Dead Cucumbers are Dead

Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that my peas are doing great and I'm harvesting them now:

The bad news is that the frost got the cucumbers literally the night I decided to put them out. They're dead. The flowering cucumbers that I was so excited about are dead. So I replanted them and like 2 nights later another frost came and now those seeds are dead too. I HATE Wisconsin's weather sometimes, I really do. Today is the first decent day we've had pretty much all month, it's been either cold, rainy, windy, or a combination of all three.

I did at least get the tomatoes out onto the porch permanently. Two are tall and doing very well, one is shorter but still seems pretty healthy, and the 4th might end up going because it's spindly and doesn't have many leaves. I probably don't have room for 4 tomato plants anyhow so if I have to cull the last one I won't shed any tears over it. I need to buy some dirt so I can plant my pole beans and I'm going to replant my cucumbers for a third time soon as well.

Since my grow lights on top of the fridge are now unused I'm considering getting another rubbermaid container and starting an herb garden up there just to see what I can accomplish. I'm going to buy a basil plant and put that outside so it won't take over, I'm not sure what I'll plant inside. I'll come to a decision by time I go to the store for dirt.

In other news, I made a kickass pizza the other day with half of a double batch of bread dough (in retrospect it was too much). In the dough I used 2 eggs that my dad brought up from Kentucky. He gets them from a guy from church who pastures his hens and holy cow are these eggs amazing. The yolks from 2 eggs were such a dark, rich orange that they made my double batch of dough yellow instead of the light tan color it usually is. It was delicious. Here's the pizza:

Go ahead and drool, you know you want to. And yes, it was pretty darn good. Next time I'll use less because the rising crust pushed all the toppings into the middle, which made it a mess to eat. It was still delicious though. :)

I'll try to update more often, we've been very busy though between wedding planning, opposite shifts at work, and being somewhat social. Hopefully my schedule will improve soon. Cheers!

Flowers!

It's been dreary, cold, and rainy for a while but today it's sunny and somewhat warm. Since the tomatoes and cucumbers need to be hardened off so they can go out permanently soon I decided to put them out today despite the slight chill. When I went to take them down, I  noticed this:

I really hope it warms up and stays warm soon, now that there are flowers on my cucumbers they really need to stay outside. I'll probably start training them up a trellis soon. Here are a few more pics:

Note the tiny pea pod down at the bottom there.

 I'm going to need new stakes for the tomatoes. I'll probably pick some up when I get more dirt to transplant them.

 I wish this spinach would hurry up and grow already because I want to eat it. It's probably a bit crowded in here, next time I plant it I'll probably do it in rows.

In other news, I baked an awesome loaf of bread today. It's a shame I'm not off work so I could enjoy the rest of this quite beautiful day. Trevor is going to a Bucks game tonight and Thursday after work we're going to Illinois to visit friends and go to a Porcupine Tree concert. My parents might also be visiting soon. Oh! And I ordered my wedding dress. There's still so much to do for the wedding and it's creeping up on us. August really isn't too far away, and then I'll be a married woman. :) Until next time.

Progress!

Well I was going to update this last week but something was up with the site and I was unable to post. I took some pictures:

Those are the cucumbers, spinach, older peas, new peas, and compost bucket. Those were like a week or so ago. Here's what's cool (Apologies for blurry images, cell phone cam wasn't focusing well):

Those were taken just now. The peas are budding, the spinach sprouts have their first true leaves, the cucumbers appear to be budding (!) and the new peas and tomato plants are growing pretty darn well. Can't wait until those pea flowers bloom. I should have my first produce of the year in a few weeks if all goes well. Once it's warm enough I'll be planting more pole beans out there too. It's a shame that tree blocks all the sunlight; there are leaves already on it and as soon as they're big I won't be getting nearly this much sun. If those cucumbers are actually starting to get flower buds on them I don't even know what to think. They might just be side-shoots though, in which case I'm going to have to get my prune on pretty soon.

Oh yes, how about some recommended reading while I'm at it? Do you like pork? Bacon? Ham? I bet you do. Do you buy the cheap commercial pork at the grocery store instead of off a small family farm? I bet you do (so did I until now). Read Righteous Porkchop and I bet you won't any longer, unless you like the idea of Smithfield confining mother pigs in a cage they can't even turn around in with metal bars separating them from their own piglets or manure lagoons which are kept from spilling over (sometimes) by using what basically amounts to a shit-cannon to rocket untreated, liquefied pig manure into local waterways. Yeah, it really is that bad. I'm not done with the book yet but it's such a fantastic read and will open your eyes the same way Food, Inc. did (you did see Food, Inc. right?) So please, find this book and read it:

Aaaaaaaaaand we already have a problem.

I am really not very good at growing things from seeds. I just haven't had enough experience, I suppose, which will change with practice, but that doesn't help me much now.

My pea and cucumber seeds have sprouted. The others have not. Not only that, but the cucumber seedlings are already a couple of inches tall (!) and I need to start raising the lights. That's going to make the tiny little peas (not to mention the other species once they emerge) really leggy; which is a problem that has plagued pretty much every seed I ever planted.

So what I'm probably going to have to do is get a separate light setup going for the little cucumbers so I can keep the light fixture right on top of the other seedlings so they don't stretch out. It'll take a bit of figuring out but I can do it. It's really too bad I didn't throw myself into gardening with as much gusto as I did cooking when I moved out, perhaps if I had I'd be really good at this by now. But that's alright. We won't have a place with a yard for a while now so I have plenty of time to get this right. And if my seedlings all turn out leggy again this year, I can always just order some healthy ones from the internet and transplant them. I'm not going to buy them from Lowe's this year, not just due to funneling money to Monsanto either. Last year my strawberries from there succumbed to soil disease and my peppers came with a hoard of aphids which proceeded to spread to all my other plants and resist my every effort to kill them off. These are problems you are not supposed to have to deal with when container gardening. I'll get quality seedlings from an organic non-Monsanto owned grower, thank you very much.

With tomorrow being the first day of March, Spring is closer and closer. Here's hoping my little garden gets off to a good start. :)

The Long Winter Ahead

Welp. It's the 26th of December, Christmas is over, and now it's time to settle in for Winter. I don't know where the time has gone and neither does anyone else it seems. Lately I've had many people comment on how they "can't believe it's Christmas already!" It's true, the time has just flown. Seems like it was just yesterday that I was watering tomatoes and picking pole beans. Now there's snow on the ground and my frost-hardy kale has finally kicked it and flopped over.

This next week we will be chilling out and recovering from the hectic holiday season and on New Year's Eve my fiancee and I will be enjoying some Tallgrass steaks. Yes, fiancee. He proposed on the 4th of December. We're planning on having our wedding August 22nd 2010 if all goes according to plan, so I'll likely be posting wedding updates here as well for a while. :)

January will be a month of preparation and planning. I've got to get that bedroom closet cleaned out first of all and make room for a grow-light setup. I then have to get some light housing and wire it since apparently hardware stores don't sell housing for 2 foot bulbs that actually have plugs on them. Also on the agenda is a timetable for when to start my seeds and get them outside. My seed catalogs should be arriving shortly. I plan on doing spinach, lettuce, and maybe some peas during the cold spring months, and then Roma tomatoes (for sauce!) and pickling cucumbers (for pickles!) during the hot part of the year. Since I love fresh pole beans so much I'll likely grow those too. I was considering doing 2 varieties of pickling cucumbers so I can decide which I like the best but I might not have room on the porch for that due to limited sunlight. Strawberries are out, they take up too much room for too little produce. I intend to make jam but I'll buy the berries at the farmer's market or go to a U-pick orchard. There's gonna be a lot of canning going on next summer. :)

Hopefully I'll have enough to keep myself occupied and the Winter blues won't affect me too much this year. I always have such a hard time during Winter. Perhaps this year will be different. I have some bread proofing right now so I'd better go attend to it. I'll likely be whining about that horrible closet in my next update. :)

Always the Summers are slipping away

Well folks, the sun has set on the last day of Summer. Normally I'm in full squirrel-mode by this point (Well okay I still am even this year, more on this later), and pretty leaves and pumpkins are the only things on my mind. This summer, however, has been a very special one for me, and I'm sad to see it go.

I've learned a lot this past season. Not only about gardening, but also about myself. I've grown to care about things such as agricultural sustainability, homesteading, and the value of knowing how to just do things yourself. I've realized that I'm really, really good at picking up new skills on my own just by looking up a how-to page on the internet. I feel like I will one day be able to do a lot of things that most people would balk at. Hell, I already know how to bake bread all by myself without using a machine of any sort. Just the other day someone was surprised when I told them I baked bread often, but don't own a bread machine. Sometime in the near future I'll be doing my own electrical wiring (actually this coming spring I'll have to rig up some lighting for seed starting!) and minor home repairs, just because I want to prove to myself that I can. I'd fix the broken switch on the washing machine so we don't have to lift the lid to get the basket to spin, but that involves buying a replacement switch and Trevor won't let me because that's the management's responsibility. I agree with him there, so I think I'll just have the repairman show me how when he does it.

Before I go too far off on that tangent, I'd like to go ahead and go back to that whole squirrel-mode thing. I don't know what it is, but every single year around Autumn I get the urge to hoard food. And this isn't a recent thing, I did this as a very young child. I specifically remember making a list for a winter cache and raiding the kitchen so I could store stuff in my room. My mother was none too pleased to find a bunch of cereal and other foodstuffs stashed in my own cupboards instead of the kitchen's. This year, I have a canner. This year, I bought an entire bushel of apples. And this year, I have garden veggies to freeze and raided the Madison farmer's market for enough jam and honey to last through the coming winter. I still have a few apples to can, but let's just say I won't be hurting for applesauce or apple pie anytime soon.

This year, my ridiculous squirrel instincts have been (mostly) satisfied. It's... well, satisfying. The only thing that would make me happier is if I had an actual cellar with a huge wall of shelves full of jars. Maybe in a few years. I can't wait to see how bad this urge gets when I have children to care for, because my maternal instincts make me even more irrational than my squirrel instincts. Trevor will probably refuse to talk about it.

Oh yes, the garden! The last few pole beans are slowly coming in. I have several pods that I just left to completely ripen and dry out so I can save the seeds for next year. Got some good tomatoes (finally). Those went into vegetable soup. The anaheim peppers have blossom-end rot, so they're going to be a total loss unfortunately. Very frustrating, but at least now that my chili pepper is going wild with blossoms I can give it some milk so they don't end up like the first batch of tomatoes and the anaheims. I bought a string of peppers for drying at the farmer's market, so I won't go without. One little strawberry plant is hanging on like a champ, but I know I'm going to lose it to the same wilt that got the others so I'll probably yank it and use the pot for cold-weather crops. My basil is going nuts again, I'll probably trim it back soon.

As far as cold-weather stuff, I've already got kale, lettuce, and swiss chard planted. They're all leggy as hell since I started them from seeds and only have one puny light in there. I put them outside in the sun before any more damage could be done and picked the strongest ones when I thinned them, but they're still floppy. Ah well, they're still growing well. I plan to plant some spinach if I can just find some seeds. I may have to order some, since apparently none of the stores around here have heard of fall planting. I think I'm gonna do some garlic too, and when it gets too frosty for anything to grow I'll fire up the old Aerogarden.

The summer was a cool one, but it was still kind to me. I learned a lot of lessons and will have a bigger, better garden next year. Signing off for now. Fare thee well, Summer! Until next year.

Another Job

I found out yesterday that I'm being hired back at Sendik's, which is a higher-end grocery store here in the Milwaukee area. I'll be making $9 an hour, 4o hours a week. Yeah, big load off my mind. I've been watching our savings steadily decline while waitressing and was really starting to get worried. Crisis averted!

Anyhoo, I did my fall seed-starting. Well, some of it anyway. I found seeds for kale, lettuce, and swiss chard. I still need peas and spinach, plus some new containers and dirt (I didn't plan that out very well.) Here's hoping that we'll have some lovely fresh greens right up until the frost gets bad enough to kill them all off! In other news, my pole beans are flourishing. Every couple of days I go out there and pull off a good handful of deliciously snappy beans. I've been mostly eating them raw rather than cooking them. They're good in salads.

The tomatoes have been struck with blossom-end rot, unfortunately. I'll still have a few decent ones but all the biggest ones are rotting. This is another lesson learned: Forget relying on commercial feed. I've been using Miracle-Gro for them, but apparently they don't put enough (or any) calcium in it, which has led to a calcium deficiency in my plants which causes blossom-end rot. Next year I'm going to do some composting out on the porch and ditch the Miracle-Gro (it's owned by Monsanto anyway and they're not getting another dime of my money if I can help it.)

Not sure what's up with my big pepper, either. It's not getting any bigger and I assumed it just needed to ripen, so far it's still green but it's shriveling in the middle. Dunno if that's normal or not, I'll keep an eye on it. There are more tiny peppers starting to develop on there too, and still plenty of flower buds to open yet.

My strawberries... well, I think they're a bust too. They seem to have Verticillium Wilt. I've already lost two plants, and the others are showing signs of having it, even the little baby runners. I mowed the big ones down to ground level to interrupt the disease cycle, we'll see if they last much longer. Either way I think I might go ahead and yank them and dispose of the soil and bleach the hell out of the containers. At least then I can reuse them for my lettuce and stuff. I'm thinking strawberries might take up too much space for so little yield anyhow. I might ditch them in next year's garden and wait until I can put a big patch in the ground to grow them. Next year when it comes down to jam-making time I'll probably just hit up a U-pick farm.

I bought some new books, including one called "Almost Vegetarian". We're trying to cut back on the amount of red meat we eat, so the books I bought should help towards that goal. Tomorrow I'll go to the Farmer's Market and stock up, today I think I'll take whatever scraps I have left and make pork or chicken fried rice using this method. Maybe even shrimp, although I don't much care for shrimp.

Oh look, it's 10 AM! I Love Lucy is on. Toodles!

Bread!

Today I got up early so I could get a loaf of bread in the oven before it gets too hot. Nothing beats the smell and taste of fresh bread, and since I still have some strawberry jam left I'm in for a treat later today. I might stop by work later since I've promised my banana bread recipe (I actually got it from Trevor's mom), some green tomatoes, and whatever bread I made next to various co-workers.

I like to be generous at work. It seems like so many people are astounded by the fact that I like to cook and bake, and even more astounded when I tell them how simple it is. I try not to bore them with details about my garden and the finer points of bread-baking (mostly because once I get going it's hard to shut me up), but I do bring in some of my stuff to share. Generosity seems to have gone by the wayside with many folks today. Even Trevor sometimes snarls at me when I'm heading toward the door with half a batch of scones packed up for people at work. "Don't take those to work! They cost money to make! Let them get their own!" I try to gently remind him that we are blessed to have what we do have, and that brightening another person's day with something delicious to eat is never a waste. I fully believe that there is a reason that things tend to work out for us, and that if we ever start acting selfish and greedy that things will go sour. Besides, we're both constantly spending far more money on video games, books, and music than ever goes into what I bake. If we were really hurting for money, those luxuries ought to be first to go, not the occasional treat for friends and neighbors.

Having said that, it's looking like late summer will be a time of plenty as far as beans, peppers, and tomatoes go. I've been keeping an eye on those beans the past couple of days, and they've gone from no flowers at all to too many for me to count. I'm so glad that I didn't decide to prune them back. The tomatoes are still growing extremely well, although I did lose one to a nasty split (I overwatered. Whoops.) New flowers burst open on the anaheim every day. The weather has taken a turn for the warm as well, with it being in the 80's all week and the 90's for the weekend. It'll be miserably hot at the state fair but I don't care. We'll still have a blast.

I need to go check on my bread dough, it should be just about done with the first proof pretty soon. It'll be going into a pan for half an hour after that for the second proof, and then into the oven for half an hour. Then it's going into my mouth. Here's the recipe, for those interested:

Farmhouse White Bread

1 Package Active Dry Yeast
1 Cup Lukewarm Water
1 Tablespoon Sugar
2 3/4 to 3 Cups Bread Flour
2 Tbsp. Unsalted Butter, room temp
1 Tsp. Salt

1. Dissolve yeast in lukewarm water, add sugar, wait for bubbles.
2. Add 1 cup flour, butter, and salt, mix well. Then add the rest of the flour.
3. Turn the dough out and knead 10 minutes.
4. Put dough in bowl, cover, let rise for 45 minutes.
5. Preheat oven, oil bread pan.
6. Punch dough down, put in pan, cover. Let rise another 30 minutes.
7. Bake about 30 minutes.
8. Remove from oven, cool on wire rack.

Enjoy!

Edit to add: My but the birds are out today! American Goldfinches, mourning doves, chickadees, downy woodpeckers... all have been to my feeders this morning. I never get tired of hearing the birds flitting around the tree outside, chirping and singing between raids on my feeders.

An update!

Well now, it's been a while hasn't it? To be honest, nothing much has gone on, though there has been a little progress with the garden.

The tomatoes, for one, have exploded. I hung the basket up from the roof to catch the sun for a few days, and just left it alone, wondering when the tomatoes would start really developing. Well, a storm rolled in and I took it down out of the wind, and there were suddenly like 20 or 30 little tomatoes between the two plants! It's taking a lot of water to keep them from wilting now. I snipped the baby strawberry runner from the mother plant, we'll see how it fares. My anaheim has a lovely little pepper growing and new blossoms opening every day, and the chili plant has sprung back nicely even if there are no flowers yet. The beans, unfortunately, seem to have stopped producing. They're growing nicely, but after I picked those first beans no more blossoms have appeared. Next year I really need to watch how I fertilize my plants, because dumping fertilizer on nitrogen-fixing crops means lots of foliage but no produce. Lesson learned, I suppose.

I practiced my pie making the other day. I'm terrible, and need a lot of practice. I think most of it will be reserved for the winter, though, because even with though this has been a fairly cool summer so far with us being on the third floor and having poor airflow it gets unbearably hot in here sometimes with the oven on. That's alright, it'll give me something to do while I'm pining for the spring to come.

Oh yeah, Trev said we're going to the State Fair next Saturday. Can't wait! I'll be sure to take lots of pictures. It'll be good exercise stomping all over the fairgrounds for hours. Speaking of exercise, I'm trying to walk on our treadmill every day for a mile. I feel so much better when I do, I think a distinct lack of aerobic exercise might be part of why I feel so tired all the time and have low blood pressure. I'm so out of shape it's not even funny. Eventually I'd like to increase my endurance so I can flat-out run a mile. Right now, it takes forever to reach a mile even walking really fast and it's so boring I can hardly stand it. I try to read while walking but even so. I tried watching TV, too, but the stupid machine is too loud to hear the TV over. Today it's nice and cool again with a lovely breeze, so at least I won't roast half to death.

Oh! Before I forget, it's recommended reading time! We go to Half-Price Books a lot, and last time we went I found a book by John Seymour called The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It. It's a wealth of knowledge, and I'd suggest it to anyone who's interested in homesteading. If only I had the means to really put that knowledge to use! I don't think Trev will ever go for it, though. I also found The Gallery of Regrettable Food, which is a hilarious look at the terrible stuff they served back in the 50's and 60's. Hot dogs and beets in jello molds? You bet! My other good find was a book on preserving, which will come in quite handy this fall when we raid the apple orchards.

I'm going to head out now, I need to make the bed up, do some dishes, and get my walking and showering done. Toodles!

Harvest time!

Some of those beans are ready for harvest today. and my Anaheim finally had a single blossom burst open. The others should follow suit soon.

I made a blueberry crumble the other day. I was going to make a cobbler but I didn't feel like messing with pie pastry, so I just whipped up a crumble topping with a cup of flour, 6 tablespoons of butter, half a cup of brown sugar, and a few handfuls of granola and rolled oats. Tossed the thawed blueberries with some flour and more brown sugar and into the buttered baking dish they went, followed by the topping. I don't remember how long I had to bake it, I just checked it after a while and it was bubbling. Turned out to be quite delicious. I think I need to work on my pie pastry, so maybe tomorrow that's what I'll do since Saturday we'll be busy.

I'm off today, so we might go see Harry Potter sometime after Trev gets home from work. I think I'm going to make vegetable soup tonight, so I'll need to get a bag of my beef stock out of the freezer (I usually make this soup totally vegetarian by using vegetable stock, but there was none at the store. Only chicken and beef.) and should probably go throw together a loaf of bread and get it proofing. I don't think we have any block cheese, which is unfortunate because I always serve soup or stew with crusty bread and cheese for dipping. Blah, maybe we'll just have Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes with the green beans on the side, and I can whip up a bowl of salad. We'll see. :)

A garden update and the Moosecat

Before anything else I'd like to spare a word for my dearly departed kitty, who passed away a year ago yesterday from renal failure. Moose, you are and always will be missed. Hope there's always a patch of warm sunlight up there for you to roll in.

That said, I've got an update on the garden, and this time there are better pics. Those beans are even bigger now (I had no time to upload everything the day I took these and have been lazy since), as a matter of fact the biggest is already longer than my middle finger (which is my longest finger). Amazing how those things can develop in just one week. Bunch of ripe tomatoes on the vine too, and the basket strawberries have put out a runner. I'll probably go ahead and keep it to replace the one that died. Here are some pictures:

Bean blossoms!

My bean plants have a ton of little purple flowers popping up all over. Also, my anaheim has shot up a good 3 or 4 inches past the stake I tied it to and the chili plant is growing some fresh new leaves to replace all the wilty ones. It might make a comeback yet if it starts growing like the anaheim is. Still waiting on the flower buds on the anaheim to pop open. Tomatoes are doing well and the strawberries are looking good too, save for the little wilty runner. It died. :( I probably didn't let the roots go deep enough before I snipped it off the parent plant. Ah well, live and learn.

We're going to the Milwaukee Zoo on Wednesday. I'll post a trip report with pictures soon as we get back.

More balcony and garden

Here is the view from our balcony, taken today. We're on the third floor so it's pretty nice. It's usually very quiet out save for the occasional loud car or nearby construction, so I sit out here often to enjoy my breakfast or read a book. Lately we've had a problem with wasps, but I got rid of them. Normally I leave bugs alone, but paper wasps are aggressive and like to get into the house, and none of us want to be stung. I wish I'd taken pictures of the nest after killing the queen wasp, it had larvae and eggs in it, which is pretty cool if you like bugs (I do.)


This is the tree just outside. I love this tree, it provides me with plenty of birds and a place to hang my feeders. I put them out into the branches using a long pole, and bring them back in again when they need refilling. Currently the wooden feeder there is empty due to Red Winged Blackbirds raiding it nonstop. I've just taken to filling a tray and setting it on the edge of the balcony for now, so the seed isn't knocked onto the ground and wasted by these giant birds trying to land on it. I get mourning doves, cardinals, chickadees, american goldfinches, robins, and the occasional blue-jay here on the porch. In the winter there will be dark-eyed juncos, but you never see them in the summer here.

These are new berries starting to form. I'll get a few stragglers like this until fall, when the second bigger crop should come in. It won't be enough for preserves or anything, unfortunately. I think when we get a yard I'm going to plant a big patch of June-bearing varieties so I can have a bumper crop to make preserves out of. But that's a story for another day.






Look at all the flowers on these tomato plants! I can't wait to see this thing loaded down with fruit later on this summer. I've been trying to ensure pollination by shaking the branches, apparently that works well with tomatoes. I do get the occasional fat little bumblebee up here but not much else in the way of pollinators, so it's up to me. You can see my finch sock there too. There are almost always at least two birds hanging off that thing.




Here are more tomatoes. That red one still has a couple of days to ripen before I'll bring it inside for Trev to put on his sandwiches. This plant also has plenty of flowers and is growing well. A few sunburned leaves, but otherwise it's a healthy plant.








Pole beans! These are Kentucky Wonders. They absolutely flourished during the hot spell we just had, and are like twice the size they were a week and a half ago. I was planning to just let them grow up the little trellis I have staked there, but I'm considering letting them grow all over the railing on the balcony as well if they want to. The only problem there is if a storm comes I won't be able to move them back out of harm's way, so we'll see about that. I'll update when I see flowers on these.



This is an Anaheim pepper plant. It's doing pretty well and has a couple of tiny flower buds that still seem to be forming. Hopefully they'll bloom soon. I'm really hoping to get a good harvest from my peppers so I can dry them and make my own chili powder.








This is my chili pepper. This poor little thing was doing very well until some aphids decided to move in. Well, I wasn't about to have that, so I bought a squirt bottle and filled it with dishsoap and water. It didn't really deter the aphids completely and caused the poor plant to wilt and become stunted. Trev's grandmother kindly gave me some insecticide powder and I promptly came home and rained aphid death upon the plant, but it never really recovered. I'd have replaced it by now but Lowe's doesn't have any that look much better, unfortunately, and it's way too late to start one from seed.

These are my little runners from the strawberry pot. The wilty one on the right there is the newest one to be planted, once it gets established more it won't wilt during the heat of the day. The others are doing well, but I'm not putting them into full sunlight just yet. Once their root systems are better established into the soil, I'll start hardening them off to sunlight. Hopefully these babies will produce well next June.





This is spinach. Well, it was spinach. We ate it all. It was delicious. Unfortunately, it's now too hot for spinach, so we'll have to rely on store-bought until things cool down in the fall. Then I'll plant a whole bunch more and we can enjoy fresh spinach in every sandwich and salad again.








This is my monstrous basil plant. The aphids have also attacked this but they're unable to hurt it, apparently. It's just growing too fast. The bumblybees love the flowers, and we love the leaves. I'd be giving this away if I knew anyone who wanted any, since it's obviously growing way faster than we're using it. Once it gets too cold for basil I should see about making pesto.






I think that's it for today. I need to shower and eat something so I can be to work at 4 PM. I currently work as a waitress at a little restaurant within walking distance. As a matter of fact, the place is actually so close that if I go out onto the balcony in the morning the smell of bacon often wafts over from there. I don't make particularly good money ($40 or so on a good night, $15 on a bad one, in between any other time) but it's not a stressful job at least. It's something for now, and when it's time to move on something else will pop up. I'm trying to learn to drive by then, and Trevor might be moving from his deli job at store level to a graphic design/marketing sort of position at corporate. We're really crossing our fingers for that one, we need to start building up the spare cash for a down payment for a house. Anyway, I'm out. :)

In which I introduce my kitties, boyfriend, and garden.

These are my two cats. The one on top of the doors is Tarquin. Tarquin... likes to do dumb things. This is clearly demonstrated in this picture, where he has opened the closet, climbed through all the junk in the closet, and pulled himself onto the top of the doors. I don't know why Tarquin does these things, I just know that when he gets it in his mind to get into something he's probably going to do it whether we try to deter him or not. If we keep him from getting into the closet, he'll just go under the sink and get stuck, or behind the entertainment center. Or on top of the bathroom door. The little one on the floor there is Sebastian. Sebastian loves me very much, and rubs on my legs while I'm cooking and asks me to pick him up so he can purr and lick my arm. He bites Trevor. He bites any company we have. He bites my mother. He bites everyone else who tries to pet him. Hell, he even bites me sometimes. But I loves him anyway. :3

This is Trevor. He's my boyfriend, hopefully soon to be fiance, hopefully eventually to be husband. We've been together going on 3 years now. He works hard and puts up with a lot of crap from his girlfriend, who has ADD and random bouts of depression (not to mention horrible PMS.) I love him just because he's Trevor, but I especially love him because he praises my cooking, tells me how pretty I am, and no matter how clingy and pouty I'm being he'll always hug me until I get tired of it. Trevor loves video games. No, really, I mean he loves video games. If he's home from work, he's probably playing a game unless we've got company over. And even then they're probably playing something that has multiplayer.

And now, the garden. These are all early pictures, I'll post current ones in my next post. These here are Quinault strawberries, an everbearing variety. The little flowerheads I'm holding there eventually turned into fat little strawberries. They were a little bitter, which was disappointing, but these plants are only in their first year so they still need time to get established. Next year's first crop will probably be bigger, fatter, and more delicious.





More strawberries, this time in a hanging basket. I'm up to 7 strawberry plants now since the other pot put out 3 runners.











These are tomato plants that I foolishly thought would have enough room to grow in one of these little containers. They're actually doing okay now; the top one has lots of flowers and a tiny tomato and the bottom one at least has a few flowers. When these plants are done I'll reuse the container, but not for tomatoes I don't think.







These are tomatoes that were growing way back when I first bought the plant. This is one of those $10 container tomatoes from Lowe's. Trevor has since eaten some of these tomatoes and declared them to be good. I'm not a fan of raw tomatoes, unfortunately, so I'll have to take his word for it.








Ah, my poor peas. I overfertilized these, so they unfortunately never flowered. Too much nitrogen in the soil makes for lovely green foliage but you sort of need flowers for produce. I should have given them phosphorus. So, I had to pull them up to make room for my pole beans. These will be planted again in the fall since the summer heat is way too much for them. I actually had a couple spring back up from the pot I pulled them out of, and decided to let them grow along with the strawberry runners I had started there since they were such little troopers. Well, that was before the 93 degree three-day hot spell we had. Farewell, ye peas, we hardly knew ye.