Ho hum

Sitting on the swing with a jacket listening to the squirrels drop acorn clusters like atom bombs and watch oak seed helicopters fly around...even a few brownish leaves falling.  Four years, not counting growing up in Uh-HI-uh,  you'd THINK I'd be use to the coming of fall, but I am SO NOT READY!!  This summer has been a blur with thankfully a few positive splashes over the top.  Of course there are a few reasons I am ECSTATIC for school to start which you can peek at over here.  One negative spot to my summer has been my poor pathetic garden.

This side of the mowed part is my sad, thin plant space.

There are accumulating reasons for its non-productivity, but mainly: put in too late, not enough water- oddly enough that spot is UNDER water more often than than not- and the final straw: the poochies and dead fence collars.

I was so excited my tomato plants were growing like crazy, literally a jungle from only 4 plants and on Saturday I had to tie them up AGAIN. A dying cherry tomato plant my dad had given me had more than recovered and was producing several yummy clusters Monster Man had already picked, leaving multiple little green and bright orange ones. YAY!!  My poor green beans...out of five rows, only four pathetic plants came up. Not sure if that was due to Monster Man being the planter or birds going crazy over my garden space the few days after.

The dead fence collars are the result of Man Eyes which is the technical term for a male person literally NOT seeing what is directly in front of his freaking face.  *That will be discussed further in a a whole 'nother post!  Basically, he unplugged the Invisible Fence that keeps the dogs in our yard.  So over the weekend, the collars beeped the dogs all over the yard in the SAFE zone, wore down the batteries until they were toast. So by Tuesday and I've had to call the dogs YET again from two yards away, I finally figure this out--  I saw the cord dangling...crap!!  He had unplugged the fence (in the house) to plug in his computer.  Well,  just slap me stupid. AAARRGGGHHH.  Dogs now need retrained on fence area...because safe zone was beeping them all weekend. No wonder Lucy is acting like a freak- she's been so well trained to the fence I rarely even have to put a collar on her and she's flipping out and running around like a spazz. As an added bonus, both collars are DEAD.  Now the garden is beyond the 'Safe' area were the dogs normally can't reach.  I stress normally.

Anywho... so now I've figured why dogs are running amok, had to wait a day or so before I could get more batteries - tell kids to help keep an eye on the dogs.  Mr. FixIt the next afternoon yells at Lucy to get out of the garden. Oh man!  He informs me she was picking tomatoes. ???  Dog that freaking picks tomatoes!!  Run down to check my few crazy tomato plants and OMG!!  She had carefully picked every flippin' cherry tomato off the plant. Green. Red. Orange. All GONE.  Three near-ready-to-pick beefsteak tomatoes from one of my wildly growing plants. Gone.

Naked tomato plant. Guilty party is top left peeking around a tree, "Who me?...naaahh."

Then I saw the green beans. SMUSHED. Broken. Flat in the mud...near some very big paw prints.  GREAT!  Apparently while Lucy delicately picked tomatoes for a snack, Lyla tromped through my few beans, one pepper plant, and pulled 6 cucumber plants totally out of their mounds. 
AARRGGHHH!!!    Thankfully, upon scanning the neighbor's garden it appears untouched. Only one edge paw print and plenty of tomatoes, etc, appear undisturbed. THANK GOD!  I retreated to the massacre,  picked my 7 green beans that weren't quite ready but on broken stems, and sternly scolded both dogs.  Cooked those beans with my rice for lunch. Damn pup.

And I'd wondered the day before, when I'd caught Lucy with a tomato, which kid had given it to her.
Damn dog. I hope she has some killer heartburn. For a week.

Pickles!

Lookie there!! Pickles! I apologize for the grainy cell phone photo in my sunporch fridge. You're lucky you have that!

Thanks to Angie at Are We There Yet? and her grandmother's pickle recipe, we started pickling our cucumbers from the garden! According to Mr. FixIt, Monster Man and the neighbors, they are a hit! I don't like pickles myself, but they really smelled "pickly" when I opened the "test" jar. I had to cut Monster Man off before he finished the jar by himself!

So far we have one batch of Angie's recipe- 5 quarts done including one quart of small whole cukes/pickles, and I have at least enough medium sized to large cukes left to do another batch of those recipe and I think enough for a batch of one-day sliced refrigerator pickles. Not bad from a very small garden with only about ten cucumber plants.

I don't have beautiful pics as Angie does for my recipe, but here's my great aunt Anne's recipe for One-Day Sweet Pickles. Though IMO Angie's grandmother's recipe was MUCH simpler as I'd rather spear than slice the cucumbers, lol. Mr. FixIt usually makes these one-day pickles really well.

One-Day Sweet Pickles
11 cups cucumbers (not peeled), sliced thin
1 large sliced onion (or diced, my gang likes sliced)
Layer those in a glass or non-metal dish.
Sprinkle with 1 TBPS salt.

Let stand 2 hours. Drain.
Add 1 tsp celery seed to pickles and onions.

Mix to dissolve (do not cook):
1 cup vinegar
2 cups white sugar

Pour dissolved mix over combined pickles, onions and celery seed. Refrigerate for 24 hours. Ready to eat after 24 hours. Will keep in fridge for one year or put into containers and freeze.

Viola! Pickles! :-D

Excuse the gibberish below. It is there because I posted the pic from my phone. :-D

Veggies

Are finally growing! Look at what is in my garden:







BEANS!!






and

Tomatoes!
(no, you don't need more coffee. B took these-her arms are short and she zoomed too much, lol)







Cukes! This was taken a week ago and the plants are more than triple of this picture with several blooms and small cucumbers coming on now-Woohoo!!



I do have a cute little fence around the garden to guard from wayward toys, balls and the near-blind dog. Hopefully I can also keep out the rabbits and birds and my SON- who picked off a handful of tomato blooms last week "Here momma, flowers from your garden!" AAACCCKKK!!! - I just might end up with something we can eat! :-D

Little Garden

Anyone who knows me, knows I have a black thumb...seriously. Kids and critters of all kinds I can feed/fix/heal/grow, but I tend to kill most green plant life I come in contact with. One look at my pathetic little 6 stems of what should be compact-car sized Christmas cactus, that I've had for 12 years no less, is the proof. One day I will post my sister's CC and mine, which are both from the same original plant, for comparison. Pretty embarrassing just to think about it maybe I'll hold off on that thought. Would probably be the final nail in the coffin for my poor CC.

As poor as my growing skills are, I tend to do better with outdoor plants, probably because it rains enough that mother nature does the watering when I either don't have time or remember about midnight that I should have watered the poor dying vegetation, so when we use to have a decent size garden in SC, it did pretty well. We usually had enough zucchini and peppers to share and enough cucumbers for Mr. FixIt to make approximately 400 batches of freezer pickles. (I don't like pickles.) So even with my lack of garden skill and horribly dry soil with clay an inch down, our gardens usually turn out ok.

Usually.

The last large garden we had in SC, I was pregnant with Monster Man, had spent almost a week getting soil turned, fertilized and rows ready, and planted a mess of beans, carrots, peppers, zucchini, cukes and watermelon....which a sudden severe thunderstorm, deluge of water and tornado destroyed in about an hour. Dang. Most of the seeds were floating, then flowing away in the deep water. I was sick, all that work, which was done during my only spare time I could muster during daylight in 90-degree heat which meant my work had to be done late evening and during the night, dog-tired that week. Time, labor and loss of sleep for nothin'. I did have a few sparse carrots and beans that survived, but the true survivors were the cukes and zucchini since they were in tall mounds. I was so ticked off the only thing I did the rest of the summer was go out and cuss the plants that weren't there every few days. Those remaining plants hung on just to spite me and produced enough for us eat that summer and some to share with neighbors.

Monster man coming along late that summer, the next spring was a horrible drought, a 700-mile move the next summer, and two cold Ohio summers later, I finally am giving a garden another shot. A very small garden, only about 5x10 and less than a fourth of our SC gardens, is in the works. Mr. FixIt helped turn all the soil, the kids helped work in some new soil and fertilizer and we planted some cucumbers, beans, carrots and two tomato plants. It has rained nonstop so they sprouted in about 4 days...

One cucumber mound (I know I need to thin out a few)

A few beans sprouting.

Even wildflowers!! Woohoo! These are in the front yard in an area that was covered with ivy/ground cover stuff that apparently hadn't been thinned/tamed/dealt with in the past 15 years so the soil is a bit scary even with the added soil/fertilizer, but we'll see what happens.

I'll keep you posted, but don't get your hopes up. I could be showing pics of brown deceased items at any given moment.