End of May veggie update

Lots and lots to show you today! First, here's some of my bigger squash. The plants are loaded with them, all different sizes from one inch long to almost ready to pick. The two I DID pick are at the bottom of this post:


And a snowpea (with the squash wading pool in the background) these are so good I'm not even getting many pictures of them, not cooking them or steaming them, just eating them raw and crunchy:


My cherry tomato bush is loaded with little tomatoes. I've picked two of the ripest ones already, you'll see them at the bottom of the post.


So is my grape tomato bush, and they've got differing shades of green and orange going on, too. I like it when they start producing one to three tomatoes per day, that's exactly what I need for my salad.


After I picked the one LONG pepper from each pepper plant, now both of them are producing 'normal' sized peppers:


Here's what's ripened and been picked today. Two little squash, both about 5 inches long. Two cherry tomatoes, four grape tomatoes, and one Better Boy tomato. Plus two snowpeas that made the picture, but got eaten before I could get the jpg cropped and up here on the blog. :D

Mid-May Garden Update

Ready for more tomato and squash pictures? Sorry, there's no snowpea pix, I've *guilty grin* eaten them all.

Here's my Cherry Tomato bush. Some of them are getting too big to really call them cherry tomatoes, but they're not ripening yet, still just as green as they can be. I hope they don't all ripen the same day! Between this bush, and the Grape Tomato bush you've seen already, I should be swimming in little tomatoes pretty soon.


I have two pots with banana pepper plants, and one pot has ONE immensely long pepper, and a handful of smaller buds. But this one looks too long to be normal, somehow. Maybe it's a mutant alien pepper... :)


My Early Girl bush has several golf-to-plum sized tomatoes, but again, all still very green.


I'm most proud of my squash plants though - lots and lots of blooms and lots and lots of teeny squash. Here's two of the biggest so far. Maybe thumb sized? Too small to eat, but a good size to drool over. After last year with no squash but lots of blooms, I was about to say that squash growing in a kiddy wading pool didn't work, but this year is a total reversal.

It's snowpeas and squash!

I was so surprised to go out and look at my garden and discover that I don't just have foliage, I have veggies! First, here's my snowpeas - I picked the one in the middle and I'm going to eat it right now:

*crunching noises*

Yup, mighty good! The other two I plan on leaving until tomorrow night's salad, let them get just a bit longer.


And squash! Cute little ones, but still, more than I got last summer:


These are doubly precious to me since there's so many of them - I guess it's the difference between regular dirt and planting in Miracle Gro potting soil.


Here's the biggest. Still smaller than my little finger, but bigger than the others:


The grape tomato bush is full of blooms and little tomatoes too - want to play dot-to-dot with teeny tomatoes? Click on the picture to enlarge, lol


And there's peppers on both plants now. I'll put this last so you can easily compare it to the picture taken a week ago ... look how my pepper is growing!

Squash, Peppers and Windchimes

Ohhh, lookie what I saw when I looked under the leaves of my squash plant today! Surely with all those buds, I'll get at least ONE squash worth eating, don't you think?


And a little pepper - I can't wait for these to start growing. Does anyone know if the dark streaks up the stem there 'mean' something? Like over or under watering or... ?


And finally, got a shepherd's crook at Home Depot today. A friend of mine from Georgia gave me this last winter, and I've been wanting to put it out ever since! What's neat, it's also a birdfeeder, you fill the globe with seeds. I think I'll wait till late fall for that, because I don't want to attract birds to the area where my ripe tomatoes will be. :D

Little Green Tomatoes

Everything is coming up little green tomatoes! Here's five of the seven that're on my cherry tomato bush. I may not even have to stake this one, it's staying low and compact:


This is the Early Girl plant, they're looking nice too:


Only a couple on the big boy plant so far. Here's the biggest:


The grape tomato bush is my top producer. Twelve tomatoes that I can count, (although some of them are teeny-tiny) and bunches and bunches of blooms:


And here's my biggest tomato, slightly larger than a golf ball size, on the Better Boy plant. It has another couple of marble sized ones.


Meanwhile, my squash hasn't got any blooms yet, just buds, but the foliage is sure getting big and healthy looking:


I've taken the wire off the peony bush, and moved it to the back again. I also shifted the snowpeas to the end so I could sink the legs of the wire frame into the dirt, then I started using some scraps of fabric and selvedges to tie up the vines.



The peppers have blooms too, both plants - but they're growing very slowly, compared to the tomatoes.

How does YOUR garden grow?

End of April veggie update

I'll start with the obligatory group shot:


My grape tomato plant has lots of clusters of blooms, but no little green tomatoes yet:


But my Early Girl plant has a tomato! This first one is about marble sized:


The peonies in the previous post are using the wire cage that I'll put between the snowpeas. They're getting tall enough to where they need it! Maybe I ought to go buy another one. I had to scoot the window boxes apart so the peas wouldn't grab onto each other. ;)


The squash in the wading pool is doing fine too, much healthier looking than last year.


And last, my Better Boy tomato. I'm wondering now if this one or the Early Girl will ripen first. The race is on!

April Flowers

Lots of things blooming in my yard, end of April. These smell so sweet - and I get more and more of them every year:


I'd bring some inside to admire, but the ants like them as much as I do, so they're definitely a flower to keep outside and admire from afar.


I keep thinking about diversifying, and getting some other colors of peonies, then separating these and mixing them together. But my favorite colors are green and cream, like these. I wonder what other varieties they make? I'll have to go hunting next fall.


I have several different colors of iris, too. Plain yellow, plain lavender, and two varieties of purple/white ones.


For some reason, I don't get both varieties of purple/white and white/purple blooming at the same time.

Blocks of the Month and Yarn balls

You wouldn't guess it from all my garden posts, but I HAVE still been quilting. You can get a lot of quilting and web page making done while you're waiting (and waiting) for a plumber to call you back... and waiting (and waiting) for a plumber to arrive ... lol

But finally, I have a new not-leaking hot water heater, and dishes and clothes are being washed, etc. Catching up, here's the web page and the six inch star block I did for April:


The web page for May is almost finished, way early, for once. I won't officially put it up until May 1. Here's a sneak preview of the block, though, a six inch Maverick Star:


I've also been finishing up the Cats and Pinwheels quilt, by adding the yarn balls on the two long border edges. I don't really get into applique, even machine applique, so I'd been procrastinating on this, even though I really thought it'd add to the design of the quilt. Here's the left side:


And a slightly different one. I know it would have been easier to use a solid piece of bias tape for the string, but when I laid it out that way, it didn't look like it connected to the ball, it was TOO solid. So I tried a solid ball, and that just looked wrong next to all the scrappiness of the quilt blocks. I went back to the patched ball, and made a patched string, and I think it'll do. Here's the right side border:

Yet another Cat and Garden Update

First, a request from Mom. She liked the picture of Libby from my last post, but demands that Toby get equal time. So here's my other rescued Siamese. He wanted to look out the window undisturbed and chatter at the birds, especially a dove that lives in the ash tree. But I wanted a picture and kept tapping him on his furry little butt, so he'd look at ME instead of the bird. He finally turned around, looked exasperated, and gave me a couple of long meows. So this is him explaining, "The white bird is out there, I'd much rather watch it, if you'd quit thumping my rear end, I could concentrate. Understood?"


So I'll leave the cat alone, and start with the garden headline news ... my first tomato! It's on the Better Boy plant, the one that had blooms when I bought it. This plant has three, but the other two are even smaller-than-green-pea size.


The wading pool squash are going great so far. I'm not going to let myself get too excited, though, because they were going pretty good last year too, till the rabbit got them. Any of you that regularly garden know of a good companion plant that I could grow with the squash? I've heard corn, but... not in a wading pool, of course.


And here's my windowbox snowpeas. I'll have to put them near the cage pretty soon, so they can climb, but the cage is round front by my peony bush. When they start getting the huge golf-ball size buds, the peonies are usually too heavy for the stem and need some support until the blooming is over.


And, I'll close with another group shot. ;) The banana pepper plants aren't growing near as fast as the tomatoes, anyone know why? Any advice?

Garden Update for Mid April

*grins*
Get used to it, I like to keep a photo-record of my plants. ;)

Here's another version of the group shot I took 9 days earlier - scroll down to see the previous group shot - I like seeing how they've grown, and it's fun to be able to look back on last year and see which ones grew best, and produced earliest. Several of the tomato plants now have buds and blooms, the Better Boy has three teeeeeny little tomatoes, not even the size of an English pea yet.


My squash in the kiddy pool is doing great - I planted 5 seeds per hill, as the directions on the back of the packet showed, but not all of them are up. I wonder if storing these seeds in the freezer (they're the ones that didn't get used last year) impacted their hmm... sprout-ability? Viability, that's the word I was looking for. Most, but not all of the snow peas sprouted, and they were stored in the freezer too.


And finally, a picture of Libby, who hates to go outside, but loves to sit in the window and watch me when I'm outside.

Cat Quilts and Snowpeas Growing!

I'm still working on this quilt - but I did finish piecing my kitty borders. Yes, it's on a fence, and I rotated the pic so you didn't have to tilt your head... lol

Now to put (applique, uggh) the yarn balls on the sides. I've changed my mind and am thinking about only putting them on the long sides, do you agree? With a little scrappy bias tape tail, with one loop in it, I think.


And I've got snowpeas, growing like a weed! These pictures were taken just a little more than 48 hours apart - the top picture was taken Sunday, the one on the bottom, today. I can't wait to crunch into my first raw, fresh off the vine, crisp little pea pod. ;p