Nature Is So Amazing!

We've had a pretty cold and snowy December this year.  Yesterday was the first day that the temperature was above freezing in at least two weeks.  The youngest son is home from college right now.  He happens to look out the sliding glass doors onto the patio and sees water dripping off the gutter.  "Mom, you gotta see this!  It looks like an angel!  I look out and sure enough, I see an angel, too.  I go and grab the camera to snap a picture before it gets ruined.  My husband looks out, and decides we're both nuts.  What do you think?

This summer we had some spectacular zinnias planted in our vegetable garden.  They were absolutely stunning.  We weren't the only ones enjoying them though.

What was truly amazing was that the Monarch didn't care that we were watching and taking pictures.  We talked in normal voices.  We talked about what shots we wanted to get.  The Monarch just kept right on doing what it wanted to do.  We literally could have spent the whole afternoon just watching this little guy go from flower to flower.

This time of year as we honor the true meaning of the Christmas season, also try and look at the scenery around you.  Instead of complaining about how inconvenient the weather is, and how yucky the snow and ice is, look at God's handiwork.  See how truly awesome the fresh snow looks in the sunlight.  See how the tree branches make a cool design against the gray permacloud.

Nature is truly awesome!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  Happy Gardening to All!

I Hate Fall!

A week ago last Saturday was the last one in October.  I had the day off and I went out that morning to do a final clean up of the garden.  The tomato plants were long gone but the peppers had produced  abundantly  all through the month.  As I am out there pulling off the final harvest, and yes that is where the name of the hot sauce I make comes from, I realize...it's not real warm out here.  I can see my breath.  I also remember why in the last few years I have had the garden cleaned up by the end of September.  This job really stinks when it's cold out!

From a distance, the pepper plants don't look to bad.  But up close, I knew it was time.  Up until that week, the temps had been great! Highs in the 60's and lows in the 40's.  But starting that Wednesday, we had the dreaded "S" word...SNOW!  Great big wet gloppy flakes!!  Off and on for three days.  The first night I dragged all the old bed sheets out and dutifully covered all the plants the best I could.  But when it snows during the daytime and no one is home to cover them.  Oh well.

The jalapenos, cayennes, and the habeneros weren't affected that badly.  Even the ghost peppers didn't look too bad.  But the more tender green and banana peppers weren't quite so lucky.  It was kinda depressing.  It was the best green pepper crop we had ever had.

When I was younger and first started gardening, I would baby both the tomatoes and peppers until the middle of November some years.  Covering up everything in the yard every night.  The neighbors must have thought I was nuts.  I can remember cleaning up the garden and there would be flakes of snow coming down!

As I got older, my blood must have got thinner, because I decided I was nuts!  So I vowed to have at least the vegetable garden cleaned up by the end of September.  I have followed that new edict faithfully for a few years now.  Until this year.  The fantastic late summer-early fall weather here in Northern Indiana faked me out.  Now, I was paying the price.  Multiple layers and gloves!  I hate using gardening gloves.  I like to feel the dirt.  

The morning did warm up fairly quickly and temps were in the low 50's by noon.  By the time I was ready to attack the giant zinnias, I had long since shed the gloves and was down to just a sweatshirt.  My husband came running out of the house wanting me to spare the flowers because they still looked so good!  Really?  Have you looked at them lately?

Look pretty sad to me!  I hate Fall!

The Last Hurrah!

Wow.  It's been a month since I last posted.  Incredible.  But, as you gardeners know, late summer is a busy, busy time.  Throw in a couple of baseball games and a hockey scrimmage, and time flies, as they say.

Anyway, I was getting a little worried about the garden.  Rain has been pretty scarce since June.  We're 3.52 inches below normal for the summer.  And my electric bill reflects that!  We get our water from a well.  But, as per God's plan, the garden has been bountiful here at the end.

This was the tomato harvest two Saturday's ago.  I now have 18 quarts of tomatoes in the freezer.  Yes, I said freezer.

I just pop the tomatoes in simmering water until the peel softens.  I then peel them, quarter them and pack them into a plastic freezer container, quart size.  Way easier and doesn't heat up the kitchen like traditional canning.  We'll be enjoying them in lots of soups and casseroles this winter.

This past weekend, I wandered into the garden to check on the peppers.  Holy cow!  After several trips back and forth to the kitchen, my mind was reeling.  The pepper plants outdid themselves.

Two dozen bell peppers, three dozen banana peppers, enough cayenne and habaneros for hot sauce.  And last, but definitely not least, jalapenos that nearly fill a five gallon bucket!  That's a lot of chopping.  But it's worth it to have the fresh flavors in the middle of a cold winter.

Ah, yes.  For those of you wanting to know how the hubby's ghost pepper venture is faring...they are doing quite well.  Who knew they could grow in the northern climes.

And here is his first attempt at making a sauce with them.  Lots of onion and garlic with the peppers.  He was quite upset with me when I wouldn't let him use my good food processor and he had to make this outside on the patio. I didn't want to have to air the house out for a week before it was livable again!

News Flash and Updates

We have Tomatoes!  I picked the first one on this past Monday (8/12) and have picked another six or seven since then.  Not the prettiest tomatoes ever, but sure taste good.

Just sliced up and ate the first one with a little salt and pepper.  Then had another on tacos.  I definitely see BLTs in my future!  The orange cherry tomatoes are starting go crazy, also.



Update No. 1:  I wrote before about my volunteer flowers by my porch step.  The petunias and snapdragons that just showed up from several years ago.  Well, they have a new buddy. A moss rose (aka Portulaca Grandaflora).

The long stemmed straggly looking plant that hasn't bloomed yet, to the left, is the moss rose.  And these guys go way, way back.  We're probably talking ten years since I had any in the front porch pots.  It will be interesting to see what color they turn out to be.
 I have pretty much ignored these guys all summer and they just keep blooming.  Cool!









Update No 2:  In one of my earlier posts, I promised to take more pictures of the new flower bed on the west side of the house.  As you recall, I couldn't find any pictures of the daylilies that were planted there previously.  Well, here we go.

The "Julia" coneflowers are all in bloom and the Russian Sage has gotten a little bigger.
These coneflowers have been really prolific.  I've cut blooms off several times and brought them in the house. They look really nice in my yellow kitchen!










Did I mention that my tomatoes are really yummy this year?  

It's Finally That Time of Year!

Ah, the anticipation is starting to build.  It's that time of the year when all your hard work pays off.  Yes, it's getting to be Harvest Time!  Wait, you say, it's only the beginning of August.  I picked veggies out of the garden yesterday!  Yeah, the crowd cheers!   Okay, so it was a couple of green peppers (kinda small, too!), a dozen or so Banana Peppers and approximately 3 dozen Jalapeno Peppers.  But there are still lots on the plants and the cayenne could be picked now too.  There are even green peppers on the habaneros.  Yippee, more hot sauce!

But, the best find in the garden this weekend was this....

Yessss!  It's almost tomato time.  The best time of the summer.  Garden fresh tomatoes.  Yum-O!  The ones you can buy in the grocery store year round are just pathetic.  They're mealy and have zero taste.  I can hardly wait to slice into one of the red-orange globes of deliciousness.  It will be tomato frenzy for about a month.  Eating, juicing, freezing, canning.  And then they're gone for another year.  I can hardly wait.

Oh, yes.  I promised the hubby I would show off his pride and joy this year.  Ghost peppers.

He's on his own with these bad boys!

 

Deadheading

No, it has nothing to do with the Grateful Dead.  But everything to do with my least favorite job in the garden.  I will go out of my way to find plants that do not require this action during the growing season.  That's why I rarely plant any petunias.  Going around and pinching off the dead blooms and your hands smell the rest of the evening.  Yuck.  Don't get me wrong, I like petunias.  My Grandma always had petunias out.  The Wave Petunias are a little better, but by the end of July you still need to trim them back--they start to look leggy.

A couple of years ago I started buying Calibrochia instead.  Much better results.

This year, I even scored some of the elusive brand new Lemon Slice Calibrochia! (Okay, yes, there are white petunias in there.  Only because I couldn't find any White Calibrocia.  I'm not happy!)

Deadheading can also be useful if you want to keep a flower from expanding beyond it's flower bed or spreading like wildfire.  Case in point.  My big perennial garden (aka wildflower garden) used to have a dozen different varieties of plants in it.

Now, it looks like a field of Purple Coneflowers!  So much for deadheading.


The only flowers I don't mind all the trimming and fussing, are my roses.  There is just something peaceful about working in these beautiful flowers.

It must be the smell.  It must hypnotize you into not feeling the thorns raking across your arms and seeing the blackspot and yellow leaves spreading up the bush.

I thoroughly detest deadheading!

Surprises

I don't know anybody that doesn't like surprises.  Especially gardeners. If you don't know what a gardening surprise, you are missing out.  A gardening surprise is a plant that just magically appears in a flower bed (or yard) one day.  The first of these magical plants was, aptly named, the Surprise Lily.  It showed up in two different beds the same year.

They have some big long latin name that escapes me now, but are also known as Resurrection Lillies.   They still appear from time to time.  Then I had some little white flowers that showed up real early in the Spring in my pink garden, but those eventually disappeared.

At the back of the house, I have a nice sized perennial garden, that started out with several different plants, but is now mainly Purple Coneflowers.  At one time, I had tried to grow Rose Campion in there, to no avail. Imagine my surprise, when a few years later, it appeared 10 feet away around the shed, nestled between my Lavender and my Blue Columbine.

Speaking of Columbine, it appeared 10 feet away last year in the bed next to the house!  It doesn't look so great right now, the last few 90 degree days have been rough on it.  But it did bloom.
.

This year is no exception.  For the last 3 or 4 years, I have put pots of Lantana on my front porch.  But in prior years, I have had pots with Petunias and Snapdragons (not at the same time!).  Imagine my surprise this summer, right next to the front porch!  Petunias AND Snapdragons!

My mixed feeling surprise this year is my favorite, but I don't know what it is.  My mailbox flower bed stared out with Blue Salvia, Red Bee Balm, White Boltonia and a White Butterfly bush.  The Butterfly Bush didn't survive the winter, but this showed up in it's place.

It looks like it might be in the Campion family.  But it could be a weed out of control.  I don't know, but I kind of like it!

A Gardener's Vacation

A couple of weeks ago, the hubby and I traveled two hours from our Northern Indiana home to Grand Rapids, Michigan.  We were taking a well deserved long weekend vacation.  Our itineraries differed slightly (Grand Rapids was just voted Beer City USA, again.) but I did get to visit the #1 place on my list--the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. An amazing place!  It covers 132 acres with both indoor and outdoor gardens.  There are paved walking paths or you can take a tour on the tram system.  We walked the grounds and it took an hour to hour and a half, so be prepared to spend at least half a day there.

I think we spent the most time in the indoor gardens--the carnivorous garden, the arid garden and the truly amazing tropical garden.

 These plants are called living stones because they truly look like little pebbles.

Bamboo growing indoors!

 Beautiful Orchids!

Maybe someday the plant on my desk at work will look this this croton!






There are gardens especially designed for children.  Their own area has a farmer's garden, a butterfly garden, a labyrinth for them to follow.  And the latest trend in gardening--the living picture.

There are several waterfalls.  This is one of the side waterfalls.  The main waterfall had a group of art students drawing that day and we didn't want to disturb them.

And the sculptures.  They range from artsy to whimsical.  A few of my favorites were:

Star Wars, anyone?

I need one of these!

Mirror image

But the most amazing sculpture of all was of the American Horse!  Pictures do not do it justice.  It is absolutely HUGE!

If you are ever in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area.  You have to make time to visit the Frederik Meijer Gardens.  The perfect way to spend part of a day.  We need to go back.  We didn't take nearly enough pictures!

Happy Fourth of July!

Hope everyone has a safe and Happy Fourth of July.  I'm out working in my gardens today.  Quite a bit of tidying up after 10 days of rain.  5.75 inches worth.  But I did want to share my patriotic container.  I always try to do something red, white and blue.  (Which is easier nowdays than it used to be!)

Finished cleaning up the roses, now back to the weeds everywhere else!

It's Only Been 30 Days!

Okay, I've already mentioned how weird our Spring weather here has been.  So this afternoon, feeling guilty about neglecting my veggie garden for nearly two weeks, I wandered out for a look see.  We were gone for four days and the last week has been non-stop storms and rain.  (It is clouding up again as I type!)  The weeds are finally tolerable, that was good.  Totaling the rain gauge for the week, we received 4.5 inches of rain so far.  But to be fair we did need part of that.  But much to my surprise, was the size of the tomatoes and peppers.  They've only been in the ground since June 2!  So, of course, I run back into the house like a crazy person to get my camera.

These are my tomatoes.  This year I planted 8 Celebrity tomato plants, 4 Roma tomato plants and one Sun Gold cherry tomato plant.    They've never been this big after one month, EVER.  I plant an interesting variety of pepper plants.  I have green peppers, banana peppers, jalapenos, cayenne and a couple of habanero plants.  My husband has a couple of different ghost pepper plants, but that's for another blog post.

So, I start looking closer at the peppers, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

There are actually peppers on these plants after one month!  And these plants didn't really have any blooms on them when I planted them.  I have Never had these kind of results.  The only thing I did different was I bought the plants early and re-potted them until I could get them into the ground.  (Plus a little Miracle Gro along the way!)  I just may have to re-think how I go about vegetable gardening from now on.