Lammas Veggie Garden Video

Yesterday was Lughnasadh (or Lammas), the first of the three harvests. It’s traditional to look over the crops you’ve planted and see how they’re doing. I ran out of usable batteries for my camera. We have re-useable, but Sithboy confiscated them for his game controller, so the only thing I had to use was my crappy video recorder. Yes, this is my voice. I have no idea what the clicking noise is, so my apologies on that.

Hobbies! Hobbies! Hobbies!

Okay, this is going to be an update post, as I’ve got a few hobbies finishing up, and a few more starting.

This is the state of my veggie garden. Horrible, isn’t it. The weeds just took right over and the few nights of frost we had killed off everything. Well, almost everything. See that green up front inbetween the two browns? Guess what that is? Celery. Yup. Even after two nights of below freezing temps, the celery is still nice and green. Too bad it’s too thin to harvest. I can’t put water on it because the sun is too weak and won’t evaporate, so the plants would be sitting in damp soil all the time.

 

And this is the scarf I started a few weeks back. Crap, it’s long and I’m still on the first ball of yarn! It isn’t going to be very warm. I think it’s one of those accessory scarfs.   

 

 

 

 

This is a sweater I knitted for Husbands grandmother. I did it a couple years ago, and forgot about it until my mother-in-law showed it to me. She told me she liked Cardinals and when I saw the pattern in a magazine I just had to knit it up for her. I don’t know if she ever wore it, but I’m glad I did it anyway. This was also the project where I learned I’m a loose knitter. Poor woman was swimming in it.

 

 

And I’m working on perfecting the best hot chocolate recipe. Hopefully I’ll have it ready in time for the holidays. We’re going to go into the city and buy special mugs for hot chocolate. I LOVE sitting my a roaring fire, watching a holiday movie and drinking hot chocolate from a holiday mug.

More Garden Pictures & Food Link!

You must be getting bored with all the veggie pics. Sorry, I just love taking pictures of them, but I have something new for you this week too. I have a wonderful link for  a good writing friend of mine–Marlene Dotterer. She has a recipe for a baking mix, but the special thing about this, is that it’s all natural. She is a nut over ‘real’ food. If you’re concerned with what may (or may not be) in your food, you need to follow her.

http://marlenedotterer.wordpress.com/2011/08/20/for-something-completely-different-baking-mixes/

Let me know if the link doesn’t work, okay.

Got more green peppers from the garden. If you ever plan on growing green peppers, do yourself a favour and only buy two plants. You get so many.

What do you get if you leave a green pepper on the plant? It turns red.

Onions and celery. I’m beginning to think this celery is never going to be ready.

   

And this is the wildest melon I’ve ever seen. Husband brought it home because (and these are his words) it reminded him of the egg in my paranormal story!

   

Guess what it’s called?

I’d like to show you what it was like on the inside, but Husband cut it open real early in the morning. I don’t think it was anything special. He never mentioned anything about it. I should ask him anyway.

Oh yeah, before I forget, it’s bear season around here. Already seen a few commercials about how to keep bears from wandering onto your property. So I guess we need to clean this up:

  

~Happy Eating!~

More pictures from the garden!

As I posted at the beginning of the week, my garden is slowly winding down. These will be the last few pictures of it. Maybe a few more as we harvest, but that may be all.

First off, a few flower pictures.

I can’t remember the name of this plant, but they come back every year. The birds LOVE the seeds in the fall.

My seidum (I never know how to spell this plant). Just starting to get a pink hue to them. It’ll be dark red in full bloom. Should be good this year as we had lots of rain.

Poor tomato plant. Both felt the weight of an over-load of fruit. Got a lot of black bottom ones too. Chipmonks ate well this year.

Remember all those apple blooms back in the spring? Here’s the same tree. No leaves, just apples. Husband says they’re good to eat too.

Here’s a tip for growing green peppers. When the flower dies off, try to angle the fruit away from the center of the plant. It should hang outside of the branches. Otherwise you get peppers that are bent and soggy because they don’t have the room to grow.

You can barely see the squash, but they’re in there. Three so far. See how the leaves are dying off?

One melon. We might have another as the season draws to an end, but I’m not holding my breath.

Four pumpkins altogether. We had less last time, but these are small. More like gourds.

And last, but not least, 2 random pictures I took the same day.

 That is Miss Molly on the right, and her father Brownie. She is SO my cat. Only lays down on me, and Brownie only sleeps on stuff that has Sithboy’s scent.   Cat even knows what computer case is his.

This is a discarded exo-skeleton from something. A little big bigger than my thumbnail.

That’s all folks!

Hobby – Plants & Gardens

I sowed more seeds over the last few weeks, spurred on by the idea of blogging about gardening this year. I used dirt from our two front barrels (peat, black earth), but I’m wondering if what’s coming up is weed instead of plant.

Most of what I sowed were flowers. Some Hollyhocks, coneflowers, ornamental grass, and some spearmint. I LOVE spearmint tea, and it’s good for the digestive system. I planted the spearmint in a pot as it’s a very invasive plant.

Husband cleaned out the garden and put some compost in and mixed that up. It still needs to be tilled, to mix the ash in. He wants to do a garden again, and so do I, but we’re going to be smart about it this time, especially as we know what plants do what. 

  

This is the only place I could put my seeds. As long as they stay wet, they should be fine.

 

Spurred on by the sprouts from my full moon planting (Yes, already! At least I hope they’re not weeds!), I asked Husband if we were going to have a veggie garden this year. He wants to, as we didn’t have one last year. I don’t know why food from the garden tastes better, but it does. Maybe it’s all the hard work and anticipation at the final outcome.

Below is our veggie garden. Pretty nasty, but we have a rototiller that will get things ready. See those green clumps on the right hand side? Those are strawberries. We should have protected them with straw, but we used leaves last year and they survived. I dumped a few buckets of ash from the woodstove in the veggie garden. I looked it up and depending on the soil content, it’s good. The soil here is mostly clay with a few bags of peat moss and black earth that we put in two years ago. Personally, I don’t think it’ll do that much harm, but we’ll only know after this growing season. I think we’ll just stick to the normal veggie garden stuff; tomatoes, green peppers, radishes, onions, carrots. Maybe some garlic this year.

Below is a garden I’m hoping will come back. We have a type of perennial sunflower growing here. They’re a bugger because they grow so tall, but the birds love the seeds, so I like them too. As you can see, we have a little construction going on there, and they trampled on in the fall, so I’m hoping they come back.

This is the front garden. I’m planting some seeds indoors and will plant them in here. Also, I’m going to buy some perennials and annuals too. Can’t have everything by seed.