur Flour). However, for some crazy reason I thought I would use tempeh crumbles instead of taco meat, and shredded cabbage instead of lettuce. It was different, alright, but still good. The main thing is that the crust was exactly as I anticipated, thin and crispy around the edges but chewy in the middle. I believe I will be doing this dough recipe again, but using traditional pizza toppings.
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| Taco Pizza |
PEPPERS
This past weekend I was starting to get concerned about my Zavory Habanero seeds. Almost all of my other pepper seeds had already sprouted and were a couple of inches high already, but I had no Habanero sprouts. However, one day I saw a tiny bit of green starting to poke up. Apparently these seeds take much longer to germinate than the Shishito Pepper and Tam Jalapeno Pepper seeds. As of right now, out of the 15 Habanero seeds I planted, I have 4 of them sprouted. The sprouts are so very tiny compared to the other peppers that are already up, but at least they are finally up.
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| Habanero sprouts on the right, Tam Jalapeno on the left |
Once these guys get bigger I will transfer them to bigger pots and then put them outside on the garden cart so the plants can harden-off. All the rest of my plants are already on the garden cart. I roll them out into the sun each day and then back onto the porch at night. We had a low of 35 degrees one night this week and a few of the plants were not too happy!
WEEDS
Our unusually wet (with snow) winter has left us with a bumper crop of weeds. Linda and I were able to get outside on a somewhat warm day this week and pull most of the weeds from our back pathway. However, there are still an abundance of them out in the garden, as evidenced by the picture below.
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| Weeds out in the vegetable garden |
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| Back flower bed with almost weed-free pathway |
VOLUNTEERS
Every year I have volunteer plants come up in my garden. These are plants that have sprouted from seeds that were dropped the summer before. About the only volunteers I get are tomato plants and tomatillo plants. But I am happy for anything that comes up on its own. I spent some time the other morning pulling weeds out of the garden, and at the same time I pulled up probably several hundred tomatillo plants. I bought one tomatillo plant from the Master Gardeners Sale a few years ago. Every year after that I have not had to buy one because I have a bazillion come up as volunteers! I usually leave the biggest one or two plants and then pull up the rest. In addition, there are a lot of tomato plants that come up on their own. I try to leave a few of those, but I have to guess as to which type of tomato they are. Each summer I mark on a chart where each plant is planted in the garden. That way I know what variety is planted where, and I can reference this chart the next year to determine the variety of the volunteers. So far, the volunteers I think I have are the following: Yellow Pear Tomato and Big Cherry Tomato. I am hoping I see a volunteer come up in the vicinity of where the Black Krim Tomato was last summer. I also have staked out a couple of Tomatillo plants as well.
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| Possible Yellow Pear Tomato at top, Tomatillo at bottom |
PARTING SHOT
While I was out in the garden just now taking pictures of the volunteers, I happened to check out Summer Girl's favorite hiding spot, and there she was. She likes to get underneath this huge variegated Euonymus shrub we have. She sometimes stays in there for hours! That's all for this week, I hope you check back next week to see what's happening around here.
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| Summer Girl in hiding |
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