Monday Garden Club

Another big harvest this week.  Actually this was all picked just yesterday!  I have a lot of work ahead of me to preserve all of this but I know how good garden veggies taste in the middle of winter, so it's worth it.  I plan to make some soup today, blanch and freeze the rest of the broccoli and beans and make more roasted veggie pasta sauce this week.  I made some pasta sauce last week and took photos that will be up here complete with instructions in the next few days.  The girls start school on Thursday, so I'm hoping I will be able to blog a little more and visit blogs a little more as well.  I feel so out of the loop lately, not reading and commenting on all my favorite blogs, but I will be back soon!

 

I have decided to discontinue using the Linky for connecting other bloggers and their gardens, so if anyone else is gardening this week and blogging about it, drop your link in the comments below and I'll you to this post.  Happy Gardening!

Participating Bloggers:

Verde Mama

Shady Lady

Monday Garden Club

Well, hello there, long time no blog! Before I get to the garden, I'll give a quick update on what the heck we've been up to since I last checked in.  I've been busy taking pictures.

  

The Gardener has been mowing lawns 2 nights a week (ours and one other), and just yesterday started a new garage project.  He found a 2 car garage on craigslist for cheap, so he bought it.  The only catch is, the garage is currently standing in someone's front yard, completely assembled.  The Gardener and his dad removed all of the shingles and a bunch of other parts yesterday, and hopefully by next weekend, he'll have the wall sections ready to be moved.  We need another giant project like we need a hole in the head, but doing it this way is much cheaper than starting from scratch, and our little one car garage, besides being too small for much of anything, is falling apart. Yeehaw!

The Gardener and I also celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary last Thursday.  We went out for dinner Friday night and displayed exactly how old we are by deciding not to go out for an after dinner drink and instead go home and SLEEP.  No, really, it was awesome and much needed.

The girls were gone for the weekend with Grandma N and Uncle T, boating and swimming (Apparently in their underwear and T shirts because somebody forgot to pack swim suits. Oops!)  and when they returned, look what they found inside a jar in the house!

A few weeks ago while on a walk through the garden, I noticed my parsley plant had been completely eaten.  All that was left of it was stems, and on those stems were lots and lots of bright green and yellow caterpillars.  I ran to find the girls and minutes later there were about 10 caterpillars in a re-purposed pickle jar.  2 formed a chrysalis and the rest apparently didn't appreciate their new environment because they didn't do much of anything and are still laying lifeless at the bottom of their makeshift cage, as removing them would disturb the remaining chrysalis which is attached to the side.  Anyway, look how pretty!

After admiring the beauty of the new butterfly, Mae released it onto a flower...

And while I no longer have any parsley growing on the garden, I have patty pan squash,

cucumbers,

LOTS of sunflowers,

watermelons,

tomato trees plants,

and we're still getting some broccoli!

I made 3 big jars of pickles last week, blanched and froze some broccoli and beans, and cooked and ate damn near my weight in summer squash.  I still have lots of produce to preserve and use up but I'm hoping I can get some roasted veggie pasta sauce made in the next few days, and when I do, I plan to post the recipe here, if I don't get distracted by Facebook, or editing wedding photos, or a dog eating yet another pair of shoes.

Anybody else gardening this week? If so, grab the Monday Garden Club button on my sidebar, paste it to your blog entry and link up below with Mr. Linky.

Monday Garden Club: Minnesota Edition

So, did anyone other than Sheila noticed I didn't post a garden update last week?  Well, sometimes life gets a little crazy and I say to heck with it when it comes to making my self-imposed blog deadlines.  I had 2 weddings to photograph last weekend and both girls were in swimming classes every day for the last 2 weeks, so updating the blog just didn't happen.  Not to mention (although I will), packing for our annual trek out to Minnesota, spending way too much time at Costco getting new tires put on my car.They told me 1 hour on the phone, 2 hours once I got there and just kept increasing the amount of time every time I walked up to the counter and inquired. 4 hours and a $25 gift card for my inconvenience later and we were finally on our way to a weekend of fun, mixed with heavy rain and long rides in the car. Rain IS good for the gardens and that's what I want to showcase today.

Thursday night we arrived at my mom's house VERY late and went straight to bed, but when we woke in the morning we all walked out onto her patio to check out her not so little condo garden.

Most of her plants this year actually came from my little greenhouse when she visited earlier this spring.  She has taken good care of all of them and they are flourishing on her little sunlit patio.

Ground Cherries

Next stop on our trip was my brother-in-law's garden.  It rained almost the entire time we were there which doesn't really make for a fun trip to the north woods of Minnesota when you are forced to stay indoors. Just as the sun was going down on Saturday night the sun came out and we were able to go and check out the garden. 

And as soon as we finish our complimentary hotel breakfast this morning, we will get back in the car and drive the last leg back home to see what happened in our garden while we were gone.

Anybody else gardening this week? If so, grab the Monday Garden Club button on my sidebar, paste it to your blog entry and link up below with Mr. Linky.

Monday Garden Club

I leave the garden for 4 days and look what happens!  I guess it could have been a bad result, with a tornado or something, but still I could hear the weeds calling me outside to do some clean up as soon as I unpacked the cooler and started a load of laundry in the washer. 

According to the rain gauge, 2.5 inches of rain fell while we were gone.  Made for easy pulling weeds, but also made them all HUGE.  I filled ELEVEN 5 gallon buckets and I'm not done yet, but it's a big improvement.

There are edibles out there too!

I hadn't planned on pulling any carrots (mostly because I thought they weren't ready yet) until these came out alongside some big weeds I yanked out of the ground.  I'll let the rest grow for a while longer

I think we have finally figured out how to have a successful tomato garden.  First, spacing is huge!  As in the more the better, and even then go a foot or two wider than that.  Of course, that's not an option for every gardener, but tomatoes grow with such gusto* that unless you can keep up with the pruning (and can cut off a few blossoms and tiny, green tomatoes without having a panic attack), they spread and tangle together and become a giant mess by the time they start to ripen. 

*I think it was was Riot Kitty who commented the other week about tomatoes being the sluts of the plant world.  I couldn't agree more!  Besides the overall craziness, I am constantly pulling out tomato plants that come up on their own all over the garden.
Second, staking or caging.  For years I used those flimsy wire cages from the garden center.  You know, the kind that stack not so neatly, stick together and bust at the welds?  Never again!  Now that the Gardener made me some heavy duty towers out of used electrical conduit, I have sworn off wire cages forever.  I actually bought 2 of the heaviest round cages I could find at Fleet Farm, and still they don't hold a candle to the practically FREE homemade cages.

And third would be pruning and training.  Even with the new cages, the tomatoes still need to stay inside them to be successful which means going out every few days and tucking the new growth inside.  I also adopted a heavy pruning technique starting last year, which is proving to be quite effective.  You should have seen my brother's face last week while we were out working in the garden and I was snipping off entire branches (the suckers) of tomatoes to encourage more vertical growth and less sprawling outward.  Not only does it look cool to have tall vertical towers of tomatoes, it also prevents the tomatoes from hanging on the ground and reduces the chance of disease because no fruit is laying on the ground rotting.  The bugs seem to leave them alone this way too.

Summer squash

Anybody else gardening this week? If so, grab the Monday Garden Club button on my sidebar, paste it to your blog entry and link up below with Mr. Linky.

Monday Garden Club

Monday again, and a very hot and sticky Monday at that.  It is July after all, but it's always a little annoying when the weather people on the news say it's so hot out that using a fan in the house won't even help. Ugh!  Since we have no air conditioning, we have the fans cranked up, but with the breeze outside and our close proximity to the big Lake (Mother Nature's air conditioner for those of us who live with in 10 miles of it.) it's not quite as bad as it could be.

With regards to the garden, I'm just glad it's still growing after a whole week of neglect.  I have been sick for almost an entire week, making garden work the last thing I feel like doing.  I went out a few times to pick some broccoli, peas, and kohlrabi, but absolutely zero weeding has been done. Eek!

Zucchini

Broccoli

Wax Beans

San Marzano tomatoes

Silvery tomatoes

Raspberries

And of course my garden helper who just finished a tour of the raspberry patch, AKA lunch.

Anybody else gardening this week? If so, grab the Monday Garden Club button on my sidebar, paste it to your blog entry and link up below with Mr. Linky.