Twick or Tweet!

That, my friends, is what an Angry Bird says on Halloween. :)

I made costumes this year from a great tutorial found online by Dragonfly Designs. Angry Birds want candy!!!

Read more about our Halloween here.

Happy Halloween!!!

My Cold Frame

One of the things on my garden "wish list" has been a cold frame. It is essentially a miniature, unheated, portable greenhouse that can be used to "extend the season." This means you can use it in spring to harden off new plants and also in the fall to protect cold-weather crops from frosts.

You can buy cold frames, of course, for a wide variety of prices. There are also many DIY examples out there for making your own out of an old window and straw bales, etc.  This idea, however, caught my eye as being something that would be economical and practical for my first cold frame.

It is a window well cold frame. I purchased two plastic window well covers from Menards for about $5 each. Then, I asked my dad to put together the hinged frame with some leftover 2x4s and an old door hinge. We screwed the window well covers to the frame and voila! A cold frame!

The purpose of the hinge is so you can vent it. On days when the sun is shining brightly, it may actually become too hot inside the cold frame and cook your plants. Give it a crack to vent and you'll keep things just right.

We've had about three frosts since I put the cold frame over my lettuce and basil. Here is an example of what it looked like about 9 am after a frost:

This is the temp outside vs. in the cold frame:

As you can see, it's not much different. But again, it is not supposed to be a greenhouse, but rather a means of protecting from frost and giving longevity to cold weather crops, like my lettuce. FYI: the basil did not weather the frosts well, even in the cold frame, and is turning black and wilty.

Here is a peek inside:

I'll keep you posted on how long the lettuce survives! It is fun to continue to harvest salad after the frosts have begun!

September Garden Update

After freezing over 25 lbs of squash and making every kind of zucchini baked good known to man, I finally cried "uncle" and pulled out the zucchini and yellow squash plants from the left raised bed. All that was left were my two basil plants, which I transplanted to the right side. Now the left bed was empty and ready to "double dig."  When we planted this garden in April of last year, we covered the grass with newspaper and cardboard, wet it down, stabbed some holes with a pitchfork and filled it with dirt and alpaca poop. That was a quick and easy way to start a raised bed. Now that it's had 18 months or so to settle in, we decided to really do the hard work and make sure there is good, loosened soil to a depth of at least 12-15 inches. 

To double dig, you first remove about 10 inches of soil from the first end of your garden, creating a trench. Toss the soil into a wheelbarrow for later. 

Next, take a pitchfork or similar garden tool, and drive it into the ground at the bottom of the trench, wiggle it back and forth to agitate the soil and repeat down the length of the trench. Next, dig a trench in the next row, filling the first trench with the dirt from the second. You repeat this process to the end of the garden, at which point you fill that last trench with the dirt from the wheelbarrow from the initial trench.

Luckily we picked a time to do this after some significant rains, so the soil was not too hard. However, Doug did manage to break our pitchfork in the process! 

If you can see, the level of the soil is only to the first row of pavers. We'd like to fill this bed to the very top. 

You may also notice, we put down some black landscaping fabric in our walkways. We should have done this from the beginning, as weeds in the paths has been a big issue the past two years. Hopefully we can buy some gravel in the spring to fill in the gaps around the paving stones.

Sept 10th: "Little Al" had a growth spurt and is now bigger than Big Al!

Big Al still going strong:

Blueberry update: still standing!

Only one of the 2 original blueberry plantings has leaves:

My fall lettuce seeds are doing well! It's fun to harvest fresh salad greens. One of the transplanted basil plants is in the middle. It didn't really like the move too well:

My bush beans are also doing great! I plan to plant a lot more of these in the spring and fall next year.

Peppers: finally developing some fruit. All green though. I read that all peppers start green and then turn red or yellow as they ripen. So far there is no sign of that.

Sept: 22 Big Al is turning orange! We may have a ripe pumpkin after all! 

We had our first frost warning (Sept 22) and picked everything we could. I am hoping to ripen the tomatoes and peppers indoors in a brown paper bag. We harvested 1/2 lb of bush beans and they were delicious!

First Day of School - 2012

Well, it's been over two weeks now, so I better hurry up and post about my girls' first day of school! To read more, click here.

August Garden Update

It's been a busy summer. Probably the busiest I've ever had! Eventually I'll get around to back-posting about all the fun things we've done (maybe), but for now I need to start with the present.  I've been feeling pretty down about the garden. It's been the hottest, driest summer on record here in Indianapolis. That's not really an exaggeration! It's been awful. We had major water restrictions all summer long. Most of our lawn was so dry and crunchy it was too painful to walk on barefooted. I watched our cilantro bolt and die. I did collect the seeds and they are currently drying out in a paper sack in my basement "root cellar." 

I hand-watered our garden almost daily throughout the summer to keep it alive. So it stayed green, but not productive. We were desperate to get bell peppers this year! But we only got one fruit out of the three plants. One of my three tomato plants died, but the other two were big and tall. Yet, they only a yielded a half dozen ripe tomatoes. My zucchini and yellow squash were producing, which was a relief. And the basil plant was kept shaded by the squash leaves and was looking good.

Fast forward to today. These pictures were taken this morning. See how lush and green everything is? What a difference some rain can make! 

Here are both the raised beds:

Two zucchini and two yellow squash have run a-muck and taken over the entire 4x8 bed AND crept out onto the path as well. I have squash coming out of my ears! As a result, we've tried many new squash recipes and been eating it for breakfast, lunch, dinner AND dessert.

Here are my 3 pepper plants. Supposedly red, yellow and green. I harvested two green peppers from the "red" pepper plant. Maybe they would have turned red if I waited, but they looked too good to leave on the vine!

These monstrosities are two tomato plants gone wild. Next year I will plant romas and hope they stay contained. I trimmed these back as they were literally out of control. There are a lot of green fruit, but only three ripe. If all the green tomatoes ripen, I'll be doing a massive happy dance!

Some weeks back, I planted four squares of lettuce but only three have really taken off. Humph. Oh well - I'm looking forward to some fresh salad greens in another week or two! 

See those green plants with small white flowers in the back? Those are bush beans. I sowed those seeds the same time as the lettuce. Only two squares germinated, but they appear to be growing well. Bush beans will be a first for me and is more of an experiment than anything else.

I had given up hope on our pumpkin patch. It was so green and viney and full of flowers, but no fruit had appeared as of the first of August. Now, we have at least four pumpkins beginning to form and many female flowers tempt me to hope for more:

This is our biggest pumpkin dubbed: "Big Al." It's close to one foot long now.

Here's one of the smaller pumpkins, Little Al, about five inches in diameter:

Today's harvest of squash. We were gone over Labor Day weekend and came home to this! (And the fridge and freezer are already full of squash as it is...). Those long zucchini are about 14 inches, to give you some perspective on the magnitude:

Basil! Pesto is on the to-do list:

My jalapeno peppers have finally begun to grow and they look great. One of the three tomatoes harvested, I ended up pitching one since the bottom was too yucky. The others may go into a spaghetti sauce I make (augmented with tomatoes given to me by my sister-in-law and mother-in-law). Behold the two perfect green bell peppers. If that's all we get, though, I will seriously cry.

July 2012 Garden Update

I got tired of seeing my scraggly little blueberry bush "sticks" and finally went to the garden store to purchase two additional "real" blueberry bushes.  I felt HORRIBLY guilty about using a peat moss slurry to fill their holes before planting. I will never buy peat moss again, but it was in my garage and there was no sense in wasting it. We mulched with pine needles and I dump my coffee grounds on them periodically. Fingers crossed they will produce some fine berries for us one day!

Just a quick "state of the garden" shot. Not much to speak of in way of peppers or fruit. One of the tomato plants looks to be very ill. I will probably pull it out soon. Zucchini and yellow squash have been producing which is nice. That's about it.

You can see the bottom left where I have pulled the broccoli plants. After harvesting 4 sub-par broccoli heads I have given up hope of getting any side shoots of significance. Not enough to warrant the space and watering effort. They are in the compost heap now. Notice my barren patch of soil beyond it. That is where both attempts to germinate carrots failed. Notice there are not even any weeds growing there! Not sure what's up with that. Maybe it's just too darn hot?

Onion Harvest

This is my meager onion harvest on July 13, 2012. It's hard to see from the photo, but most of the onions were the size of shallots. My biggest ones were maybe 2.5 inches in diameter. Very disappointing! I blame the heat and horrible drought, even though I have been watering every other day.  Oh well - there's always next year!