Crazy Talk

Well, it is officially fall. Our heat kicked on for the first time a few night ago and, even though the high is near 80°F today, I'm going to say that the cold has officially begun.

I think we've sort of stagnated in getting our house all fixed up. The few remaining boxes are still remaining, our garage is still a jumbled & unorganized mess, we have paint picked out for at least two rooms that we just haven't gotten around to buying (much less actually using), and the third bedroom looks like we are in the beginning stages of an audition for Hoarders. But we've been so busy lately. This weekend was the first weekend in six or more weeks that we didn't go anywhere. Crazy!

That's not to say we weren't at least a little busy, though. We did some major renovation of the front bed - dug up the flowers and bushes we didn't want (or that were dead), pulled all the weeds, turned over the dirt and, drumroll please, planted the irises! Finally! I have irises from our old house (that I'll need to tag & mark next spring so I know which type they are), some hopefully bronze ones from my parents' old house, some purple ones from someone in our new neighborhood and four special ones that I bought from Clark Gardens last spring. Hopefully they all do great in the front bed and next year I'll be able to mark them, dig them up, separate them by color and plant them in the back yard.

Speaking of back yards, ours is in semi-bloom right now. We have some lovely fall wildflowers, most of which I have no idea what they are. Besides pretty, that is. I took a decent number of pictures this morning and uploaded about 20 of them. Don't worry, I won't post all of them on my blog, but they are on my Flickr page (link in the sidebar 'cause I'm lazy), just in case you end up bored and need to kill time on the internet. Here are my favorites, though.

Yep, all that is in our back yard! I'm still kind of floored with how large our yard is. And that it has wildflowers! (Speaking of which, drop me a line if you know what the flowers are! I'm looking at you, Pop!)

In other backyard news, we had our first meeting with a pool company! Whee! We have another one set up for tomorrow and have one more company we want to talk to, but so far they haven't called us back. So we might end up talking to a different company because I'm totally not going to chase someone down and beg them to take my money, you know? But yeah, pool planning is happening! We should get the first company's plan (and price estimate!) Friday. We already know one thing: we will spend a big chunk of change on the fence. Like, not quite pool-sized but, depending on the choices we make, big enough that it could be in wading pool territory. For real. It's crazy. Or maybe it's not so crazy and I'm just not used to spending the big bucks. I think there is still a big part of me that is that college student who thought that having three grand in the bank was amazing.

Now, that college girl couldn't even buy a fence!

Is That You Spring?

Finally, it's a lovely day today! Like a roll-your-windows-down-and-beware-of-sunburn kind of day. It's like summer is trying to happen! I question if it is really here to stay though because we haven't even seemed to have a real spring yet. The weather doesn't stay nice for more than a day and we had to have the heat on as recently as last week.

It makes me rather grumpy. I need sun! I need summer! I need pool-appropriate weather! And each time I think it is here to stay, bleck, nope. Back to overcast and cool/cold. Boo.

My poor irises were blooming so profusely last week. But then we hit 36° overnight and they all shriveled up and ran away. Kind of like I wanted to do. But maybe, maybe, maybe this time the weather really means it. And while my irises are no longer pretty, I do have a few things in my yard in bloom. One of them is a first-time bloomer: our pecan tree!

Theoretically we could have pecans this fall. Just in time to move!

Poke

It's been two weeks since my last post so I figured it was about time to post an update. Not much is going on but here's a little overview.

Gidget is off her medication but still experiencing some pain. Nothing as bad as before - she's now chewing air instead of violently pawing - so I'm hopeful it is just the remodeling suggested by the dentist. We have a dentist appointment tomorrow and shall see what she says. All of the other kitties are doing fine. They are much more cuddly now, especially at night, since it is no longer 100°+ outside.

Speaking of the weather, things have finally started to get cold. We switched over to the heat yesterday. It didn't actually come on during the day, but it might have snuck on in the night. Maybe. Things haven't gotten down to freezing yet outside, though, so my Romas are still putting off tons of tomatoes. Now if I would only water them...

My shoulder is doing good. I have some days that are perfectly normal but then I overdo it by attempting something like ironing and I have a few sore days. But I scrubbed the shower the other day with only some slight twanging the next day, and then only when I reached cross-body. I was doing some easy yoga regularly but fell out of that with the post-ironing pain. I need to get back to it - the movements have really helped me get my range of motion back.

I'm knitting on a cardigan sweater and having mixed luck. I ripped out about 5" of work because I wasn't liking how it was turning out. I initially had ribbing at the bottom and front bands, but I didn't like the proportions - the bottom band was so much smaller than the larger front band, which was pulling in (I figure I hadn't picked up enough stitches). So I ripped out the bottom band ribbing and am in the process of replacing it with a simple folded hem. Then I'll re-do the button band ribbing but in 4/1 or 5/1 rib instead of 2/2 rib. I think that will take care of the problem of the ribbing pulling in too much. Additionally, I'll be doing an i-cord edging (which will be on the bottom edges of the front bands) to make it neater than the wrapped edge I was doing before. All that (combined with picking up enough stitches on the front) and I should be a lot happier with it. Add to that, the fit is perfect and I greatly enjoy the color mix of the yarn, so yay!

And in the way it goes with all my larger knitting project, I briefly interrupted it to knit a little project, a little Christmas star.

I think it's perfectly adorable (and the red is cashmere so it's delightfully soft, too) but after I finished it, I realized... we never have a Christmas tree. (Kitties, you know. They make it too much of an adventure.) So now I have an ornament and nothing to hang it on. Currently, it is hanging on the pull-knob of the barrister bookcase. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it but I'm still quite pleased with it. (And it's a great way to use up little bits of yarn!)

All this knitting though, and I must admit: I'm kind of itching to crochet a doily. Or knit a lavender-filled moth. Or, oh yeah, finish my sweater!

Oh, and I almost forgot! One of my New Year's resolutions was to try more tea vendors. I've successfully ordered from two of the three new vendors I mentioned back in January (TeaSpring (which I posted about) and American Tea Room (which I forgot to post about)) with Sugimoto being the odd man out. Well, I'm making an executive decision and calling this goal accomplished. The other week, I ordered from new-to-me vendor Verdant Tea specifically to get some of their divine-and-destinted-to-be-a-favorite Laoshan Black. Next year Sugimoto will still be a new-to-me vendor so maybe we can try again.

Of course, as far as other resolutions go, I'm oh so very behind on my 'read 24 "real" books' goal and am stuck on number eighteen. One behind where I ended up last year and I have a month and a half to at least tie. So I'm adjusting my goal to 'read more "real" books than I did last year'.

And I think I've exhausted every possible news topic. Well, other than Dan but nothing new there - he's working. A lot. Oh, he did make me an orange-honey wheat beer that's pretty fantastic. And he did another pumpkin beer which is practically pie in a cup. So the brewing is still going strong. We have bottle-conditioning beer in about half our closets.

So that's it, that's the news here. A gripping page turner, is it not? But all in all, it's doing pretty good, I think!

Okra and Weirdness

The weather has turned cooler, which I'm not too thrilled about. For a while, though, our garden plants liked it. But a couple of days ago, the Marglobe tomatoes (which had really perked up when we had a "cold" snap a few weeks ago and temps went into the 80s) decided they were done and promptly kicked the bucket. The grasshoppers took care of any delusions of grandeur the Rutgers tomato plant may have had. The butterbeans gave up the ghost long ago and the jalapeño and banana peppers are the only peppers still alive (though the jalapeño looks unhappy about it). The Romas are still riding high from last month's cooler weather though I'm not sure if anything will come of all those blooms.

But the okra? Is a champ. In fact, I just got four okra from it this morning - the most it has put off at once all year! And there are still three or four baby okra on it, a few blooms and two okra that I'm leaving in an attempt to save some seeds for next year. It's the only plant that hasn't been totally disheartened by the broiling Texas summer and I hope it keeps on kicking for a while!

In other news, we had a strange visitor today. Well, we had a couple. First off, our neighbors have a new-ish kitten and puppy, both of which decided to frolic in our back yard today. Honestly, it was pretty cute but really drives home the fact that we desperately need to fix our fence. The gate has a huge hole in it. Why, it's big enough to allow a puppy in! (For the record, it's about a fifteen pound puppy, so not like a four-pound baby. Which means, yeah, the hole in the fence is not tiny, either.)

But after returning said puppy to her owner's arms, I noticed another little uninvited guest.

Quite the funny looking caterpillar, isn't it? I think it looks like Sanrio's Keroppi. Just spikier.

I know that this guy and his friends might love to nibble on my okra and other assorted growing things, but I can't find it within myself to kill caterpillars when I see them. Too many fond memories of playing with them as a child. (Well, that and they make a horrible squish - I can't kill things that you feel crunch or squish when you stomp them. Yuck!) He was on the brick of the porch so I just left him there. After taking many photos of him. Such an odd creature!

Stop Mocking Me

It's been a bit too long since I've updated, so I figured it was time to fix that. It's not so much that I haven't had anything to talk about (I can babble about nothing with the best of them), but rather that the things going one aren't all that huge, I've had no related pictures and I've been rather busy doing housewife-y type stuff (or being in the pool) and that doesn't really mesh with being able to type up a blog post.

First off, an adorable Gidgie:

Gidget (and Bitty) have their post-extraction check up this weekend so hopefully that will all be good news. Happy-doodle gets to go in with them so she can get her teeth cleaned as she now has the stinkiest mouth in our herd. Hopefully that will just be a cleaning, no extractions needed.

Next: our garden. Meh. We've only had marginal success here and I don't think there will be much improvement because things are so darn hot. My squash and zucchini have decided to die gracelessly (the zucchini without doing anything, the squash after putting off lots and lots of blooms - all male), my tomatoes are alive and kicking but only one Marglobe is doing anything (happily, that "anything" is growing a tomato), my peppers are pretty but unproductive (though we did get one jalapeño) and my butterbeans have finally lost the battle against the grasshoppers.

I hate the grasshoppers. They keep perching on windows and I am convinced it is because they are mocking me. "We just ate your tender butterbean leaves and they were delicious. Muahahaha!" Evil, stupid things. Many have drown in our pool and I can't find it within myself to be sad. Drown butterflies? They make me sad and guilty. Drowned grasshoppers? I want to do a little dance.

On the plus side with the garden (the grasshoppers have no plus side), the okra seems pretty happy. We've gotten slightly less than a dozen okra from it and it is doing its best to give us two more in a few days (the blooms are just buds right now). The grasshoppers have attempted to munch on them some but don't seem to like them.

We have managed to get enough okra to fry some up, but we got them from my parents' garden so I don't think it really counts.

They were really good though. I'd say I've officially learned how to fry okra without cornmeal. Millet flour works great (and tastes pretty much the same)! Thumbs up!

And speaking of frying, no picture but I did learn a new way of cooking venison - frying it! Dan gave me some cookbooks for my birthday (no, I actually wanted them, they weren't a hint about my cooking or the equivalent of giving me an iron or anything like that) and there was a recipe for batter-fried venison which turned out to be so tasty. They were kind of like steak fingers but better since I'm not a huge fan of steak fingers but I really liked these. It's good to have another way to cook venison since my dad keeps us fairly well stocked in it. (I did recently learn that you can actually buy venison, but I'm not exactly sure where. I don't think my grocery store carries it though they tend to carry lots of not-so-typical products.)

Oh, in other news: tea! I'm one step closer to my New Year's resolution to buy from some new tea vendors! My tea pantry was getting pretty thin - I was down to 68 teas, which might sound like a lot, but manages not to be when I'm more used to having 100+ teas - so I placed two orders, one with American Tea Room and the other with Le Palais des Thés. Neither order has arrived yet (since I just ordered them yesterday) but I'm looking forward to it! That plus some stuff I picked up at the grocery store today and I'm at a much more comfortable 86 teas in my pantry. Whew. I was worried for a bit.

Speaking of being worried, last week I came to the realization that I didn't have enough yarn for the top I was knitting. I had enough for the pattern as written, but I needed to top a bit bigger than the pattern and that left me with enough yarn to make basically a crop top. So I hunted down a second ball of yarn through Ravelry, ripped back my almost 5" of stockinette and started alternating the yarns. (For the non-knitters, since the yarn is hand dyed, I have to alternate between the two since the two balls are slightly different from each other. That way there won't be a noticeable line when I switch to the second ball.) So now I've got about two and a half inches done with another foot or so to go.

I'm hoping it will be done in the next couple of weeks but we shall see. Fortunately, my lovely HiyaHiya needles make the stockinette portion go so easily and fast. I'm still in love with them!

I think that's about it as far as recent news. (Which is good cause who really wants to read this much?) Oh, one little thing - tomorrow is our anniversary. Ten years! Yes, ten! I can't believe Dan and I will have been married for a decade. I'm too young to have been married that long! But I'm totally pleased that he's put up with me that long!

In celebration, I give you Cocoa belly.

Absurdity

I've been quiet blog-wise lately, but that's mostly because the most excitement going on has been knitting-related and both of my recent projects have been gifts, so I haven't been able to post about them.

But today was Father's Day and I got to give my dad quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever knitted.

A crawfish.

Isn't that freakin' adorable? I'll admit, I squeed a lot while I was putting the finishing touches on it. SO CUTE. But I do recognize that it easily at least ties (if not beats out) my previously knit adorable absurdity, the Rubber Chicken.

The other recent knitting project I just gifted was a shawl for my mom for her birthday. (Her birthday hasn't hit yet but Dan's got work activities that weekend, so I gave it to her early.) I don't have a good picture of that yet, so hopefully I'll get one I can post soon-ish.

In other knitting news, I've been working on narrowing down my interchangeable needles to find that one perfect set. I've gotten it down to two and hopefully I'll come to a conclusion between the two shortly and I'll post more about it than anyone here wants to read.

In non-knitting news, my garden is growing. I'm having some issues with my butterbeans (the grasshoppers think they are delicious) and the butterbeans, zucchini and squash are all having issues draining. I think I've solved the draining issue by drilling some more holes in the pots and I'm hoping that will make the butterbeans happier so they aren't as vulnerable to the grasshoppers.

The okra and tomatoes are doing good - I have a couple more okra almost ready to harvest, one Marglobe tomato turning a nice orange color, about six Roma tomatoes that are still green but they look happy. Also, my Rutgers tomato plant is finally putting out some blooms as is the slower Marglobe plant. My zucchini aren't really doing anything and the squash are blooming like crazy but, aside from one single female bloom, all of the squash blooms have been male.

At the very least, it looks like we'll have okra and tomatoes this year. Which is pretty yum, so I'll take that!

My Garden is My Daily Squee

It's so exciting out in my garden now. Things are growing! Okay, basically it is just the tomatoes, but the squash are efforting mightily so I anticipate some sort of future showing there.

First off, my 'maters.

Romas! I have two more growing on another plant and another on the third Roma plant. Very exciting! And fun they are so oddly shaped. That makes me happy. (I think it has to do with always pulling for the underdog. I hope this means I won't become so attached to them that I will be sad when the time comes to eat them.)

The baby Marglobe is getting bigger! Now it's the size of one of those large marbles. Shooters? Anyway, so far this one is the only thing to show between the two Marglobe plants I have. But that's okay because the Rutgers is doing nothing so at least the non-producing Marglobe doesn't have to feel bad about itself. Yet.

Honestly, I feel like a bit of a dork saying this, but I have no idea how long it will take before these hard green things turn into edible red things. When I asked my garden-guru parents, they started asking me things like how big the tomatoes were it would produce and what color they would be. I have no idea. So yeah, this whole tomato thing is a surprise from start to finish.

Let's look at my squash!

Well, squash bloom actually. No squash yet. I think all of the blooms to date have been boy flowers. Which has lead Dan and I to speculate if we perhaps purchased gay squash. Which would be problematic in that I'm pretty sure gay squash would not be able to naturally reproduce. Which means we would have pretty flowers. For a few hours every morning. And that's it.

Hopefully we will get some girl flowers in there soon. The flowers are pretty but they close up as soon as the sun gets too hot which, given this is Texas, is about 10:30am. The butterflies sure do enjoy them before them, though. This weekend I've only been out in my yard in the afternoon when it is nice and hot (we've hit over 100° already) and I've been sad because my yard has seemed so lonely and butterfly-less. This morning, though, I learned that that is not the case. The butterflies are simply morning bugs who siesta in the hot part of the day. They were out in force this morning when I went out at nine. Frisky, too. A couple tried to fly up my shorts.

And take a gander at who was on my okra cage this morning!

I've seen him before! Actually, this is about the fourth time I've seen him (her?), always near the okra. I'm growing kind of attached. At least I know I won't have to eat him.

More Things are Growing!

Guess what I found in our garden today? A baby tomato!

Whee! It's about the size of a marble right now so it's got a ways to go before it is a real, live, edible tomato but hopefully it will get there. Theoretically it will be a Marglobe tomato (one Marglobe plant and one Roma were unmarked so I might have mixed them up while planting), which really doesn't mean anything to me currently, but hopefully it will by the end of the summer.

So cross your fingers with me that this little 'mater becomes a big, red, edible one (and that Dan and I get to eat it, not the buggies)!

In other news, the baby okra that was growing outside? Yeah, I went out the day after I posted my okra post and it had fallen off the plant. So my okra numbers are back to two. Sadness.

The Evolution of Okra

My garden is growing things!

Surprisingly, the first fruits of our garden have been okra. (I thought it was more of a middle-of-the-summer thing, not late May thing, but, well, here we are.)

And if it isn't exciting enough seeing the little fuzzy baby okra grow into big fuzzy edible okra, yesterday, I was able to take some as the first harvest from our garden!

Sure, it was just two pods but we've got another one growing out there now so I feel pretty confident that our garden will produce at least a grand total of three okra. (I also have two blooms on my squash plant, but you know the whole thing about counting chickens... I'm pretty sure that applies to counting squash, too.)

Now, I know that I like okra. But okra fresh from the garden? OMG, so sweet! (As in, it tasted so sweet, not that it's sweet that my garden is growing okra... okay, though that is pretty cool, too.) I've never really been tempted to eat okra raw before but this stuff? Totally could. It's delicious.

But instead of eating it raw, I had promised Dan that I'd try my hand at fried okra. Of course, since I can't have cornmeal (what you dust okra in for frying), we tried brown rice flour (it worked well when I fried some catfish). It turned out pretty darn tasty!

Though it is a bit hard to tell when anything with brown rice flour is done because it doesn't exactly turn golden or anything. So I probably could have cooked it a minute longer, but hopefully I'll have lots more okra to experiment with this summer and I'll get the chance to perfect my timing.

Also, because I found this guy hanging out around the okra, I thought it would be appropriate to share his picture on my okra-related post. It's a new visitor to my garden!

Hopefully, I'll soon be able to post about the squash growing in my garden!

Non-Knitting Updates

I thought I'd add a little blog-related updating that isn't knitting related since I've been so focused on needles issues lately. So here it is!

First off, my finger.

It looks painful, yes? Yes. Well, it isn't nearly as painful as it was. I still have some movements (fully extending my finger, putting too much weight on my hand) that make me feel like the fingernail is being pulled off with pliers, but for the most part I think the cut on the nail bed has healed. So at this point, it's really about just letting the nail grow out. And use my metal mesh glove when I am cutting things!

My garden-growing is doing well, too. Sadly, I don't have a recent picture. Well, relatively recent, that is. I have a picture from last week but so many of the plants have really grown since then, it doesn't feel right to post that picture now. My butterbeans are particularly huge now. (They also seem to like raising their leaves vertically so that every so often, they look like they have their arms thrown up in surprise... Not really sure what that's all about but it makes me giggle.) Oh, and my okra plants have two 'ittle bitty okra growing on it! The peppers have even bloomed, too, so hopefully I will have some baby peppers showing up soon. My squash are happy-looking but no blooms yet, my zucchini is growing nicely (but it still small) and most of my tomatoes have put off at least one bloom.

We also have finally gotten our pool up! The weather hasn't been fully cooperative for constant pool days, but I get at least two or three days a week to get out there and get some sun roasting in. My shoulders are a bit warm as I type, in fact, because today was one of those delightfully sunny days. It's wonderful!

In addition to averaging a couple of sunny pool days a week, I'm also averaging about one butterfly rescue from the pool a day.

There are a lot of butterfly friends around our yard and it seems that they occasionally decide to go swimming. It's not a good idea. I end up fishing them out, letting them hang out on my hand until they are dry enough (and warm enough) to be able to stick to our apple tree or pomegranate bush, then I transfer them over and let them dry their wings out. Surprisingly, all but one of the butterflies I've pull out of the pool have still been alive and all but one of those seems to have made a recovery. So yay! It's Baywatch for butterflies in my back yard.

Speaking of butterflies, Dan and I went to visit my parents for Mother's Day Sunday and they have a lot of wildflowers still blooming and even more butterflies! I took a nice handful of pictures which I need to go through and post. Hopefully, I got some pretty ones in there.

And I think that's about it right now. I'm sure there have been other things going on but nothing too exciting (not like what I have posted is actually exciting, but anyway) so I can't recall it right now. But I'm okay with an uneventful life because things are going pretty well so I can't complain!

Magically Growing Plants!

Look at how much my little plants have grown! They're all so tall!

Uh, okay, it's really not all that amazing because these are not my seedlings. My seedlings were either stunted or killed by dampening off. Blah. So Saturday, Dan and I ran out to the local(-ish) nursery and picked up all sorts of goodies.

We got:

• Okra x2 (Spineless of some type or another)
• Tomatoes x6 (Roma x3, Rutgers x1, Marglobe x2)
• Peppers x2 (Jalepeno and Hot Banana Pepper) [added to the Cayenne x4 remaining from the peppers my parents gave us that the sun didn't cook before I repotted them]
• Squash x2 (Crookneck and a white majestic or something-or-other that sounded interesting) [these were our unplanned impulse purchases... much better than the lime tree we were eyeing earlier (which is the result of a joke made a while back by Dan, but something I'm seriously considering apparently, which is absurd, but hey, that fits with everything else I do!)]

Those all got added to some cilantro that I had already planted [and whose growth has yet to be stunted... maybe] and two pots of Fordhook lima beans and one pot of Golden Zucchini that I planted today.

Honestly, if I had found either limas or a fun zucchini at the nursery, I would have gotten them instead of going with the seeds again - once bitten, twice shy and all. Hopefully this seed attempt will go better than the previous since my poppa came by last week and checked out my set up and gave me some advice, which Dan and I implemented Saturday before planting the new plants.

So fingers crossed!

Meh and Yay!

I've got a bit of a 'good news, bad news' thing going on in my yard.

First, the bad news: my veggie-type plants are unhappy. My one okra outside is still alive (though a bit nibbled on) however my tomato plans are dampening off. Basically, they are weak little seedlings and couldn't fight off fungus and are now dying. Sigh. I thought my okra was having the same issue, but this morning when I looked again it appeared to be okay. So I went ahead and planted the remaining two seedlings in the pot to see if they will all live (or die) together.

As for the tomato issues, Dan and I are going to run out this weekend to get some more grown up tomato plants to give it another shot with something a bit sturdier than a seedling. Hopefully that will get us back on track. I still have to plant the zucchini and butter beans. I'm waiting until it's a little warmer since it still has been dipping into the low 50's at night.

Overall not horrible news but the dampening off is particularly discouraging. Still unfun growing news.

So now the fun growing news! Another of my Clark Garden irises is blooming!

This one is labeled as Anaconda Love, but it looks nothing like what Google says Anaconda Love looks like. Not that Anaconda Love isn't a pretty flower, but mine, whatever it is, is much prettier. Look at that little glowing purply-blue in the middle of the petal? LOVELY! When I get sad about my tomatoes, I just look at my not-a-snake iris and have to smile.

No, Seriously. I Hate You.

Something is eating my okra. And it isn't me.

I planted 6 little seedlings earlier. Now they all look like this:

Boo! Something (that I hate very much) is eating all the leaves off of my okra babies!

So yesterday I (okay, Dan, but it was at my request) got some worm/caterpillar/larvae/etc killer (Dipel Dust) to hopefully take care of the problem. Fortunately, I have a few more seedlings on the porch that I was saving, just in case. Well, in case happened. I've planted one of the remaining plants outside as a buffet invitation for my okra-eaters and sprinkled it with the Dipel Dust. Hopefully, there will be some dead okra-eaters out there tomorrow.

In better news, some of my Clark Garden irises are blooming. Okay, right now it is just one of them, Brilliant Performance, but the iris-that-isn't-actually-Anaconda-Love has two buds on it, so hopefully in the next day or two I'll get photographic proof that it is something other than what the bucket is labeled. And then maybe I can figure out what it is. (Though I'm a bit doubtful on that since there are so many freaking varieties of iris (and I want them ALL!) and there are a lot of ones that look alike, so yeah, my chances are probably not good.) But until then, look at the pretty peach and orange iris.

Still Growing!

Okay, first off, totally don't except (or fear) every-other-day updates for the entirety of the vegetable growing season. I'm sure things will taper off, it's just right now, lots of things are happening!

My tomato seedings are coming up (above), the radishes are being very enthusiastic (they are the tall things in the background of the pictures), my onions are very prolific (they look like a lot of tiny green snakes) and I even have a few spinach seedlings poking their heads out.

It looks like one set of radish seeds have decided not to do anything while most of the others have decided that at least two of them will sprout. (It does make me a little sad to know that I'll have to thin them out, but oh well.) I'm hoping the three spinach that are popping up are just the early ones and the rest will get their act in gear soon. I have zero complaints about the onions so far and I am already looking forward to thinning out the tomatoes (because I do not need the fruits of that many tomato plants).

I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to put the radish seedlings into their full-size pots (apparently I could have initially planted them in there but eh, live and learn) and get some other seeds started. Herbs maybe? We shall see. I'm sure I'll post about it!

Day 3 of Insanity

Things are starting to grow! Dan excitedly informed me this morning that green things are beginning to appear in my little mini-greenhouse I planted my veggie seeds in.

So far it looks like the onions are the early starters, but there is a tiny bit of green poking out in one or two of the radish spots so things seem to be going well so far!

Garden Weeds

I was outside weeding my iris beds when I found the weirdest weed ever.

Who knew those grew in this area?

The Insanity Builds

Maybe I have a bit of spring fever because I think I've descended into madness. First off, let's look at the cause of my issues: things are blooming like crazy.

Even my irises are getting into the display, including the super-shy white and pale lilac ones.

So what has this delightful and intoxicating display of color caused? Yeah, that's where the insanity comes in. This is what we picked up this weekend.

Yes. Do you see the insanity now? I'm going to attempt a vegetable container garden.

I've got a number of seeds (12, I think?) but I only planted four this morning, specifically the ones that I thought were the biggest risk/least likely to be able to deal with our heat: bunching onions, radishes, spinach and tomatoes.

Okay, the tomatoes aren't a high risk thing but I am getting started on them late since I'm growing from seed so I figured I had best get cracking. I'm most hopeful about the onions but I'm thinking the radish and the spinach will be very unhappy since things are already so hot. But I did save some seeds so I'm going to attempt to grow them in the fall, too, which I think might have happier results. Wish me luck!