Gardening Assistant

Gone Swimming

Summer is here with a vengeance.  Humidity is staying around 95%, heat about the same.  Gills would be appropriate wear for our area of the country.

Tonight our friend-of-a-friend's-daughter arrived from Switzerland for a month long stay of language study.  Her english is already wonderful, she will be mostly increasing her vocabulary and perfecting her grammar.  I hate correcting her accent, it's so beautifully Italian with a pinch of the Brit thrown in.

It's going to be a great month.  She's going to help us with our Italian (currently non-existent) and with our embarrassingly awkward German.

--------------------------------------------------------

For those of you who have been faithfully checking back for Family Garden 101 and it's Monday linky.  I'm so sorry.  Summer has been busier than I could have imagined.  I've been in the garden more than I've been writing about it!

I'll be back come Monday with a new linky, and if my wonderful husband manages to fix my camera I'll have pictures.  I hope you'll link up with your green goodness too.

For now, when I'm not weeding, I hope to be swimming.

Family Garden 101

Hopefully Late is better than Never. 

That's the refrain that's been going on in my brain for the last two weeks.  My garden has been drying out from the flood and blessedly my tomatoes have been thriving. Unfortunately I've not been able to get out to plant the okra, beans, and purple hulls or the companion flowers that I had in my mental schedule.

I also still do not know about all the seeds I planted before the flood.  They may be sprouting in Kentucky right now...

Plus no pictures.  Waaa.  I really love pictures.

This week I hope to get the rest of my seeds in and then some young plants of a few variety of squash.  Plus I need to figure out how to support my tomato plants.  Not to mention I'm sure I've got some weeds that need tender-loving eradication.

On the home garden-box front- we've had more lettuce than we can eat, out of just 6 heads of lettuce!  Yummy.

I hope your gardening week has been earthy and lovely!

Wild Turkeys, Flood Waters...

My husband and two teen-aged daughters had managed to plant 72 tomato plants of several varieties and about 72 various types of pepper plants the day before all the weekend storms rolled in.


Our area got hit with about 20 inches of rain in 2 1/2 days.  You can just see the top of a sign in the middle of the first picture.  This lake is not supposed to be there.  In fact that's not even an area that has a creek.

 The second picture is directly to the right of the top picture.  It shows the right half of the garden that was still covered this morning. It seems my garden area was not submerged- at least not for long, but not all the gardeners were so lucky.  The back 1/2 acre is still covered with water.

I wonder where all the bush bean seeds I planted last Wednesday now reside? I'm not complaining, I'm warm and dry and my family is safe.

Please pray for all the families in our area who were not so fortunate.

Family Garden 101

 My normal gardening post is rather short this week due to health issues.- Unfortunately, I spent several days in the hospital with my 4 yo.  He's much better and is currently sword fighting with his 8 yo brother.

We did manage to pick up our flats of tomatoes and peppers from the local 4-H sale.  The sky opened and it rained and rained here.  I can't wait to get out and plant.  Hopefully the dust-bowl look will not return.

Blessings All!

Family Garden 101

April 19th

The theme of this gardening-week is No Rain.  As in none, nada, zilch.  It's been the driest April I can remember.

The week was not without false alarms though.  Saturday morning we were supposed to get thunderstorms so I drove over and spent an hour frantically planting Lavender, fennel, dill, swiss chard, chamomile, leeks, stock, and giant zinnia seeds.

Alas, the sky cleared; no rain.

 Hope's hoses to the community garden spot were damaged.  Let's just say 700 feet of neatly coiled hoses don't fare well when they are inadvertently run over by a tractor pulling mowing equipment.  So... bring out trusty teens and water buckets.

I love these girls!  I know that the watering was more fun because they got to ride in the back of the pickup from the water spigot to the garden.  I just hope we start getting spring showers before the novelty wears off.

Under the top layer of the dust-bowl look the earth is still a bit damp.  Surprisingly, in all that dust we have seedlings coming up especially the beets, and turnip greens.

Besides the watering we spent a bit of time weeding and planting bush beans.  I put in 2- 40 foot rows that were 2 plants wide.  I plan to plant 2 more rows in 2 weeks to stagger the harvest a bit.  I also started the sunflower house.  The seed packet didn't hold much; so far the house has 3 walls.

Our onions are doing well.  We have several patches of both purple and white.  I forgot to take a photo of the potatoes but they are up and pretty.

Totals for the week?

2 trips out to the garden and 3 hours time spent working/riding around in a pickup.  No $$ spent this week.

Back to Work

My family has been given the opportunity to participate in a community garden.  I'll be posting updates on our grand veggie-experiment.  Join me each week at Family Garden 101 with a link to your garden project and we'll have a virtual community garden to enjoy.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After a week off, we were back to work this week.  We did everything outside, if it was at all possible.  

Spatial reasoning and pre-math.

Pre-reading and pre-spelling skills, i.e.- tree climbing.

Horticulture, ecology, design....

Nature study of Lilacs

Sketching Azalea blossoms

Literature, math, anything portable, which is almost everything.  Now if I just had an Ipad...

It was a lovely week.  The weather goes from mild to hot pretty quickly where we live.  Already my two youngest can't play outside after lunch- it's too stressful for their metabolism.  We are now spending the mornings outdoors, everyone working on their own projects and then starting "school" for the older kids right after lunch.  

It was a wonderful idea, in theory.  I'm loving the mornings.  I'm not loving the afternoons.  My brain simply does not want to explain math at 1:30 p.m..  I don't want to help with vocabulary words, or term paper questions at 3:30 p.m..  I'm not remembering to check german or copy work....   

Time to rethink, re-plan, re-motivate.  I don't want the school year to end in a whimper.