Sara’s Fave Photos

Scallions (green onions) are super easy to grow and have lovely flowers as a bonus, which easily reseed new little scallions. This post is for Thursday Challenge, and the subject this week is “Youth.” And for Think Green Thursday, growing your own food is the greenest thing I know. This photo, like most of the posts on this blog, is straight out of the camera, or SOOC.

Must be away again for a few days; see you on my return.

These Meyer lemons fell off a tree in Sonoma County, California and made their way to Seattle, courtesy of a visitor. Lemon trees have thorns but do an unusual thing: they can flower and fruit at the same time. Those flowers smell so sweet!

Thursday Challenge this week is “Food.” And Think Green Thursday is always about living lightly, to my mind, so eating extra lemons from a friend’s tree is pretty “green” to me.

This photo has a simple subject, but the complication is that I don’t know what the plant is. First I thought comfrey, but I looked it up, and no. Then I thought Lambs’ Ears, but I looked THAT up, and it doesn’t grow in rosettes like this one. So, I don’t know. If anyone can enlighten me, I’d be grateful. It’s growing in a neighbor’s yard near my home in Seattle, Washington. [It appears to be Mullein. Thank you, Ms. Toastburner!]

For more ruminations on the theme of Simplicity, visit Thursday Challenge. And because I’m pretty sure it’s an herb, and that qualifies for Thinking Green, visit them for more ideas about being green.

Even with the warm weather we had this summer, it’s not too easy to ripen tomatoes in Seattle. But of course, I must try. The small ones seem to have the best shot at it, but I’m still learning with tomatoes, as with so many things. These are Husky cherry tomatoes, and the plant is particularly strong and sturdy. The tomatoes aren’t bad, either. I slice them on a sandwich, even the small ones, for flavor that can’t be beat.

Interesting fact: See the little star-shaped caps at the stems? There are five points. Fruits (and tomatoes are fruits, I think actually berries) that have patterns of fives, like an apple’s seeds if you cut it crosswise, are USUALLY safe to eat and not poisonous.

Visit Think Green Thursdays for more ways to live lightly on the earth, besides food gardening, that is.

This new (about a year) house is so great. One of the best things is the backyard space, with no fences between us and the neighbors on both sides, and the scenic horse pasture behind us. This view from our patio shows our little vegetable garden near the birdbath, the two columnar apple trees closer to us, and mostly our neighbor’s yard with the big shrubs. It’s like living in a park!

I feel that gardening and feeding the birds is a way to contribute to a better environment for all. Visit Think Green Thursday for more “green” ideas.

This is one of my favorite garden tips.

When cooking, especially in the cold winter months when you make lots of stews and such, save those stubby bits cut off of the bottom of the garlic cloves. Really, those teensy little things! Go outside and poke them into your vegetable bed, maybe an inch under the ground. If you can, put it with the cut side up. It will grow, I swear, into a plant, and in July after the green tops wither you will have a whole head of garlic! No need to buy special “seed” garlic and waste it by putting the cloves into the ground without using them first.

I learned this after observing that the sliced off root ends of onions sometimes sprouted in the compost pile. I moved that first plant into my garden, and I’ve been planting onion bottoms and watching them turn into big plants ever since. But this is the first time I thought to try it with garlic. Look what I dug up a week or so ago! And these two dozen plants grew in maybe a square foot and a half of space, the plants just a few inches apart.

Think Green Thursday is a site about living more “greenly.” To me, growing your own food is one of the greenest things you can do.

You can’t really call them green beans when they look like this. The yellow ones are called wax beans and the package on the purple ones says they will be green when cooked. We’ll see. They sure taste great just like this.

Here’s a tip: When storing, make sure they are in a plastic bag but DRY (wash just before eating or cooking). Peas like it moist in storage but beans, surprisingly, do not. That avoids the disappointing rust yuckiness. Also, you think you will remember which you picked when, but you won’t. Mark the bag with the date!

Home gardens are the ultimate in local, fresh, and hopefully organic food. And a package of seeds is so cheap, plus the seeds last many years if stored in a dry place. So grow your own! And for more GREEN ideas, visit Think Green Thursday.

UPDATE: I cooked them tonight, steamed the way I always do, and sure enough, the purple ones became green. Check it out! Top one is after cooking a bit and stirring, bottom one a bit firm but tender. No purple! They were yummy.

This small park in Renton WA on the Cedar River is so small or unimportant it doesn’t show on our AAA map. But it’s lovely and perfect on a warm day. We went to be someplace cool and quiet, and rested on the grass and looked at the leaves. It was wonderful.

In terms of Think Green Thursday, even though parks are not wilderness, they remind us of how powerful and meaningful the simple outdoors experience can be.

Everyone loves to grow tomatoes but not everyone knows how to make sure there are lots of tomatoes on the vines. With bees experiencing serious decline for unknown reasons (although I seem to see more this year than last year in my own garden), pollination can be a problem.

The solution? You! Assisted flower sex is the answer, and you get tomatoes for your trouble. Unless you are a farmer with acres of tomatoes, for a few backyard plants you can make a big difference in yield by going around your plants with a child’s little paintbrush, or even a cotton swab, and brushing each little yellow flower in turn. Do this every few days to catch as many flowers as possible, and you will be amazed at the results. And it’s fun!

Visit Think Green Thursday for more takes on the meaning of green.

These chive flowers are so pretty and the plants so easy to grow. I read they make a nice little hedge in front of bigger plants, but I have room only for one nice one. It’s near the kitchen door, and when I’m cooking, I just go outside and snip, snip, there you are.

I think that growing herbs and other food crops are a great way to garden, and good for the planet also. If you’d like other ideas about being green, visit Think Green Thursday.

Visit the new site of Think Green Thursday. I know that posts do not have to be green color, but photos of green are some of my faves, so that is what I am submitting.

These are hostas and the leaves are several inches big, actually not in my garden, but I wish they were. Slugs love hostas, but slugs also love beer in a tunafish can even more, and crawl in and drown a happy death. Thus we can have hostas, irises, and other slug attracting plants. The slugs seem to prefer Trader Joe’s very cheap import beers, quite good for people also.

This is part of my backyard, and my neighbor’s yard beyond the little fence, just two weeks ago. The show is over now, but with the magic of photography, the moment lives on. I am happy that I planted all those bulbs last fall, even though it was such a short, but intense, pleasure. I feel that gardening is a very green activity, and if you’d like to see other photo interpretations of the idea of green, visit Think Green Thursday.

This is not my garden; again it’s from the Bronx Botanical Garden in New York City. This section was to inspire and inform the home gardener. While I have planted vegetable beds with flowers in them, I have never seen the plants planted in diagonal rows. So simple, but such a great idea. If you are going to have neat rows, might as well be at an angle, for pretty.

I like this photo for Think Green Thursday because to me the idea of growing your own food is about as green as you can get, especially if you do it the simple, cheap way with kitchen compost to enrich the soil, seeds, and there you go. No expensive supplies needed, just a bit of know how. Just ask a gardener and you’ll learn enough to get you going.

Just for the heck of it, here is a photo of the raised beds from October of 2007 in my last house. The string trellis at the right is for the flat peas which were already done by then. It was a nice garden, but the current one will be even nicer, eventually.

Here’s a photo from my trip to New York, taken in Crocheron Park in Bayside, Queens—my old stomping grounds, you might say. The weather was mild and dry, and perfect for a quick walk.

The new Think Green Thursday meme doesn’t need postings to be a green color or even a photo, but photos and greenery suit me fine. For other ideas on being green, click HERE.

I found this new meme called Think Green Thursday and I had just the perfect photo for it. My daughter took this of my seedlings on the windowsill, ready to plant outside, and they are so cute and GREEN that I had to jump in and join the meme. Good luck to the Pagan Sphinx for a great idea.