Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Spring Planting

Zucchini and cucumbers

Two-thirds of the garden is in, but only if you count the scraggly remains of the cabbages I planted last fall.  The dog carnage was nearly total, though I did manage to replant a few that weren't thrown halfway across the yard by digging paws.  There is now a nice hardware cloth fence around my beds.  Unfortunately I used all but three of my garden stakes to hold it up.

I would have all my beds finished, except Burpee seems to think I don't know when to plant, and is holding my order until the "appropriate time for your planting zone".  We're close to the Gulf.  I've had to turn on the air conditioner.  I think the danger of frost has passed.



My rosemary survived the winter in spectacular fashion.  For some reason our oak tree doesn't drop its dead leaves until the spring... I'm not sure if it's the clogging infestation of spanish moss, or if it's just a stubborn tree, but believe it or not I raked that yard just last week to add decomposing leaves to the bottoms of my garden beds, and now it's like I never raked at all.  I'm leaving it in with the rosemary to act as a mulch, but I'm going to have to wait until the yard dries out a bit before I hit the rest of it again.  Three days straight of rain, and we were approaching an ark scenario.



Rory, the smooth fox terrier, loves the puddles.  He'll go splashing through them and get confused when the other dogs won't join in the messy fun.  He's gotten huge since we got him last fall.  He was the size of the chihuahua, starving and covered in fleas.  He's now bigger than my daughter's dog; she's some sort of massive corgi-something mix and happens to be the exact same color as Mr. Pickles, the aforementioned chihuahua.


Thanks to a rusting old chain link fence, and dogs who love to chase cats and squirrels, we have a major undertaking coming up, where we're going to have to replace a sizable chunk of our chain link material.  They're like bats... they can squeeze through the smallest fricking opening and go running down the street.  If it wasn't for the nearby train tracks, I might let them roam, but they're just far too close.

I'll update this when the tomato and pepper plants arrive.  I have tried starting my own seeds, but I just have far better luck with purchased plants.  I'm hoping the hardware cloth will also cut down on the number of hookworms I get on my tomatoes... they really did a number last year.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Garden Woes and Hope of Spring

After my previous post five months ago, a few things happened.

One, more blossoms appeared on my pepper plant, and quite a few ended up fruiting, so that was not the last pepper of the season.  As a matter of fact, I just picked the last tiny pepper off the plant four days ago and sauteed it for topping an Italian sausage I had for dinner.

Two, I planted my cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower... however the dogs didn't like this arrangement and dug most of them up for me.  So no sauerkraut from the garden, though there will be a nice, big, beautiful hardware cloth fence around the beds soon, as I've ordered my plants for this summer's garden and the dogs also made a hole in the chain-link fence, so when we picked up the repair materials for that, it was quite easy to get the other stuff.  It was practically on the same shelf.

Three, I have shifted my blogging focus.  A nice gardening blog is all well and good, but not when the author is a craptastic gardener.  The dog fiasco didn't help much.  So I've started an additional blog over at Knitter's Media Reviews to focus on movie, television, and book reviews with an eye for recommendations for fellow knitters and crocheters who like to have something running on the TV while they work.  I will still be posting my personal journal-style posts here, but they will probably be much less frequent on average.

I know, I haven't posted in four months, and you're wondering how I could possibly post *less* than that, but I did say "average".  Over there I'm trying for a consistent five posts a week.  Here I've posted 482 posts at an average of 5.75 posts per month (I started this thing back in 2008, can you believe it?!?)

Anyway... I'm not hitting new movies very often, but I am working my way through the Netflix and Amazon Prime catalogs in a fairly regular fashion.  I review mostly independent, action, sci-fi/fantasy, and rom-coms that strike me as interesting or have someone I like in them, but they're usually on the older side.  Come check it out and see if my taste is the same as yours... and if it is you may find a hidden gem or avoid a real clunker.