Inspiration from a Strawberry

Oh Weak! It's been over a month. Super mega quadruple weak. lol

Here's the thing... the planning, preparing, sowing, transplanting, etc. of a garden is fun. The whole 'waiting for it to grow' part? Not so much. Boooorrring, we say.

Right now we're just in the growing phase, but even more so, the weed maintenance phase -which we haven't been too vigilant in actually maintaining. Even though we've been picking small handfuls of veggies every now and then things are still boring. Plus it's as hot as you know what out there.

Anyone else at the ho-hum stage?

Yesterday I discovered the Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake on CBS morning cartoons. Yeah, that's right. I freaked out. I went to the website to play games and watch videos, and what do you know? Miss Strawberry herself giving out garden inspiration.

http://www.agkidzone.com/ss_videos.action?asset=sweet_dreams_garden_grows_vi_ss

Yahoo! I love Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake. Now if they would just play the Gummi Bears... I wish I had known about these cartoons last week when we were doing the Nielsen Ratings diary. They would have gotten my endorsement.

(Oh, by the way, have you been to kodakgallery.com? You can make an actual physical book with your photographs in the pages for not that much more than getting them in prints. LOVE IT!)

Anyway, back to weeding.

High: 86 Low: 64, sunny; Lunar Phase: Waning Crescent, 28% of full.

Low-Tech

Hello everyone! We've been on a tech-vacation and haven't even looked at a computer for a week. Have you ever done that? I like to pretend I'm from another era sometimes where nothing is plugged in. The only thing about that is that we missed GBBD, but we didn't have much to show anyway. At any rate, we're back now.

Nothing really happened in the past week except we got all the rows of the garden tilled finally (the last one on the first day of summer). I've got to say, I'm kind of disappointed in how long it's taken to get things planted. I thought we'd be this far along way back at the frost-free date in May but all the rain we've had every other day put a big hamper on the operation. I still need to till an area for our sunflower forest, if it's not too late.

Oh, remember that hot pepper from last post? It was the hottest darn thing that's ever, I mean ever, touched my lips. I thought it was gonna be a banana pepper, but --oh no! Fire!! It was creeper hot too. At first it started out tingly, then it grew to very alarming, and then I rushed to the mirror to look for chemical burns. Lastly, I ended up planting my lips on anything in the freezer they could reach. It was one of those hot peppers that is fun at first, then it gets scary and you think it's never going to reach the hottest point until it does and you panic over it. heehee

There's another kind of little pepper growing and it looks like a jalepeno. I'll be more careful with that one.

We also have three different kinds of tomatoes showing themselves. I can not wait for a juicy red succulent tomato....

And everything else is growing just fine. Seriously, that's how boring it's been here. Just watching things grow.

High: 79 Low: 60, cloudy to thunderstorms; Lunar Phase: Waning Gibbous, 86% of full.

Tomato Volunteers

I was out weeding the pepper beds (long overdue) yesterday and suddenly came face to face with a rogue tomato plant. I couldn't believe it at first, but there it was. Then I looked around some more, and found that there were actually 5-two looking pretty large.How awesome is that?! They could be either Roma or Cherry because that's what we grew last year in our little test garden patch. Being lazy paid off after all...

I also pruned all our 'cultivated' tomato plants last night. I hope they do well. I was nervous about cutting on them. We should have little tomato buds soon.Check out this fatty hot pepper. It's about 3 inches long and thicker than a thumb.

AAAAH!! Extreme Closeup!!

My -yes, my--mine, mine, mine -ornamental corn is coming up too. I got impatient with all this wet weather and put some patty pan squash, zucchini, bush beans, and even pole beans in the area along the back fence.

I also found out that something that I assumed was a weed around the place was really a wonderful flower. Of course you know that I don't know the name of it. Don't care. I'm calling it popcorn. Now I know not to pull those again. lol

Ok, that's it for now. Gotta save some for GBBD.

High: 87 Low: 69, sunny; Lunar Phase: Waxing Gibbous, 61% of full.

Flood

Our town got over 6 and a half inches of rain before noon today, and that's not counting the big storm that passed through before midnight last night. No worries here though. The hill kept us nice and dry. Our pool was overflowing, the garden got pretty swamped for a while, and our front street became a raging river, but everything is fine now. Remember how I said the ground was wet on Wednesday? Well, it's not had time to really dry out, so saturation happened very quickly in the area and surrounding counties.

Our hometown was not as lucky as us. They got about 10 inches this morning and large portions of various sections are under water. Our parents are fine, but many people are displaced tonight, Matt's sister included. Although her house was not yet under any water, she was evacuated by rescue workers via boat-and had to leave her dogs behind. (A pet owner's nightmare, of course.) If it weren't for the fact that Matt's brother lives near the high school where they sent the evacuees, she would have had to spend the night there. Her husband is stuck in another town to the south and at last word, they had closed all northbound entrances into where she is. We are still waiting for more info on her situation. Most of the town is without electricity for safety reasons.

A small town to the southwest is 90% under water. There was a section of the highway closer to here that was closed due to a giant mudslide that washed a bunch of old growth trees all over the road like twigs, leaving a few houses precariously close to the edge. Mudslides in Indiana! Needless to say, we are under a state of emergency here.

Our hearts and prayers go out to those who lost their homes today, but we are also truly grateful that not one life was taken by the rising waters either. Hopefully as the flood crests, that lucky streak will continue. I'm sure tomorrow there will be more information as to how to help the victims.

High: 88 Low: 71, strong thunderstorms and then sunny and hot; Lunar Phase: Waxing Crescent, 24% of full.

Mrs. Nurse

Well, we still didn't get any more tilled. Boo. Matt hurt his foot messing around in the garage and he hasn't been able to do much of anything for a week now. I've been playing Mrs. Nurse. I've also tried to post at least twice this week, but got swept up in other things. Life just won't stop for our garden.

Except for the day that we got our little pool set up.

They're so easy and fast. We didn't put that sand there, but we'll use it.

We also have 3 green beans growing. I staked the tomatoes today in between thunderstorms. The ground is w-e-t.

Everything else is in growing mode except for the carrots that never came up. What's up with that, doc?

Anyway, I'll try to get back on a real schedule for posting again.

High: 82 Low: 72, thunderstorms all day; Lunar Phase: Waxing Crescent, 2% of full.

Making Up Names

We had a great time at the Indy 500! No wonder it's called the greatest spectacle in racing! We've been to the Kentucky Derby before, but this blew that away. There's nothing like having a car fly by you less than 10 feet away at over 220 mph. (And did you know that they use ethanol fuel and recycle all the tires?) I tried to upload a slideshow of our pictures from the event, but it's not working. If you'd like to see them, here they are on Imageshack.

We spent a quiet evening at home for our anniversary. We needed to relax for a while.

Yesterday I got back into the swing of things. I started by doing a check of everything. There are now pumpkins and sweet corns growing in the corn bed. Some melons popped up. We have good looking hot peppers on very unimpressive hot pepper plants. The peas are almost at the first crossbar of the pea trellis. The green beans are getting blooms.

The vining seeds have sprouted along the fenceline. The bunny has been kept at bay....

Things are good!

Aren't these just so gorgeous? Love them! Don't have a clue what to call them, but oh wellsies! If I do find out what they're called, I'll call them that, but otherwise they are going to now be called 'Oh Wellsies'.

They're by the road, right next to these.

Matt says these are a weed, but I always think of weeds being an offensive plant with nothing good to offer. Obviously this plant has interesting purple cones and therefore couldn't possibly be seen as offensive, one would think. Then, I realized that most weeds have pretty flowers and blooms on them. I shall call these 'Coneheads'.

Yesterday I thought it would be a perfect time to weed our swimming pool area, which is just a big ring of deep sand. Things like to grow in it. It took me 4 hours (!!!!) and I sort of got lazy at the end and let some stuff go. Here's a really interesting "weed" that's growing in there.

Isn't that a great flower?! It closed up when the sun got too hot in mid-afternoon. Now this one, I'm truly clueless about. If I don't find the name of it, I'm calling it 'the Neato plant'.

Today is the best day to get the tilling finished finally and that's the plan for this evening. I need to get my sunflowers, broccoli, cauliflower, and squash in immediately. Immediately, I say! (By the way, have you seen the Miracle Fruit yet? -See? Anyone can make up names.)

High: 77 Low: 47, sunny; Lunar Phase: Waning Crescent, 34% of full.

Indy 500 and Googly Eyes Gardeo

Remember the carpenter bee that was harassing me on the deck? Look where his lady nested: Right under Green Man's chin! That's pretty clever. Yesterday I saw sawdust falling from his beard.

Our peas are looking so cute. Their little arms are wrapped around their guiding sticks so tight.

Lavender is going to town.

The blossoms don't smell, but the

leaves are very fragrant. I thought it would be the other way around, but I'm pleased with this arrangement because the leaves last longer than the blossoms.

Irises are also still looking great.

On my way out to water the Impatiens tonight, I found these three outside of the square bed. I didn't plant them. They are another pleasant surprise. Tomorrow we are going to our first ever Indianapolis 500 race. We got free tickets and we're taking Matt's dad and uncle. None of us have ever been. We've been to the Kentucky Derby, but not to the 500, until now that is. They say there are 300,000 people expected and the race will be televised to more than 375 million homes. This should be fun. Wish us luck!

Since we won't be around tomorrow to show a gardeo, here's a link to a really funny one starring Christopher Walken on SNL. I tried to load it, but it keeps crashing blogger. It's worth following the link though, trust me. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone!

High: 74 Low: 49 sunny; Lunar Phase: Waning Gibbous, 79% of full.