spring 2013 project: my back yard

(AKA, DIY yard terracing! Whoo!)

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to Waltham, our city/suburb, was that I wanted to be able to have a house and outdoor space of our own. I wanted a garden and a yard where our future kids could play. We couldn't get that in the middle of Cambridge or Boston. The lot we ended up with is relatively small, but the front is big enough for some flower beds, and the back yard had a small green space and the edge of a rocky hill. It looked spacious enough when we had first seen our place in late winter, but when the back yard started to fill in with weeds and poison ivy come spring, I realized we actually had very little useable outdoor space.

(You can see larger versions of these picture by clicking on them.)

That lush green jungle is primarily just rocks, broken glass, a large dead tree, and poison ivy. Definitely not useable.

We paid landscapers to remove the worst of the brush last fall; I had gotten a bad case of poison ivy last summer (I used to be immune! but no longer) and didn't want to mess with it again. We were then hoping to have the landscapers terrace the backyard a little, but when we got the estimate for the work, it was about $10,000. We could definitely not afford that! I decided to try working on it myself. (After paying a professional to take down the dead tree. I knew I couldn't do that myself.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I have never landscaped or done anything close to it. Mowing our lawn last summer was the first time I'd ever mowed. The only "garden" I've ever grown was the pots of herbs I grew on the fire escape of our last place. But I am not one to let inexperience stop me! Have you ever heard the silly kids' joke, "How do you make a statue of an elephant?" The answer is "Take a block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." This was the approach I decided to take with the backyard. I would chip away everything that didn't look like "my" back yard.

I got started in late March/early April, after the snow had melted but before anything could grow. I wasn't sure what I would do yet, but I knew that the first step was to clear away all of the leaves, sticks, and branches so I could get an idea of the land I had to work with.

Partially cleared. Unfortunately I didn't take many "before" pictures. This was the worst part of the project. There were decades' worth of leaves to rake away, wrapped around decades' worth of rotting branches and garbage. More than half of the yard was covered in winter creeper, an annoying, invasive vine that kept getting caught in the rake and making my job even harder. I had to pull out all the vines and runners and roots, some of which turned out to be poison ivy roots. I couldn't tell at the time because it was too early for the poison ivy to grow leaves, so it blended in with the winter creeper runners. After my first rash of this season cropped up, I started wearing long sleeves, arm warmers, and my work gloves, and washing myself and all of my clothing obsessively after each time outside. There was also a huge amount of broken glass throughout the yard, which I removed shard by shard.

While I did find a couple 3-4 hour chunks of time on weekends, the vast majority of this work was done between when I got home from work and when the sun set, which was about an hour a day in April. And because of social life stuff, I couldn't be home before dark every day. So it took me the whole month to clear the back yard, one hour at a time.

All cleared. Now that I had an idea of the shape of things, I could sort of envision how best to make it useable space. I imagined two distinct levels: one larger, even one on the bottom, where someday I'd have a garden, a seating area, and a bird bath. The other, upper level would be smaller, left sort of wild, with trees and eventually flowers. I would make a path between the two terraced levels.

I didn't know how exactly that would work, but I liked the idea. Online searches for the best way to level one's land mostly gave me answers like "rent a tractor" or "hire a landscaper," so I was on my own. I did find that for small leveling jobs, people used what a bunch of sites called a "grub hoe" and a dirt rake. I could have gone to the hardware store for these, but first I went to my dad. He had an extra dirt rake (this is the best part about being from a really rural area: of course my dad had an extra dirt rake) and while he only had one grub hoe, he gave it to me because he "never wants to have a reason to use it again." (This did not bode well for how laborious the work ahead of me would be.)

What I call a grub hoe, on the left, is also called a grubbing hoe or hoe axe. It has a hoe on one end and an axe head on the other. You use it to hack at the ground to dig and loosen up the dirt you want to move. It belonged to my grandfather, who was a farmer. It was really exciting and sort of sappily symbolic to me that I would use the same tool he used on the land where I grew up to improve my own home and land. The dirt rake, on the right, is what you use to move the loosened dirt around. These were my buddies for weeks of work and remain my favorite yard work tools.

Again, I could only put in about an hour a day of work, and even then only a few days a week, but I hacked at and raked the ground, pulling out winter creeper, poison ivy, and locust tree shoots as I found them. (I am proud to say that I seem to have eliminated the first two, but those darn locusts are still my enemy.)

The finished version! At least, as finished as it's going to get this year. I sprinkled some grass seed around just to have something growing out there, and other plants have sprouted up. I also planted a garden! A real one! That wild rabbits love! The bottom area is mostly leveled and larger, with plenty of space for our garden (which will hopefully be twice as big next year). Someday we'll put a bird bath and a seating area back there, too. The top area isn't quite as leveled as I had hoped it would be, but there are so many roots from our trees and the trees on our neighbors' property that it was really difficult to move the earth around. It is flatter now though, so it's easier to walk on, and I made a little path between the layers on the right side.

It's getting overgrown, but I just can't spend much more time on it this year.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm so happy with how far it's come!

staying safe in boston

It's been a while since I've posted, and I was writing up a big post for this week, but all of the events of the week in Boston have just put me off of the idea of posting about cake icing or gardening.

I moved to Boston fresh out of college in 2007. I made friends right away, I went out to dinner and to shows and to dance nights all the time, and in less than a year of being here, I met and fell in love with the man who would later become my husband. I've worked several jobs here, went to grad school here, made huge life decisions here. I recently bought a home in a suburb of Boston. I don't know whether it's more apt to say that I adopted Boston or that it adopted me, but either way, in the last six years, Boston has become as dear to me as family member. My thoughts and prayers are with all the people struggling and hurting in our country right now (the explosion in Texas, flooding in Chicago), but I can't help but be partial to my city, where my heart is, in more ways than one.

Everyone deals with strife or fear or terrible news differently. Some people reach out to others, and some people turn in. In the last week I've discovered about myself that I am one of the people who turn in. After receiving bad news, I like best keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, to my very close family, at home. This morning my suburb (and later most of the Greater Boston area) went into lockdown as the manhunt for the suspected marathon bomber continues, so we were literally all forced to "turn in." I can see from friends' blogs and facebook pages that this is a problem for the people who turn to others in times of strife, but this is exactly how I would choose to spend a day like this. So I'm sorry for the relative silence, and though I was about to pick up blogging again this week, bear with me while I get my footing again. I need to turn in a little.

To end on a nicer note, we woke up to find that the orchid a coworker had given me as a housewarming present last summer had bloomed again overnight. It was a really beautiful contrast to all of the dire news this morning.

I'm literally a fair-weather blogger, and now that the warm weather is back, so am I, so expect future entries on the before-mentioned icing and gardening, as well as nightshade-free Tex-Mex cooking (I promised a reader I'd write an entry on that months ago!). In the meantime, please stay safe, everyone, and love each other as much as you can.

halloween pumpkins, and goodbye VeganMofo!

Happy Halloween! This is one of my favorite holidays. Kevin and I carved pumpkins earlier this week so we could put them on the porch in the hopes of luring trick or treaters! (Since we moved this summer, we're not sure how many trick or treaters we're likely to get.)

Kevin's is on the left; mine is the cat on the right.

After we finished carving, Kevin roasted the seeds. I've tried this in the past and not had the best luck--the shells always stay too chewy. His recipe involves boiling the seeds first, which softens the shells.

 

They're really crunchy and tasty, without being too chewy. I was finishing up my pumpkin when he was making them, so I'm not sure what seasonings are on there; onion powder, cumin, and salt, maybe?

Finally, though this soup wasn't made from the pumpkins above, just last week we had a pumpkin soup that I made from a pie pumpkin we got in our CSA.

I added pea tendrils just after it finished cooking, which are another veggie we'd gotten in our CSA. I'd never cooked with pea tendrils before, but they were good! Served with some nutritional-yeasty bread and roasted chickpeas.

With this entry, we close out VeganMofo, the Vegan Month of Food. I hope you've enjoyed it! And have a great Halloween!

roasted cabbage slaw

I really love roasted cabbage, so when I found this Kitchn recipe for Roasted Cabbage Slaw with Hazelnuts and Lemons, I had to give it a try.

Soup, sandwich and slaw! I love all the colors on this plate. They call for half red cabbage and half green, but all I had was a lot of red, so mine is especially purple/pink.

The slaw itself was decent, and didn't require as much chewing as normal cole slaw because the cabbage was softer, but I'm not sure I roasted/broiled it long enough to really get a good roasted flavor. I didn't let any of it blacken, since I was afraid of burning, but next time I'm going to wait till the edges are charred to pull it out of the oven.

One thing I like about cooking is how much chemistry and science are involved; if I had been taught real-life (okay, fine, just food-related) applications of science in school, I would've liked it better. Like beets, the color of red cabbage depends on the chemicals around it--acids in the recipe (like lemon juice) make it pinker, while more basic ("basic" as in the opposite of acidic, not as in "easy") ingredients keep it darker purple/bluish. You can see the chemical reactions in action in the picture below, which is the step at which I added the lemon juice, but had not yet stirred it in. See how the lower edges of the slaw in the bowl are a more blue-purple? You can tell where I sprinkled on the lemon juice, because it's where the cabbage starts to turn more pink. (Mostly at the top and right of the bowl.)

This all reminds me of that T-shirt that says "Baking is Science for Hungry People." Science is really cool when you can eat it!

korean bbq marinade

I've used Emily Ho's recipe for Korean BBQ Marinade several times for tofu and tempeh dishes. I've never had Asian pear juice, so I usually add a splash of lime juice to help give the recipe a little acidity.

Here served over stir-fried bok choi and carrots, with rice. I almost always add some homemade kimchi to the top.

I love Korean food to begin with, and I like that this is one recipe I don't have to adjust because of my allergies to hot pepper--it's not spicy at all. It's also gluten-free if you use gluten-free tamari instead of soy sauce, which I do for most recipes. It's a little sweet, a little salty--in short, it's my favorite marinade.

Sunday Brunch: my favorite: tofu "eggs"

This is the last Sunday Brunch of Vegan Mofo! So I'm posting a couple brunch-y dishes I haven't had a chance to write about individually: tofu "egg" dishes.

Back when I was vegetarian, my favorite brunch/breakfasty foods were egg-based dishes: scrambled eggs, fried eggs, omelettes, French toast, etc. So as you may have noticed, our Sunday Brunches tend to be veganizations of eggy things. Tofu, in my opinion, does a good a job of mimicking the texture and ease of all the above dishes, and with a bit of black salt (a sulphur-tasting salt used in some Indian cuisine) to top it off, the flavor is essentially the same as well.

Tofu eggs florentine, made with fried tofu. It's only sort of "florentine," since I used spring greens instead of spinach.

Tofu eggs benedict, only Kevin's famous tofu bacon is on the side instead of on the "eggs." And a side of Japanese (white) sweet potato hash browns.

And, of course, scrambled tofu. It's not exactly easier than frying tofu to resemble fried eggs, but it's still really easy, and just strikes me as being a heartier breakfast.

 

 With sweet potatoes, the natural (or at least, ubiquitous, in our house) accompaniment to tofu "egg" brunch dishes.

Saturday Snack: Fomu: Boston's tastiest vegan ice cream

Fomu is a vegan ice cream parlor that has been open in Boston since this summer, but I haven't been able to get there until this month. They have a wide variety of flavors available as scoops or in pint containers. You can have your ice cream in a bowl, in cones, or IN VEGAN WAFFLE CONES (even gluten-free ones!), and they have a large selection of vegan toppings, from fudge sauce to gummi bears.

Most of the ice cream is made with a coconut base (but tastes less coconutty than the Purely Decadent brand ice cream), though they have a few flavors made with nut bases. When I was there, of all the possible flavors, only 2 (cake batter and cookies and cream) contained wheat-the rest were gluten-free! The employees are friendly and will let you try a tiny bit of any flavor if you're torn between options.

This is a "single scoop" of cookies and cream and was actually too much ice cream for me. In the best possible way.

I also got pints of Strawberry (because it's tied with cookies and cream for my favorite ice cream flavor), Salted Caramel (because when the lady behind the counter let me try it, I knew I HAD to bring some home for Kevin), and Bourbon Maple Walnut (for my mother's birthday, not pictured).

Fomu is in Allston, two doors down from Peace O' Pie, Boston's vegan pizza parlor. It's also just down the street from Grasshopper, a vegan Chinese restaurant, AND a short walk from Genki Ya, our favorite, organic, not-vegan-but-very-vegan-friendly sushi restaurant, so heading out to this neighborhood means you can eat a great vegan meal and have a fantastic vegan dessert afterwards.