So this spring has been very weird. well... maybe it has actually been "Spring Like". Spring and Fall are the transitional season right? They are meant to be a bit unpredictable. our last frost date is listed as May 10.  I always wait though until memorial day weekend to do my planting. I figure I am pretty safe then, and our local garden club (which I keep meaning to join...) has a plant sale so I just buy them all and then plant them all and have a grand old weekend! 


I have been researching the straw bales and while some people recommend new ones each year that seem insane. (I have bought 17 in the last two years and they are $5.00 each and that just seems like a lot to spend annually....) so I figured I would just supplement and condition the balkes very well this year so they are still viable. 

Thus began my search for fish heads. Alas after posting twice on facebook asking for fish heads no one responded, I sometimes post things that are a bit.. shall we say "off" just to make people scratch their heads. For example a year or so for christmas I got amy sedaris' new book. “Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People.” I was VERY excited as I love her and her wacky sense of humor. So I changed my facebook user picture to this picture :



(just the bathing suit image actually) with no explanation. or caption or anything. No one asked, I never told. but I am certain people wondered. why? who? why? so I am guessing that my requesting fish heads was seen as a similar "tiffany is twisted" "do not make eye contact" "back away slowly" type situation. So long story I did not get fish heads. I did get epsom salt, aspirin egg shells, and some shrimp skins or whatever it is that shrimp have and fertilizer. Hopefully this will be enough.

As I said this Spring has been odd and our area had a frost warning Fri, Saturday and Sunday nights (may 25,26 and 27th!)!! I waited till Sunday to plant and still had to cover everything (I think I lost some celery (pictured in the last post) but nothing else, thankfully!)






I bought, 4 zucchini plants, 4 cucumber plants, 3 full sized tomato plants (green zebra, shady lady and hillbilly) 1 paste tomato (yellow banana) 1 currant tomato (sungold- my favorite! they are like little candy balls!) 1 grape tomato (grapette), 4 'sweet banana' sweet pepper plants, 1 'Hungarian wax' medium pepper plant, 1 'ring of fire' hot pepper plant, 1 'sweet pickle' sweet pepper plant 1 'jalapeno' hot pepper plant 2 tomatillo plants ('toma verde' and ... hmm can't recall the second variety). the plants were all strong and large and we have already gotten a few peppers! YUM! picture when i can.... i also built my own potting bench and will post a picture of that too! :)












***the above picture is from the book but i found this copy here: http://bostonherald.com/entertainment/books/2010/11/amy_sedaris%E2%80%99_crafts_book_will_leave_readers_stitches

Well spring has finally sprung! It has been slow coming this year! The yard is coming along well.  the retaining wall has gotten its second layer, the front beds are mulched, the herb spiral was renovated and replanted. No time for a real post but isn't a picture worth a lot of words?  so basically this post is going to be crazy wordy! lol  get ready!

toad house

herb spiral

daffodil

potato towers I will do a post about these soon

herb sprial

Regrowing celery

Light bulb vase that I made

first flower of the year, a crocus

lettuce in a basket

added a wee pond to the her spiral

parsley (curled and flat leaf) and tarragon came back,  added lemon thyme, english thyme, rosemary and oregano

strawberries

toad house with chives and the pond

azalea

she's a New age girl

So, I am not Irish, but my house has a big shamrock on the door and I am planning to make a split pea centerpiece to celebrate an Irish saint.  I am also not Catholic but I love giving things up for Lent! I always have, it is fun to see what you can live without, an exercise in self discipline, and even more-so since I know no one but me cares if I stick with it.  So this year my new years resolution was a vague "be more healthy" and I started by limiting how much pop I drink and what I eat.  So for Lent I decided NO MORE POP! and  wonderful GF gave up meat.  HMM kinda a two-for there. since she has given it up I am now eating a lot less, since we shop for,  cook and eat dinner together.  This should be interesting!

We normally try to eat at least one vegetarian recipe per week but GF doesn't like pasta very much, especially sans meat, and I don't like beans. so we focus on mushrooms a lot of the time. but 40 days is a lot of mushrooms. lol.

In non Lent related news, We are building a retaining wall around the front garden bed.  We are doing this for many reasons.  1. It will be pretty/increase curb appeal. 2. It will actually retain the dirt and mulch that seem to love to cover the sidewalk and 3. b/c Maya likes to pee right there. GROSS. She doesn't get that my garden is a bad choice.... so hopefully this will stop that!  We went to Home Depot and picked out the pavers but had no clue they weigh so much (20lbs each!) so we only got 22 to start (we need about 100 total) since we drive a regular little four door car.  and are not super tough. I am thinking this project will be bigger than I imagined but seeing how nice the pavers look with just the one layer, sitting there (eventually it will have 4 layers and they will be level.. eventually...) I think it will be well worth it!

I also got (with my tax refund of course, tis the season right?) a cast iron dutch oven (summer campfires look out!), cedar shims (for an awesome DIY Sunburst mirror project I have planned.), and reed fencing    (for potato towers and to cover an ugly chain link fence. ) so I have lots of good things in the works...  if the snow will ever stop.  :(

** bonus points  if you are wondering.... yes the title of today's blog IS a reference to the 90's one hit wonder song..

blog fail, update and reinvention

So I kinda failed at blogging.  Summer took hold, and with the 90+ temps we ended up with  a lot less garden and a lot more pool. lol. We got one of those inflatable rim pools and set it up (note to self: a slanted hill-y back yard and a pool,  do not an easy situation make) and spent the better part of the summer sitting it in (it was only 30inches deep) watching our garden shrivel. We did get some cherry tomatoes, some small onions, some potatoes, a handful of tiny peppers , a cucumber, and some education, so it was not a total failure.  The herb spiral rocked once again. All the herbs did superbly and tasted delicious! I will update later and add some pictures.  I also think I may start adding a few other dimensions to this blog. I will probably always stink at keeping up with it, but maybe it will be easier if I also talk about less seasonal things.    Since Pinterest came into my life I have been doing a lot of crafts and have also been trying lots of new recipes, so maybe I'll blog about those as well. And maybe hiking since we stopped smoking (after the asthma hospital scare, so almost a year ago now!) we started really getting into hiking it is so much fun!  Oooh and the Oscars! lol that is my latest obsession.  Each year we try to see all the nominees for best picture, best actor and actress. We have 3 more to go (plus two more that we will not be able to see, due to them not being shown anymore and not yet available on DVD) So far I really liked Argo, and Beasts of the Southern wild.. I also enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook and The Impossible (though i do not think Naomi Watts is best actress!, she was practically  in a coma for 1/2 the movie!   ok back to the grind! (which reminds me i also got a juicer and started making my own juice.... lol)

Glass flowers!

At work we  have been making these glass flowers. We get misc. glass pieces and the clients turn them into  wonderful  lawn art. I have seen them elsewhere for sale and it is funny. we worried about the prices, being high, (due to the high cost of steel (which we use for the stems and the laser cut leaves) but then I realized people are selling just the glass pieces for huge sums, without  what we call receivers (where the stem attaches) or the stem or the leaves.  It is crazy. later I will post the one I have at home  but for now I will post the ones we just finished at work.  So far I don't really get a lot of traffic, or at least in terms of comments, but if you are around northeast ohio, let me know if you are interested in a flower. (we don't ship them d/t the steel which is the problem with getting them off etsy etc.) (we also make bird bath/bird feeders to i took a couple pics of them too!)

  

Curses of a different sort

So I haven't blogged in a bit b/c we had a medical crisis.  My wonderful girlfriend had a severe asthma exacerbation - basically she had an asthma attack that lasted for three days despite treatment and had to be hospitalized. It was terrifying, but she is ok now. Needless to say this put my garden on a back burner. I did get the peas in the "ground" (back straw bales) on the 18th (she was hospitalized on (Saturday) the 17th) but not in the way I would have wanted (I had to get them in since I had soaked them in water and wasn't sure what would happen if they stayed in the water too long... and then since I had no topsoil, or compost or time to get any, I had to use some potting soil I had gotten to start seeds with) and finally put the potatoes and onion in on   (Friday) the 23rd (she was released on (Wednesday) the 21st and I took off Thursday and Friday to be with her).  Our weather here has been so weird that I think the delay worked out. The weather was so warm/hot, then it cooled off and rained...so it was probably better to not plant when it was really hot and dry.

I took some pictures Of what I managed to get  done and of how far the beds have come with our early summer like weather, and would have posted them, but as luck would have it while my wonderful girlfriend was hospitalized, we had a bad storm that took out our computer monitor! I am assuming it was a mild lightening strike, but we didn't notice, it until she was released and at that time were unable to tell if it was the monitor or the comp itself, so we had her brother come look at it and hook up a new monitor.  Yeah if  bad luck grew on trees I could consider myself a master gardener!

 Well all that being said,  the potatoes and onions are in, no sign of growth yet, but I'm sure they will pop up soon. I bought top soil and humus at a ratio of 3:1 totaling 320lbs. (and I had to load and carry it all by myself!) and filled the hole in bales, then I added the seed potatoes and onion sets (both red and both $3 from Walmart) I bought some more seed starting potting soil, and started some  of the seeds I had saved, (I saved some hot banana peppers, hot cherry peppers,  bell peppers  and some I just labeled "salsa mix",  zucchini, and  some tomatoes -mainly slicing and cherry, and will start the rest today).  I normally do not do well with seed starting, mainly b/c our house is too cold and I do not have a proper seeding area b/c the cats love to eat the seedlings so I have to hide them away so I don't hold out too much hope for these seeds, but i just can't stop myself from trying... Due to this, and the fact that the bales do best with well established plants, as opposed to smaller seedlings, we are planning on buying most of the plants from a local annual plant sale that is held on Memorial Day weekend (when we plan on planting).

 and now for PICTURES!

Azalea- hasn't died, despite the walnuts!

Violas, Sedums and Grape Hyacinths

Red Raspberries

Red Potatoes and Red Onions

Widows tears

Seed Starting

Christmas Cactus, loving being outside again!

Veronica

Coral Bells

Herb spiral

Maya and the herb spiral last year right after I built it.

So today I worked on cleaning up the herb spiral I built last year.  It was an idea I found online and knew was perfect. I had been using a corner off our little concrete patio as an herb garden and this location totally lent itself to the spiral shape. An herb spiral has a bunch of benefits. 1. it creates micro-climates so you can grow herbs that have different growing needs in the same space. 2. It allows you to fit more herbs in a small location since you are "building up, not out" 3. It is attractive and unique. 4 The how to is pretty easy, I did it in one afternoon.  5 the cost is practically nothing

Chives that have overwintered

The herb spiral two weeks ago.

                                                                                                       

The concept of an herb spiral is that you build, with rocks and soil, a spiral (Conch shell) shape.  The topmost area is not shaded and rain drains down, so it is the warmest and driest area,  the middle level is not as sunny or dry, and the bottom is the most shaded and wettest area(you can even make a pond or bog at the bottom!).

You then plant your herbs accordingly, to what "climate" best suits their needs and voila! I used rocks and bricks and pieces of broken terracotta that I had around the yard (free).  This year I will have to supplement the soil given the dreaded walnuts, but you can use your own soil if it is not poison (free in most cases) you just have to jazz it up a bit with some gravel and sand and some compost. (free or nearly so in most cases). I plan on getting some more sand and adding some topsoil and and some manure to add to the spiral, (it has settled a lot since last year, so I would have had to add to it no matter what). So far it has Thyme and Sage sprouting and then the Chives that I keep in the pot at the bottom. I may try a pond or bog later but for now the chives enjoy the bottom spot.

Clean and waiting for more soil and eventually plants