Winter or Spring?

Last weekend we planted our Sugar Snap Peas in the garden.  We were barefoot and playing with the water table.  The sun was warm and bright.

This weekend, it snowed.  Not enough to stick, but snowflakes were in the air and it was sooooo cold!  Enough already.  We had to turn our furnace back on!

The grass we planted did so well and the girls loved to watch it grow every couple days.  Each shell is full with tall green grass.  It makes me wonder whether one could plant vegetable seeds in egg shells as indoor starts and transplant later.  Are egg shells good for plants?  I would imagine you could just crush the shells slightly before putting them right into the ground.  Maybe next year I'll try it.

 Trying to plant the peas.  One little helper helped, the other one didn't.  Guess which one is which...

 And then there was one...

We planted 4 rows.  One of the rows contains the seeds I saved from our "crop" last year.  If they turn out well, I will save all of our seeds for next year.  It's a little intimidating.

 Boothe has graduated to a big girl swing.  And does very well.  I'm much more scared that she will fall off than she is.  But even I'm not too concerned as the swings are very low to the ground.

 And of course Boothe can't just like to swing.  She has to love laying back and scaring me half to death.

So since last weekend, we have some tiny pea sprouts.  Yesterday I noticed them mostly around the outer edge of the garden which gets the most sun.  Hope this crazy weather doesn't effect the little seedlings.

Garden Planning

I have begun to think about and plan my summer garden. Some things can be planted as early as April 1 so it's not to early to start planning what veggies are going in this year and getting the seeds ordered. If you live in Indiana, I found a great site that tells you when to plant certain vegetables based on which zone in Indiana you live.

Purdue horticulture program

I also came across a great guide for which plants to plant together because they help in the other's growth and which to avoid planting together. This works no matter where you live!

List of companion plants

We are going to plant a couple rows of sugar snap peas early in the season and try to replant later in the summer for a second harvest. We also are going to plant a bunch of carrots since ours did so well last year. We harvested about a years worth of carrots last fall and are hoping for the same outcome this year. And lastly, we will put in a couple hot pepper plants. We did these 2 years ago and they were really fun the grow. They would look really nice in landscaping too. We froze a lot of our peppers and are just using the last of them.

Our garden area is pretty small so we may turn up the soil behind our garage to use as a second small garden. There isn't a great deal of sunlight back there so I need to do some research into what would still grow ok back there. Any suggestions?

My parents have a huge garden where we grow all of our green beans, tomatoes, green peppers and onions. If we didn't have their yard to use, we'd have to find room to grow those veggies too.

I can't wait to get started. All 4 of us have such a fun time checking on the garden, finding the first small growing vegetables and picking the ripe ones.

My First Wreath

I love decorating for the holidays, especially fall leading into Christmas. My home feels so warm and festive for those 3-4 months a year. These chilly temps early in September this year has gotten me started a little earlier than most years. I made a wreath for my front door and I really like how it turned out. This is the first one I have ever made and I'm now wondering why!?! I already have plans for a Christmas one.

I hope it holds up through the elements! And the pumpkins out front are from our garden. I love that I can use so many in decorating my home this year. They are much too expensive to buy in a large quantity from the store or pumpkin patch. I still have plenty in the basement to puree and use for breads.

We had a great weekend in Colorado with the Cory family. I took way too many pictures and hope to get the chance to sit down sort through those this week to share with you all.

Happy Fall! :)

The Carrots of our Garden

We pulled about half our carrots last week just to thin them out and let the smaller ones have more room to grow larger before we pull those in about a month. Judging by how much of the tops of the carrots we could see we knew we had some big ones. Some looked more like sweet potatoes than carrots. This was the first one we pulled...Magnolia was a great helper to her daddy. Boothe was...well, Boothe was something else...DIRT!!! Lift...and drop!The fruit of our labor. Lots of carrots to eat and boy have we been eating them!Boothe didn't play in the dirt the whole time. She eventually wondered over to the picked carrots to explore.Some of these are going into the refrigerator for us to eat within the next few weeks and the rest will be stored in moist sand in our attic for a few months. We did this last year and they store great. I actually read that stored carrots increase in vitamin A for the first 5 months of storage.
I wonder how big the rest of the carrots will be when we pull them next month!

Twirling, Pumpkins and a new Lens

This week as I was cleaning out some drawers and closets for our garage sale, I came across my old Nikon film camera. I can't even tell you which model it is. It is in a case and I didn't open the case, but I considered putting it in the garage sale. I placed it back on the shelf to think about it more and later the thought crossed my mind that maybe the lens on that camera would work on my D80....interesting. And I didn't even know what lens that old camera had on it. I went and got it, put it on my camera and viola -- a "feels-like-a-new" lens! A Nikkon 28-80. Perfect. Makes me want to take more pictures. And I have been.

Magnolia twirling. Just because that's what she does when she has a dress on.

And finally we had had enough of our backyard being consumed by pumpkin vines. Last weekend we ripped out ALL of the vines. Our final count is 15; 9 large, 6 small. They are on a card table in a cool dark place in our basement. I really don't think we need anymore. It feels good to be done with those vines. Now all that are left are the carrots, which are doing great. Ahh, it feels good to be done with those pumpkins!

Harvests from the garden

Our garden has been busy and we have been enjoying a small early harvest. We pulled about half of our onions early. They were small to medium in size, but definitely big enough.Most of the greens had shriveled up so we knew the onions probably weren't going to get any bigger anyways. I think our massive pumpkin vines had shaded the onions a little too much. Better planning next year. We still have several bulbs in the ground that we are hoping will grow larger. I sat the onions in the sun after I pulled them to dry a bit and them put about 75% of them in a mesh bag hanging in the garage to dry the rest of the way. This is the proper way to preserve them through the winter, but I don't think I have enough to last more than a couple months so I won't know if I'm drying them correctly. One day I will have a large garden with enough produce to last me through the year! :)These are our first 3 pumpkins. Pumpkins in July...something we've never heard of. That is until a pumpkin seed came into contact with our ultra furtile soil. Now I have 3 basketball sized pumpkins sitting on my kitchen counter.Make that 4 little pumpkins...Our pumpkin vines are quickly taking over our yard. We now have a bigger area of pumpkin vines in our yard than the size of our garden.The actual garden is way back there behind this mess.We have 8 more pumpkins on the vine turning orange.One of the vines is a breed of smaller pumpkins and the other grows regular sized ones.Our poor little carrots stuck in the middle of all this chaos. We keep cutting back the vines to ensure the carrots are getting enough sunlight.
Well, enough of our crazy garden. This week I have some newly canned goods to share!

Growing Garden

I'm not sure what I wrote last about our little backyard garden, but this past week we took out our sugar snap pea plants. I was really happy with the amount of peas we harvested and the plants had stopped producing so we took them out to make room for our other veggies. Our other peas aren't doing so hot. We have on several occasions caught a little rabbit rummaging through our garden and he has obviously been nibbling on our garden peas. I doubt those will end up producing at all unfortunately. I think it was our fault for waiting and not planting those early with the other peas and onions. I guess you live and learn and we have learned our lesson. Magnolia is really enjoying seeing the baby bunny though!

We pulled our first 4 onions to use. They are on the smaller size but plenty big enough and taste great! And then there's our unexpected pumpkin vines that have TAKEN OVER not only the garden area but part of the yard and still growing. This photo was taken about a week ago and since then has grown to about the size of a small watermelon. We have a couple that size and a few grapefruit or melon size. We are either going to have GIANT pumpkins by the fall or ripe pumpkins in July!

Gardening {part 5}

Here is what our garden is looking like these days. We have been eating sugar snap peas for by the handful every meal of the day. They have pretty much finished producing though. I think I'll get 1 more handful tomorrow and then we will take out the plants to make room for the other veggies in the garden. I have saved some peas to use as seeds in next year's garden.We put in some garden peas and they are coming up well. This picture was taken a few days ago and since then they have grown to about twice the size and have their little feelers searching for something to grab ahold of.So we made our own compost last year with the grass we dug up from the garden spot, leaves and random yard waste and the occasional melon rind and rotton Halloween pumpkins. Well our pumpkin seeds planted themselves in our garden are are doing very well. We left 2 plants to see what would happen and they have taken over. We should have plenty of pumpkins come fall this year!Our carrots are also doing well. We had success last year preserving our abundance of carrots in /3/sand for the winter so I'm hoping to do that same this year. We put in even more carrots than last year.

My 200th Post

So since we started this blog when Boothe was born I have posted 200 times. Wow! What a record of our life for the girls to look back on when they are older. I have seen somewhere a company that will take your blog and make it into a book. I may try it out and have do it yearly if it turns out well. It would be pretty neat to have a yearly printed copy of all my blog posts to flip through.

I have been taking a lot of pictures and sometimes I end up with random ones that really don't fit well in any one blog post. So today I decided to just dump them all into this post.

Magnolia licking the spoon after I made some cookies. I have taught her well.Magnolia just being Magnolia.Our days are split between in the playroom and outside.

Could Boothe be any more obsessed with Zoe? Loves her. And luckily Zoe loves to be bear hugged and snuggled by Boothe.

Our peas are doing great. So far we have picked 23 and have eaten them all raw off the vine. The plants are about 6 feet tall now. We expected them to only be about 3 feet. Has anyone grown sugar snap peas before? How tall are the vines suppose to be?

We have a busy June. Last weekend we had the wedding and were in Indy Friday-Sunday. This weekend the girls and I are traveling to Ohio for a graduation party Friday-Sunday. The following weekend we have another wedding in Indianapolis on Saturday and may do something for Father's Day in Indy on Sunday while we are down there. And then the last weekend in June we have a baby shower on Saturday. I guess the first half of July is busy too. We are having Boothe's birthday party on the 3rd and then we always go to my cousin's for a pool party on the 4th every year. Dan's brother, Pete, his wife, Mis, and their 7 month old, Ayla, are coming to visit from Colorado the week after the 4th. Then the following week of July 11th-17th we will be up in Michigan on the lake at a rental with my family. I'm sure we will find something that will keep us busy the last 2 weeks in July too! So I may be posting a little less this summer. I'm not sure how it will all work out. For now though, keep coming by and following us!