Palette Herb Garden + Shiitake Bed

Good morning everyone Eugin here 🙂

If you guys remember my previous posts, I have been working on our new pallet herb garden / shiitake bed. Amy and I purchased and broadcast a bag of buckwheat seeds into our garden bed on Thursday (?) and they have already begun to sprout profusely. I did this in the hopes that it would function as a good cover crop, aka green manure.
I also broadcast some seeds into the tomato container. Such vigorous growth! I am probably going to have to thin them eventually.

We also picked up a few packets of herb seeds as well as a few starter “exotic-ish” herb plants. We transplanted/ sowed everything last evening and we took pictures of everything so you can see just how we did it.

Here is a picture of the proposed placement of the herbs.

The middle rows will have butter lettuce and should be surrounded
by a mix of green herbs and microbial inoculant:

With each plant, i took care to single dig as best as I could so I would not disturb the soil microbes in the bed.

Not sure if you can tell in this photo but I gently spread the root ball on this Thai basil a little bit and introduced some of that microbial inoculant to both the rootball as well as in the dug soil below. We spread some of our home made worm castings into the hole and covered everything with soil.

After all the plants were tucked in nice and tight, Amy spread our special blend of green herb seeds around the plants.

We are really hoping for a lush bed of fragrant herbs that will come back season after season, so we have our fingers crossed!

After the inoculated seeds were broadcast, we covered the seeds with our homemade castings and spread as evenly as possible.

Time for feeding! We added sea weed extract and fish emulsion + a little bit of molasses and did a solid drench.

Today, we have more seedlings!

So in this bed, we have:
butterhead lettuce
cilantro/coriander
arugula
oregano
basil
parsley
thyme
thai basil
mint
green onion
catnip & cat grass 😉
All of the seeds were inoculated with mycorrhizal fungus so I hope the bed becomes/stays ever fertile!

I also added some purslane seeds to our azalea “bonsai” pot as a living mulch.

As always, we will keep you guys updated so stay tuned folks!

Also, look at this cool leaf Amy found in our worm bin!

It may be hard to see in the photo but it looks like golden gossamer. how crazy! And say hello to the worms  😉

Thats all for now everybody. I’m off to go enjoy the rest of the sunday afternoon. Hope you all enjoy your weekend!

listening to:
pachelbel

For The Love of Cat(s)

Hello everyone, Amy here! My other half, Eugin, has pioneered this humble blog for us and I am just now taking my first go at it. I am a little shy in the sense that while I do know that I want to take part in this experience but am still unsure of ‘what’ or ‘how’. After a couple days of mulling over how I should make my grand entrance into this WordPress world, I have decided that I will acclimate to the waters by writing about something essential in our lives and will continue to make guest appearances throughout our posts.

My very first piece will be about our house’lions’, Calvin and Hobbes (not necessarily in that order). I would first like to state that although their names may be cliche for a couple of cats, our love for the series by Bill Watterson made it inevitable. Quite surprisingly, the cats have quite lived up to their namesakes.

We adopted Hobbes,

or Bug Bug, or Hobblet, as we so lovingly call her, as a runt in October of 2011. While Hobbes is not a conventional female name, due to a strange blunder by an uninformed worker, for the first few months of having Hobbes, we thought she was a male. Eugin and I have been pleasantly and constantly challenged for the past nearly 3 years with ways to earn more of her love and affection. Why, you ask? Any cat lover will tell you, that a cat’s love is quite gratifying because it is definitely something that you earn. When Hobbes is in the mood for some TLC, she can knock you on your butt with how sweet she can be. Her gentle Hemi-like purr is so decadent that you are filled with the urge to never stop!

Then there is Calvin.

Very much like the Bill Watterson series’ Calvin, our newest addition is full of character, pizzazz, and mischief. For the first few weeks he wasn’t so much a cat as he was a pile of fur with an appetite. We soon learned that he has nothing but love to give and demanded the same from us. We were and still are very happy to oblige. He just turned one this past May and has nearly tripled in size since we adopted him. He is never shy but is deathly afraid of the sounds of crinkling plastic and it still makes us laugh.

The dynamic of these two cats together is very much like the relationship between two juvenile siblings. The love each other greatly like siblings. They bug the pants off of each other like siblings, and that’s is usually Calvin pestering Hobbes. Nonetheless, the love and joy that these two characters bring into our lives is yet unmatched and it is my pleasure to unveil them to you!