Sunday, June 22, 2014

Most of my off time is spent in the garden or doing yard work these days.  During the summer my housework suffers severely.  But I think I will have time to make peasant bread today.  It is a wonderful no knead bread that I found at "Alexandria's kitchen" blog.

Mowed the backyard and filled up the dog pool for Molly this morning.  Found my first ripe tomato....  one of the Goliath's.  I have half a dozen cucumbers ready to pick as well, and there are new potatoes under the volunteer potato vines.  I finally pulled the lettuce, spinach and broccoli out as it is finally too hot for them anymore.  Planted carrots to begin the summer season.  I am over whelmed with green beans also.  I may have to start canning them.

I have the materials to make a great trellis if I can just decide where I want it and I have started using wood chips as mulch this year.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Tomatoes

Looks like this one will be ripe in about a week.  I planted 5 kinds of tomatoes this year.  The one pictured is a Super Fantastic which is a hybrid variety.  I also planted Goliath (heirloom) and Red Beefsteak (heirloom) Sweet Cherry 100  (garden favorite for me) and Celebrity, which is a bush tomato which I will never grow again regardless of how well it does.  I found out Monsanto owns the rights to it, so no matter how good it does or is, this will be it's one and only year.  It has been a fantastic year so far for gardening in Oklahoma.  Have not had to water for the last 3 weeks and things are just shooting up.  Need to mow more than once a week at this point.  The bugs are off schedule too.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Sunday

It's raining again.  At least it is not a downpour like most of our recent rain has been.  Molly is asleep on the floor behind me.  She occasionally makes a dog noise and rolls over.  We brought her in the house this last fall and I don't think the house has been the same since.  Our 4 cats put up with her and  it seems that she has adopted them.  I think I will turn today into a cooking day.  Can't make bread in this kind of weather but macaroons and shortbread cookies would work just fine.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

OK, so I was watching Braveheart again tonight.......duh, on my favorites list.  Makes sense now since I joined Ancestry .com.  I did the dna test.  75% from the British Isles, 5% Native American, 2% Irish, we won't talk about the rest.......jewish/oriental.  I have traced my direct maternal line back to 900 AD.....of course my mom is a genealogist so I had a head start but....Adair is Scot/Irish/Cherokee....Starr is British...Childers is British...Fitzgerald is Scot (think Geraldine uprising)  Damn I actually found a Bruce, a Kennedy, an Agnew and a Stuart.

Squash 2014

Still here.  Thought I would post some pictures of this years garden.  The squash is really looking good this year.  It is time to finish off the spinach and probably the lettuce as it is getting too hot for it.  There will be an abundance of tomatoes also.

Hopefully I can get some canning done this summer and try out some new recipes I have found online.  Like the Coconut Oil Chocolate one I  found this week.

These squash plants are called lemon squash and they are an heirloom variety that I have planted for the last several years.

The weather has seemed different this year.  With all the polar vortexes putting off planting time until later and also killing off some of the bug populations it seems.  We have seen some different kinds of bugs and birds this year.  We had a Hawk moth in the backyard this week and wild hemlock sprang up in the backyard as well.

The hemlock has been removed  (with gloves and a plastic bag)  I was afraid that Molly would accidentally get into it.