The Past Few Months

The last two and a half months have been so busy that I haven't had any free time to breathe, much less blog.  Now I'm heading off to Minneapolis and General Assembly for a week, but here are just a few visuals of what's been going on:

Vegetables

While our hydrangeas came out in a myriad of colors this summer, our vegetable garden has had strange results, perhaps because of the inordinate amounts of rain. The peppers that usually do amazingly have barely produced anything, many of our lettuces were soggy and tasted bitter, and our tomato plants look awful--especially the lower parts of them-- despite the fact that we had ripe, wonderful tasting black krim and big rainbow tomatoes two weeks ago.

The rain barrel we put in to help us reduce the amount of water we'd use has overflowed several times since we haven't really needed to hose the garden much.

But our pole beans have grown up and off the trellis and our zucchinis have been huge. Kathy has made lots of two different kinds of zucchini bread -- one much healthier and one much tastier-, zucchini chocolate chip cookies, and zucchini parmesian.

When we got back from the Cape this weekend, our garden was overflowing with other tomatoes (Zapotec and Big Boys are just ripening), onions, scallions, beans, and carrots, as well as several more zucchini. We also had three different kinds of potatoes-- red, blue-purple, and onaway-- even though we didn't plant them this year.

And after months of lots of leaves the broccoli and the eggplants are finally growing vegetables!

Vegetable Garden

This year we decided to double our vegetable garden.  In early April we got the beds ready and planted seeds.  Today we finished putting in most of the rest of what we'll be raising.  

We've got tomatoes, peppers, eggplant,

herbs, and 

onions.

 The seeds we put in in early April have begun to come up.  They include carrots,

broccoli,

beets,

and pole beans.

The strawberries and blueberries in our containers are also in bloom.

Overall it's a great start!

Dreaming

I've got two of my three classes for the spring semester ready to go and spent most of the long weekend doing some of the "reading updates" on the third, my Contemporary Issues in Religion course. (Who could possibly imagine that so much stuff would be written on religion and biogenetical issues in one year!) In between reading articles on stem cell research and Michael Crichton's Next (one of this year's required books for the course that I'm 1/3 of the way through rereading), Kathy and I did some garden planning. We decided that, while we'll cut back on the variety of potatoes this year and plant only three kinds--Onaways, Cranberry Reds, and All-Blues-- we'll double or triple the number of hills we'll make.

We're also going to put in more tomatoes this year than last because I really can't stand the tasteless "fake" ones they sell in stores and serve in restaurans during the winter and spring. With more of our own, we'll be able to can some and make sauce from some so that we'll have the real tomato taste during these colder months. We'll go mainly with traditional types--Burbank, Brandywine, Calabash, and Chadwick cherry-- though I ordered a Tigerella (a variety on the Green Zebra that disappointed me last year) and a Yellow Perfection plant (both of which are heirlooms) for some variety and a Stupice so that we'll have tomatoes early in the season as well as late.

We're going to skip cucumbers this year, since no one really liked the ones we grew last year. Instead we'll expand our lettuce varieties. Rather than just green Romaine, we're going to try to grow Red Iceberg, Savoy, Red Romaine, and Formidana-- and we're going to try to start them from seed. We're also going to put in more peppers than last year-- mainly sweet varieties in orange, red, and purple--so that we can freeze some for winter and spring cooking. All of this will mean probably doubling the amount of the tiny back yard we give over to gardening, which I find really exciting!


On top of that, since Kathy would like to grow some berries, we're also going to try to do some container gardening as well, planting Ozark Beauty strawberries and Top Hat blueberries in medium sized pots and keeping them on our back porch.

Now to begin the two month countdown until I can begin to prepare the soil!

Books, Cheese, Gardens, and Papers

It's been a busy month. My desktop crashed, causing me to have to reload Windows and then copy everything from the laptop. At the same time I had a 50 page paper due for one of my grad school courses and then, when that was done, all the termpapers and final exams that my students turned in had to be graded. But they're DONE!!!!

So now I'm turing my attention to summer type things. With the exception of the Onaways (which I would have thought would show themselves first), our potatoes have all begun to show themselves.

We put cucumbers, peppers, and lettuce in last week, along with a lot of different kinds of flowering annuals. We've also planted the hanging baskets and gotten them up on the front porch. And about two hours ago, I put our tomatoes (four different kinds this year, including Green Zebra and German Johnson heirlooms) in the ground.

My hopes for the next month until my summer grad school courses start are mainly to:

1) play lots of guitar and flute;

2) knit. I finished one scarf this weekend, but I've two more that I've promised people to go before I can start something more creative;

3) play video games. I'm part way through Zelda on the Wii and will have to redo Scratches, since most of the game was lost in the computer crash. Plus there are my avatars in A Tale in the Desert and Second Life to keep busy; and

4) make cheeses of various kinds. Late Saturday night we made mozzarella for the first time and then promptly ate it, so I want to spend more time making not only soft cheeses but hard ones as well.

Unfortunately the reality is that the three summer courses have each assigned three to seven textbooks that Ishould try to get through before they begin in mid-June, I've got to have a doctoral project in mind before those classes begin, and the church still has its regular daily demands so the music and games may have to wait a bit until some time in August.

Finally....

Back in January the gardening catalogues came. And back in February I put in orders from them for several things, all of which arrived at the end of March. But because of the continual cold weather and then the nor'easter last weekend, they've been sitting on the back porch looking more and more forlorn. Today, with the rains gone and the sun out, it was finally warm enough to plant. We put in eight new hydrangea plants (red, pink, blue, and white) near the back fence. Here's hoping there's enough sunlight there for them to do well!

And then I mixed compost, 4-2-6 fertilizer, and soil together in a 4 ft. by 4 ft. area right in back of our house for our newest experiment. We've decided that this year, rather than planting all the different varieties of tomatoes that we have in the past, we'll only plant 2 or 3 kinds and use the rest of the space to try to grow potatoes. So, under the dirt you're seeing in the picture are red cloud, onaway, all blue, butte, cranberry red, and carola potato seedings. We chose them becuause not only are they supposed to taste great, but as they grow they're also known for their fragrance and beautiful blossoms. So later this summer we should be grilling potatoes in shades of pink, lavendar, blue, and white.















And of course, now that spring is really here, we've got some of our yearly plants around as well.