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 :)