Our Garden Plot

We've been gardening. There is a community garden about five miles away from where we live and we got a plot. It has been fun working with Gabe and seeing him try to make it all work out whether it is working to try and get the clumps out of the soil or answering my questions about what he thinks we should do about this and that since we are novice gardeners and trying to figure tings out. He hasn't shown an interest in gardening for a few years but now he seems to be enjoying it.


Gabe, the two little ones and myself have been driving out the "the garden" and it is fun to see the little ones want to imitate us big ones. Hoes and rakes for kids are sold at the hardware store and I think that I should have bought them (maybe Istill will) because the little kids really want to help and there is plenty of space for them to muck around on the part of the garden that hasn't been planted yet. The dirt is very clumpy it would truly be helpful for the to hack away at the clumps with us.

Anyway, it seems we were taking a break from our formal homeschooling and working in our garden has provided us with a place to get out of the house (and for Gabe to come up from the basement) and do some hands on learning. It's good for us.

A little bit from the garden

This is a picture of just about all the beets from our garden.  I am going to bake them and slice them for supper.  We are really just beginner gardeners and have a small garden.  We got a little bit of some things (like beets) and some very small potatoes and onions and what seemed for a while like a lot of tomatoes.  My husband made salsa with those.  The tomato production seems to be slowing down a bit.  We were going to try our hand at canning but we will see how much more we get.  With the earlier tomatoes I made this delicious tomato salad.

Seven Quick Takes Vol. 15

1.  I got a haircut on Saturday!  I think it has been at least a year since I got my hair cut.  It's amazing how good I feel.  It was really long and I wore it in a pony tail all the time.  I had it cut above my shoulders and layered.  I'm just thrilled with it and my husband likes it too;)

2.  It was hot at the beginning of the week: the upper 80s and maybe 90; but the past couple of days have been so beautifully perfect.  Yesterday I went on a weed pulling rampage.  It was easy because the ground was just the right amount of wet.

3.  It looks like we may have to look for other options in my wish for a clothesline.  We got an umbrella clothesline that requires a hole to be dug in the ground for installation.  

We called to have the underground utilties marked but it seemed like no matter where my husband dug he always ended up hitting an underground cable t.v. line anyway. Some other possibilities are  Mrs. Pegg's Handy Line and something that attaches to the house like this one.  They are kind of expensive but it seems that these may be the best options for our limited space and it will end up paying for itself (though maybe not as quickly as I would like).

4.I hate Facebook.  When someone says something that rubs me the wrong way (i.e. discusses politics) there are times when I feel I just have to comment and tell them (politely of course) that they are mistaken and here is why.  That is in the heat of the moment and then comes the next day when I feel embarassed and am loathe to check my email in fear that they may have responded back.  Sometimes they don't but when they do I just delete the response and hide from the whole situation.  Isn't that silly?  I recently did yet again but this but this time I moved the email with the with the response to a special folder and will perhaps look at it later when I have time to think about it and not become upset or preoccupied about it.  I think I have a misplaced sense of guilt about speaking my mind. 

5.  Memorial Day weekend is the annual Renaissance Fair.  We may go to this as we haven't been in a long time.   Much of what goes on isn't purely "Renaissance" but a mix of many time periods and there seems to be a certain Wiccan element as I recall.  Something cool I remember from last time I went was a woman who made cookies form medieval times.  She talked about how it was the man's job to beat the eggs because they didn't have mixers and the eggs had to be beaten for a long time.  The cookies were beautiful as they were made with a cookie mold.  I think it will be fun.

6.  Smileyboy's first birthday is July 3rd and I often find myself thinking how hard it is to believe that at this time last year I was pregnant.  He was due July 2nd and I was sure he would come late as my first two children were induced at two weeks past the due date.  My water broke on July 2nd and my labor wouldn't get started because of how he was positioned.  Thank goodness he moved to a better position before it was time to push.

7.  Our garden is starting to look really good.  I wish I had a picture handy to post.  It will be interesting to see how much stuff we get.  It's a small garden but maybe we will get enough tomatoes to do a little canning.  We have beets so I may be able to try pickling some and maybe freezing the greens.  I have never done this before so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Have a good Memeorial Day weekend and for more Quick Takes go to http://www.conversiondiary.com/.

Seven Quick Takes Vol. 14

1.  I posted about Angelboy and my husband putting together a frame for a raised garden here.  Well here is a picture of the garden with the dirt in it just waiting for the plants to come and live there.  Hmm...I guess it depends on how fond of gardening you are as to whether or not you find this picture very interesting.

2.  There is a woman I know who just had her 9th child at the age of 42 and she had her first child at around the age of 30.  Isn't that amazing!  I love it when older women are able to have large families.  It's unorthodox to have nine chlidren in todays society, but it is even more unorthodox to do so beginning in your thirties and continuing on into your forties.  I can appreciate this as I had my second and third child at the ages of 37 and 39 and am hoping God gives me the strength I need to accept more if it be his will.

3.  I had a really bad attitude last week.  Then I saw the above mentioned woman with all her nine children and her new baby and my attitude changed.  If she can have her 9th baby at the age of forty-two with the oldest child being 12 how can I claim to be stressed out as a housewife with two little ones who gets mostly plenty of time to herself and has plenty of help.  (O.k...I don't have nine, but it is still hard to get it all done sometimes.)

4.  Speaking of older women having children...I had an ultrasound done of my ovaries on Tuesday.  It was kind of depressing as the ultrasound technician told me my ovaries were small.  She then said that this was good in that it is normal for your ovaries to get smaller as you get older, and then added, "unless you want more children."  Ugh. 

5.   We finally got an offer on our condo and the closing is scheduled for May 25.  I pray that it goes off without a hitch... or at least minimal hitches, anyway.  I dream of the day when we will be paying only one mortgage.

6.  We got a Brill reel lawn mower today (Those are the push lawn mowers without motors).  Our power lawnmower died and we had been thinking for a long time about getting a reel lawnmower.  Our grass hadn't been mowed yet this season so our grass was pretty long and we had even longer gone-to-seed Dandelions  sticking out of the grass.  The mower did great with the grass but it didn't mow the dandelions so we have a yard full of dandelion stems sticking up.  Very ugly.  We may have to power mow these some way and then start over again by mowing them with the reel lawnmower before they get very long again.  I guess you have to mow your grass pretty regularly as the manual lawn mower doesn't do as well with tall grass as the power lawnmower.  We'll give it a chance.

7.  Tomorrow is May 1st and the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.  Wow!  Goodbye April.

Thanks for reading!  You can read more qt's at conversiondiary.com.  Have a good weekend!

Raising the Garden

Here's a picture of my husband and Angelboy doing some father/son bonding while building a raised garden (I hope the neighbors don't mind that I got them in the background).  Our soil has a high clay content in our back yard and we haven't had much luck growing anything for the past couple of years, so we decided to give the raised garden a try.  We are all excited about the prospect of growing things in our little patch of dirt.  We may divide it up three ways so we can grow anything we want as we all have different ideas of what we want to grow.  We better get a move on; it's only getting later and later in the growing season.

The Last of the Tomatoes

Here are the last of the tomatoes that my husband picked last month(not that there were very many this year). He wanted to get them before the first frost and perhaps do something with them. Right now they are on a table in our basement and our cat knocks them off and plays with them. We may just end up throwing them out but I thought that they would at least make a rather striking photo.