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“Mondays in My Garden”: Four Easy Ways to Save Money when starting your Garden
There are a few blogs that I just love. Household 6 Diva is one of them. Ann Marie is a down to earth Army spouse recently relocated from Germany to Texas and there are so many times that I think, “Wow, would we be good friends if our lives had ever crossed.” She started a series called “Mondays in My Garden”. Be sure to read her inaugural post here: Welcome to “Mondays in My Garden” Ah… my garden. Just the thought of it has my heart smiling. Yesterday it was 72 degrees out in NE Ohio. The back door was open all day. The front door was filled with sunshine. Smiles, laughs, giggles…
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Starting Seeds in Milk Jugs
I’ve got the itch as anyone who follows my Gardening Pinterest Board very well knows. It’s the beginning of March and I want to be outside, in the dirt, enjoying the sunshine, hard work and noises and smells of Spring. But it isn’t that time in NE Ohio. Instead the forecast still includes snow, the temperatures are still in the 30s and getting the rototiller out is no where in site. Sigh… That is why I LOVE starting seeds this time of year. I get my hands dirty. I get to watch my plants start. I get to dream about what my garden will look like this year. A good…
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Seed Packets Promise a Garden of Beauty
We live in zone 5b. I did not realize this. I was a zip code and area code type person. Now, I can add planting zone: frost free date zone to my list of where to pinpoint my “home is where the heart is” on the map. Knowing your frost free zone is of premier importance for gardeners. It is the point where you little debutantes can come out and meet the world outside of the green house. I nurtured some impatiens and alyssum last year and saw their frozen little bodies worthless in a garden last year. Impatient can be imprinted on my garden gloves…. need to wait… need…
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Tasty Tuesday Banana Pepper Gratin
Summer is so over… so very over. Temperature dipped to the twenties; leaves are brilliant red, orange with faded yellow edges; sunshine hours have slipped to dark morning and evenings. Autumn is here.. no doubt. The gleaner in me came out this weekend when I heard of the temperature forecast. Dale and I picked anything living out there that could be touched by a freeze. Whoa, I already have packed a peck of pickled peppers into the pressure cooker. My imagination has been running overtime as to how to use plant after plant that over produced this year. Yeah for that… but I can’t let them die on the plant.…
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Crazy Carrots
I have always loved art. I see beauty in some of the oddest of places. Don’t we all? However, there are times when the normal is the ‘piece de resistance’: garden carrots.Art… it appears wherever it can, whenever the whim arrives.I prefer the pencil straight carrots that my grandchildren draw. I have several of their colorful creations taped on my cabinets displayed as art in my kitchen. Now to the carrots themselves. We did all the right steps, fertilized in fall, rotor tilled prior to winter, staked the fence posts late winter, rotor tilled to get that soil up to fluffiness. I still don’t know the proper farmer’s terms for…
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Tasty Tuesday Dress Me Up Salsa Pico De Gallo
Salsa is a staple at our house, and has been for years. Tell me… WHO can live without tortilla chips and salsa? Or quesadillas with salsa? The occasional late night nachos with salsa? You get the picture. I used to have a truck load pumped into the house… back ‘er up and fill the tank. Well, not really, but if felt like that. I would wipe out a whole shelf in the commissary each time I went.So, naturally after canning a gazillion tomatoes the light bulb went off as to how to use these red beauties and the first thought: Salsa.There are several recipes for this mainstay, here is my…
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Peppers, Green, Banana, Hungarian Wax A’Plenty!
The garden just didn’t appear out there over night. And to my recollection, little gnomes haven’t been out there weeding, hoeing, rotor tilling, etc…. Especially the rotor tilling part… that machine is a monster that wants to go anywhere but where I feel is straight. (Yeah for Dale on this and so many parts of the pre-harvest work.) At the sound of our behemoth, those little gnomes would have jumped straight out of their gourds and be headed so far out of Michigan as to be fictional memories. So, maybe that’s the story!The beauty of a vegetable garden is that crops sweep in at their own pace and then demand…
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Tasty Tuesday From Pickled Hot Peppers
Packing pickled peppers, and these babies are hot ones! Isn’t it funny how in the heat of the summer, it is time to put the heat in the kitchen and fire up the canner. Our pressure cooker is steaming, rattling, cranking out pints and quarts of the best our land has to offer.We planted jalapenos, yellow banana peppers and Hungarian wax peppers. Our peppers with heat are the latter: the Hungarian ones. Glad that we have that, as I want to taste that zip when I crunch on a nacho!Putting up these three varieties melds the taste together. We enjoy the fruits of the summer all year long. But the…
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Tasty Tuesday From Seeds to the Table
We did it! Threw fertilizer here and there, rotor tilled in fresh compost dirt, planted seeds after threat of frost. Frost came: turned on the sprinklers at some early ungodly hour and let it run, as the water is warmer than the air not allowing ice to form, and the sun did not have a crystal prism through which it could burn our babies! So, seeds in… popped out the ground, had an initial weeding, thinning and OH YEAH.. .We have spinach, lettuce and strawberries for our first salad of the season. A side salad, but oh so good. I will remember to rinse those leaves 6 times as opposed…
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Spring Break Fun
I love the change in routine involved with Spring Break! We have enjoyed alarm clocks off, time outdoors, moments together and later bedtimes. Time with school-aged friends, time with neighbors, time with cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles. I had a great Easter weekend at home. We enjoyed Easter church-service as a family, followed by the annual Easter-Egg hunt at Hub’s Grandma’s house involving A LOT of plastic eggs and A LOT of kids. We spent a few days enjoying the warmer-then-usual Spring weather in our backyard, planting some flower seeds, friends over to play backyard-baseball and so much more! We packed up the car mid-week and headed to my folk’s house, about a five hour drive, but well worth the time!…
