I found one of these in the garden this weekend. What would you guess? Is this a good thing or a really bad thing?
Okay, now I've really lost it. I'm actually photographing my compost heap. Sorry friends, I guess I'm long gone. I won't be surprised if I come home one day to find you all sitting in my apartment explaining how an intervention works and dragging me down to the Maritime for drinks. But until then here is a picture of my compost heap
Anyway, as it turns out, they're not weeds. Check out the picture at left to see what happens when you throw some potatoes in the compost. I guess my compost is pretty fertile after all.
I really can't beat this one. Saturday night we 
were having dinner with our neighbors Bart and Jim and a few friends of theirs. The rain that had been plaguing the weekend stopped for a few hours and we had a wonderful meal on their deck.
Look! My first zucchini. He's just a wee lad yet but I imagine he'll be ready for harvest in a few weeks. I understand they grow pretty quick. How exciting! There were a few green ones and a few yellow ones.
Saturday was a day of weeding. Lots of it. Message to self: next year, mulch well once your plants are established.
The cellar is now installed and stocked. It's pretty neat to have the entire collection hermetically sealed and completely climate controlled.
bit more confident. So Zins now, then Rioja, then Petite Syrah, then something Italian and then American Pinot Noir.
Well the good news is that the pumpkins are continuing to make great progress. With five plants on each hill, I never expected them all to flourish. But now that they're growing so fast and starting to crowd each other, I had to select the weakest from each hill to take one for the team. I may need to thin them again at some point if even three per hill is too much to support. Here at left is a shot before the thinning.
The lawn sorely needed a good mowing last week. I had let it go too long and the grass was heavy and the tractor was complaining. I did get a few good shots of a frog in the pond, my first peony of the season and the big bush at the
bottom of the yard that blooms with the most beautiful red flowers every year. I always forget about the flowers on this one and am always surprised when they come out each summer.
The granite is in! After four plus weeks without countertops, I finally have surfaces in the kitchen again. I must say, it's come out looking pretty darn good.
it's exactly where it should be.
It was kind of a frustrating short weekend upstate for me. We arrived up late on Friday night and I discovered that the outside water pipe that I repaired a few weeks ago had once again come undone. That means that a) an incredible amount of well water had been wasted and b) the garden was not getting irrigated for however long the hose was undone, it could have been the whole week for all I know. That meant that Job 1 on Saturday morning was once again mending the hose, not what I needed to be dealing with.
week and now the squash have done so. I pulled of the leaves of the sick zukes from last week and they seem to be doing well. One of the plants has a weak looking stem but I'll see how it develops before I stress about it. The cukes, in the same bed, are happily doing their thing.
fact that I probably won't have peas this year. The plants have hardly grown over the past two weeks and there's no sign of fruiting. I think I put them in too late and now it's simply too hot for them. There's nothing I could have done different as the garden simply wasn't ready for them any earlier. I put them in as soon as I could. But I'll know for next year that they really should go in end of March, beginning of April.
had to throw in this shot of Jim's nephew Jacob with his aunt Trish. He's not really walking yet but he's quite the bruiser at seven months. And, he's one of the best babies I've ever seen. We spent the day with Jim's family yesterday and he didn't fuss once. What a cutie!
They're up and almost finished. These guys are all over the yard. They were there when I got the house and all they need is a good deadheading when they're done to keep them coming back year after year.
I'm not sure what's going on here but one of my zucchini plants has come down with some bad leaf acne. This can't be good. Any ideas on what it could be?
Here's a lesson in why mint cannot be planted among anything else. Last year this was a single mint plant with one stem. Now it has taken over its barrel. Imagine what it would do if I let it loose in the garden!
...but I sure do have a bear! This is my winter birdfeeder. I decided to leave it up through the spring and summer this year to keep up the show outside the window. On two previous weekends I had discovered it fallen over but I assumed that our wet May had softened the ground to the point that the pole lost its grip.
Now I realize that there were definitely more brute forces at work here. My friends Mark and Jeff around the corner told me a story about how a bear stole their bird feeder off the deck one year. I was a little jealous that nothing that cool had happened to mine. That will teach me to envy my neighbor.
Check out how he (or she?) mangled the metal feeder apart to get at the goodies within. He was big enough to rip the metal pole from the base. The last picture shows the full extent of the damage. I guess I'll put up a replacement in the winter again...perhaps a bit further away from the house this time.
The first big story are my zucchinis which have now flowered. I'm pretty sure that's a good thing and not a sign that the plants have bolted (it's not nearly been warm enough for that). I know that zucchini flowers are a delicacy but I had no idea how to prepare them and if harvesting them would mean no actual zucchini (I fear that it would). So I let them be. I'm hoping that we'll see some real zukes forming soon.
The pumpkins are continuing their impressive progress. At this rate their going to start crowding each other out soon (see how the leaves are already starting to overlap each other). I think we'll cut them back to two or three plants per hill in the next week or so.
And now a setback. We had a lot of heavy rain over the past week and I've noticed some erosion across the Italian bed and the mesclun. In the picture here you can see the diagonal band of lighter soil where the erosion occurred. Some of the basil and parsley plants have their roots exposed now and I've lost a bit of the lettuce. I'm hoping for some dryer and warmer weather now but temperatures are due to remain low over the next week and there's still rain in the forecast. Yikes!
I mentioned my fears to the guy down at the Agway. I was particularly concerned after seeing reen tomatoes forming on some of their greenhouse plants. He said that we've simply not had the weather so far this year. The tomaters need a few good hot days to hit their stride and we've simply not had that yet this year.
So I'm trying to baby them a bit by removing dead leaves and stems that didn't make it. I'm not going to panic yet but if I end up without tomatoes this year, I'll be the first to say I told you so.
The beans which seemed to be taking their time have now made a good showing. Two sides of the trellis have come up (seen here) but no word yet from the third side. Could it be that we're not getting enough sun or water on that side? Or could they just be a week behind, we'll see what happens next week.
In another coup for the happy confluence of ideal conditions and a tendency for quick germination, the pumpkin seedlings have emerged (shown here). Regular readers will recall that these seeds went in just last week. That's pretty impressive growth for just seven days. By far the fastest seeds in the garden so far. I have at least 17 seedlings so far which means lots and lots of jack-o-lanterns if I let them all do their thing.
I may have jumped the gun a little bit. But who could blame me when the lettuce looked this young and vibrant. Baby lettuces are super tasty and by snipping just a single leaf from the outside of each plant, I've not done anything to adversely affect the rest of the plant's development. By next week I should be able to take even more out, which is a good thing as I have six for dinner on Saturday night.
