Seedlings of discontent

Thus far the differences between the cheap seeds I bought at Wally World and the expensive seeds I bought at the boutique garden store are minor : Neither is maturing.

And looking at the seed packets they came in for advice is not working either. I would like to know what the leaf structures of these plants might be and no one is forthcoming at least with the cheap seeds the packets feature photographs of the damnable plants. The expensive seeds are lovingly illustrated with  original art work that was strongly influenced  by what the plant looked like but not limited to that image. So its um, pretty but only approximate.

Thus far the least successful of all the seeds are the "Mixed Flowers", these are loser plants and the pretty photos of happy flowers on the packet should be strong enough evidence of intentional bait and switch to involve the AG's office and they should be nice to me because I have their number, actually I have a bunch of numbers for that office and I am not really that afraid to call them .

The mixed colors Lupines are also still a mystery. The photo shows only the flowers and none of the rest of the plant body and without the aid of flowers its hard to tell which two inch plant is which. So I went to Google Images to help myself with identification. I should have done this perhaps before it got dark out. This is why I need a lap top! I could take Google to the plants! It turns out I had guessed pretty close with the vine, even at its fetal stage it looks kind of vine-y. Nothing else had any baby pictures posted on line. Dicks.

I did find out I have very good place in flowers though. So score one for me, I mean other than the  Mixed Flowers debacle, for instance, the lupines I picked up are stunning and I would really love if the poppies were to mature but I'm thinking that looking at them right now? They aren't going anywhere, I'm going to plant them with the bedding plants but they aren't going to be the stars of the show. Pity, the picture says they are enormously beautiful and they would be huge stars of any show if they would mature. They look like pink muppets on stems.

Garden Update 15

I would say this is the last last Garden 2009 update. I took out the two remaining pepper plants and the much-more-hardy than I had expected pansies. I'm so proud of them, they were beautiful right up until the freeze. I was beginning to think I wasn't going to have to replant in the spring. These were super pansies.

A walk through gardens' memory lane. Sigh. They grow up so fast. They went in back in April and I took them out in December. I think that was a pretty good run.

Those were the days. Another sigh.

And then there were none. I pulled the most dead of the stranglers and left the strongest of the peppers but even the peppers finally gave up the ghost. We put a lot of leaves down and some dirt to get the process started and hopefully I can produce some of my own mulch so enrich the soil a little/ I put more dirt down when I unpotted the pansies. Pro Tip ? Don't wait until after the soil has frozen to try to get the plants out.

The baby brocs are still out there working - not very hard, but they're still in the ground and still green and they seem to be growing. The bugs got at them pretty good when they were really young and two of the plants didn't make it, but the rest are doing well.

In the midst of all this horticultural destruction, there is some life. My raspberry plants are still working. Don't they look sweet and delicious? They are. They really, really are.

I can't wait for my 2010  seed catalogs!

Garden Update 15

 Well. There isn't much of the garden left, but there is still a garden and it is a happy garden.

On Saturday while I was running around like a crazy person doing all the work in the world, I took a break and went to check out how the garden was doing. I haven't spent a lot of time with the garden lately, I pulled a couple of tomatoes off a few weeks ago and a pepper, but there hasn't been a lot going on there. I also had to take out a couple of baby brocs but that was a while ago. The remaining brocs don't look too chewed yet.

But on Saturday I pulled a lot. I took out all the tomatoes and a couple of the peppers. It was time and the plants were dead or clearly on the way there. I felt bad but not as bad as I thought I would. I think they and I were ready to let go.

Sad isn't  it?

The peppers are allowed to stay because they are still making peppers

They are little peppers, granted but they are peppers and I'm not going to pull them out if they are still productive.  Unlike the tomato plants the peppers are still green and pretty and healthy.

Speaking of green

Aren't they cute? So little and bug chewed, I'm still keeping the hope alive.  I'm not unplugging frankenhose and removing the rubber mulch blanket that's presumably keeping them warm at night. My flowers in front are still blooming, but I think its because they have a nice blanket of dead leaves to cuddle up with at night.

Garden Cookies

Hi, I'm Diana and I am making more dog cookies! I was out and they kept dragging me back in! The bastards.

I had four additional dogs added to my list over the weekend and I started to worry that I wasn't going to have enough to go around. These things are gifts, I don't want to look like I'm giving them testers. I want every body on my list to get you know, "enough". I now have sixteen dogs on my list and I was a little afraid that varieties I had were not going to be "enough".

So. Now I just finished making banana/honey flavored. I was going to also make  mint/parsley breath freshening cookies and I went to the store to get bananas, mint and parsley. I was very successful with the bananas and mint and then I had to look around for my parsley and finally found a bunchie of  what I thought was parsley - because it was in a slot called "curly parsley". I did not notice the tag on the parsley that read "cilantro".

Cilantro isn't just a fancy way of saying " curly parsley" is it? I don't know from either of them and I'm not sure of the breath freshening talents of cilantro, because if if cilantro was okay, I think it would have specified "cilantro"  and not parsley. But I'm not sure. I can say that cilantro looks a lot like what I imagined parsley would look like.

They both look like things I riped with great prejudice from the ground around my real plants. Speaking of  my real plants, the garden, is still there. I had to yank two baby brocs  due to  pest damage and I tried to remove a tomato because it was dead, but it was still tied up with garden tape and I didn't have anything handy to cut it free. The other plants are still there and still making  every attempt to be productive, with the peppers just covered with blooms -  but I'm not feeling hopeful about further harvests, but to give them the benefit of the doubt, I'm not going to completely remove the non-dead plants and the plastic mulch until after the first freeze. Then I'm going to start dumping leaves on the plot and start thinking about next spring.

Aunt Cookie Rides Again

Yea! I actually started on my Christmas dog cookies and its not even the December! If I'm good and moderately disciplined I can do one or two batches a week for the next two or three weeks and get all of them made and then be able to take it easy for the holidays, although I do see at least one batch of turkey shaped cookies for Thanksgiving looming in my future but I think I'll be able to handle it.

So far its just the one batch and its not even one of the "good" kind, its filler. 200 + tiny pink stars, to be paired with 200+ tiny green stars. I know I was going to go with larger bones for my red and green but I decided the stars would be better for the small dogs on my list and I have a slightly larger number of number of smaller dogs on the list this time around and I don't want to be disrpective of my small dogs. My big dogs can handle it. The regular bones are a leetle small for the big dogs and a leetle large for the small dogs but they are the perfect size for the cookie sheets so the cookie sheets win the toss.

I still need this week to make the green cookies and then I'm going to move onto the peanut butter and then the pumpkin/molasses and then cheese and then bacon and then I get to start on Christmas cards!  and I haven't even thought about the decorations and the lights and my growing Santa issue... I'm all ready tried and its not even Halloween yet. Remind me I have to ask off for New Years!

But back in the now. Guess what? My Raspberries produced!

Can you believe it? In October! I feel bad now, I have totally ignored the plant for months because it hasn't done anything since early in the summer and now it comes across with berries in October! It's a Halloween Miracle. Mayne I need to go visit the vegitables more often than I have been, maybe the tomatoes have decided to come ripe. it could happen, if I can get raspberries in October there is no reason I can't get tomatoes as well.

Hmmmmmm.

I just want the weather Gawds to know that as much as we all appreciate the lovely rain and cooler temperatures that they have graced us with - Totally, Thank You Weather Gawds - But and there is always a but, I still have tomatoes trying to get ripe and they need it to be warmer and brighter to do that, so thanks for the autumnal weather but can you just reschedule it? Thanks.

Also? I don't have enough sheets to cover all my plants if it was to say if it were not possible to reschedule winter or if it just gets much cooler... true, I do have a lot of sheets, I have a sheet set problem, but... I'm not sure what would be worse from my plants, to get cold and freeze to death or to be crushed to death by flannel sheets. Poor plants.

Weather Gawds, I just need two, three weeks of eighty degree weather and fourteen hours of direct sun a day - I don't think this is too much to ask in October is it?  They are not calling for frost  here yet so I feel that we still have a fighting chance, right? I mean, right?  It can't be too late!  there are still have little yellow tomato flowers out there and cute little green tomatoes! Lots of them! Many different kinds! The world roots for baby things! Right? Everyone wants them to reach their potential, right?

Sigh.

There are very few little baby peppers out there. The  peppers for their part seem to have thrown in the towl, they got s really good second wind the last few weeks and though and produced their little hearts out for that time. I don't see many waiting in the wings anymore either, a couple maybe and they don't seem to be getting larger but maybe...  I mean they could really pull out a big win here.

The baby brocs are all ready getting chewed on.

Moving on.

I've been using these tooth whiting things I got cheap at Poverty Barn for two days, can anyone tell? Can you tell from there that I have cleaner, whiter looking teeth? Apparently this new design stays on your teeth better, I'm glad they improved because even now its a battle the whole five minutes to prepair a cleaner, whiter tongue. The strip for your top teeth works really well but the one for your bottom teeth kind of induces drooling and I don't think they talk about that in fine print.  I don't like my bottom row of teeth anyway, maybe if they stay tea stained and dark, they'll just fade into the background?  The packaging says you can tell the strips are working if your teeth feel "dentist smooth" after use. I guess I've never felt my teeth post-dentist visit because "smooth" doesn't feel familiar to me. They felt "smooth" after I had my braces off but since then I don't think I've noticed and for that matter, just how strong are these things if they are some how sanding the surface of my teeth down? I wanted whiter teeth not smoother teeth. I'm a little concern now.

I looked at the packaging and it says something about removing tarter as well. Do you know what your dentist uses to remove tarter? A sharp thing! A hard, sharp pointy thing that the hygienist goes to school to learn how to use! What is in these things that they come equipped with tiny little hygienists? I'm not just concerned, now I'm a little worried. Just who is paying these tiny hygienists? Am I going to get a bill? Will these tiny, unpaid hygienists prevent me from attaining a sexier government job?

I took the strip off. Are my teeth whiter and smoother from there? Should I be able to see my uvula through my teeth?

Garden Update 12

At this point I thinking I would be posting some sort of Garden 2009 post mortem. I did not think I would still be harvesting much less planting (deep sigh) I was not going to replant the brocs. They were more trouble then they were worth, I did not love picking wormies off them, they were the only plants that required pesticides and they were hardly blockbuster producers, but I did find that they will grow here and more importantly, I can grow them. It would be so awesome to have broccoli from my own garden to serve at Thanksgiving.

I know! And what's worse? They are planted within sight of the brocs I pulled out.

The good news is that the new plants are still too short to see over the bed "walls" and the other ones are too dead to know there are new kids in the ground. There are a couple of other  plants, ones pepper and one tomato, I might be getting rid of soon because they aren't producing and no longer need to be there and need to move on to their new lives as mulch. My other plants are going like gangbusters though.

Wow! And I'm pretty sure that all these fruits are going to mature. I think the plants are really enjoying the cooler-ish weather that we are getting right now and they seem to be taking advantage of it.We've also had a couple of days of light rain and high humidity and it's showing. I was having problems with wilty plants, even with daily watering and that was frustrating to one and all but right now the plants and I would be happy with a few days of sunshine.

The plants are not going to be productive forever though. I was going to pull everything out all at once and put away franken hose and throw out the rubber mulch and think about what I want to do for next season. I all ready know that I am going to say "yes" to another season of Spanish Flag and "no" to more plant strangling morning glories.

family picture

There is more to my garden then just vegetables. I also have managed to keep my flowers alive all summer too. No one is more shocked than I am. I had planned over vacation to immediately rip out my of-course-dead flowers in the front and replant some fall hardy flowers. But then when I came home they hadn't died! And since then they have only gotten better looking. The veggies aren't the only plants enjoying our fall weather.

Garden Update 11

I'm back! I'm still tired but now I don't need twelve hours of sleep a night. I'm good with nine or ten.  Things are looking up, eventually I'm hoping to be able to be able to stay up until after dark.

Anyway. Garden Update 11 Time!

Well. Things have changed.

Things are a little sparser then they used to be, a little less full, a little less fertile a little less.  I think I went on vacation at a critical time for the garden and it suffered while I was gone. I didn't know that it was going to miss me!  I told everyone I know to go and get tomatoes and peppers and brocs but sadly, no one was able to and I think it really hurt the gardens feelings and it just stopped.

I feel really bad about the broccolis. I spent a lot of time worrying on them and picking wormies off them and now they've bolted!... I have failed them.

I was so into them before I left for vacation but three weeks without them and I just lost the plot. The good news is that 1) they do grow here and 2) I can grow them. Knowing that, next spring, I'm not sure I'm going to plant them again because they were the highest maintenance of any of the plants I put in and I'm not into high maintenance. I'm Ms. Green Pinky finger when it comes down to it.

The peppers are still rolling along.

I think all the peppers are producing a good little end-of-season-crop for me. Once this group is harvested though I'm going to pull the plants out. The same goes for the tomatoes and they aren't producing nearly as well as the peppers. I'm not holding my breath for the tomatoes to ripen.

In the defence of the tomatoes, there may very well be more of them out there but there is this gigantic spider web constructed in the airspace over the part of the garden where the tomatoes are planted and I am scared of the spider web. It's huge and I don't want to  meet the maker of it under any circumstances. Also? spiders are supposed to be our friends and eat all the bad bugs? I found a bad bug on one of my pepper plants and that tells me all I need to know about the spider who built that web.

I think the garden has about another two weeks in the ground to produce what it's going to produce because once the peppers are a leetle more mature I'm going to harvest the lot of them and pull the plants out and remove the rubber mulch and figure out how I'm going to store Frankenhose for next year, and later that day? start thinking about what I'm going to plant in the spring.

Pressure playa

Since I walked in the door after work I have:

1. Cleaned the bathroom
2. Spruced up the kitchen
3.Vacuumed the downstairs
4. Went grocery shopping
5. Made a meat loaf
6. Washed the Dog
7. Walked the Dog twice
8. Called in something suspicious to the police
9. Had a visit with the police
10. Corrected my hair color
11. Harvested the garden
12. Kitten Blogged!


Ta Da!

 

Not pretty, but they will taste glorious!

Harvest II

 

  

That's two days worth! I know! I'm shocked too. It turns out if you plant in good soil and you take care of the plants as they grow, you may be able to get fruit to ripen. I gave the vegetables in the first picture to a friend at work and I said "Well, that will be it for a while, I don't see anything else ripening up in the near future". Liar, liar.

I came home from work to check on the plants mostly to see how chewed up the peppers are getting and instead harvested tomatoes. The peppers are getting chewed though so it's time for another visit with Uncle Seven and hopefully it will clear whatever it is up. Something is being mean to my raspberries too and I'm not happy about it. I did get eleven or twelve berries off the plants and even as tiny as the output was, I'm taking it as a victory over the forces of  evil anyway.  Those bushes are going to have to be re-potted in the fall because even with their current state of random dead branchedness, they are still sizable plants. I could replant them but the holes would need to be massive and I'm not going to torture myself or anyone else with the job of digging to China. I'm pretty sure re-potting them is going to be enough of an adventure in horticulture itself, perhaps the job for an unwanted above ground pool?

Going back to the plants that are still actually producing, the orange tomato in the front of the second picture is a different variety than  the Carolina Gold pictured in the back, the front tomato is a Yellow Mama and it is a sauce tomato, it is the surviving sibling of the Tangerine Mama that died after planting and that Burpee refunded. The Yellow Mama took forever to start growing and even longer to set fruit and is the last of the tomatoes to ripen.  That variety unlike other non-red sauce tomatoes is supposed to retain its color after cooking, so if the plant was to ever produce a bumper crop I could conceivably make yellow spaghetti sauce. That would be neat.

Speaking of things that are not neat. I have a second degree burn on my arm!  my own Darkmark! Imagine me, a Deatheater...

 The doctor did say it had all ready begun to heal and that it looked very good and had no sign of infection! So no antibiotics for me, she did give me some silver sulfadiazine to lightly apply twice a day for the next two weeks. She did mention that despite the high quality healing , it is going to scar.. But that's all right,  I mean who wants to go through life with no proof that you've had a life? I mean really?  I've all ready decided that  it's not really a scar from a cooking mishap. The mark will be all that remains of a tattoo from some terribly exotic and secret  adventure I went on in my youth after which  I was forced to remove the tat when I returned to my prosaic reality where I tell everyone evermore that I got the scar from a cooking mishap.

Garden Update 11

First off,

Yay! We have broccoli!

We do not have the crop of green beans I started with, but the one plant that's left seems healthy

In the back ground, you can see two lovely little gypsy peppers. Speaking of peppers...

And of course, tomatoes, tomatoes tomatoes

Those aren't grapes, that's what  happens when there are too many tomatoes for the branch to hold. It dips. I think that is also the sign of a lazy gardener. At present I have two different places where I can't pass because of dipping branches and I have branches that have taken up residence in other plants cages. I do not see this a good thing.

We had a storm the other night and it took three of my large tomatoes! I was broken hearted. I should be happy it didn't uproot any plants but I did have one plant tip over but the base was strong enough to not break but it could have, its the first time I was happy that plant has been so slow to grow fruits, if it had been as heavy as the others it would have been a loss. It is also a lesson on planting deep, the deeper you plant your plants the stronger a support system they develop and they can survive  assaults like a strong wind. I also credit the cage to keeping the plant safe and protecting it heavy weather. So 1) Plant deep and 2) Use  well made cages.

The whole gang

And the garden is only about vegetables, I also planted some flowers, my Spanish Flag is doing beautifully. I'm still waiting on my morning glories and black eyed Susan vines.

Garden Update 10

First, today is 7-8-9! and  I want to brag on my harvests

 

  

  

 those little red tomatoes are not the same as the tomatoes in the first shot

In the first shot we have some very nice little tomatoes and two even nicer Carolina Golds! They are beautiful fruits and really quite large and I love their color. I'm really proud of those .  That plant is going crazy with fruits and if even  only some go all the way, I'm going to have to learn how to cook with them. So far I've made two meat loafs with the help of the little tomatoes and they have been a great addition.

In the second shot we have my darling hand sized Gypsy pepper. They can be red, green or brown. My plant seems to be a green plant. I looked the variety up and they are good for being stuffed or used in any number of recipes where you might use a bell but  they have a thinner skin and a less watery taste are are considered a better for cooking then your bells. I put it in my meat loaf too. Num.

In shot three we have more of the little red tomatoes and a few of the Italian Ice variety. They are larger and fatter than then reds. I ate one and it tasted just like a regular tomato, I had thought the literature said they were sweeter. I think I'll let the next batch stay on the plant longer. They don't look white in the picture but they are, mostly. The large tomato is my first large red to get ripe, it's really kind of a dark pink but that is the variety, they are called Razzle Dazzle.

On to the whats in the garden but first to my issue. My green beans are ill! I've been told they have powdery mildew.

 

I've also been told how to cure it but its all the plants and I found the seeds. I might just yank them up and plant new ones  and tuck away the mildew cure for another time. . What should I do? The beans are not a success, but... Tomotos!

 

And the peppers! They are s l o w l y coming along with the smaller varieties leading the way

 

  

And finally, the brocs. I don't know if it's actually bolting, but its doing something and I'm happy

And the family picture