According to taste

“Dash out to the garden and grab me about six basil leaves, please,” I tell Thing One.

“I don’t know which one is basil,” Thing One laughs.

Remembering that Thing Three used to munch basil leaves through the fence in the garden when he could just stand, I corral him.

“Please go get me six basil leaves.”

“Which one is basil?”

“It has long green leaves and tiny white flowers.”

Not quite. 

RIP Zinnia

Thing One laughs again. “Even I know that’s not basil!”

We did get everything straightened out and now basil has been determined so my zinnias may grow in peace. 

 

Spring has begun!

 The time for seeds has begun!

I get so excited. We have catalogs laying about, bags of dirt in the house and on the deck, trays patiently waiting to be filled and seed packets. Many, many seed packets. Some circa 2011, haha!

Sunday we took advantage of the sun and relatively low wind so I could make a mess on the deck. I played in the dirt, and now have one tray of lettuce seeds and two trays of tomato seeds. I also have what I hope will become an herb garden precariously perched on a windowsill downstairs.

I'm sure there will be more. I'll keep you posted, but as of Friday, I have three brave lettuce seedlings, two tarragon (a new one for us), five thyme and one basil! Yippie!

Released into the wild

Once upon a time, late last fall-ish, I was puttering around in our sorry excuse for a garden and found a weird bug sac of some kind on a stem of one of our very woody basil plants. I showed Dada and broke the piece of stem off and sequestered the entire thing in an empty, clean Jif jar. He didn’t hold out high expectations of anything hatching and I sincerely hoped it’d be something cool and not something disgusting. Dragonflies, ladybugs, etc are welcome in our corner of nature. I’m less thrilled about wasps, for example, but did have one land on my knee the other day and he or did she absolutely no damage to me whatsoever. Thanked him or her for landing on my knee instead of, say, my head or my face, and I asked if it was a larva eating wasp or some other kind, at which point it perked up as if remembering it had a job to do, and off it went. We both lived happily ever after.

Anyway, I stuck that Jif jar on a sunny windowsill facing south, after Dada kindly poked small air holes in the lid. He is so good to put up with all my whims.

I’d kept an eye on it, as it was at eye level every day that I opened the curtain in front of it. Today, as I went to close the curtain to block some afternoon sun, I noticed movement.

BABY PRAYING MANTISES!!!!

I am SOOOOOO excited!! I called everybody and when everyone got their fill, I took them outside and released them by twos and threes all along the side and back of the house. I know they are excellent hunters so I wanted to make sure they all had some territory to work, but it is a big world and thought they might at least want to start their first day of freedom with a sibling. If they eat each other, that’s their business. Some were quite eager to climb out and explore and others I had to coax out. I even charged a pollen-covered bumble thunder beast with showing a few of the babies around. 

I popped by stick with sac back in the jar and put it back on the windowsill in case there are any late bloomers. I’m so glad I got curious last fall! What a neat surprise!

Gettin' dirty

Yesterday I smelled like I was at camp. That's a good thing. That means I was outside in the sunshine, enjoying the huge bees and the many birds and the sunshine!

Our strawberry patch, sans baby bunnies, who have moved on:

Irises which came with the house- my favorite kind of plants- the ones I don't have to do anything to, haha! They come up and surprise me with their gloriousness every year all by themselves. Yippie!

Our "pond", as usual, is a disaster zone. We didn't even cover it last fall so I've been attempting to remove the gazillions of drowned leaves, spreading them out to dry, letting them air out all that stink, and then wheelbarrowing them to the compost pile where they'll probably sit until the second coming. But we have a big froggie! He's on the stone in the foreground, to the left of the small sapling. 

Dada and I worked in the garden yesterday. Since he burns pretty easily, we waited until after 5 as it was 90 degrees during the day. I know it doesn't look like much, but we are optimistic for a good showing this year. Unless these four days of storms which start today do everybody in...

This is my Borage Triangle. At least, I think that's what those guys are. I didn't plant them there this year, but that's where some were last year, so I'm hoping they're repeat guests. I can't say offenders as I'm more than happy to have them for the bees and butterflies. My mother insists they look like alien bioscouts, haha. 

Dada, the purist, and I are once again disagreeing about gardening. I planted the cucumbers right along the fence so they could grab hold and go up. He says I'll be fighting a losing battle with the weeds along the fence line. I suppose we're both about to be proved right.

These tomatoes are called Allegheny Sunset. I didn't prop them last year and so they got very sprawly. I think a vole was helping himself as I didn't get a single bite; by the time I found them they were all chewed up from below, so I guess they're tasty but I wouldn't know from personal experience.

The yellow broomsticks mark basil, to the left in the back are pepper plants, and then everybody else is a tomato of some kind. I love the teeny cherry ones so we planted Sungolds, black cherry ones, yellow pear ones, and red currants. Scott likes real sized ones, hence the Allegheny Sunsets, Cherokee Purples, and Brandywines. 

We didn't get around to adding in the carrots yet, though there are some in the back garden with the onions and the peas. I forgot to take pictures of them, hmmm. And we saw on facebook that you can wire old bananas to a post and the butterflies will come enjoy them, so I want to do that, too!

How does your garden grow?

I don't know about you guys, but I get a little stir crazy at the tail end of winter before everything greens up and it all looks dead, brown, soggy, grotty, and dead. Ha. So I inevitably gather up a bajillion old pots and bags of dirt that Dada graciously concedes to buying and I sift through my seed packets trying to decide what I want to plant. I didn't order any new ones this year, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best!

Starting on the left, and if everyone shows up, we will have morning glories, then pansies in the foil covered pot as they like to start in darkness, the green pot with strings to hang from will host Thunbergia which is something white and winding along with Zebrina Malva Sylvestris which, oops, looks like a hollyhock upon Googling. Oh boy. Well, continuing on, in the tan pot are some leggy lettuce sprouts, four sun gold tomatoes are starting in that red/orange pot and last but not least are zinnias and rudbeckia which is a fancy name for Black Eyed Susans, I think. I hope.

The guys in the foreground are brandywine tomato and red currant seeds while the background are Allegheny Sunset tomatoes and cucumbers. We haven’t had good luck with cucumbers since The Best Nest where Dada had the raised bed gardens complete with the soaker hoses. Here they tend to drown in the spring and shrivel up to look pickley in the summer while they are still cucumbers! 

The three pots on the floor are sun golds for Zita, on the table are Thumbelina zinnias, and between them in the plastic bin are marigolds, Cherokee Purple tomatoes, black cherry tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, sweet basil, bee balm, more Rudbeckia, some sweet peppers, and some Genovese basil. And I still have more dirt and more seeds to play with! I’m so excited! With all this rain, though, perhaps I should begin cultivating water lilies... for our moats...

I know I've talked about this before, but some of you are new here. I tend to be more of a "let's plant these for the bees" than a "let's plant these for us" gardener. In fact, gardener is too strong of a word for what I do. I should label myself a putterer. I love plants that self-seed and I drive Dada to distraction as he, with his orderly engineer's mind, likes things tidy, in rows, cooperating with each other and not hogging nutrients while my vegetation philosophy runs towards, "flowers like to be close to their friends, too!" My things crowd each other, avoid each other, don't come up where expected, and come up where they are unexpected. I love that marigolds will crop up wherever they feel like it. "Don't pull him! That's a basil! He stays. And he stays. I don't know what that is. Let's leave it and find out; it's cute!" Can you hear Dada rolling his eyes and protesting? That's how I found out about mulleins, which are cool tall spiky plants with tons of blossoms and large, super soft leaves I've been told make an excellent substitute for toilet paper. Good to know! Especially these days, ha.  

I got a bonus seed packet of Chinese Foxglove last year, which I did nothing with because I didn't know anything about it. I had Dada look it up this year and it looks to me like borage, and even better, it says "tendency to self-sow". WOOHOO! He says I'm fired. So if you hear adult voices squabbling from our general area, carry on. It's just our annual Battle of the Blossoms.  

Zucchini, anyone?

We've already established that I'm not the most OCD of gardeners, so this post will surprise exactly nobody. Some of what WILL drive anyone with OCD a little crazy, though, is the warning understatement my phone displays about "this platform is not supported and could possibly therefore result in unpredictable behavior"... y'think? Like, adding all the pictures I uploaded is too much to ask? Or posting them in the order that I click them? Hmph.

My apologies. Technology strikes again.

And they're, big surprise, out of order! *sigh* Here we go.

This is white mullein, even though it's yellow. I didn't plant it. I didn't even know about it. I found it and then used an app called Picture This to identify it, because one was growing in the garden and I thought it was pretty so I left it alone to see what it would grow into. I know, you're all dying of not surprise. 

I may have already mentioned that I planted corn this year. My incredulous husband reminded me, "you know that it takes like four rows of it to be able to even pollinate, right?" Nooooo problem. Four rows of five seeds each, voila. 

Something tells me that's not quite what he meant.

But lookie! I have corn! Granted, the bunnies ate most of them, but I have 5 or 6 that are struggling along and some even have tassels. Woohoo!

Somewhere along our 20 years of marriage we got a morning glory plant. I left them with Grandma Barb while we did one of our moves, and they took over most of her front yard along her porch, much to her delight. Purple was her favorite color, so she encouraged it, trellised it, potted it, and it just went wild. I have some wild ones growing both out front and out back, and they always make me smile. 

This guy below is Borage. He's supposed to be excellent for your pollinators, so I planted some both last year and this year. Apparently it is not safe from baby bunnies, as I had at least five good-sized seedlings ready to transplant one day and the very next when I went to put them in, they were gone. Completely disappeared. The plants in the same tray with them were untouched. Hmm.

So I started over again with seeds and was excited to see that I'm growing a clump of them in the back corner of the garden and a smaller group in the front. They get pretty tall, so I popped one group into a tomato cage and that seemed to help them stand up a little better. The ones in the back of the garden are mid-thigh or taller on me. 

Yes, I'm growing broom handles. Haha. That's how brooms are cultivated, didn't you know? Home Depot has huge plots out back and...

Anyway, on the left are my handful of zinnias, and the broom handles my Dad gave me all mark where I planted tomatoes. There is a tomato plant in a cage, too, and the cucumbers were behind those. The cucumbers been really wimpy this year and don't taste very good, perhaps because the water situation has been so weird? We have an incredibly wet spring and then it's been dry and cracked all summer. I confess to not watering perhaps nearly as much as I should have.

I LOVE these little blue flowers. They grow along the sides of the roads wild and I asked my dear, sweet husband what they were. He said, "weeds." I've argued that they're not weeds. I looked them up, too, and the name?

Blue Weed.

Ugh.

Also Chickory!

HaHA!!

Above, tomatoes and basil. I've been finding those bright green "very hungry caterpillars" munching happily along, much to my consternation, as they grab onto ME when I pull them off the plants. I've been flinging them onto the roof of the shed where some sharp-eyed birds have been swooping down to carry some of them off. 

Along what's left of the creek out back is regular mullein and some truly white white mullein. I was hoping to catch the bee who was nuzzling the yellow ones, too, but I guess she was camera shy. 

I only planted two acorn squash seeds this year, so to stumble across zucchini and spaghetti squash vines this year is making me laugh while my husband facepalms. Hey, free zucchini? I'm okay with that. Anyone want some?

No sign of the acorn squash, by the way. Maybe they'll show up next year. Teehee.

A close up of the mulleins. I can not get enough of wildflowers.

There's the spaghetti squash on the top and middle, and a baby zucchini coming along on the bottom.

And the white mullein that I found in the garden that started the investigation. Beside the broom handle. No, on the right. The one on the left is basil.

So how does YOUR garden grow?

The Ides of May

We had sunshine yesterday, real, actual sunshine, for the first time all day in I don't even know how long. So I decided I better start the hardening off process for the garden seedlings. Who knows when we'd get another one? (Actually looks like we'll have two in a row as today is sunny and low wind; don't read it out loud as I don't want to jinx it!)

Those are mostly various types of tomatoes but the yellow-green cheerful looking ones are basil and the tiny ones on the end are salvia, I think. I am never sure who needs to start inside and who can just get dumped into dirt outside, so I try some of each and hope for the best. They seemed to enjoy their field trip, anyway, and stayed out for an entire hour. I hope to do at least that long again today and maybe stretch it a little further.

We've had visitors. Meet Gus and Gertie, the ducks who return to the pond next door each year. Yes, they are sitting in our front yard in what the kids call The Leak. Remember that you can click on the photos to see them larger. I didn't want to get any closer and scare them. Gus saw me and headed for Gertie as it was...

And here's where y'all come in on this, the Ides of May: tomorrow I begin taking Nerlynx for one year. It replaces the Herceptin that I had for a whole year and is supposed to help prevent cancer recurrence.

The number one side effect is diarrhea, yaaaaay. Also there are potential liver issues. While I can prepare for one of those things:

I'm not sure there's really much I can do about prepping my liver. So, all y'all get to pray against diarrhea as ain't nobody got time for that, especially at the end of the school year and the beginning of summer and I already had that last year, thank you very much, and am not looking forward to any repeat performances. Also please pray that my liver behaves itself and I experience no issues. The side effects of liver damage ("call your doctor if you notice these signs") were identical to the side effects of the medication itself: vomiting, tiredness, nausea... I mused to Dada, "how am I supposed to know if it's garden variety vomiting versus liver related vomiting? It's not like it's going to tell me!" Ugh. 

BUT you can do anything for one year, right? And my doc and the drug company are both very proactive about prevention and easing into the med carefully. For example, it's written as a 6 pill a day (and thank you, Jesus, that they are tiny, WOOHOO!) prescription, but starting tomorrow I will take 3 daily for a week. If that seems to work, I'll up it to 4 for a week, and build up to the 6 daily. Alongside the pills, I am to take Imodium 3x a day for the first two weeks. Dada, guess we know which stock to invest in. 

So that's the situation as of right now. Please pray hard as I'm supposed to be at Damon's school three times in the next two days and I can't do that if I'm stuck on the commode, as Nana would say. Pray for him, too, please, as he's overwhelmed with these big projects. We will all sleep well Friday night, for sure!

Happy hump day!

"How does your garden grow?"

Uh, well, ours is a complete disaster. Thanks for asking. 

I guess we had other things going on this summer. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Here is our garden jungle: 

I can hear Ray Stevens in my head, "embarrassing." So let's have a closer look at things.

Here are the tomatoes:

We planted Cherokee Purples and either Big Boys or Beefsteaks, but I haven't seen anything other than teeny cherry ones come up...

The strawberries are still doing their thing:

And we have a humungous basil:

The borage I planted for the bees is hanging in there:

Heh. That would be the purply blue flowers in that mess. As ever, you can click on any photo to have it open in a more eyeball-friendly page to better investigate.

I have no idea what these adorable yellow flowers are, but they have carroty-looking tops/stems so I purposely didn't weed them as I wanted to see what would happen. Anyone have a name for them?

Cilantro has gone all to coriander:

Butterflies are visiting the apple trees:

Spiders are everywhere:

This particular one is either brave or crazy, having built a web just outside our back door. I can't tell you how many times I've opened the door just a few inches to holler out to the boys and/or the dog, remembered the spider too late, and have had to apologize. It's a good thing I have no hair, or this poor thing would have to redo the web several times a day. And it's right at face height, so it's usually, *door opens, I take a big breath to begin to holler, pull head back a little bit as spider takes cover, apologize to spider, commence hollering while keeping door as closed as possible lest any bugs make it past the web and into the house, slam door shut* The spider is doing a good job as I've only seen one stink bug make it in so far...

The zinnias and marigolds did well! I even saw a hummingbird enjoying the zinnias.

And this, my friends, was lettuce in its former life:

The back "garden" was overtaken by the ghosts of last year's veggies. Apparently we'd tossed zucchini out to die and they reincarnated, took over, and had to be chopped back by PaPa during his last visit:

We did get a few zucchini out of the deal except they were so huge by the time we found them that they were really seedy and not much fun. I guess that's why Aldi sells little skinny ones, haha.

And it's almost apple season already! Eeeep!

Dada bought some fun shades for the deck this summer, which give a whole new resort-ish feel to the place:

Yes, that would be Virginia Creeper, creeper-ing along. There's also poison ivy in there, which all the menfolk currently have as they just can't stay away from machetes and chopping vine-covered branches and oy vey...

And my lovely, tough, good thing they take care of themselves hostas. Hosta? Hmm.

Those poor guys were completely dug up and tossed aside when the geothermal install happened. The guys doing the digging asked what they were and then shrugged, "well, they'll probably figure out how to come back." And they did! Yay!

I sure hope nobody was depending on us for tomatoes (unless they're cherry ones) or cucumbers or anything this year. None of my cucumbers tasted like anything much, and I can't tell if it was just because of chemo affecting taste buds or if it was the ridiculous wet spell followed by months of hot and dry without being watered or what, and nobody else in my family eats them to compare notes with. If nothing else, we helped birds and bees and butterflies, which is half the fun anyway. Uh, I mean, sorry I didn't get out there to weed very much, honey...

Funny calories

Dada was in France for two weeks with a crew from work to do some training and auditing. Some of you know that he's been trying to stay low/no carb because he finds it easier to keep excess weight off if he combines that with a good bit of exercise. 

Well.

Then he ends up in France. With friends. With French food. With nice crusty buns that are tasty and soft on the inside. 

Kryptonite. 

We texted about it a little bit and this is part of the conversation about food and portions:

If you'll recall, the "inch of finger" part goes way back to February of last year when I had the flu in a bad way and Zita was recommending some natural, homemade remedies. She meant "ginger" and was hijacked by AutoCorrect. We still use "inch of finger" in normal conversations these days. 

Happily, no flu to report, and a plethora instead of tomatoes and basil. Lunch for me sometimes looks like this:

I could eat it every day. Let me know if you want tomatoes, especially teeny tiny ones. It's not fair for only the fruit flies and myself to be enjoying them!

Carrie, Carrie, quite contrary...

How does your garden grow? 

Just kidding. She actually took the picture for me. 

My sweet friend Karen Autumn posts excellent and fun pictures on Facebook of older objects which she breathes new life and love into. I was thinking of her as I grabbed this basket which belonged to my great grandmother Frances before I headed to our garden. I love when pretty things are functional things and fun things! 

It makes me smile to think that my amazing Grandma Frances used this in her gardens- I am old enough to remember her cherry trees and her riots of flower garden patches- and now here it is, making my life easier so that I don't have to try to lug everything back to my house in my T-shirt.

Not that that would ever happen as we adults possess the skill called planning ahead. Ahem.

That would be our first watermelon, a sprig of basil which I accidentally snagged off, cucumbers on the top, multitudes of tomatoes including a Cherokee Purple one on the right, and zucchini in the foreground. We also have extraordinarily tall lettuce (I didn't know lettuce grew up but these ones do), golden beets, carrots, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, and holy cow basil and tomatoes out there. 

I must must must get back to blogging as my phone is out of storage: can't take any more pictures until I clear some stuff off, and the garden is CRAZY. 

Hungry? Come on down!