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You wouldn't think the garden needed any more rain than the frequent amounts of precipitation we've been getting quite regularly, but the thunderstorm that dropped an 1-1/2" of torrential rain (in about 10 minutes) on us this past Thursday seems to have given the plants a huge boost.
I harvested our first broccoli (the one pictured above) yesterday, and we had it for dinner last night with roast beef hash. So good! This head wasn't as nicely formed as the others growing nearby are, but it needed to be picked.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned I was having trouble with chipmunks eating the blossoms off all my pansies. That problem was solved with the (ahem) relocation (ahem) of thirteen chipmunks. Now we've got a red squirrel (or seven) who munches on the leaves of my begonias in the window boxes. What's lacking in his diet that he feels the need to dine on my begonias?
There are quite a few blossoms on my cherry tomatoes. I'm really eager to have the red, little nuggets as an addition to our daily great big bowls of salad. The leaves on this plant look dirty because I just staked it up yesterday after it was pounded into the mud by that thunderstorm that rolled through.
I put this wooden arbor trellis in one of our raised beds and planted my pie pumpkins on either side of it. (I'm embarrassed our grass is so long and untidy but having so much rain makes it difficult to find a time to cut it when it's not soaking wet.)
The idea is for the vines to grow up either side and over the top. I'm sure they'll need a little encouragement (bondage?) to start their climb when they get a little bigger.
I may have inadvertently done a good thing. ('Smagine that!?) This jumble of huge leaves in the raised bed (picture shot diagonally between the two cold frames) shown above is cauliflower.
Year before last I had a great crop of cauliflower, but tying the leaves up and over the heads to encourage nice head formation is a bit of a pain. So last year I found an heirloom seed for "self-blanching cauliflower." It may have been just a bad year for cauliflower (or who-knows-what), but each and every cauliflower went to see on me before forming a decent head. No harvest at all.
I jettisoned that seed and planted my old stand-by again this year. And I planted very intensively. Maybe too intensively. I was sure I'd put the plants so close together that they would never have a chance to develop. However (ta-dah!), the plants have grown to be so lush and healthy that the leaves are totally "self-blanching" the heads themselves without any intervention from me. Super! I'm looking forward to what looks to be a good crop in the not-too-distant future. Once again: In gardening there are no failures, only experiments!
Lastly, I made our second real picking of strawberries yesterday. Thirteen pounds of huge, sweet, juicy berries we've been eating by the bowlful. And in smoothies. And freezing for use after the season ends. Yum! Jam is next on the list.
Yes, our season is much slower and later than most of yours, but with patience (of which my dear husband will tell you I have very little) we do get results. Most of the time.
Well, at least I'm trying to find a stepping block that will get me back into the saddle of regular blogging.
I have my computer back up and operating which is a big relief after the ups and downs of the past month. Seems we've found a good, honest, fair, easy-to-deal-with computer guy whom we are now calling our new best friend. The first computer "guru" we dealt with charged us three times as much as this second one but didn't do anything to solve the problems I was having. So it goes. I just feel very happy to have found someone else we can rely upon when computer glitches pop up that can't be taken care of "in house."
Being without my computer has given me the time to get completely caught up on my whole list of summer tasks. Hahahohohoheeheehahaha! Summer time and the livin' is easy. Well, yes, but because of so many things we want to do, both work and recreation related, that simply can't be done in other times of the year up here in our neck o' the woods, it tends to make it all on the frantic side. Keeps us hoppin', that's for sure.
I want to give my garden some press time here on the blog. And I promise to gather some pictures to post soon. Yesterday, I made my first real harvest of strawberries.
The total haul was four and three-quarter pounds of sweet, juicy, lusciousness. We ate a few, shared a few and had strawberries and cream for breakfast this morning. Only two of our three varieties are producing so far with the heaviest yielding variety (Cavendish) of last year still to start. I can hardly wait for the first Strawberry Cream Pie, and I've promised to make a Strawberry-Rhubarb pie for Papa Pea this year.
Our regular rains continue with a couple of heavy thunderstorms rolling through last night. Our grass is so long we might have to bale it when it dries enough for chopping it down. Right now it's solidly covered with white clover which our bees are loving.
Our little tourist town is full, full, FULL of vacationers so I try to get in and out as early as possible when it's necessary.
I've missed you all (very much!) during this past month of periods without connection to the Internet and am trying to get caught back up. So now, into that saddle and . . . giddy-up!
Just a short post this morning to say I'm having the same blinkety-blank problem with my computer as when it was "fixed" (ha!) ten days ago, so if I drop out of sight soon, don't worry about me as I will be fine -- my computer may not be.
In the meantime, I'll keep on keeping on as we've all recently said we must!
Our days are busy and full around here. Although Papa Pea and I are both home most of the time, we actually don't see a lot of each other during the day as we've both got our own separate responsibilities and chores on which to focus.
We have breakfast together to start the day, touch base at lunch time, and then again at dinner. After that last meal, we're both off in different directions to tie up the ends of whatever we've been working on that day.
If all goes well, we end our day in the living room catching up on what's been happening and discussing the plan for the next day. I'm settled on the couch with either some kind of handwork or a book (usually a novel), and you'll find Papa Pea most often going through old files of his, reading, tossing, or updating (doing this was a big goal for this past winter, but it seems to have seeped over into this summer, too) or reading. He's a voracious reader in his quest to gather knowledge, learn and satisfy his innate curiosity.
It takes about fifteen minutes (sometimes considerably less) for one of us to start yawning (which, as you know, is highly contagious). In my case, these huge, uncontrollable yawns cause my eyes to go blurry, then tears start running down my face with each succeeding jaw-cracking yawn. (It's so bad I actually have to keep kleenex in my robe pocket for mopping up.)
Nine times out of ten, I'm the first one to say I cannot keep my eyes open one more minute, I say good night and shuffle on back to the bedroom.
I tell ya, it's an exciting life we lead around here. And goes to prove that at least for us, once we stop moving, it's all over. ZZZZ-zzzz-zzz . . .
However, all that being said, I do have proof that a few minutes spent each night sometimes produces results.
This is a soft, soft, oh-so-soft knitted baby blanket I recently finished. The yarn is machine washable (a must, I think, for a baby blanket that will be used). It's that chenille-type yarn that's on the market now. I knit it in a simple basket weave pattern and it turned out a bit larger than I had envisioned. (But that's what happens when you don't have a pattern and wing it.) It's more of a crib-size blanket, I think, measuring about 32" wide and 40" long.
So often when I give a baby quilt or blanket to a newborn, there's a two or three-year old sibling that I like to have something for so he/she doesn't feel left out. I found a pattern for these little knit "kittens" that were fun to make. Only about 7" tall, soft and easy for little hands to grasp. I fiddled around with different embroidered yarn faces for them but couldn't come up with one I liked so decided they would be "Amish kittens" with blank faces!
Truth be told, like it or lump it, we all are.
Susan, at e-i-e-i-omg!, using her usual great sense of humor, wrote about the old age bugaboo in a recent post. She hit the button right on the head and has inadvertently encouraged me to put forth my current feelings on the subject.
In our living room, we have a good-sized mirror over the couch. The placement of this mirror was not intended for vanity purposes but rather in an effort to fool ourselves into thinking our tiny living room is bigger than it actually is.
Nonetheless, every time I pass through this area, which is several times a day, I involuntarily find myself glancing in the mirror. Bad idea.
"Arrrgh," I groan inwardly (and occasionally outwardly) each time my eyes are drawn to my passing image. Unlike most women who find themselves looking more and more like their mother, I see my father's face looking back at me. Even though my father was a good-looking man, the first person who says I'm beginning to look just like him may get decked.
Age . . . what is age? I can easily remember many years ago sitting on my grandmother's lap and asking her how old she was.
"I'm 56," she replied. Good gosh, that seemed old. EL-derly. Ancient.
Personally, I was never bothered stating my chronological age . . . until I hit the big 7-0. Now that just sounded old. Still, I've been fortunate to be in super-duper physical shape and to not feel "old" as I hear many folks professing at the time they hit that milestone.
My mental age blissfully remains somewhere in my late 30s. I only wish the appearance of my physical body would retain that message.
In the past year (I turned 70 plus 4 this past spring), I've noticed big changes in this temple of a body of mine.
My skin texture is changing. (I've yet to delve into those ads for eradicating crepey-looking skin, but still.) I'm beginning to fear this unsightly pooch of tummy fat is going to stick with me forever. Are the knuckles on my hands growing bigger every day or is it just my imagination? The aches I experience during the first two weeks of garden work every year have now expanded to two months . . . and counting. Up until this past year, when I stood with my legs together, the tops of my thighs didn't touch each other. Not anymore. From where did that ugly flab come?
Maya Angelou once said (and I'm sure I'm paraphrasing here), "My breasts seem to be in a race to see which one can reach my waistline first. So far the left one is winning."
I must remember that with aging comes wisdom. So as my physical body slides into slothdom, it surely means my brain cells are becoming sharp as ticks.
I mean tucks.
No, tacks. Tacks! Yes, that's the word I meant to say.
In my case, very slowly. Our cool, wet June weather without much warmth or sunshine is keeping everything in the garden from taking off as I wish it would.
I hilled our potatoes for the first time yesterday, June 22nd. Last year I hilled them for the second and last time on June 25th. In the picture above, the row on the right is done, the one in the middle is half done, and the row on the left hasn't been worked on at all.
This is the third year of our asparagus which means we could harvest spears for a one month period which ended a week ago yesterday. So now we're letting the spears go to ferns to feed the roots for next year. We didn't have enough asparagus to freeze this year as we ate it nearly every day and shared some with others. It was delish and enjoyed to the utmost.
You'd think our weather would be conducive to peas growing well, but it seems to me that neither the sugar snap peas (above on trellis) are as far along as they should be, nor are the shell peas (below).
These guys germinated really well, grew about five or six inches high . . . and are on hold at that point.
My Brussels sprouts are doing well. Looking healthy, but not very tall yet.
The yellow and green beans are complaining it's been a little on the cool side for their liking. Although they did germinate, they're not looking very healthy or vibrant right now.
Everyone warns to be careful where you plant mint as it will spread and take over your acreage. I'd like it to just take over this bed. But that's not happening with any speed. It came up kinda spotty this year and you can see the far end of the bed had nothing in it until I put in two new plants. Come on you little mint plants. Purchasing a year's worth of peppermint for Papa Pea's daily morning mug of tea is expensive!
