This & That

In the Garden

My sis is having a birthday today. I don't think she reads here any more but on the off chance she does, I wanted her to see in print that I hope she has a happy day doing exactly what she wants, and that I love her.

I wandered into the garden earlier this week. It was nice to be able to do that, since last year at this time I was limping pre-surgery. Kneeling is another matter entirely, but walking is awesome. 

I love the garden at this time of year when the jungle that happens when things really start crawling around hasn't happened quite yet. You can see Evan's garlic patch there on the left, and the squash-type things on the right. No sign of squash bugs yet, but you know they're lurking....just waiting to devour the plants.

The peas are just starting to come on. I don't think everyone else in my family would necessarily choose to plant peas. It's not that they don't like them, but they're kind of labor intensive when it comes to shelling them, and the pile of peas you get is so small in relation to the amount of pods you start with. 

But I'm such a fan of garden peas. They are so sweet and tasty. 

They're sweet enough to eat right out of the shell. So I'll plant my garden peas as long as we can get the garden put together early enough in the year to do it.

The lettuce is still soldiering on, mostly because we haven't had lots and lots of really hot weather yet....thank the jet streams for that. Taco salad this weekend, I'm thinking. 

The Alien In the Garden

We've discovered an alien life form alive and well, and living in our compost pile.

It's growing steadily by the day, wrapping it's sticky tendrils around the garden fence, creeping into the orchard and into the neighbor's pasture.

Several different life forms are visible and living comfortably among its leaves.

Some disguise themselves as pumpkins.

And others take on a gourd-ish disguise.

We're not exactly sure that it's friendly, given the stickers along its big vines, but we're sure of one thing....it's fat and happy and thriving on our compost.

Yard Wandering

I know I said I wouldn't be blogging this week, but I had time last week to take and edit a few photos from around the yard, just to show some progress in certain areas. Maybe it's not interesting to anyone but me. To me, it's just a little bit of a miracle to put seeds or plants in the ground and then watch them take off.

We have lettuce that may be ready in a couple of weeks.

And the beets are doing well. In fact, everything Evan and I planted over the last month or so is up. I should have taken a picture of the peas, but I forgot.

Evan's potato experiment is yielding results. The ones in buckets are much further along than the ones just planted in the trench next to the buckets...for whatever reason. It will be interesting to see if potato yield correlates.

Here are the sad looking ones in the trench. Hard to tell, but they're much smaller. We've discovered some volunteers left from last year up at the top of the garden. We'll just let them go and see if we get anything.

The tossed iris under the gas tanks have started to bloom. This just makes me happy because I think there's a life lesson about blooming where you're planted, or in this case, tossed. Conditions in life may not be ideal, but beautiful things in life can happen when you make the best of them.

I finally got the plants I bought at the nursery into the ground or into pots. I planted a few perennials because for me there's almost nothing better than planting something once and getting to enjoy it year after year. This is an annual that called to me. It's in part of that big hole left by the daisy dig-out. I planted a couple of coreopsis, which usually die on me....ever the optimist. Also going into various flower beds were some candytuft, and a couple of lupine, which I have also tried to plant before and they've never managed to survive. I'm hoping that trying different places around the house might yield different results. We'll see...

The pots are finished. Anyone notice a theme here? So last year at this time we were getting the yard ready for the wedding. You may remember that there was a very different color scheme. It was pink, pink, pink, nothing but pink. (Name that movie.) It's not that I don't like pink flowers. I do. I also really liked the way the yard looked for the wedding, but I did miss seeing some different colors, so I decided we were going with yellow and orange this year.

There's some red-orange in various places, and some white, because you need a little of that, too, but yellow and orange are going to get their turn.

And I'm not anti-pink....I'm not. In fact if you look closely you can see 1 plant that has pink around the outside and yellow in the middle. A little homage to the wedding last year.

We have this lilac in the corner of the yard that has never really done much. In fact my husband and I have been talking about taking it out. I must have heard it was on the chopping block because it's blooming like crazy. 

And lastly, the hostas have unfurled in all their dinner-plate-sized-leaves glory.

The Manly-Man Version

So, while my daughter and I were doing girly things over the weekend, you might wonder what my husband did to keep himself busy.

Well, nothing screams spring like permethrin-sprayed, turkey hunting camo suspended between two trees over the back patio, right?

Then there were some dead things on the move. My husband and Evan had fetched home their newly-stuffed caribou from last fall. Trouble was, they had to do some rearranging in the den to make room for them to hang. Since Evan doesn't have a dedicated dead things hanging spot yet, we have to find a place for 2 critters instead of just one. It was pretty frustrating for my husband because things weren't quite working out the way he wanted. What he wanted was to put it in the living room on the same wall with the 3 gargantuan elk that are already in there. This quickly became a line in the sand issue with me because, while he guilted me into giving in on the elk lo those many years ago, I'm not turning my living room into a wildlife refuge. He has a den and he has a cabin. If things don't fit in those two places, he needs to quit stuffing every dang animal. #huntergatherermarriageissues  In the end, he decided he needs to do some reinforcing on the wall he wants to hang his on.

So this is what I'm left with as he is chasing turkeys in the mid-west. 2 very large caribou lying on my living room floor with a dining room chair barricade around them so small children will have to really work to get at them. 

Evan stuck around after having worked with his dad to try to solve the caribou debacle. Between the two of them, they decided to till up the rest of the garden ground to get it ready for multi-family planting.

He's also trying an experiment with potatoes. We're going to try growing them in buckets to give the place where we've planted them the last two years a rest. He and I have seen some online tutorials about this and it will be interesting to see how things turn out. 

You can see he had plenty of good supervision. So there's the manly-man vs. the girly. I'm not sure which of us had more fun.

Working & Playing

A combination of both this week.

With the slightly warmer temperatures, my walking buddy and I have started our daily therapy sessions walks around the neighborhood again. We have been friends for over 25 years now and understand each other well. She knows I would walk in the rain or snow, and I know that if it's below 45° she will come bundled up like we live in the Arctic. At that temperature I'm usually walking in a long sleeved t-shirt. She also doesn't have hot flashes, and I think that's terribly unfair.

Lots of laundry with regular clothes and company gone, and Easter over. While I classify laundry as a gerbil job....think gerbil running on one of those wheels that goes around and around and around...never ending and never getting anywhere...it's not a job I struggle with. I am a fan of clean laundry and how good it smells. I also iron, which probably makes me a dinosaur on so many levels.

When I was at the farm-y store picking up the peony rings, they had little strawberry starts...10 in a bag of sawdust. Total impulse purchase here, but I'm thinking I'll put them in one of the flower beds and see what happens. I bought 3 bags and only have one planted so far. I'm hoping to get more in this weekend.

A switch out for the little wool banner. Hook, line and sinker for seasonal stuff, especially when I have time to make it. It makes me happy to do stuff like this, and it makes me happy to have it reappear year after year.

I felt like doing some sewing this week. I was really good and pulled out the pattern for one of the sadly-neglected house quilt blocks.

This little section turned into a tree by the house. 

And the finished product. 9 more blocks to go, which means I'm not quite halfway done.

And last week's Project Life app pages.

Current so far this year. That also makes me happy.

Trying to Keep Up

With the exception of the cucumbers, which seem to have inexplicably given up the ghost, the garden is in over drive. Perhaps it senses that it has only a limited amount of time before the frost comes but wow....

Here is a picture of what has been picked recently. The chilies sitting on the wood stove were the ones I turned into the chili rellenos. I think there's over a bushel of tomatoes there, some of which got turned into salsa this past weekend.

The peppers of all kinds have outdone themselves. Take a look at the size of this jalapeño. It's literally almost as big as my hand. 

Beans, Beans.....and More Beans

I am an early riser. I do my best work in the morning without other things to distract me. 

I woke up yesterday morning a little before 6 and was actually grateful I beat the alarm for a couple of reasons. First, it's hard to match this kind of view and second, the beans had been haunting me.

I knew they were ready to be picked, but there was no way I was going to sit in the sun no matter what time of day it was, and pick the dang things. Nobody in my family likes picking beans. We're OK with eating them, and freezing them to eat in the winter.

It's a fairly labor-intensive job unless you only plant a dozen seeds, and it's just like the men in my family to head for the hills when they are ready.

I spent about 45 nice, early-morning minutes picking all I could before the sun got high enough for me to call it quits. I ended up with most of a grocery sack full. Now all I have to do is find some time to get them all snapped and in the freezer before I leave for camp next week. Oh, and pick the rest of them. Dang men.

I noticed a couple of problems in the garden while I was out there. First off, about half my beans look like this. I have no idea what this is, but the plants that have it are much less productive.

And then there's this, which really does have me worried. One of my tomato plants....the leaves are curling and I have no idea what is going on, but the plant next to it has started as well. Any ideas on either of these??

On Second Thought....

We may need that ark yet. You know what they say about people who don't have sense enough to come in out of the rain.....

That was Bryce and I yesterday morning. It was just spitting when we first went out, and being from this area of Idaho, we didn't think much of it,  but it settled in to a really steady rainfall. I kept saying, "It'll quit..." but it didn't until after we came in.

 

 

So we spent an hour in the rain planting tomatoes and peppers. Got them all done and the zucchini, but nothing else.

 

 

We have lettuce and spinach ready to cut, which makes me really, really happy. Here's a little video after we were done planting. That's not background noise you hear. That's rain coming down.

 

 

 

It makes me very happy, and while I was soaked when I came in, it was worth it to have the rain.

 

R.I.P.

This is the last of our 2014 onion crop. It gave its life for the Katsudons my husband made last night for dinner (and it was REALLY good!), except for the sprouty center whose remains will now reside in the compost pile.

Rest in peace last Candy onion remains. Sad......so sad. This means that I will have to start buying onions at the grocery store instead of going out to the storage room to snag some.

The Water and the Onion

Randomness today. For the third year in a row, I plugged in the fountain that Marc made me and it started right up, despite the fact that I don't move it indoors when the weather gets really cold.

The fact is that I can't move it indoors. It's too heavy, but I love the sound of the water outside my newly-glorious craft room window, which has been open for a couple of weeks now. It's just good for my soul to hear it, so thanks, my Marc, for doing something good for your mama's soul. 

When I was fixing dinner last night, I went out to the storage room and grabbed this. Yes, I'm still using onions from the Great Onion Harvest of 2014. It's between the size of a tennis ball and a softball and is in great shape, other than the sprouting in the middle, which I'll cut around because it tends to be a bit on the tough side. The onions we've planted the past few years have been this Candy variety, which seems to be a better keeper than a Walla Walla and tastes just as good. It'll be time to start the new crop pretty soon.