Clever Cloches (not)

Well, desperate, not so clever.  In my determination to cover my seedlings at night I carved the botton off of a Tidy Cat Plastic Container and a big old Hawaiian Punch plastic bottle.  I'm also using a Folgers empty plastic container on a tomato.

I'm better prepared some years and have saved back gallon milk jugs which are GREAT with the bottoms sliced off. You can easily vent the container by taking off the cap.

I wish I drank more pop so I had some liter bottles to use but noooo, June 8th and I'm scrabbling for things to protect my babies from the cold.

On the plus side I seem to have plenty of empty tp rolls to use as cutworm collars for my seedlings...

Garden Note: Still One Cool Cucumber...

Where on earth did that phrase come from, since cucumbers do not like cool weather and mine are sort of paused in their growth and happiness cycle by the stuntingly cool night and day temps.

Monday evening I did not even get out there after working late to cover everyone.  Major Guilt.  Everything looked ok yesterday except for one of the Tomato Easy Pick seedlings which actually sort of curled up the day I put it in.  I have been rather faithfully watching to see if it sent out a happy new tentative leaf but noo.  Gotta yank it tonight and make room for a Krim or Superbush which will not be germinating in this frosty lifetime.

Nobody said it was easy.

Cold Weather Gardening in June

I've been waiting for it to WARM UP so that I could put in my warm weather veggies.  This weekend it is JUNE, right?  Lovely warm June!

Cucumbers, Swiss Chard and two types of lettuce.

Sweating during the day working in the sun and having to cover my plants and stuff things back in the mini-greenhouses at night. 47 and 50 something at night, and 50s predicted at night all this week.

I thought last week's hail and rain damaged some of my seedings but I'm now thinking something is going into the greenhouses at night and shearing off my morning glories and tomatoes.  This in addition to the cold is just too much.

I finally got my Yukon Gold seed potato bag planted.  The bag really isn't too big.

Theoretically you can start potatoes in it in March and April, according to the directions.  I had a thought maybe they could be started in the garage, but reading the instructions further, they want you to pour a gallon of water a day into the bag.  Hmmm.  Not so good in the garage.  I could if the weather is less snowy into April next year go ahead and try it outside.

I used my trusty new Swiss Army knife to cut of sections of the potato with eyes to plant.  Afterwards I was thinking maybe I should have left more potato with each eye section but if I putzed around making sure I had done that right those potatoes would never get in the bag. 

I was a wild thing and also put a few sections of potato with lesser eye sprouts in a raised bed.  None of the eyes were the one inch long desirable size.  We shall see if I get no potatoes or a plethora of potatoes.  Gotta try stuff.

Since only three of my tomato seedlings survived the hail massacre, I planted a row of Black Krim and Super Bush tomatoes each.  These are last year's seed so we may get nada, but again, I have all these nice raised beds, I should just TRY STUFF.  No harm no foul.  Anything that sprouts and lives is just great.  Especially this year.

I cleaned out a bed on the west side, the most gnarly looking and right by the street.  It took maybe two hours just because of dead Siberian Iris foliage which would have been sooo manageable if I had cut it down last fall or early spring.  Then again, my defense is that we never got an early spring.

All of my tropical house plants outside are taking this cold really well.  I keep waiting to look out after another cold night and they've all lost all of their leaves but noooo.

Box Elder Bugs remain noxiously clingy.  I wore a ratty shirt outside to work yesterday and I didn't notice a hole in the shoulder right off.   I must have seen it out of the corner of my eye ten times and thought it was a Box Elder, and I slapped that hole in my shirt silly, let me tell you.

I finally put some corn in a bed.  I buy seed for corn every year meaning to plant some someplace, maybe even in a container (some grow everything in a pot on your balcony blog made me thing containers would work).   It is in a couple of rows in a 2 x 6 ft raised bed, carefully spaced.  Knee high by the Fourth of July is unlikely but it would be fun if it worked.

Fig A "Field of Early Glow Corn"

I'm moving alot of plants this year so I am going to have to do a combination of potting things up and moving directly from one spot to another.

My game plan is I will inventory what needs to be moved, then plot out where I can most likely put the transplants, then voila, move those puppies.  I'm sure to have everything on the east side by summers end.  (wink).

Working on a Book Blog

Grumble grumble.  I find that I like doing book reviews but I often have trouble writing them.  It is like a book report in school or something. 

Still, recently an author actually asked me if I would like an arc of a new title and agh I've been waiting for this sequel for over a year and so I said YES.  I give my mailing address and no book...no book....no book.  Finally it turns out only a select few people with actual book blogs apparently were getting arcs and those who occasionally write reviews but have other completely silly topics on their blogs were Bozos Non Grata.   No arc for you!

I decided to make YET ANOTHER blog that is all books.  I'll still talk about books here but a nice full review will be on the Billionth Book Blog in the Universe.  Maybe I should have called it that, hmmm.

Anywho, I'm not linking to this bookish blog until I have at least ten reviews to get it started.  There will be no ads, no links to Amazon.  Back, I say back! 

I might link to Good Reads because authors really seem to think it helps them, and I want to share the good reading I do in as many ways as possible.

I'm retiring this fall, as you know, so I should be able to have plenty more time to read and recommend.

Watch this space!

 

 

 

6/12/13  Yo ho! I have completed one review!  9 to go!  I have set up the pages for about the next five, so I've got my books picked out, it is just a matter of putting virtual keyboard to virtual paper.

Ready for Google Reader to Poof

I finally sat down with my feed list from Google Reader.  I put anything I'd really like to see here and some blogs that I like ok but they have too many ads for my taste or they aren't updated much I just stuck in favorites.

I actually had to Google Google Reader to get to it, I looked this week in my list of apps or whatever from Google and it isn't anyplace to be seen.  I suppose they don't want people going all wild and subscribing to feeds.  Bad dogs.

I enjoy my current blogroll and have been tweaking it lately. It has my many interests pretty well covered.  I am at 85 and I could be mis-remembering, but I think the limit is 144 blogs in the roll.  Keeping an eye on it and will let you know.

Grimm Finale

Well, I didn't see that coming.  The entire Zombie Apocalypse was orchestrated to give Renard's brother the opportunity to steal and control the newly zombified Nick.  Smooth.

On the plus side, Renard has lost his Grimm but he has all the members of the Nick Admiration Society to help him.

And PLEASE for heaven's sake, let Nick's mom come back to the show and kick some booty getting her boy back.  It would be a very different and possibly humor laden storyline for all those folks to work with a more typical snarly Grimm than they have experienced with smooshy loveable Nick.

Today in the Garden

It has been raining heavily but thank heavens not destructively for several days.  Everything is LUSH. It is a JUNGLE.   Here are some photos of the jungle:

Strawberry in Strawberry Pot!

Seedlings hardening off in a mini-greenhouse.  I keep finding adorable tree-frog things in the top row each morning.  I try putting them elsewhere in my veggie garden daily.

Purchased annuals and herbs airing out for the day.  They go in the greenhouse at night and the seedlings go in the garage since temps are in the low 50s!!!! at nite this week. Grrr.

One of my new daffodils (Prototype is the name). Adorable!

A poor shot of another new daffodil.  I'm moving everything out of this heavily defended (but the beagles still break in) garden this spring.

It looks better in person!  Those are daylily leaves nearby.

Perennials overwintered in the raised veggie bed. They'll go on the east side soon.

Some herbs, hens and chicks for the Fairy Garden and a new mini-greenhouse this year. It was only 24.88 but the plastic is very thin and rain had the roof sagging with water, yikes.

Last year's end of season windmill.  How I do love it.

Longview of the veggie garden.

A shiny RED garden tractor plant holder though it looks bizzaro yellow/orange here.

Spider Plant enjoying the great outdoors.

 

An "Umbrella tree" I think that suffered terribly indoors this winter.

Tsk. These are pink and white. Maybe Salome....

Nectarine in a pot.  I pull it into the garage in winter.  It has been potted for at least three years.  Might put it in ground this season and try protecting with burlap.

Bozos ready to assist.

My strawberry patch. Winter survivors.  A mix of everbearing and Pretty in Pink.  I ruthlessly snip runners so they don't go everywhere.   Cocoa bean mulch is great in the veggie garden though I had trouble finding any last year and I'm seeing none at all this year.

Foggy picture of my Peas :)

The east side greening up like mad. Moving everything from outside the fence in here this year and grassing/sodding in the front and side yards.  Secret garden indeed.

Poor little miniature evergreens and everything else in this bed.  I'll dig it all out properly and add plants from elsewhere.  It will look lovely. Stay tuned.

Pretty trees and hostas, nasty grass, woodland phlox and  dire anenome from Hades.

I need my whole garden to look like this and my veggie garden.  That's the goal.

One of my favorite plants in the world, white Bleeding Heart.

There is something gorgeous about a hosta unfurling.

A rain drenched peony emerging.  After a long bleak winter, this is why I garden.

A hardy geranium.  Green leaves that appear lightly dusted with silver.

Ignore that tag. This is Jacob's Ladder "Stairway to Heaven".

A beautiful white pine we planted from a three inch tall seedling when we moved in.

Hi Ho, a Fairy Garden has to start somewhere.

Tons of work to do, but this rain is getting everything off to a tremendous start.  My garden and I will be in great shape by the end of the season, right?

Pin This!

I took a class on beginning embroidery and am now able to work on lovely and charming little figures.

 I purchased a book recently called Little Stitches: 100+ Sweet Embroidery Designs 12 Projects by Aneela Hoey.

Aneela has a wonderful site that is mostly sewing and quilting but she has done some embroidery design as well. Visit Comfortstitching to see her lovely work.

Inside the book among other things was a picture of some adorable sewing pins with large colorful heads.  If your grew up in my household with my sewing mom, you knew that little silver sewing pins could be ANYWHERE and you should beware where you walked or sat.  If the pins were like the ones below, you could be assured you would see them before they got you.

Flower Head Pins

Button Head Pins

The only place I could track them down with my Ace Librarian Tracking Skills was a site called Nancy's Notions.


Don't get stuck without them!  Hahahahahaha.

Happy Mother's Day!

Google Redirect

Somehow I picked up a piece of adware/malware that my Anti-virus didn't have the ability to detect or remove which is likely Google Redirect.

Anything you search in Google redirects you once you click on a results link to an ad site or that goofy site with a big green arrow that pulses "Click Here".   I could not see in my research any sort of viable way of getting rid of it.  Even help forums for malware and anti-virus companies had no real solutions that did not look worse than the problem. 

One interesting thing I did read while researching that would not have occurred to me was that sometimes blogs will have someone asking a question about something like this in the comments and then the blogger "addresses" the issue and in fact the blogger and commenter are one and the same and are either trying to drive traffic to their site or are going to link you to malware/adware galore.  Nice.

You can just use another search engine to avoid the problem or type in the specific site address.

I was going to use Yahoo as my new search engine but I didn't like the results of searches. 

Dogpile searches three different Search Engines for you at once but the search results also did not have alot of relevance to what I wanted to see.

Having read articles on CNET and elsewhere I went with their number one recommendation, Duck Duck Go.   Supposedly not all about data mining as Google is (nosy buggers), but uses the same spare interface and the relevancy of the search results was, dare I say, Google-esque.