Gardening
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Tomato City
Last week I wrote about cucumbers and the insane amount we harvested throughout May. Oh, they still sent May off with a bang, giving us a reusable grocery bag full in the last two days of May. But, let’s talk tomatoes…. I’m beginning to run out of counter space. This isn’t a new thing, I’ve dealt with this before in Florida and our harvest there, but we had more counter space then. I’ve been picking them when they just turn pink on the bottom (unless I miss one and get one that is ripe), to keep the bugs and birds at bay. I’ve seen many birds flying into the tomatoes…
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May—The Month Of….
Early May to say, within the last week, could easily be designated the cucumber weeks of May. I’m almost willing to call the whole month the Cucumber Month but the last week the Sumter cucumbers have waned, letting the County Fairs take over as producing the abundance of fruit. I might be able to get another round of fruit out of the Sumters but I think they are done. The County Fairs have another few weeks. The amount of cucumbers we’ve been harvesting has been bordering on the ridiculous. I took some to Chris’ field site for the biologists and archaeologists to eat on, then he was home last week…
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Storing the Onions
If you follow over at Sprout Dispatch you may have seen my post about our onion harvest. For a week the onions sat in some deer feeder platforms in our computer room, fan on, door shut to keep the cats out. The room started reeking about a day into it but finally mellowed (or I got nasal fatigue) by the end of the week. Finally last Sunday I took them outside and cut the tops off, leaving a few inches, trimmed up the roots a bit and then stacked them in some storage crates I found at Walmart. Initially I was going to opt for laundry baskets but a few…
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Then & Now | The Redbud Tree
March 2, 2012 April 16, 2012
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Early April in the Garden
I love our variegated nasturium flowers. I think they are my favorite! The onions decide to start trying to flower and we pinched the flowers off to give the bulbs a bit more time to fatten up. We had some maroon bluebonnets decided to flower at the last minute. Sweet pea blossoms along the back fence line. The honeysuckle aroma is so delightful! I love walking in to the aroma! The County Fair cucumbers were planted a bit far apart so Chris helped them out by putting bamboo poles across so they could vine easier. Caterpillars were going crazy eating lettuce and other plants. We did a round of BT…
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Soup From The Garden
We had a scattering of beets that survived a round of seed planting back in January. They were part of the bad carrot planting we had, rains too heavy and washing away the seeds. But a few stuck and it was finally time to pull them up and replace them with peppers. When we were pulling them I was reminded of this recipe from a new-to-me blog that I bookmarked over a month ago. I dug it up in my feed reader, looked it over and decided it was doable. As you see above, all of that came from our garden. The only thing that did not come from the…
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Taproot
A couple of weeks ago I was reading a blog when they mentioned Taproot Magazine, a new publication partly founded by Soule Mama. I used to read her blog often but haven’t much in the last few years so I went to the magazine’s website and to her website to read more about it. Instantly I was enamored and I had to have it. So I subscribed as a founding subscriber for a discounted rate and between doing that and reading more blogs with photos of the magazine, I’ve been wondering where mine was. Well, yesterday I opened the mailbox at lunch to see it sitting there. I was so…
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Meet the Ladies | Tomatoes
The Ones We Bought In an effort to jump start the season of tomatoes we decided to buy a few plants already started at our local nursery. I’m not big on hybrids but Chris’ mom loves Early Girl and so we decided to give her a try. I’ve wanted to try Cherokee Purple for years but it has never made it into our garden. I have seeds, in storage. We’ll see how she performs for us. I ended up with two Cherokee Purple’s because when I went to grab this one, I broke the tomato. Guilty, I had to get a second one and pay for both. I decided to…
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Mid-March in the Garden
We had two, mostly straight, days of rain last weekend. During the breaks in the rain we spent a little time in the garden getting seeds in the ground and transplanting tomato seedlings. I took all of these last Sunday evening after the rain has finally stopped and the blue sky came out. The photo above shows the sugar snap pea trellis but on this side of it will be some long beans. We planted salvia out front to entice the butterflies and hummingbirds. The sugar snap peas from below. The front half of this plot is spinach and flat leaf parsley. Chris was able to start sweet basil seeds…
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The Sunflowers
I popped into a Dollar General on the way home from visiting Chris at his field hotel two weekends ago to grab a few goodie package items to send to my niece and nephew. The seed display was promptly placed in the middle of the aisle near the cash register and I could not continue on, I had to stop. No, the seeds weren’t organic and who knows where they were from, but I was so enticed by the super cheap price, somewhere less than $0.50 each for most packets, that I grabbed up a few packages of sunflower seeds, ageratum, celosia and zinnia. I can’t wait for the celosia,…