Garden Starting!

My pink Tulips.

Radishes popping up !

Good Spinach!

Excited to see some things coming in the garden! Radishes, onions and lettuce are popping up! Any my tulips that I just planted last fall are blooming!

Spring Things!

Here is a little picture story of what has been happening around here. It seems we are busy but nothing to out of the ordinary to tell.

Enjoying the first flowers -mini irises.

Lots of bike and dog time!

Trees are blossoming - wind and rainy weather!

Getting started on the planting - potatoes, radishes, onions, carrots all in the ground and enjoying the taste of our spinach and asparagus.

Fun birdies at the feeders. 2 Oriole males have been hanging out, along with lots of goldfinches, sparrows and woodpeckers.

Pumpkin and Apple Pickin

After the first couple of frosts, we figured it was time to clean out the garden. I said good bye to the cucumbers, tomatoes etc. But I still have a few pepper plants out there, waiting to get as many golden yellow peppers as possible. We also have picked most of our apples by now and Zach enjoys biting into many a day. We had lots of fun harvesting our pumpkins and got a couple of huge ones - though they didn't quite hit the 100 lb. mark, they came close! We loaded them in the loader to move them up to the house for decoration. We have since found new homes for 30 + pumpkins sharing them with friends and family. What fun!

The HOME Report

Yellow and Purple Peppers!

Z living in his PJ's and enjoying the Cats.

After telling you all the other news...this is what has been going on more on a daily basis.
Picking tomatoes....I have made 2 batches of salsa (42 pints), 1 batch of pasta sauce, and over 3 gallons of pickles. Not to mention giving about 2 batches of salsas worth of tomatoes away and who knows how many cucs. I have had a hard time keeping up - especially since I have had a nasty cold for 2 1/2 weeks! Ugh!
The peppers are starting to turn some beautiful colors! The yellow ones are a bright orange color and we are also starting to get some red ones! Renae has grown some purple peppers which are also neat.
Last night I did a rough pumpkin count - we are at about 50! The majority are orange and we have a few that we will need the loader to move as Dean planted a variety called "Big MAX".
Zach has been on a PJ and crib kick lately. He has not slept in his crib for a year and now he has decided that is where he should be about 50% of the time - so we are moving blankets and pillows many times a day to get situated. He also has been insisting on wearing jammies most of the time and if  he isn't still wearing them by nap time we have to put them on for a nap!
The sweetest saying came out today...."Mommy, I love Daddy and Jesus." there was a pause (which made me feel a bit left out), "and I love you too, Mommy!"

Garden WORK!

After all of our trips and parties, it's back to work plus the WORK around here to do. Since it keeps raining we are still mowing like crazy around here, we even need to sweep up the grass clumps cause we can't keep up.
The garden goodies have been in need of daily picking and we are already over run by zucchini. :)
Beans and cucs are also in need of lots of  daily attention. Looking back at my garden pic from the beginning of July, it amazes me how fast things change!

Cucs and Tomatoes much bigger

PUMPKINS - no way to even get in there to peak!

Just about there! Mmmm.....BLT's!

Green Peppers getting big!

Growing Vegetables and Lightening Bugs

Fun to watch the garden grow. We are now getting peas, zucchini and beans & cucs are blooming. Some tomatoes are starting.
We also have been enjoying the firefly display at the end of our drive. The wet conditions must have been favorable for them because there are hundreds of them, twinkling away. Really cool. If you drive by about 10:30 - 11pm stop and see if you can see them!

Garden Update 2011

 This week, we picked some of our radishes. Oh how fun it is to get to pick stuff that isn't weeds!
Zach is going through another "cleaning" phase. So he joyfully washed the radishes and then scrubed the sink.
He does pretty well at knowing the weeds from the plants, but last night I caught him just before he was going to cut down a green pepper.
I enjoy taking a few pics of the garden as it progresses so I can compare later.

Trying the Tiller

We got another fun "toy" this spring, a lawn mower/tiller. But since we had already gotten our garden in, we needed to try it out at Dean's sisters place. Seems to till the dirt up real well, although we have had to do a bit of tinkering on the tractor engine to get it running right. But that too seems to be fixed, for now.

Dean trying out the tiller.

Z had his own JD to ride.

Fun Photo Project for Sara.

Garden Planting 2011

Our Garden is complete. We started planting on May 14 with the radishes and finished with our pumpkins, cucs and watermelon on May 20.
Now we have lots of stuff peaking out of the ground! It is so nice once you start to see everything grow. We had a few nights last week that got pretty cold so we covered our tomatoes and flower pots - I think they would have been fine, but better not to risk it.
I tried to down-size a bit from last year's 20 tomatoes - so now we have 15. I was thinking 10 or so but hard for Dean to resist planting lots. Watch this fall for the "Tomatoes for Give Away" post. :)

Planting Potatoes

Our Asparagus is growing! Next year we get to harvest it! Can't wait!

Fire Bug

Friday - Dean got on a fire kick. We have had a huge pile of trees in the pasture since last spring. And after burning some dead stuff in the garden and cutting down the big dead tree by the garden, we accidentally burned our stump chair which then in turn lead to finally burning the big pile. The stump chair was nice to set stuff on but we had never had any intention on keeping it - it was just to big to pull out with the tractor. Maybe after it has burned and weakened a bit from sitting a year we will be able to get rid of the whole thing.

Our Pumpkins!

We decided to pick a few of our orange pumpkins yesterday. There are many more still on the vine, we can enjoy picking them more if a little at a time right? As you can see Zach had fun! So did Mommy!
My Pumpkin with our pumpkins.

From Green to Orange

We like Green tractors and Orange pumpkins!
Saturday...Zach celebrated his birthday a bit early when he found his birthday gift (the Green tractor pictured above) hidden in Mom & Dad's closet. Oops! There was no way we were getting out of giving it to him right away.
The last post I showed a pic of that pumpkin I made for Zach. Here is the updated version with it all orange. Cool huh?

Garden Update

What have we been up to? Mostly gardening it seems. We are busy picking cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and corn. We also just picked our first big watermelon (hard to know when to pick). Zach has a fun time in the garden marvelling at the size of the pumpkins etc. He also loves to pick onions!
Most of our big beach ball size pumpkins are already turning orange! Hope they make it til October! I carved Zach's name on one of them with a stencil. It is looking better all the time as the pumpkin changes color as the scab of his name shows up more.

The Garden

The garden is looking pretty good so far. If all continues well we should have plenty....20 tomato plants!, about the same on peppers! Anyone have a good spaghetti sauce recipe?
The Zucchini are also starting appear so won't be long til we are harvesting plenty of them as well.
Amazing how all of it can grow and produce fruit in such a small amount of time.

May Daze

Well it seems May has passed and it has already been about a month since I posted anything.
We've been busy! I took lots of pics of our fun. So here it is...
Early May we helped cut down trees at Grandma B's house and Zach got his first tractor ride with Daddy. We also had some fun playing with cousins there and Auntie Nae had some baby Canada Geese to play with.
Zach really loves Grandma's chickens. Even though the mean black rooster started a fight with him once, he seems to have forgotten already.
We spent lots of time preparing our garden spot and finally got the majority of it planted on the 16th. Things are starting to grow pretty good now and have been working on weeds.
We discovered that a fox had her den in our pasture near the garden. Dean thought he counted 6 babies which seems to be a lot. We were able to watch them play, pretty cute.
We also had a nice grill-out with the A. family - Zach and Tressa had a blast with the trikes and Luke was content to have Zach give him a few wagon rides. :)
Other projects around here... Keeping up with the lawn is a project in itself!
In the past week Dean has been setting traps for the moles in our tree rows - he has had quite a bit of success and Zach knows where each trap is and watches closely that we don't miss checking one. He has also learn all about shooting a gun - as he tells Daddy to "Bootz 'em".

Mother's Day 09

This weekend was filled with projects and special times. Saturday, Grammy came up and we went bargain hunting at the city rummage sales. We were on the hunt for clothes for Zach...but also found him a few toys including the car pictured in the slide show. He really likes it! He can't drive it yet, but sure likes to sit there, bounce and play with the spinners and levers. It was a really cold and yucky day with even some snowflakes! Ugh!
Sunday, the sun was shining...so we enjoyed a major outdoor project. We had hedges around the garden and we finally got up the gumption to tear them out and make the garden spot larger. We hope this will help our garden produce better - which it should after seeing the roots on the hedges! You will also see a pic of this buried treasure that Dean dug up. It was right along side the hedges and a bugger to get out. Not sure what it was there for in the first place, a clothes line maybe, but whoever put it there wanted it to stay!

Garden Goodies!

A little garden report along with some pictures of our little niece Allison enjoying her first summer of garden fun! She really liked chewing on the carrot. Nothing better than those garden goodies! We have been sneaking some of our potatoes for a few weeks. And just lately have had some fried zucchini and our first pick of green beans. Mmmm...can't wait to taste some more!