Catching Up

Summer is a busy time here at The Slice.  The garden is planted and growing gangbusters.  We've had a bunch of rain and plenty of sunshine.  It's all lush and green out there just now.  I haven't really had to water until this last week.  It's been wonderful.

Just the other day I dug up the first planting of potatoes and harvested a huge bucket full of reds, whites, and yellows.

Out of curiosity, just now I went out and weighed yon bucket o' taters.  They tipped the scale at 29.2 pounds.  I guess I know who is going to spend some time looking for ways to preserve and prepare potatoes.  I have another bed twice the size interplanted with the tomatoes.  This could get dicey.

A couple weeks ago I managed to pick enough black raspberries to make a small batch of 'jam' for ice cream topping.  To. Die. For.  I'm telling you.  If you have any room at all, plant raspberries.  You might want to consider making room.  You don't really need a garage, right?

This stunning specimen is my latest garden conquest.  Last year's broccoli died a horrible, crooked, warty-looking fungal death.  This year, I get this beauty.  That stuff you get in the store doesn't hold a candle to the home grown variety.  Extra tasty.

Yep, that's my big ol' hand in there just for scale.  That's one big head of broccoli.

Of course, in order to dig the potatoes, I had to pull up the onions I planted in the bed with the potatoes.  Most of them were ready anyway.  My onions never get very big, but I did notice that the ones that had become mostly uncovered over the course of their growing season were much bigger than the rest.  The ones on the left side of the picture below were basically sitting on top of the soil with just their roots in the ground.  They are the largest onions of this batch and might be the biggest I've ever grown at about 2 1/2 inches across.

This year I pleaded and begged and wheedled and whined until I got my husband to build a bed just for growing cucumbers and pole beans.  Here it is:

Yep.  It's a classic all right.  Those two round dealies at the top are genuine recycled bicycle wheels.  I painted them with black spray paint before he fastened them to the top of those posts.  All told, they're just a bit taller than I am.  I think they'll provide ample growing room for pole beans and whatnot ('whatnot' will probably = cucumbers most of the time).  There's a third little section in the middle that currently houses the zucchini production facility.

This year's pole bean selection is of the purple podded variety.  They don't look it right now, but the beans are supposed to be very purple.  Unfortunately, they lose their purple color and turn bright green when cooked  Still, it's fun to say: Purple Podded Pole Beans.  Try it once...or twice.

As usual, the garden this year is full of surprises.  What garden is complete without its fair share of volunteers?  This year we have:

Black-eyed Susan

Sunflower of unknown origin most likely my bird feeder.

Second sunflower of unknown origin also likely my bird feeder.

Fernleaf dill

A long time ago, I was told by a very experienced gardener that once you plant dill, you will always have dill.  She didn't lie.  I planted dill once about four years ago and I have it every year whether I plant it or not. 

Probably the biggest success in the garden this year so far has to be the zinnia bed.  In a word, it's tremendous.  Most likely the best zinnias I've ever grown.  It's so amazing, I can't even get a good picture of it.  This is the best I can seem to do.  To quote a good friend of mine, it's STUNNING.

Perhaps the individual flower shots are better looking:

This one might be my favorite.

My husband asked me the other day if zinnias are a perennial.  Sadly, no.  But, I can try to save the seeds and grow them again next year.  He seemed satisfied with that answer.  I like the idea of saving my own seeds.  I don't know what will happen with the zinnias, but I'm going to give it a try.

Well Underway

We got frost last night at The Slice.  May 16, 2014 and we got FROST.  I had to scrape my windshield this morning before we could head out to the market. Just what sort of nonsense is that anyway?

Hmmm?

In spite of the overnight low approaching freezing, the gardening season is well underway.  All the plants seem to be doing quite well.  Except the ones I tried to grow in the greenhouse.  Not so much grow, I guess, as start.  I have purchased replacement plants for all the seeds that haven't really grown and they are doing pretty well.  The ones I've tried to start are also planted in the garden, but they are tiny and refusing to grow so much as a single new leaf.  I hope with warmer weather, they'll change their outlook and join us for the summer.

Yes, the greenhouse is pretty much a disaster.  But it's okay.  We've just started out with this greenhouse business and we pretty much immediately ran headlong into the learning curve.  All is well.  We just can't regulate the temperature well enough yet to get things to roll along as I expected them to.  Silly me.  Jump in with both feet?  Why not?

But I do have some really nice things happening in the gardens right now.  We are the proud parents of a bouncing baby Golden Curls Willow tree.

It's much more impressive in person.

Along the driveway, we've added two  more fruit trees:

Blurry!  For some reason I just can't get a good picture on this side of the drive.

The two trees in the back are a plum and another apple.  The front apple tree has these:

Spent apple blossoms.  I am fervently hoping for apples!

Out in front along the street side of the walk, we put in a couple of pear trees.  I took pictures, but you can't really tell what they are exactly. 

Not all of the new additions are plants.  We also added this cool gecko.

Here leezard, leezard, leezard...

Around back in the vegetable garden, the new tomato bed is planted and mulched in.

Those plastic bags around the tomato cages are a lifesaver!

Of course, I just realized that I promised a blog about how I use those all too numerous plastic shopping bags to protect my tiny tomato seedlings.  And of course I have no pictures of my process.  I guess I'll have to bust out a spare tomato cage and a plastic bag.  Sheesh.

The asparagus is doing splendidly.  In fact, of the 30 crowns I planted last year 27 have returned.  I expected half to die so I planted heavily.  We had to put some bracing in to keep the ferns from falling over.  I need to come up with a more permanent solution to this problem.

In the garden proper, the beds are filling in nicely.

And, try as I might, I can't get all of the potato and onion bed in one shot.

Looking good!

The flowers are blossoming all over the place in spite of the unseasonably cool weather.

Grandma Vi's fern-leafed peonies.

 I love those peonies!  I can't find them anywhere anymore and I'm so glad I have Grandma's to plant here.  They took a bit of a beating in a recent storm.  Still, this is nothing compared to the tornado ravaged countryside a mere 30 miles from here in the small towns of Beaver Crossing, Cordova, and Sutton Nebraska.  Scary stuff, huh?

What I love about my garden is its resilliance.  These chives were grown by my mother-in-law in a different part of the state and have been in a pot, in a bed, in a raised bed, in a pot again, dug up and transplanted numerous times.  Yet here it is, flowering like nothing ever happened.  So pretty.

Well, I guess that's it for now.  I leave you today with this picture of some creepy phlox.  Have a good one.

What Lies Beneath

Lovely, isn't it?  I see a whole lot of this on my frequent commutes to and from the city. This photo was taken on an especially pretty looking February day with brilliant blue, sunny skies and clean, dry roads. What you can't see in the photo is the gale force wind that was blowing my car all over the highway.

Life is like that sometimes.  It's often the things you can't see, or those that aren't at least readily evident, that create the largest impact.  Think about the last time you accidentally bit the inside of your mouth.  It's a small thing that nobody else knows about unless you tell them, but you can't think about anything else every time you eat or drink for a couple of days.  At least I can't when it happens to me.  But my pain threshold is pretty low.

I've done a lot of soul searching the last couple of weeks.  I spend quite a bit of time on my own when I stay in the city at The Rookery (a nickname I came up with for the place I stay when I'm there.  It was either that or the catacombs which is far too maudlin...neither is perfect, really).  When I first started staying there, it was great!  I had all this time on my own to do the things that I couldn't find time for at home.  I made baby gifts.  I tried new recipes.  I crocheted Christmas gifts and ornaments.  I read an actual book.  I tried English paper-piecing a small quilt which still isn't done but I work on it a bit here and there.

These little hexagons are all stitched together by hand.  It takes FOREVER.

But in the last couple weeks, The Rookery has become more of a pigeon hole.  It's a nice place. It's clean. There's a balcony.  There's a garage that keeps me from having to go out into bad weather to start on my way to work in the mornings.  It's quite comfortable.  I have my own space and I appreciate it so very much.  However, after a while on my own, I start to go a little nutty.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  How can you tell?  Ha. Ha.

In all that silence and by-my-self-ed-ness, it's easy to lose sight of the things that really matter. The little things that well up inside me can and do take over.  All those little things that I try so hard not show the world and that nobody would ever probably guess start to press their way out.  When it's just me, then me is all I have to look at.

I recently read a quote that said a life unexamined wasn't worth living and I suppose that's true to some extent.  I would like to counter and say that a life over-examined isn't properly lived at all.  Pieces of it are re-lived and replayed over and over.  Mistakes are re-made and magnified.  Molehills become mountains. I am haunted by my own creations. 

I am especially haunted lately.  Things have been happening in my life that I have no control over.  I feel betrayed...used...even though I probably have no right to feel that way.  That doesn't change the fact that I feel what I feel and in the big, empty shell of by-my-self-ed-ness, that feeling is enormous.  It crowds everything else out, good and bad, until all I'm left with is a certain sense of having somehow earned feeling so damned awful and alone.  What goes around, comes around is what we used to call it.

Which is, I'm told, utter nonsense.  Sitting here at home with my husband and my dogs and my real life all around me, I can see the wisdom in those words. The trick is remembering that when I'm holed up in that pigeon hole.

I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end.  And, if it's not okay, then it's clearly not the end.