Rest assured that my failure to post much here recently is a lack of garden work recently.
Things I have been doing recently:
Planting second round of spinach, cilantro, mustard greens, shallots onions and leeks.
Repotting houseplants and porch plants (coffee plants and spirea).
Harvesting some of my food, most notably including my corn. I know it's early but some of the ears were getting bit of fungus at the base. They are beautiful! Pictures soon, I promise.
I went to the Oregon Nursery Association trade show, and ended up buying two amazing books, Don't Throw it, Grow it! a book on starting plants from your grocery leftovers, and Food Plants of the World: An Illustrated Guide. The latter is probably more useful, and I have definitely looked a bunch of stuff up in it already. Don't throw it is really much more exciting though. I have lychee, mango and avocado seeds planted, and pomegranite seeds saved. Next up, meyer lemon, kafir lime (because these are true-breeding varieties, not hybrids)and almond! Also next up, more windowside shelf space.

HAWK

HAWK
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

If it weren't for the chickens, I would unreservedly say I am doing something right/awesome in having a visit from this youngster, which I am pretty sure is a juvenile coopers hawk. As you can see, though, he was pretty excited by the ladies, who were pacing and bawking in hilariously useless terror (that wire under him is the coop). The chickens, which aren't full grown yet, are about twice his size. The internet says that it was once thought that coopers went after poultry a lot, and were hunted for it, but that they in fact almost never go for chickens. As far as I'm concerned he can go for all the pigeons and starlings he wants.

I didn't get a good picture of its back, but it has these great fawn-like spots.

Chances are good that I saw this kid getting conceived in a park near my house, back in April. (The best you can say about cooper's hawk sex is "grumpy ambivalence")

In other wildlife news, we seem to have a special needs possum living under our back porch. It is tiny, fearless and clumsy, and keeps getting itself cornered by our totally harmless cat, in plain sight. It is super cute. I hope it grows more so it can't fit under there anymore, but it has stayed the same size for at least a month. I'm sure I will find eviscerated by one of the more hunter-like neighborhood cats one of these days.

On balance, I am happy that our yard is a good wildlife hangout, even if it means extra vigilance.

wonder bean in flight

aerialbean
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is my tuscan wonder bean. It has climbed up its six foot tall corn and I may or may not have helped it make the leap to the adjacent shrub. It is also trying to make its way up the peach tree on the patch's other side.

More soon on the early phases of my summer harvest! In the mean time, check out the flickr set.

Summer is doing its thing

sunpattern
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I don't have time at the moment to upload all my new garden and harvest pictures right now. Suffice it to say that that sunflower (the pattern is my doing) and a couple of others have been cleaned and the seeds are drying. Three heads came to about a quart of seeds, and I have approximately a zillion more to collect. We may try to make sunflower butter with them. We have this scheme, in the fall, to make a meal only of food grown in the garden, and if we make sunflower butter we can skim the oil and use it to make sopes or tamales. The first tomatoes are coming in. My volunteer sungolds are in fact sungolds, though slightly darker than they were. I think they may be ripening faster also. The extremely persistent but not totally delicious cherry tomatoes that are on generation 3 are both more delicious and starting to get that seamed look that heirloom tomatoes have! I will have to look up tomato genetics to get a clue about what is going on there.

I am really beginning to find the summer drought difficult. I kind of hate watering. I killed my wood fern by not watering. My sunflowers in the front bed that I haven't watered since my water barrels dried up are finally starting to parch, though they were okay through the heat wave. I will have to turn the hose on that side of the house on again. My potato boxes are also getting neglected over there. Oh well. Chris doesn't like potatoes anyway.

I finally figured out how to take close-up pictures with my crappy digital camera, so there will be many pictures soon.

first corn

first corn
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is the tiny baby corn from the precocious but ultimately stunted red corn plant which is now about a tenth the size of the others (which are probably 9 fee tall!). I probably picked it too soon (I'd meant to let them all dry on the stalk) so we'll see how well it dries. I tried a kernel. It tastes like, well, cornmeal, since it isn't sweet corn. I was expecting this to be more red, since the leafy parts of the plant have a lot of red pigment in them. There were red kernels in the mix i planted. I'll have to do more research to see if I can find anything on heirloom corn genetics.

It looks like I'm only going to get one cob per plant. I may experiment with clipping the tassel off the top of some of the plants to see if they'll put out more fruit. There is a complicated hormone related reason why that may work which I am too heat-addled to dredge up at the moment.

This is kind of a weird time in the garden. Summer squash is at eat-one-a-day levels, the basil is growing like mad, and I am kind of terrified of all the tomatoes that will be ripe soon. The spring greens are all pretty much toast, (aside from chard and kale, which are pretty much always in season). I would like to plant some more greens, maybe have another go with the cumin, and I have onion starts to plant, but I'm not sure I could keep any young plants alive right now. All I can really do is water.

Chickpeas

chickpea detail
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is my most successful food plant experiment. The sprouting chickpeas I got at the co-op sprouted nicely. They took a while to get going once I transplanted them, but took off. Now they are two feet tall, with a pod every couple of inches. I think they are just about done for the year. I'm going to let them die and plant another batch, since it only took half a season for them to get this far. The fresh pods are very sweet, like very sweet peas (which, technically, chickpeas are). They only have one or two peas to a pod. The most interesting thing about the plant is a sticky substance extruded from the trichomes. I haven't yet figured out what it is for. Bug protection? Heat dissipation? They don't seem to particularly require a lot of water, which the second theory would suppose.
I'm excited to see how much my five or six plants yield.

ginger

ginger
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

Tiny ginger sprouts! It doesn't look like much, but its grown hugely in the last couple of days. I got directions for growing ginger here. This batch of my Exotic Herbs Experiment is proceeding. I lost all my tiny cumin starts to water-neglect and cats crapping in the bed. Better babysitting next time. The sesame is alive but not doing too much.