I needed only a few flowers started this year and didn’t want to spend a fortune on seed trays. So after a while of thinking about it, I came up with the bright idea to order some peat pellets and use my cookie tins as trays for them.
So far the tins are working out quite well.
I figure they might rust sometime, but for seed starting, that’s not a problem.
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I’m still using my Blue Jean Water Tote
I got two slips off the sweet potato vine.
Happy Gardening Season!
Sheli’s photo expresses how life has been going around my home… And I’m guessing it may be the way life is going for some other folks homes as well.
I wish you all the best of health and happiness. Big hugs to you all!
~*~
We got most of our garden planted over the past few weeks. We’ve still got a few things to go. It helps, to add cheer to our life, walking to the garden and seeing the plants growing with a promise of veggies to come… or a promise of watching deer and bunnies feasting on our plants. 😉
Happy gardening!
Yesterday, my husband tilled up the garden and planted the onions.
Our garden season is off to a great start.
Our daffodils are still blooming lovely.
Wishing you all a week of flower blooms and happiness.
In my youth, I considered breaking beans to be an enjoyable chore. I felt so grown up helping to break the beans for canning while spending time with my Mom. Now, I consider breaking beans an enjoyable nostalgic activity.
I watch documentaries while doing any sort of lengthy food prep like breaking beans. I some times wonder why it is that I prefer to watch a documentary instead of a regular movie.
Perhaps, it’s because when I was growing up and I’d help my Mom break beans, shuck corn, peel peaches or any one of many time consuming chores, she would tell stories that ran the gamut from silly to serious. The stories helped to pass the time and made the chore more enjoyable. I feel blessed and so very thankful to have these wonderful memories of my Mom.
A documentary is more personal than a movie, it’s like folks sitting around sharing stories of their experiences and thoughts. I suppose watching a documentary while breaking beans is my feeble way to relive a tiny bit of the special story telling moments from my youth.
Wishing you all many happy moments this week.
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We’ve spent quite a lot of time outside enjoying the colors of Summer. I never tire of seeing the flowers in bloom. Right now the lilies and zinnias are making a show. I’ve kept my camera busy. For me, the fun things about my lilies and zinnias are that the lilies are perennial and require very little maintenance and the zinnias are all volunteers from last year’s zinnias and require no/low maintenance as well. Pretty neat 😀
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We got a pretty mess of vegetables out of the garden the other day. We were happy we could harvest a few squash.
We had several potatoes; we used some and stored some for later.
We have a rule at our house that the first mess of squash has to be fried. It used to be fried in oil in a skillet method. A few years ago, we needed to change our way of cooking to be healthier, so we make a stir-fry instead. Our stir fry is a bit of olive oil, squash, potatoes, basil, onions, and a bit of cornmeal just for nostalgia. 😉
Thankfully, our area is finally getting some rain. My husband thought it a good idea to go ahead and harvest all the potatoes so they wouldn’t ruin. I agreed with him since the potato plants were starting to die and since we got such a nice harvest a few days before.
Considering that we didn’t plant but 5 lbs. of potatoes, I think we got a good harvest.
I’m guessing there’s probably a couple pecks (half bushel)
We’re happy with them.
Temperature Blankets Update:
I decided to skip May temperature blankets update and wait until June to do my update so they’d be a bit bigger than every couple weeks.
They’re still coming along fairly well.
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One of the fun aspects of gardening is that you never know what you don’t know about a vegetable until it shows up in your garden.
I’ve been gardening since I was a toddler. I’ve seen and planted several different varieties of potatoes in the half dozen different places I’ve lived over the course of my life time, not doing the math, but that’s a few dozen gardens. My husband also has a long history with gardening as well. This year, we learned something new that we never knew about or even thought about: poison-potato berries.
My husband was in the garden and called out to me, for me to come and see the tomato-looking growths on our potato vines.
I grabbed my camera and took off.
He showed me the tomato-looking growths. We discussed if we had gotten a cross-pollinated batch of potato sets of ‘tomato potato plants’.
As soon as I got back in the house, I ran a search on them through a search-engine and I’m glad I did.
These are not a cross-pollination, what we have growing on our potato plants is a normal type of ‘poison-berry’ that naturally grows on potato plants, although rarely of any size. However, the bigger ones are usually on the Yukon Gold variety, which is what we planted this year.
Fortunately, the poison-potato berries doesn’t effect the quality of the potato tubers growing in the ground, so we’re good-to-go on that.
Also in the photos, you can see the flea beetle damage on the plants. We’ve been fighting the tiny damaging buggers all season. I don’t know why they’re so hardy this year, unless it’s because it’s been such a hot dry gardening season so far.
Tah-dah and there you have it.
We 2 Old Gardeners learned something new this year.
Ain’t that a hoot?
for more info on the poison-potato berries:
https://hortnews.extension.iastate.edu/2013/08-9/potato.html
One of our yellow cherry tomatoes is ripening. It’s one of the vines we’re growing in a container on the back porch.
The tomatoes in the garden have babes on the vine, so hopefully we’ll have a few big tomatoes too.
Our chard is beautiful and delicious.
The onion bulbs are getting larger.
The squash and cucumbers vines are starting to bloom.
Something has been eating on the bean vines.
We found a baby bean on one of the luckier bean vines.
Our potato plants are big and healthy and new potatoes are cracking the ground at their base.
Last but not least our peppers are starting to produce. These are orange peppers and will take a many weeks to ripen fully… although they are quite edible at any stage of the growing/ripening time.
So despite our region having hot dry weather, our garden is doing well.
I hope all your gardens are productive.
I planted a couple of cherry tomatoes in containers on my back porch. The plants are growing beautifully and one has a few babies on it. I hope the plants continue to do well and will produce several cherry tomatoes over the Summer.
Wishing you all a productive week!
Joys Of Creating 