I know, I know. Life is always crazy around here. I really should just get used to it! Happy Memorial Day Weekend to everyone out there! Okay, now that my random holiday wishes are completed, I'll get started.
 |
| The wooden stakes are there to mark where we wanted to put the garden. |
Over the last month, I've experienced my "good knee" getting injured over Cinco de Mayo (my doctor suspects the injury is of the "runner's knee" variety and has me doing all sorts of exercises to help) as well as caught a terrible cold. (Okay, there's been much more going on than that, a KOV event, rescuing an injured baby goose, and such, but these are the things that really kept me from being active out and around).
 |
| Me putting in one of the flower gardens over Cinco de Mayo |
 |
| The only form of a covered porch we have. Storage ATM |
I was beginning to worry that I was NEVER going to get my garden started (not to mention update my blog!) Well this picture heavy post will serve as a memorial to those days being past! First, I want to show everyone what it is we are starting this summer out with in our yard. Thankfully, our rental home has a really nice, large yard, but it needs lots of work! With all the craziness going on in our lives, we just haven't had the time to really dedicate to making it the nice haven we really love having our yard be!
 |
| Yes...this is the same pile of sticks from March. Just smaller. |
You'll remember me mentioning (if not see my March post) that when we first moved in, there were so many trees (junk and quite a few dead) surrounding our yard that grass didn't even really grow! Thankfully, that pruning paid off and the grass is evening out (even if we still have some "bald" spots). Now is at least the fun part of the process! Making it beautiful! So far I have two flower gardens! There was already one in front of the house, but it was filled with some kind of ground cover plant that smells awful!
 |
| Our little table looking sad and not set up for a party yet. |
 |
| The ladder I use to hang the small wind chime and squirrel feeder. |
 |
| Kyokin in the other back corner of the yard. |
So I've been working on clearing that out (boy is it stubborn!) and replacing it with flowers. I completely forgot to take pictures of this (I have a feeling there will be more than enough pictures in this post!) garden (or the growing other flower one for that matter), but so far I've replaced the ick weed as I like to call it with pansies, snap dragons, and some gorgeous orange/yellow/red flowers. My husband thinks they are a variety of marigolds (which they may be) but I don't recognize them as such yet :). The snapdragons and pansies were clearance flowers (I got them the Saturday before Easter at Home Depo for $1.00 for six because of frost damage) that I brought home and nursed back to health. Looking at them now though, you'd never guess it! The other flowers are recent additions from
Joe Randazzo's (if you live in Michigan, you definitely need to visit them!) where they were $.89 for a set of four. The other flower garden is in the backyard near my bird feeder so that I'll take prettier pictures. Most of these flowers we either $2.00 flower sets or clearance as well. I know. I'm cheap. It's part of how
I save money as a housewife! I have a picture of me working on getting the flower garden put in, but not pictures of it now that the flowers are growing and blooming like happy little plants! I'll have to work on that! I have pictures of different individual plants on
my smugmug, but not of the whole garden. I have also planted two rose bushes (as well as transplanted a third that was placed on the side of our house in a terrible spot!) and the blueberry bush (after having the leaves eaten off by a puppy we had rescued and were holding temporarily) has moved outside as well. My lilies I planted outgrew their pot (big surprise! Those are the ones I felt sorry for when they were outgrowing their bag at Meijer) so I moved them into the flower garden out back. As far as potted plants go, I have some onions I'm growing out front (they were starting to go bad so I figured I'd try learning how to collect onion seeds) as well as flowers my wonderful friend Amber gave me. Out back, I have four five gallon buckets growing potatoes as well as a potato growing sack growing them, three herb/indoor flower pots I'm working on getting started, and one outdoor flower pot I'm trying to get to bloom. Oh, I still have my giant ivy my mother in law gave me. I had to move it since it outgrew my kitchen window!
The biggest news I have today is that we finally got our garden put in! I'm so ridiculously excited about this! This garden is probably double what we put in last year! (Thankfully we left walking room in it!) We learned quite a bit last year from our gardening blunders and are excited to start again. For goodness sake, we even made an actual chart depicting what was planted where (some of last year was guessing game until the plants came up!).
 |
| The view of the garden from our bathroom window. |
 |
| Four of the potato planters in front of my herb pots. |
 |
| Bare rows. Mostly for seeing the change in the coming weeks. |
Today was the first day I was actually physically up to going outside for a long period of time and doing any work (remember that cold...I'm still coughing :( ). We were outside working at 10:30 in the morning and didn't finish until around six in the evening. We did take a roughly 45 minute break for lunch when a sudden thunderstorm hit and drowned us with rain! My husband started by "peeling" the grass off of our selected ground while I tried desperately to save the tomato cage we converted last year into a cucumber trellis. It almost didn't make it. To be honest, I don't think it'll make it next year. At least it's surviving this year! About the time I finally got new yarn on the trellis and it was standing steady, DH (how I'll refer to my husband from now on) had finished uncovering about 5/6 of the grass. This was when everything suddenly got dark and we heard thunder. We just made it in the house with the dogs as the rain started! It made for a perfect lunch time. After we had eaten (the rain had stopped as well) we returned to work. He continued with his task of uncovering the garden and I took my trusty hoe and began to carve out rows and plant with the lettuce! I didn't make it very far (the third row) before I realized I was going to need another trellis of sorts for the sugar snap peas and honey dew. I quickly tossed one together (we'll see how it holds) and continued on. When he got the dirt uncovered for me, DH took a break and played with the pups.
 |
| The baby cucumbers and their revived trellis. |
After I put in the "squash" row (which I left extra spacing for!), I switched and began working on the other side. We have a down spout on our gutter that will drain into the garden and I wanted to make sure my cucumbers and tomatoes were near it. I put in my cucumber plantings, put up their trellis, and went to grab the first of the tomatoes, at which time I discovered I missed a whole set of baby cucumber plants! I quickly added the extra cucumbers to my cucumber line and began my tomato planting with the cherry tomatoes. The reason I started my tomato planting with the cherry and roma tomatoes is because I knew I only had a limited number of cages (we really expanded our garden this year) and I also knew that Beefsteak tomatoes can be staked up instead of caged. I wanted to make sure all my plant babies were taken care of!
 |
| The corner of the garden with the cucumbers and tomatoes. |
Since I mentioned, Randazzo's market earlier, I want to point out the good deal they gave me on baby plants. DH and I have started going there once ever two weeks to pick up fresh veggies (they have such good prices and variety) and the last time we visited, we looked at their plants too. (We always go to the location at Newburgh and Warren.) Both of my rosebushes I bought there were only $3.00 (not on clearance) and I got flowers as well as my plantlings. Now, for plantlings I got the following: 8 sugar snap peas, all of those cucumbers in the picture minus one, 4 Kale plantlings (something DH wanted to try), and 24 (yes I really mean 24) tomato plants all for $9.00. I don't know how you'd beat that. Especially since they seem to be really great plants. I feel like I won this year! (This should be taken with consideration of the dying of my own starters. This is the first year I'd try to grow starters indoors. I didn't realize they needed wind agitation to help strengthen them. Next year, we'll keep a fan on them!)
 |
| The corner opposite the tomatoes. Peas and Kale can be seen. |
While planting my tomatoes, I discovered something. I HATE cages. Last year DH put them all in for me. This year, I tried to do it on my own. Not only did I fail miserably at this, but DH has made me promise to share my predicament with you all because he thought it was far too funny for me to keep to myself. I'm still weak from being sick and since this was later in the day, my body was quickly getting fed up with being pushed to it's limits.
 |
| Baby Kale plants. |
Each time I went to push a cage down, it would become stuck. In an effort to finagle with the cage, I would shift and focus on pushing the suck leg down with all my might. Each and every time this led to the ground suddenly giving way under the leg and me wailing myself in the face with the rest of the cage which had in turn become "stuck". I feel really bad about the language my poor neighbor's experienced during this ordeal before DH took over the caging. I'm not normally one to cuss, but the shock of being smacked in the face repeatedly can do some pretty surprising things to a girl. I finished up my tomatoes with just enough room for a row of carrots! I was really worried that even though we tried really hard not to over plan this year we had and I wasn't going to be able to fit them in! Now, I'm sure by now you've all noticed the newspaper scattered in the garden. I've read online that putting newspaper down can help lower the amount of weeding that is going to be necessary for the garden. We put this in a "walking" space to try and hopefully it'll save me lots of work later. So far however, the initial watering of it was a pain. If I moved my hose too quickly, the breeze it created would blow it around. In the end, we may have wasted some time and newspaper, but even if we end up picking it up and throwing it away it was worth it.
 |
| Baby Peas. |
The garden aside, T moved out (thus why I won't be mentioning him in further posts). I've also rearranged the living room furniture again (I'll have pictures soon don't worry ;) ). We have a rental home inspection at the end of June (it was originally suppost to be last week, but God was watching out for us and let it be rescheduled!). In preparation for this, we're going to just rearrange everything to the way we now want it. For example, T's old room is going to be fully transformed into an office/crafting room. (This way my ladies aren't all forced into a "Sweat shop" to hang out and sew together). What I was trying to turn into a garden room is going to instead change into the guest bedroom. We are also finally putting the time into our basement. DH is going to have a tavern/bar area again. He's also going to finish out the pantry/root storage area down there as well. Something new we've added to our basement plans is we want to put together a spot down there to grown plants in during winter. Our goal is to try and have some fresh veggies all winter long. I don't know how well it's all going to work yet, but we're excited to try! We're thinking of putting it somewhere near the studio (yes I said studio. The boys put in a youtube/basic photography studio over the winter for KOV). All in all, I think this will be a good summer and I'm excited to get my house arranged and share it with you all! Now, to finish this all off on a nice note, I'm going to share a recipe that many folks have been asking me for lately! I found this apple tea cake recipe on a british forum, but I had to translate all of the measurements for us "lame" Americans ;) . Tomorrow I'm going to the Wonderful Miss Amber's home to enjoy some BBQ with her family and I'm going to make this with peaches instead of Apples (I'll let you know how it turns out!)
British Apple Tea Cake
2 Apples
2 TBS lemon juice
2 TSP cinnamon
1 C sugar
1 C butter
1 C flour
4 eggs
Topping:
4 TBS butter
4 TBS sugar
4 TBS flour
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and line pan. (I just greased mine and it worked lovely.)
2. Peel and core apples. Cut into segments and toss the apples in lemon juice and 1 TSP of cinnamon. Set aside.
3. Take 4 TBS of butter, flour, and sugar along with 1 TSP of cinnamon and rub together to make a crumb mixture. Set aside.
4. Place the eggs and remaining sugar in a bowl. Beat until light and fluffy. Melt 1 C. of butter and pour into the egg mixture. Sift in the 1 C. flour and fold carefully until mixed.
5. Pour your batter into the pan. Carefully lay the apple pieces on top of the batter. Top with the crumb mixture and bake for 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
6. Cool for 10 minutes before moving to a ire rack to cool completely. (Or serve out of the pan if you are leaving it in the pan like I did.)
