I am a week ahead of schedule on my new GN for Vertigo Gone to Amerikay, and I hope to be three weeks ahead of schedule by the end of next month. I will then workbomb Stealth Tribes and if I get ahead of Warren on script again, I go back to A Distant Soil with the extra time. (OOP! Forgot to add, doing a job for Marvel as well.)

Feels absolutely great to be in this work flow, so energetic and motivated. Everything going very well and I am completely happy with the balance of work and personal. I was able to take a day off for family this week, and a day off for garden work, and that left me so sore today that I can do nothing but sit and draw, so that is where I will be today.

The only down news: car seems to be completely dead. Do not relish the idea of buying a new car. At least, if I have to buy one, they are dead cheap now. Just saw a used Mercedes for less than $10,000! Holy cow. Don’t want it, but feels funny to know I could just go buy a Mercedes at that price.

I think I will stick with a modest, practical car. No rush, I don’t need one right now.

I rarely even drive my own car – I had loaned it out to a relative when it died. I have not been able to get into the city or see a movie or anything, which is a bummer. It looks like I will be seeing Watchmen on dvd. And I am slow getting packages out because I can’t go anywhere right now. Good thing I don’t do mail order. Of course, being stuck at home means I get a lot of work done, which may be for the best.

Anyway, happy times. The vegetable garden in progress:

The big white sheets are floating row covers which let air and water in, but keep the frost off. We get frost as late as May 10. Turnips, beets, collards, kale, carrots (2 varieties), peas, cabbages, broccoli, celery, basil, tomatoes (7 varieties), spinach, garlic, onions, nasturtiums, corn salad.

The big tubs are barrels from a local winery, which we have cut in half. They house the potatoes. Almost all crops are in raised beds or planters to deter hungry animals from eating the entire crop from roots up.

Cabbages have such pretty flowers that when they bolt, I keep some for decoration. These cabbages lasted all winter with row cover protection, and we harvested a few heads last month. The cold can make bitter greens, but not always. These cabbages were very sweet. Cabbages, collards, kale and belgian endive all get lovely flowers. We make bouquets for the table from them, and some smell strongly of honey.

Tulips planted with blooming cabbages look very pretty to me. The parsley loves it here, and the butterfly larvae love the parsley. I plant extra for them to eat.

The trail leading to the barn. I’ve planted about 2000 bulbs here and intend to plants thousands more.

Usually the vermin get all the tulips, but this year we have been very lucky and have been able to enjoy the flowers. And if we ever get hungry enough, tulip bulbs are people food, too. You can crush them into flour, but I wouldn’t want to.

A redbud tree blooms before a dogwood, which is just starting to show. This will be spectacular in a couple of days. With any luck, we won’t get another major frost.

I can’t recall a cool, lingering spring season like this. I guess global warming hasn’t reached us yet. The flowers love it, but summer crops will go in late. All of my tomatoes are still in pots waiting to go outside.

Anyway, I will sign off and stay on my work goal. Hope you like the photos.

c

Very nice news on the car front. A rebuilt engine has been found and it is guaranteed to 100,000 miles. Here’s hoping Putt Putt makes it to age 25. It will take at least another week to get rolling again, but glad I don’t have to buy another car.

I spent the morning gardening and am exhausted but happy. Rather more exciting than I would have liked as a neighbor’s brush fire gave us some cause for worry. Made mental notes to grab computer first.

Flowers cure all worries.

I love bluets, which grow in great clumps and line our moss covered walkways with stars.

Orange is my least favorite color, but in flowers all is forgiven. I didn’t think I would like these Gypsy Hyacinths, but they grew a delicate salmon pink, and the floral cluster is as long as my forearm. The scent is so strong you can enjoy ten feet away.

Another look at the trail to the barn, lined with wildflowers, daffodils, lilies, tulips. It’s going to take a few thousand more to get the effect I want. Much more fun collecting flowers than, I dunno, shoes, I guess.

Another look at the vegetable beds, with a wire cover. No specials skills required to do this. A roll of mesh will hold the round shape in an arch after you cut it to fit your beds. The ends fit snugly onto the sides of the wooden beds, and can be easily raised or lowered, though the mesh is wide enough for my little mitts to fit through.

Then you place the row covers over the wire mesh. Secure with clothes pins.

I’m not entirely keen on the square foot gardening concept. That gardening technique is a little mechanical for me. But if you want to read about it, here is a good overview with links.

I don’t use any special soils, and get great yields with little effort. For a more scientific approach to the raised bed gardening technique, try this website.

Important safety tip: if you are going to build your own raised beds, you must use treated wood, otherwise the wood will rot. Be sure to buy wood that has not been treated with arsenic. Most suppliers will know what you are talking about and will steer you away from treated woods which are not safe for gardening. If you get some guy at Lowe’s who simply doesn’t know what wood is safe for you to use, go to another store.

Arsenic treated wood will eventually leech into the ground and minute amounts will get into your food.

Of course you can always buy pre-made raised bed kits. They are kind of expensive, but if you are not handy, they are easy to put together. It’s not exactly cheap to make your own from scratch, costing at least $50 each. But for the serious gardener, they pay for themselves within a year in higher food yields.

I’m waiting to see if our wine barrels lend any interesting flavors to our potatoes…

The Saint of Garden Bulbs. Very cute! Thanks to Jacque Howell for the link.

Thought I’d just sum it all up in the title.

Artists just love to complain about how busy they are. It makes them feel important. After not being as busy as I would like for a protracted period of time, I am quite pleased about the busy.

In other news, the Perseid Meteor shower looked exactly like a big bank of cloud cover.

I have posted some more goodies to ebay, including this, the very first A Distant Soil splash page I did for that late, lamented Starblaze graphic novel edition.

Really wanted to get through at least a year without ebay, but necessity is the mother of art auctions. I went a whole nine months without selling art. I don’t really mind sellling art online, I just don’t like driving into the city to get stuff shipped. Time consuming.

Auctions are far more profitable than going to shows, even when one doesn’t realize prices quite as high as one might like. There are no convention overhead costs to consider. And for every piece that doesn’t get the big bucks, there’s another piece that astonishes. So, no complaints. With two major trips coming up, I appreciate the extra cash.

On the gardening front, the rainy, cool weather has made for weak yields, which has left me with more time on my hands to draw. I appreciate not having to haul great loads of water all over the acreage, but fungus felled the cucumbers and I have had to plant more after canning only 14 jars of my prize dill pickles.

Last year I had gathered hundreds of pounds of produce, and this year, no more than about 10 lbs of tomatoes. Only now are the heirlooms starting to produce.

On the other hand, grapes, berries, and root veggies have been generous. I love beets and turnips, and have already planted fall crops.

Lavender has gone wild. I’ve made some nice sachets out of velvet and organza. Some plants have bloomed three times, and we’ve even had some grow from seed, which is tricky. However, lavender doesn’t like lots of rain, and one of my favorite plants rotted out at the root. Fortunately, it started itself again from a stray clump.

Here we are at a farm learning all about how to do stuff with lavender. ‘Aint it purty?

That’s me ma.

All of the refreshments were made with lavender. Lavender cookies, lavender lemonade, lavender ice cream, lavender cakes, lavender salads, lavender butter. Yum.

The following pieces are still for sale and prices include shipping worldwide. These prices are firm.

Book of Lost Souls #7 Original UNPUBLISHED cover art, story J. Michael Straczynski, art by me. Pristine condition on 11″x14″ bristol. This is among my favorites. Very clean. $350.

A Distant Soil: The Gathering front cover art, original watercolor on very heavy Strathmore 500 acid free. Image area 10″x14″ on 11 1/2″x16″ board. Good condition. $2500.

From an A Distant Soil back cover, a painting of Jason, from a VERY early edition of the series, circa 1984. Holy cow, that date makes my head hurt. Mixed media on board, good condition. 12″x17″ image area, actual board with nearly 2″ margin all around. Edges of board have some wear, but actual image area is quite nice. Very clean and bright colors. $500

Paypal preferred. Got questions? The contact button is your friend. And for those of you who can’t find it, that’s:

colleen@adistantsoil.com

It’s the end of the growing season, and perverse wench that she is, Mother Nature sent a cold blast last week which gave the garden a big bite of frost. And this week it’s a beautiful 70 degrees.

I picked as many green tomatoes before the frost as I could. If tomatoes are hit by air colder than 40 degrees, they will have no flavor, and even our row covers did not save them this time. (By the way, never store your fresh tomatoes in the fridge.)

Here’s just a few suggestions for what to do with your late season fruits.

1) Pull up entire plant from root and bring it indoors. Do this before it gets below 60 degrees. Hang in partial light and the fruit will continue to ripen on the vine, which will give you better taste.

2) Ripen the picked fruits indoors. Not my favorite solution, because tomatoes don’t taste as good when ripened off the vine. If they are close to ripeness, just stick them in a sunny window.

If not an option, Carefully clean the fruits, wrap in newspaper and store in a cool dry place. Check every week for rot. Place apple in with the fruit. Apples produce ehtylene gas, which forces the tomatoes to ripen. Also a good tip if you are trying to chit potatoes.

3) If you have a favorite tomato sauce recipe and only a few red fruits, no worries. Throw those green tomatoes in that sauce. Add a 6 ounce can of tomato paste and a couple of tablespoons of sugar to cut the acid. I’ve used 10% red fruit to 90 % green fruit in sauce recipes and have had no loss of flavor. BTW, I never remove the skins or seeds. Run the final sauce through a blender to smooth it. I often make my sauce with at least one cup Merlot.

4) Fried green tomatoes: A Southern speciality, people act like it’s some kind of big secret to make. Fie. Just slice tomatoes, dip in scrambled raw egg. Then dip in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. I often add spices like rosemary as well. Some folks like cayenne pepper. Fry in olive oil for best health and flavor, until brown and soft. Yum! Other folks use corn meal instead of flour, but their mothers didn’t raise them right.

5) Green tomato saute: Chop tomatoes, saute in olive oil with chopped onion and a few tablespoons finely chopped garlic. Save yourself some grief and buy chopped garlic in a jar. Cook in pan until soft. Serve as a side dish.

6) Green tomato bread: The recipe I like is here. Surprisingly good, major winner as a tea bread. Easy to make and VERY tasty. Sounds absolutely ghastly, but you will be surprised. There is no tomato flavor. The fruit adds moisture to this recipe. Serve hot with butter, or cold alone. Sprinkle with white icing, or serve with cream cheese.

7) Easy green tomato pickles: Simplest recipe ever! If you like dill pickles, then you will have jars with juice left over. Don’t throw that dill juice away! Take your clean green tomatoes and put them in the dill juice. Put the covered jar in the fridge for two weeks. Eat! Very clean green flavor! You may plop those tomatoes in the jar whole, or cut them up. This is the best use of those little green cherry tomatoes. Keep stored in fridge. Will last a few weeks.

Green eggs and ham: Take green tomato saute and roll into scrambled egg with ham chunks. Very nice breakfast dish.

9) Green tomato pie: YUM! Three great recipes here!

10) Green tomato saute a la Mexican: Use green tomato saute to cover a burrito like salsa. Add a little hot sauce. Top with sour cream. Or stir sour cream into saute (after pulling out of pan with slotted spoon to remove as much olive oil as possible.) Add crumbled bacon, lettuce and whatever else you like and stuff in pita pocket. Also tastes good with a dash of cilantro. Basically, the green tomato is a good substitute in any Mexican recipe for tomatillo.

I’ve been a very bad girl this week, and am still catching up from being out of town. So, I will be at the drawing board a lot. And I am being punished because I did not get an invoice in this week, and won’t be paid for two whole weeks, and that’s what happens when you have been a very bad freelancer.

You don’t have to reward me for being a very bad freelancer, but feel free to slip me a tip for being a very good blogger.

We’re still tinkering with my new portfolio website, and I am doing major rethinking of my online monetizing efforts. This site will remains as is, with lots of blogging about industry concerns. The other site will feature my art and nothing else.

Also, the long awaited new line of goods at my Cafe Press shop is still in the works. I have a lot of freelance work to do around all that, so it is taking a little more time than I had hoped. I’m slow with my computer design progress. I’m very happy with the progress of my computer painting, however.

A quickee update on my work:

Stealth Tribes now has a minimum production schedule for completion. So, it’s back off work hiatus.

Gone to Amerikay has a production schedule and is not going to be out until 2011. No, we didn’t screw the pooch. Considering, DC’s original GN releases next year, 2011 is the better option.

The old ways are dead: getting a GN completed and having it out three months later is not done. Publishers want books nearly a year in advance.

I have another GN contract which begins production next year. I cannot discuss it.

A Distant Soil is being picked at in my spare time. Yeah, I have so much of that.

I am also doing some conceptual work for a TV show in development. It’s nothing to get excited about, since these things come and go. No, it’s not related to any of my other work.

I’ll be loading long out-of-print short stories to the portfolio site, some which have not been seen in more than a decade. And, of course, A Distant Soil will continue right here. Haven’t decided if I want to go on at 5 days a week or cut back to 3, but we will see. New planning with my monetization may help.

I want to once again thank DC McQueen for her great work here. Not only has she created a very easy to navigate website for my readers, but she made it easy for me.

Our site traffic has gone up like a rocket since it opened in January. I was comparing our traffic to a much older comics site, with nearly 10,000 pages of content. We only have 600 pages of content, but our ranking is higher and trending higher still. Also, we had frequent outages with our old server, and every time we had a popular link, the site went down. Since DC switched us over to her company, we have not had outages at all. Thanks to DC for all that! Check out her work at Girlamatic!

In the meantime, have a gander at autumn beauty down here on the farm.

Here’s a look at the barn, with new hothouse attached. Actually, that’s an old hothouse. A very nice elderly lady whose long-neglected hothouse had become a burden, offered it to us if we would cover all costs of removal, and make minor repairs to her house after.

I’ve already planted veggies in pots and look forward to having fresh winter crops.

BTW, I have not seen my car keys since I got back from out of town. I guess they are buried under leaves somewhere. The chances of my seeing them again until spring are slim. I will be losing a day’s work going into the city to have new keys made. What a pain.

The view from the stream, looking toward the house. I wish I had taken these pictures a week ago. The colors were brilliant.

The front yard is big. This should give you some idea of how big. That tiny little thing way far away in the picture is my greenhouse. It is wonderfully handy to have both a hothouse and a greenhouse.

I put the garden way down there because it has the most fertile soul. In short order, we realized that we lost so much food to moles and voles, we had to build raised beds with wire underneath them to preserve the roots. So, it turned out to be completely unnecessary to put the garden way over there. We could have put those raised beds anywhere, since we had to truck in hundreds of pounds of new dirt for them.

I tried putting a flower garden along the treeline on top of the hill, but that was a bust. After several years, the plants have not thrived, except for bulbs and some herbs. The ground here needs hundreds of pounds of lime. I decided to move the flower garden and let nature have its way with the top of the hill.

Ironically our farm is named Knock na Garry, which is Gaelic for “The garden on the hill”. And there is no garden on the hill.