Garden Week 6 (Opps!)

One of our first baby tomato fruits!

Well, it's been two weeks (opps!) since I posted last.  What have I been up to to keep me so busy? Well, we do have an event coming up (this weekend!) and we also did some small shrine tours here in Michigan ( you can find pictures of these trips here for the National Shrine of the Little Flower or here for the Shrine of St. Joseph).  That's not really a good excuse though.  :/  Oh well it will seem like the garden has grown massive amounts since my last post!

The tomato buckets!  This seems to work really well for growing them!

Here are the tomato buckets!  (Please ignore my grass...it needs to be cut desperately >.>)  I actually think I may be won over with this particular container growing.  The tomato plants seem to looove living in the buckets!  I've also noticed that the leaves prevent any droppings of the black walnut of doom to get on/in the soil so it's a double win as far as managing goes!  All of our tomato plants have little baby fruits (as seen in the picture at the top) so it's hard to think they aren't thriving!

The pool herb/leftovers garden.

The pool garden is doing well again this year!  I do have to say, I really need to spend some time and try to figure out what's what growing in there.  It's all looking good, but I need to pull out weeds and see what is coming up so maybe I can plant some more herb seeds to encourage the herbs I want to grow in there!

Our container cucumbers.

Well, we did take a loss here.  Our cucumbers were doing great then boom...just fell over and died (no sign of disease or anything!)  My guess is that even though we tried hard and everything else didn't seem to take any damage, the freeze got to these guys (We had a late freeze a couple of weeks ago).  I have decided if I want to plant some seeds to fill in the gaps or just let that be growing room for the survivors.  Time will tell, won't it?  

The Eggplant/bell pepper container.

To be honest, we've actually had two frost warnings and then the freeze as well.  I guess that's Michigan weather for your (or so my husband says).  That is another way that the containers have been nice!  With the tomato plants, we just carried them into the house and let them spend the night in our kitchen.  The rest of the containers (minus the cucumbers which was probably why they took such a hard hit) were still small enough that we could close the lids on the boxes, stack them (to conserve heat) and cover them in blankets.  Since the cucumbers are in a different bin style, we just draped

the bell pepper container

and wrapped them in blankets as gently and thoroughly as we could manage.  We didn't want to hurt the plants, but we also wanted to try and keep the cold out.  It seems to have at least partially worked though since some of the plants are doing fine.  Thankfully we've been getting a fair deal of rain lately.  I'm not sure I entirely trust Ypsi city water (years ago...close to 8 to be honest the water quality was so bad that they had to do a public release of the information).

The green bean bucket!

The green beans finally shot up.  I'm just waiting for them to start flowering!  I love fresh green beans!  It seems like they don't mind container style either (although these were one of the veggies that didn't seem to mind the black walnut tree that much).  I'm really hoping that we'll have a blessed growing season because I want to have plenty of yummy veggies to share with friends and family and the church congregation (if anyone wants any that is!).

The snap peas.

It looks like the peas are finally taking my lead and working on building my "wall of green" for the little deck/patio thing.  We grew these guys for the first time last year (and they didn't grow amazingly or die) so when we did get produce we weren't entirely sure what to do with it.  It was actually funny because I think when the plants did bite the dust, we had gotten just enough for one stir fry.  I'm guessing they didn't like the black walnut or perhaps the transplants (we bought them as such) just were weak.

Catnip!

My occasional outside cat (he's getting older and since he was a sickly kitten, I think he may be struggling with arthritis, so he really likes to lay in the sun) has really been enjoying this!  Surprisingly enough, he hasn't been eating the plants or hurting the plant in any manner (what I expected to have to deal with honestly), but he just loves to stick his head into the baby plants and then roll around on the porch.  I also haven't seen the massive amounts of stray cats that Mike was worried we'd attract.  I did pick one leaf and bring it in for the inside only little girl and she really seemed to enjoy eating it.  My cats love catnip (although I don't know very many cats that don't).  We recently picked up some of the catnip bubbles you can find in stores.  I have to say I was disappointed in them.  They are really heavy (for bubbles) and sink straight to the ground when you blow them.  I ended up mixing a 60/40 (60 % traditional bubbles and 40% catnip bubbles) mixture that worked pretty decently.  The only downside to it is that they "foam" up and you have to leave the bubbles alone until the foam settles back down.  Fana (our little cat) really seems to like this mixture better though because they float a bit, still smell of catnip, and she can chase them.  Of course, she has a small case of hyper active play disorder (she'll play herself to panting and tends to obsess during play time).  Her favorite toy of all time is light.  She will chase the laser pen, flashlights, (and much to my pain one night) car lights.  

The sweet pea flowers

Well, I got off topic didn't I?  If I'm this annoying as a pet owner, what will I be like when I have children to go off on tangents about?  That was actually part of the reason we went on the shrine tour.  We really wanted and intended to visit Saint Rita's shrine and make a bit of a pilgrimage of it to pray over our infertility, but as they tend to happen, unexpected things kept us at bay.  We instead went to local shrines and started a series of novenas geared towards praying about infertility (leave a comment if you'd like to know the ones we've been doing :) ).  We've also been doing a good deal of talking/praying about what parish we want to become members of.  We absolutely love the parish we were confirmed in, but all their two adult masses are sometimes hard for us.  There is the early morning one (8:45 am) or the really packed you can't always get a seat mass (11:30 am).  The 11:30 mass is hard because I really struggle with being shy.  Big whoop, I know, but it can (on bad days) cause some serious stress and pull me away from the mass because I'm terrified of making a mistake (it is purely by the grace of God that I make it through confession I'm sure).  It's something I'm working on, but its' also not something easily conquered each day!  As for the 8:45 mass, well, to say that Mike and I aren't morning people is a bit of an understatement.  It's true we aren't morning people by nature, but were also are what has been called spiritual firefighters.  We tend to be higher up on that list when people need help (and we love being able to be there to help people) so we tend to get a chunk of later evening calls or visits out of the blue.  During RCIA we really tried to limit this so we could be early mass people, but I think it must be a calling.  We've tried everything short of telling the people we can't help them to avoid it, and we're still being sent folks :).  I'm glad that we're in a position that we can help though.  It's also seemed like we've been receiving a fair amount of questions about Catholicism now too.  Ack, I stopped myself from going off topic, to go off topic again!

Dog-struction!

Just a bit more then I'll finish up :)  As you can see in the above picture, my in ground flower garden has been ravaged!  I think I'm going to spend a day out there and dig up all the bulbs and move them to the garden in the front.  Since I normally keep this area fenced off and the dogs out, the mole/groundhog likes to hide out here to stay away from the dogs.  I'm still not entirely sure when it happened, but the pups apparently decided enough was enough and busted through (and destroyed) my little garden fence to go mole/groundhog hunting.  The poor flower garden is just ravaged now!  Since they did this though, I haven't seen any mounds from this guy.  I feel bad saying it (because I hate killing critters or seeing dead critters.  For crying out loud, I really hate spiders, but I'm more likely to take a shoe with me to threaten them to leave me alone then to kill them), but part of me hopes they got this guy.  He kept digging around my bird feeder pole so the soil would be uneven and the squirrels could shake the food out.  What do you guys think?  Should I transplant the bulbs and be done with it?  Or should I give it another go around?  I'll be back next week with a product review (yea BzzAgent!) as well as a garden update!  Until then, God bless folks :)

Garden Week 3

My windowsill garden in the kitchen!

Well, it's the end of the week again (woot!  I get to spend a whole weekend with Mike!)  and it's time to monitor the success of the garden!  Well, to be honest, this is for me (because I love looking back and seeing how much can change in a week) and for the world wide web (so you can learn from my mistakes and enjoy seeing having a garden if you can't have one personally!).  Last Saturday was a big day for the garden!  We went and got starter plants (because even though our house is filled with windows it seems we haven't found that good spot to get starters to grow successfully yet) and planted a good deal of our plants!  It was a really productive weekend over all (it was insanely busy since Mike ended up doing a good deal of work from home on top of everything else we had going on).  Let's take a look at the "goods" shall we?

The herb pool (although it looks like some squash is coming up in here too!)

The carrots in the pool garden are growing like CRAZY!  I'm really excited :)  (Remember, this is a herb garden plus whatever seeds decide to come up from last year before we put the tomatoes in :P)  So far this fella seems to be doing really good!  I just can't wait until I can take the trellis out (it's there to keep big puppy from using this as an obstacle course).  You can see where the patches of herb seeds were planted and I hope they keep growing like crazy!  

The Snap Peas and vine flowers I'm using to make my "wall of green" around the patio/deck thing.

The peas and things for my "wall of green" have started sprouting!  I hope it works the way I want it to :)  

The potted flowers I have on the deck/patio thing

Since we attracted no bees last year, we're trying to balance out the rest of our gardening with more flowers so that we can draw those natural pollinators out!  (Trust me, nothing looks and feels more strange then going and "helping" your plants with a paintbrush...I feel like a perverted gardener when I do that >.>)  I can't say that I'm upset about this though.  I looove flowers!  Where we bought our baby plants (Joe Randazzo's), you got a flat of veggies and/or flowers for $9.00!  We got two flats, one of mostly veggies and one of entirely flowers!  (Mike is serious about this flower business this year ;) )

The terrarium that we found out for trash on our way home!

On our way home, we found the above little terrarium and stand out for trash!  After asking the home owner (who was outside) to make sure it was in fact trash, we rearranged the plants and made space for it in the car!  I've got a couple of flowers that still need to be potted on the shelf under it, but isn't it cute?  I'm hoping to get some sweet pea flowers to grow out of it and along the fence ultimately, but I love how cute it looks already :)  

The in ground flower garden.

Mike and I talked quite a good deal about how we wanted to do the garden.  We knew we had to have some form of a container garden, but what was our ideal?  Ultimately, as much as we loved the idea of the raised bed style gardens, it just isn't for us right now.  Since this is a rental home, we don't want to have to leave behind something like a really nice raised bed garden!  (Maybe we're being strange, but this is what we decided.)  The cool side of this is that I've been seeing so many awesome container garden ideas on pintrest that I felt confident going that route!  So, this year, we are working on having container gardens that can be put together cheaply for the people who don't have a good deal of space!  

Flowers and Bell Pepper Plants.

One thing I have learned so far about these container gardens is that it isn't a good idea to water at night, in the dark, when you can't see.  I had a great deal of apologizing and re balancing soil to do the next day!  Planting flowers in with the plants was something that Mike really wanted to do.  I believe all the flowers planted in with the plants are a form of marigolds and he remembered doing research last year and finding that they keep many of the "bad" bugs away from garden plants!

Eggplants and Bell Peppers.

It does make for nice photos though.  I love the bright colors of them and how they jump out at this stage in plant growth!

Cucumbers and I believe a watermelon plant or two.

We've had some great gardening weather this week though and I know the plants have been eating the sun up as if there was no tomorrow!

Green Beans...that haven't sprouted yet.

So, you remember that whole incident I mentioned with not watering when you can't see?  I hope I didn't destroy the green bean seeds!  These poor guys got the worst of my watering "experience".  Their poor little seeds were exposed for part of a morning (I didn't check the garden first thing that day of course!) in their sprouted state.  I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope that they come up!

Our five gallon bucket tomato plants!

As much as I wanted to plant five gazillion tomato plants, I settled for five.  I'm hoping to use these to construct the other "wall of green" for that patio.  So far, they seem really happy.  I know we have two Bonny's best plants, two Roma plants and I can't remember what the odd one was now!  (You can see my patio flowers in the background)  Behind them in front of that window is where the wildflower patch was planted.  It's finally showing some sprouts, but not very many yet!  (The strawberries also aren't growing at all yet :( )

The tomato plants are already starting to have blooms!

I know we have another container we want to plant and we'll probably do that not this weekend, but the next weekend.  We may also decide that what we were growing in there isn't worth really stressing about (to be honest, at this particular moment, I can't remember what we wanted to plant in it!).  We still need to get around to cleaning up the trash that blew into the yard over winter (meant to do that during the week this week, but spent the time working on the inside instead!).

Where our in ground veggie garden was last year.

We're turning the spot where the doomed in ground garden of last year was into our dining area.  I think it'll look nice ultimately, but there's a chunk of work to be done still!

The catnip/butterfly bush pot from the front of the house.

Bluebonnet and something else from the front of the house.

I guess that's all I really have to say today.  I have a couple of other really cool things to talk about, but those are cool enough they deserve their own post! (One's a craft review and the other is some home decor stuff!)  Until next time folks!

Garden Week 2 (and decorating!)

A new addition to the prettiness of my yard!

Well, I almost hate to post now (because I know this weekend is going to be a big weekend for our garden/yard), but we've been up to a lot recently too!  The above pictures is filled with new additions!  (Well, the ladder's been there since last year to be honest.)  I want to hang the windsock up a peg higher, but I'm going to have to wait for Mike to get home and help with it.  So, I guess I should go in order and tell you exactly what you're seeing!  (There will be close up pictures of some of it later in the post :) .)  The deer are two Christmas deer (the metal ones that are covered in lights) that I'm up-cycling into garden decorations!  (I actually think I have a third one downstairs to add to the little family!)  The story behind the deer is that my mother in law found them in someone's trash (don't judge!) and new that I would love them!  I did and do, but when we plugged them in to test them for Christmas, we realized all the lights were bad.  Life was busy and they got stuck under the patio to wait until I had time to remove all the lights and restring them.  

A close up of parent and baby deer (they don't have names yet).

Well, Christmas came and went and they never got pulled out.  One of our big goals for this summer (aside from growing an epic garden with lots of good food!) is to really make the backyard a place we enjoy being.  Last year we were just so busy that it didn't really seem important to spend a lot of time outside, but once winter hit, we really missed not having taken advantage of being out there.  So, we're putting in some raised bed gardens (we're going to use Ana White's plan) to go with our pool garden and we're spending some time reorganizing stuff and actually (*gasp*) trying to decorate it a bit.  In this process, we were cleaning out under our little "fake carport" (plus the weather has been nice enough to do it lately) and I saw these two (the other is downstairs since it never got brought outside).  I have been stalking some different blogs and Pintrest trying to come up with cute and unique ways to not only attract bees and other pollen spreading creatures, but to make our yard a bit more fun!  I've been seeing (especially on Pintrest) a good deal of the wire frames with vined plants growing up them.  Then the idea struck me!  I could use these deer for the same idea!

A cute dragonfly decoration (and hanging hook) I found at Dollar Tree!  The dragonfly's wings move when the wind blows!

So, I started by removing the corded lights.  Boy, was that a big pain ever!  Towards the end (because I knew the lights weren't worth saving) I ended up cutting some of the wires to speed the process along!  Then, I went and set them up where I thought I wanted them, (in this process I misplaces the little deer's ears, but I found them after asking Saint Anthony for a little help!) staked them down, and sized up the pots (because that is one of the black walnut trees, pretty much anything I plant is going to have to be in a pot!).  The idea is that the vined flowers will grow up out of the pots and that I can  train them onto the deer (so in a way it'll look like they're eating them!).  I'm super excited about this!

"But, wait, Ashley" you may say, "those sheppard's hooks look awefully familiar!  Didn't your bird feeders used to sit on those?"

A new view of the flower garden!  (and it's decorations!)

Why, yes, yes they are!  Mike and I finally made the call to buy one of these bird feeder poles and doesn't it look nice!  (I love this new bird feeder because of it's size, stabilitiy, and the fact that water doesn't get trapped in my seed and grow things, but no matter how I hung it, there was either too much sway in the cord (so breezes would knock all the bird seed out by causing the feeder to hit the sheppard's hook) or the squirrels could reach it and pull all the seed out!)  I still have to figure out what I'm going to put on the other side of the feeder.   You can't really tell what it is in this picture, but as far as decorations go (aside from the pole) there is on the left a little snail metal pinwheel, on the right a cloth flower pinwheel, and a new fence around it (to keep puppies out).  Now, I'm both a little excited and nervous about these pinwheels!

The lilies I thought had died are now peeking up through the other bulb plant (the one that was here when we moved in!)

If you remember, over a year ago, we had a mole/groundhog thing attack our garden and the little pinwheels I had put in there!  Well, I've been finding those tell tale mounds and broken earth through this little flower garden lately.  These pinwheels (although they were still purchased at the dollar store) are sturdier than the little ones...and well, bigger too.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the little fella just moves along to a different yard.  So far, there are some tiny tiny sprouts in this flower garden (didn't do a close up of this flower garden or the one by the door because the growth was so minuscule), but I may end up having to try planting something else.  (I now have a really nice printed list of plants and flowers that are not bothered by the Black Walnut poison.)

The back "deck".  Pardon the mess, we've been reorganizing and are getting ready to pack the van for the L.A.R.P.

I really really really hate this "deck" thing.  It's not big enough to put our table and chairs on (and it's way too close to the backdoor for that.  If you look up the steps, the door is right there!) and because of how close it is to our door, there isn't really much to do with it.  Mike thought about taking it down, but it's currently acting as a step for those stairs (and I'm slightly terrified of what we would find under it!).  I've seen some people turn decks like these into "garden decks" but that is normally only in apartment/duplex situations where there isn't a yard option.  So, I've decided I'm going to make it direct the flow of traffic in the yard.  Back in between the stairs and that brick thing (no idea where that goes at all) is where the "wildflower" flower garden is.  On the side closest to the pool garden (and where we're planning on setting up our raised bed gardens) we're going to grow 4 container tomatoes (we'll probably have a few extra plants in one of the gardens) and on the side closest to the camera, I have made a string trellis for the three pots of snap peas (and a few vine flowers) to grow up.  I'm hoping that this will at least make this area look somewhat pretty and act as a natural draw for pollinating bugs!  I also have last year's entry way rug (one of the pets got sick all over it and the only way I could clean the spot was to take it outside and hose it down...and it's stayed there) in the middle of the deck.  I think when we build me this chair, I'll probably leave it on the deck for my relaxing in the little bit of sun we get!  So, any ideas on what else to do to this little area are welcome!  The deck is going to have to be sanded and painted (or something) this year it seems, so maybe putting some color in there will perk it up too!

Our pool garden is really doing well with stuff starting!

Our pool garden has lots of baby herbs growing in it (we decided to use this as an herb garden mostly this year).  It always amazes me at quickly plants grow!  I can't wait to see them all tall and yummy!  I did plant a small "little container" garden of some herbs that sits in my kitchen windowsill (one of the few windows that actually gets light in our house).  Even my awesome Yoda goblet thing has something planted in him (chives for the record so it looks like he has some stylin' hair!).  I'm excited to see those guys grow too (and hopefully we can figure out a way to keep them alive all winter!).  The front flower garden isn't here mostly because I forgot to take a picture when I was doing photos.  The tulips are doing well.  There's a few sprigs coming up here and there but I'm not sure if it's weeds or flowers yet!  (And that stupid ground cover is coming back again!)  I moved some tulip bulbs from a pot I grew them in last year (the green one) into the front garden so that next year there should be more tulips!  I replanted the green container with some butterfly bush and catnip.  In the yellow one, I planted bluebonnets (I am from Texas y'all) and some forget-me-knots.  We moved the patio furniture out (and after I finish this post I'm going to go move it back) so it could dry out a little bit, so our porch looks a bit crazy.  The strawberries haven't showed any sign of growth yet :( .

A beaded "ornament" I made to hang on the bottom of the strawberry pot!

For someone who is still very picky about how she'll eat strawberries, I sure am disappointed that I haven't seen growth yet.  It has only been a week though.  Today we have new neighbors moving in.  So far I haven't gotten the best impression of them, but we all know what it's like to move and how stressful it can be, so I'm hoping we'll get along!  Tonight we're having a LARP weapon making party BBQ so I'm expecting to have a good time!  I guess that sums up this week.  Oh!  I was able to drive today (and boy did that feel freeing!)  (I slightly herniated a disk in my back a week ago Monday and have been slowly trying to (as my doctor advised) stretch and get back to my normal routine.  I still can't bend over and touch my toes, but I do have a lot of my mobility back as long as I'm not trying to lift anything heavy.)  Now, I better get scootin' so I can clean my filthy house (it's not that bad, but poor Mike just isn't the housekeeper I am ;) and he was working on taking care of me and doing the housework and working full time!) for tonight!