Before and After!

Here is a little trip down memory lane to remember what a difference two months and a lot of sunshine can make...

Peas and carrots in April.

Peas, carrots and a few beets up front in June.

 Swiss chard and spinach in April.

Spinach is gone so the swiss chard is with peppers in June.

The onions from sets in April.

Extreme close up of the onions in June!!

We started some onions from seed straight outdoors to see what they would do back in April in the front of the carrot bed.  Here is how much they have grown by June in comparison to the sets that we planted.  Now we know...

Preserving Party!!

When you have wonderful friends you can ask them to come over on a Saturday afternoon/evening and get them to do manual labor with you.  For the promise of dinner mine helped me blanch, shock and freeze all the green beans, broccoli and swiss chard that we currently had in the fridge.  It went a little something like this:

Harvest and wash veggies...

Cut veggies into bite size pieces...

Blanch for a few minutes in a pot of boiling hot water.  Then immediately shock veggies by putting them into a bowl of cold water and ice cubes to stop the cooking and preserve crispness.

Veggies will be much brighter in color!

We portioned ours in regular sandwich bags and then placed them all in a freezer bag so that they wouldn't freeze in one gigantic clump.

Lastly, Max couldn't take all that garden excitement and decided to harvest all the potatoes.  The baby russets were volunteer experiments from last year where we simply cut up a few old potatoes and threw them in the ground.  The red skinned potatoes were grown from starters we bought at the store.  That's 20lbs of potatoes you are looking at and we didn't even use the entire bag we bought for only $5!  Yum.

Weekend in pictures

Yellow, purple and green bean, banana pepper, jalapeno pepper and green bell pepper harvest!

Only doors and some trim left then it will be a masterpiece!!!

My first winter squash growing big!!  I think it's going to be a butternut...I'll have to consult the package to see what was in that mixture when I can find it...

June Updates!

A quick update on the shed progress.  We are now sporting siding, roof trusses plus a ridge board:

 We've been harvesting peas, snow peas, broccoli and swiss chard from the garden:

Then for my birthday we turned the backyard into a hippie commune and camped out:

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer too!

Shed Project

It seems that lately all my time has been eaten up by this gigantic project we only work on during the weekends.  We have decided to build a shed from scratch.  We heard horror stories about the kits that you can buy and how the wood is so awful and warped.  We wanted our own design, our own dimensions and definitely wood that we could hand pick out.  I'd say we have a couple of weekends left and then we can stop storing all our gardening supplies in the garage in the front of the house!!  Yay!  Here are the pictures of our progress so far:

I've missed the sun

I think it has only been raining for two months in Cincy but it feels like it has been raining for 2 years without stop.  I know that I could never live in London or Seattle if it rains this much.  I, the woman who is not physically able to tan, miss the sun.  In celebration of the small amount of sun that we have managed to soak up I've snapped a few photos of what I've been up to lately.

 It actually got warm enough to make our spinach bolt and force us to harvest it all in one final swoop.  It was rinsed, blanched and split into freezer bags to await future use.  If you can see in the upper left hand corner we also had a harvest of sugar snap peas which was about two palm fulls.  Super crunchy and very yummy.

 For the first time in my entire life, and not for lack of trying mind you, I was able to get a fairy rose to bloom after the initial blooms that were on it in the store had gone.  This little beauty has been only foliage since this past Valentine's day when I picked her up to come home with me.  I am extremely proud.  Flowers and indoor plants are not really my specialty.  Looks like my luck may be changing. 

Lastly, a little update on the paper mulch garden project for all you inquiring minds.  We had a ton of mail.  It filled four office paper boxes (the nice ones with the lid that holds 10 reams) and when shredded each box filled about a 22 gallon trashcan once I crushed as much air out of it as I could.  I am on my last box of paper because the "mulch" really breaks down fast when it rains and then the weeds start poking through.  It was a fantastic way for us to use the mail that Max was so diligently not throwing away for the past 6 years or so...however, I don't recommend this for someone looking for a cheap mulch for permanent beds.  It will severely disappoint.  It looks fantastic until the first rain storm and covers a large amount of space but that's about where the goodness ends.  Happy Gardening everyone and I hope you have more sun than we do.

A Few Pix

Brook's Good Side

The Beginning of the Stockpile

First Ever Rhubarb Harvest!!