Gardening Pics and my Independence Update....

A day late, as usual.


Independence Day Update:

Plant Something: Do transplants count??? I've done TONS of that in the past week. At least 40 plants have been transplanted in the past week. But I haven't done any FRESH planting in that time.


Tend Something: Weeding, watering and thinning of plants already planted.


Harvest Something: Nope. Meant to get to my Rhubarb this weekend, but I didn't.


Preserve Something: Also no. If I'd gotten the Rhubarb picked, I'd have chopped it up and frozen it till I had enough to make some rhubarb butter I received a recipe for this past winter.


Make Preparations: Gardening. Nothing else really got done this week.


Cook Something: I made cookies from scratch on Saturday, does that count?? And using fresh (though not locally grown) cucumbers in more cucumber salad.


Manage Reserves: Nope. Didn't even get to restock canned goods that I'd used during the past week, when I went shopping on Saturday.


Local Food Systems: Nope. (Can we smell a trend here?)




Compost Something/Reduce Waste: Composting as usual, but I also went ahead and shredded a whole bunch of newspaper that's been accumulating and dumped it in my compost bin. THAT was a mistake. I didn't stop to consider how fly-away all these little, tiny strips of shredded (with a paper shredder) newspaper would be, and they promptly fell OUT of my compost bin. *sigh* The other half of the newspapers to be shredded got shredded by hand into much bigger strips. Unfortunately, they also have to be VERY well mixed in, and kept very moist, otherwise they dry out and blow away too quickly as well. *big sigh* THAT was a bit of a minor disaster, I suppose.




Learn a New Skill: Don't dump tiny bits of shredded newspaper into a compost bin made primarly of chicken wire!

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Pics from gardening projects here at home and at the FIL's taken on Friday.

Strawberry patch

One Stupice Tomato, one Cucumber

Sunset Runner Beans. Something keeps biting the tops off the beans, though. I've now lost 3, but the darned whatever-it-is isn't actually EATTING the nipped top, just biting them off and leaving them.

My planter bed. I've thinned my Swiss Chard, transplanting a couple of the bigger "thinners" a bit further a part. I hope they all survive. There were some big gaps between what came up, and what came up, came up mostly in groups of 2 or 3 plants. So, I used the extra plants (as I said, the bigger ones) to fill in some of the gaps.



Two more Stupice tomatoes, planted in the big black half-barrel.
My two zucchini plants








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Here are a bunch more pics taken at the FIL's house, in no particular order, just to show how much things have grown in the past week. I hope you can make out the green growing things in the rows, though they're harder to detect than the items in pots in the greenhouse.

Ok, I must get going. I've gotta get to the garden-store before going in to work, which means leaving a couple of minutes early. (Thank goodness the garden store is on my WAY to work, right on the road out of North Pole. And I only need to get one little thing, for now.)

Have a Blessed Day!