Growing Challenge: Finally!

In case you were wondering what I was working on while Eric was schlepping 6 tons of soil around (Thanks, honey!), I was working in the garden, too.

Every night, after Caitlin and the twins are in bed I can finally get some work done. Of course it means that I spend a lot of time covered in dirt (It's soil until it gets ground into your body. Then it's dirt.) and am averaging two showers a day. Covered in sunblock and bug spray, I stay out until it's so dark I can't see anymore. Gardening by streetlight is...um...challenging. Those lights? Not as bright as they look.

Not that'd I'd know from personal experience or anything.

Ahem.

I was working on putting down seeds,

Seedbeds: Filled!

putting in plants and setting up the micro-irrigation system. All of this work gets done in tiny bites all day long in between naps, nursing and nuncheon (Did ya like that one? I can't remember what I wore yesterday, but I can remember obscure Old English words.). Then, after all the kids have gone to sleep, I do as much as I can while I still have daylight. I've been working outside for hours on end and Getting! Stuff! Done! Which is very exciting, even if it is very slow. Out of my list, I have put down seeds for the following plants:

1. Squash - Buttercup
2. Squash - Acorn
3. Squash - Early summer Crookneck
4. Squash - Spaghetti
5. Cucumber - Muncher
   
6. Garden bean - Gourmet French bush
7. Watermelon - Rainbow sherbet - the innards are pink, yellow and orange - 3 separate varieties in the package: Tiger Baby (P), Yellow Doll (Y), New Orchid (O).
8. Basil - Sweet Genovese
   

Not yet started:

• Rhubarb - Victoria
• Squash - Butternut (Yes, another one! What can I say? I've never grown any of these before and I like to try new things. Besides, there are tons of soup recipes that would be great in winter that all call for assorted squashes. Like this one.)

Plants planted:

• Tomatillos: green Toma Verde and purple Purple de Milpa
  
  
• Ground Cherry: Aunt Molly's Ground Cherry
  
  

Tomatoes (Yes, seriously. I put in one of each type we grew for sale. Imagine the fun we'll have in a few months!):

1. Sun Gold (Cherry)
2. Snow White (Cherry)
3. Black Cherry(Cherry)
4. Gardener's Delight(Cherry)
5. Black Plum (Sauce)
6. Principe Borghese (Drying)
7. Black Krim
8. Cherokee Purple
9. Caspian Pink
10. Moskovich (Early)
    
11. Stupice (Early)
    
12. Pineapple
13. Persimmon
14. Candy's Old Yellow
15. Black Zebra
16. Green Zebra

Tomato and pepper bed, before the peppers and drip system were installed. Those 8' tall stakes show that I mean business!

Bell peppers:

1. California Wonder
2. Purple Beauty
3. King of the North
4. Sweet Chocolate

I also threw in some marigold seedlings, in a random way, to be a companion planting for my tomatoes. Apparently smelly plants confuse the tomato predators. Basil would work too, as well as lots of other plants, but marigolds are what I had.

I messed around with the micro-irrigation system for awhile. It's a hodge-podge since two beds are all seeds and two other beds have plants. Sprays work fine for seeds, but not for plants; you need to run the drip system for a long time for plants, which would wash away your seeds.

I also made heavy use of my compost pile.

I freakin' love compost.

I dumped a small pail's worth of compost in every tomato hole, dug the tomatoes in deep (Trim off the leaves that would be under ground first!), shoved in an 8' stake (I have high hopes.), tied them off with strips of old pantyhose (No, really! I didn't have any twine on me, or the fancy green tomato velcro strips, but slices of pantyhose make nice, soft, stretchy ties. Besides, I don't wear hose anymore! Alternate reuse! Woo!), watered them in with organic fertilizer (I didn't have any dry fertilizer to put at the bottom of the hole, but it should be fine with the boost the compost and liquid fert. give it initially.) until I ran out of plants.

Now we wait. July 24th is my theoretical 1st date for tomatoes from the early season Stupice, if the data on it is correct: 52 days from transplant.

I'm looking forward to all the yummy food. Grown in my own yard. Organically. Really local.

Tick, tick, tick!

Updated to add photos.

Revamping a Garden Bed

What do you do when you have too much soil?

Improvise!

After having filled both of the raised beds in back and topping off the first raised bed, Eric still had a huge pile of soil left in front of the house.

Not quite as huge pile of soil.

Perhaps the supplier gave us too much. Or perhaps all that was put into the beds still needs to settle and we'll find ourselves with beds that are only half full next year. Either way, there was a pile of soil without a home that had to get moved ASAP!

Being a crazy Power Gardener, I always have plans in my head for weeding this, starting that, planting here or there. So as it turned out, I already had a plan in mind to revamp the flowerbed beneath my cherry tree for later this summer, if I had time. Well, I guess the time was now since that soil had to moved before we received a ticket. First, though, we had to remove the existing vegetation.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

The end of the daisy bed.

Hundreds of daisies screamed in terror and were quickly silenced. Please don't cry! They've gone to a better place! A place where a better gardener would have weeded around them far more frequently that I.

Next I had to find a weed barrier to put down. After my previous experience with weed barriers, I'm here to tell you that if you actually want your plants to naturalize and spread, you really don't want to use plastic or woven weed barriers. Instead, you want something that will smother the existing weeds and prevent them from popping up before your desired plants have grown up enough, yet will break down and allow your plants to spread. The one thing that I can think of that will break down over the course of a year and yet act as a weed barrier initially is newspaper.

Except that I didn't have any.

Argh!

Time to improvise again!

I scoured the house for every paper bag I could find.

Soaking the soon-to-be weed barrier.

It wasn't enough.

I called my friend and my in-laws, but couldn't reach them.

Thinking fast, I wracked my brain for what else I might have that could stand in for newspaper...

Phone books!

I don't know about you, but we're constantly bombarded with new phone books. We don't even use them anymore, so we recycle them almost as soon as we receive them and have even signed up to stop having them delivered. (See this link to find out more at Crunchy Domestic Goddess, if you, too, want to get rid of your telephone books.) Turns out I had a few left. They would have to do. I broke out my trusty cutter, sliced the pages out, soaked them and spread them around.

Look under "G" for Garden Supplies for Crazy People.

Was it pretty? No. However, it would soon be covered by soil. Yes, you can see some of the paper bags on the edge closest to the camera in the above shot, but it will break down over time and even better than that? It will be covered in flowers. You won't even know that there are bags and pages under there once the flowers get going.

Sweeping up the very last of the six cubic yards.

Piles and piles of soil! Oh my!

Tomorrow I'll rake it smooth (But not level since we're on a slope.), lay out some stepping stones, toss several dozen plants I just happen to have on hand into it (Russian stonecrop, Goldenrod, Agastache, Chinese asters, Jasmine alata, Portulaca, possibly some scarlet zinnias and Bluebeard caryopteris.), purchase some mulch to throw on top and I'll have an all new garden bed.

Just when you think it's safe to go back outside, I find another gardening project. Or should I say, another gardening project finds me!

Updated to remove Gardening Challenge label. This isn't the GC post. The next post is the GC post!

Toadal Score!

I have a toad!

Whaaat? I'm not kidding! I actually have an actual toad! I got it from the farm while out thinning Shanghai Bok Choi (Yum!). Heather caught it for me.

Caitlin wants to call it Bouncer.

I'm just hoping we don't mow it down when we go to mow the grass.

I guess it must be time to clean out my pond and mow down that grass. It's waiting (Patiently!) in a "bug box" until we're ready. I have to make the place presentable for it (Her? Him? I respect its privacy! However, it's probably female.) ASAP. I guess those tomatoes can wait a little longer.

Photos later!

Updated to add photos!

Our victim waits for release inside the bug box. No food all night since she had to wait for the lawn to be mowed on Sunday morning. Poor thing!

Eric gets ready to release our toad into the wilds of the backyard. He's very careful not to touch it since toads exude poisons through their skin. Not enough to kill a human, but enough that he's just not interested in touching it. Besides, toads have that oogie-ness factor going for them.

She's loose! She didn't look so good upon initial release, so I made sure we set out a dish of water and set her in it for awhile, just to get her cooled down and moistened. I tried to send Caitlin for grubs for a toad snack, but she wasn't interested.

Last known whereabouts of Bouncer. I put out a cracked pot in one of the shadiest parts of the garden and put the bowl of water (with bathing toad) next to it. An hour later, she was gone.

Being a female, she doesn't make any noise, so I have no idea if Bouncer is still alive or expired due to my negligence. Or out of homesickness. Who knows! So I may have a toad, or not (Very Schrödinger's Cat of us.). Guess I'll find out at some point while I'm out weeding and I hear loud rustling in the flowerbed. Aieee!

Look Who's Crawlin' Now!

That's right!

Logan!

He started crawling earlier today when Eric wasn't there to see it. Then when Eric showed up, Logan wouldn't perform. Finally, around dinner time we tried again.

And then, Dear Readers, then there was crawling.

I must say, Logan's beginning crawl is much more stylish than Emma's beginning crawl. I suspect he's been secretly practicing!

Let's see who's going to steal toys now, shall we?

Life with twins

I cannot sleep because of babies.

Having insomnia on top of that is just NOT FAIR.

Is this supposed to be an ironic twist of fate? Where do I submit my complaint?

Growing Challenge: Planting Season

It's just about the end of May and while I've grown several hundred tomatoes from seed, I have yet to put a single one in the ground at my place, for my own consumption. Or any of those seeds I bought.

I've been waiting for this:

First bed emptied of all flats and weeded. Now it's ready for seeds!

And this:

Six cubic yards of soil. That's a lotta dirt! Extremely helpful neighbor earned some prize tomatoes later this summer for his work.

And definitely this:

Finished beds! Getting filled with soil! Yeeeeeeee-haaaa! Yes, it is THAT exciting.

In the meantime, I've been pricking out and potting up yet more plants. On Monday night, after clearing out all the dead plants from the first bed, I washed up 108 pots (Hundreds left unwashed!) and then potted up 108 plants that I'd pricked out. Among them are Holy Basil, Heuchera, Chinese Asters, a few more tomatoes (The slower growing ones: Candy's Old Yellow and Black Cherry), Stevia (Really slow growing.), and some big yellow marigolds.

I've also been out weeding. Little by little, when they twins are sleeping (Hah! Speed weeding.), I rip a few out of the ground.

There is a serious downside to being too pregnant to weed - those buggers will do their darnedest to take over your yard while you're busy drinking water and laying down!
That pile of weeds may not look like much, but to put it into perspective, I used a 5 gallon pot to truck them to my bin and it took at least 4 trips. When swept up together, they made a big pile that I didn't bother photographing. Fortunately I did have some help with the weeding. Caitlin decided she wanted to give me a hand in the garden, so I had her pulling out purple coneflowers and lamb's ear.

Of course, I had to explain what the real definition of "weed" is: a plant you don't want. I told her we were editing the garden and taking out actual noxious weeds as well. Big prickly beasts that have been enjoying the cooler and wetter weather of the past few days. The bonus for me was that it softened up the ground enough that I could pry a lot of those taprooted weeds out pretty easily. Since this is my xeric garden, I don't generally water it until it gets seriously hot somewhere in June, although that tends to make weeding harder. Rainfall is always appreciated.
Unfortunately, I have about a zillion more weeds to pull! Grass, bindweed, coneflowers, lamb's ears, brown-eyed Susans, Damesrocket and more. Sometimes it's hard to look at my yard and see anything but work, work, work! But I try to look at it from my neighbor's perspective: it's pretty, not lawn, attractive to all manner of bees, butterflies and birds. Best of all, by the end of June it will have its share of hummingbirds again.

Oh well. Things are looking pretty good, even if I did ignore the yard for a year!
Now if only we had time to mow the lawn....

In the meantime, here's what's in bloom now:

Johnson's Blue geraniums.

Prairie Smoke.

White iris.

Wine colored multi-petalled columbine.

Yellow columbine.

Blue columbines. State flower!

Ice-blue iris.

Big old bumble-bee on catmint.

Candytuft.

Blue flax.

Basket of Gold alyssum.

Yes, there are a whacking lot of columbines around here.

How's your garden doing?

Eight Months

Busy.

Busy, busy, busy! Both me and the twins!

Emma is...

Eight months is looking pretty good so far. The twins are doing lots of fun things these days.

Making noise. Logan is an expert at making noise. There may very well be a gene that boys have that controls Noise Making or Making Bizarre Sounds that girls don't have. He doesn't just make raspberries, he goes Tzzzt! Tzzzt! Bbbbb! Da-da-da-da-da! and funny little grunting sounds when hungry and he's in the process of stuffing his face.

"Mm. Mhm. Mmm. Unh. Unh. Huhn. Mmm."

If you think about Tim Allen's character, with his bizarre grunting? That's roughly what Logan sounds like when eating. I suspect he's a foodie.

"Foooooood! Yeee-ha! Let's eat!"

Then there's the squealing and laughing. Logan seems to laugh at things more than Emma does and finds Emma hysterically funny. She, in turn, cracks up whenever he grins at her. Their little Laugh Fests can go on for minutes at a time. Super sweet!

Logan still inhales food like it's going out of style. He loves to eat. Loves it. Emma, finally has gotten into food, but it seems to be due more to the fact that we've given up on giving her pureed baby food and instead just give her tiny pieces of regular food.

"I try dis cheese. I not so sure if I gonna like it. When do I get da choklit?"
BTW, she loved the cheese. Crackers, too.

The only problem? Mealtime is now incredibly messy! So now we're back to multiple outfit changes a day due to all the food dropped and smeared all over their clothes. Bleah!

Glomp! Chomp! Chew! Masticate! "Baby Hulk Smash!" Snarf! Snarf! Snarf!

"Dis is goooood eatin'! I love dis stuff. Not dat cheese so much, doh."

"I got to tell you: I not so sure about dis food stuff orij- inee- at firsts, but now? Now dat dere's cheese an' crackers an' berries? Iz all good for me now."

Of course, solid food also means they are working on their pincer grasps and dropping food all over the floor. We have to sweep up after every meal or it's just too awful to contemplate.

Not so good at the pincer grasp. Emma shows us why she wears a lot of her snacks.

Step. Crunch. Step. Squish.

*Shudder*

This is where it would pay off to have a dog, except for all the additional chaos and hair. Perhaps a rental? Dogs As Vacuums. Vac-A-Dog! Get right on that, would ya? Thanks!

Movement. Logan is still crawling backwards, not forwards. Emma, however, has her own thing going on with her crawling style. She's fast and accurate. Also? She comes when called! She cruises around holding onto anything that will bear her weight and quite a few things that won't.

*Crash!* *Thud!* *Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam!*

Repeat.

Dominance. Emma has established her dominance. She is a Toy Thief. Logan can be sitting there, happily playing/chewing/drooling on something and Emma will cruise on over and take it right out of his hands. She's done this so many times that Logan starts up anticipatory crying before she has actually reached him and snagged his stuff.

I kid you not.

"Hey, dis look like a good book."

Cue the Jaws music. Emma does a half-walking crawl.

Closer....

"Logan, whatchu got dere?"
"Uh oh. Nuffin! Nuffin you want!"

"Noooo! She be stealin' mai book!"
"Gimme!"

"Nooo!"

The face of Despair.

Logan plots his revenge: "I gonna poke you in da head when you sleepin'."
Emma: "What you say?"
Logan: "Nuffin."

Emma is still close by and Logan is still crying, thinking that she's going to steal the book again. I distracted her with a different toy after I stopped laughing and shooting. Poor Logan!

Off by himself, Logan finishes "reading" his book.

Sleep still eludes us, although we do get the occasional 5 hour stretch. Tandem nursing seems to help most at night, keeping them together, but during the day Emma just isn't as tired as Logan is. Not quite sure how to handle that one. If we try to keep him awake longer, he turns into a nutcase but if we try to put her down before she's ready, she screams bloody murder and keeps Logan awake.

Ahhh, life with twins!

At least they're cute!