I decided to create a new website where Chris and I can keep a daily log of our garden. We have plans for winter gardening this year too, so this should be helpful. If you’re interested in keeping up-to-date on our home organic gardening, visit www.vegarden.com.

Chris and I went to the cities last weekend to visit our mothers on Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, the weather was quite drab, but it was a fine weekend. As always, I spent way too much money… but I did have a gift certificate that helped me purchase a food saver, and I got a free bag of dog food.

Chris’s dad had a bunch of morel mushrooms growing in his back yard! Chris brouht some home with him, and we ate them with penne on Sunday night – pretty good, but not incredibly flavorful. I don’t think I’d fork over the money to actually buy them. Inspired by Chris’s findings, I decided to scour my parents’ back yard for mushrooms as well – I found some giant, delicious-looking mushrooms growing on a stump, so I brought some back here with me. We were not able to definitely identify them using my mushroom book, so we decided not to eat them. I have seen references to a book called “Minnesota Mushrooms,” but I have never actually been able to locate a copy of it. I think it’s pretty old though, so someone should work on a new edition.

My house smells like lavender! I pulverized some lavender flowers in my food processor, added some baking soda, and sprinkled it all over the carpet. I haven’t vacuumed it up yet, but the house already smells so much better than it did before. I am working on migrating away from cleaning products that contain ammonia, bleach, and other chemicals. Nigel has had really bad goopy eyes recently, and I think it may be partly because of cleaning agents. A few weeks ago, I made some laundry detergent out of homemade soap, so hopefully using that along with chemical-free cleaners will help out his eyes.

My parents got me a food dehydrator for my birthday last week! It’s super neat – nine trays and temperature-controlled dehydrating. Chris and I made buckwheat pizza crust and flax crackers, which are currently dehydrating. Chris gave me a Raw Food (Un)Cookbook, which is where we got the recipes from. The two will go very nicely together, and I’m excited for this summer when we will have lots of vegetables to experiment with.

I’ve been pretty discouraged about houseplants recently. Last summer, I brought all of my houseplants outside, where they did very well until it was time to come in for the fall. I thought it was about time to give up on houseplants.

Then I learned about papaya. I saw a papaya tree when I visited the Como Park Conservatory last June, and since then I’ve had a desire in the back of my consciousness to grow a papaya tree – mostly just because I really like the look of them. They have neat spikey leaves, which grow like palm leaves do: the leaves cluster just at the top of the tree, and the whole trunk is scarred from fallen leaves. A few week ago, I randomly decided to search the Internet for growing papayas inside. I was completely amazed at what I found. There were many forums with people discussing growing their papayas indoors in New York, people asking for help because their seven-month-old tree hadn’t started flowering yet, and pictures after pictures of 8-month to year-old papaya trees loaded with fruit – many of which were grown inside. Here’s an underneath shot of a one-year-old papaya tree. There are a lot of people who buy a papaya from the grocery store, throw the seeds in a pot, and (seriously) watch their papaya grow to more than a meter high in 8 months, start flowering, and produce fruit.

I just couldn’t resist. I had Chris pick up two papayas in the Cities when he was there a couple of weeks ago. I’m fairly certain (after a lot of picture-browsing and reading) that I’ve planted seeds from a Meridol Papaya and a Solo Sunrise Papaya. If they grow (they haven’t, yet), then I guess it’s possible I’ll have some papaya fruit as early as November. But even if they don’t fruit, I’ll be happy enough if I can just get them to produce some pretty leaves. These things grow super fast.