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I grew up in the garden – literally!  When I was young, I had a section of the garden that was mine at my grandma’s house.  I mostly made mud pies, but also pretended to hoe and “plant” whatever I found.  When I got older, I joined 4-H and had my first garden of my very own, a small flower bed around our flag pole.  I continued to take gardening projects, including house plants, various flower garden projects, and even a tree/landscaping project. It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I first planted vegetables.  I started with peas and potatoes, and have addedRead More →

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My dad brought out some old boards from the deck they had on their house and set them up as gardening boxes for me. Now I just need to fill them, I’m going to use the lasagna gardening method, which alternates layers of green and brown materials on top of newspaper.  My first layer of newspaper went down, covered by a layer of the stuff out of my cavy cages – broken down wood pellets, poop/pee, and discarded hay. I’m going to continue this until I have a layer over the whole box, then go back and add some chopped leaves and other green material,Read More →

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Each year, I look forward to the start of fall, which is signaled by the county fair.  I love our fair, it is a favorite time of the year – better than Christmas!  I love to enter things in the fair and this year, I was excited to enter some things from my new house – things that were all mine. I have entered the flower show in the past, but most of the entries have been flowers grown by my mom and myself.  This year, I only had a few flowers, but they were flowers that belonged to me alone.  I entered a hostaRead More →

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Yesterday, I noticed that my squash had some white, powdery looking spots on it’s leaves. The plant itself looked okay other than the spots. I noticed the other day that while some of the fruit were okay, a couple of the fruits just coming on appeared to have started to rot where the flower typically falls off.  So, obviously, I had to do something, the first thing I did was find out what I had.  My twitter friends told me I likely had Powdery Mildew.  The first thing I did was to cut off the healthy fruit.  Though I would normally leave it to growRead More →

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I have many posts to write about the things I’ve been working on around the house, but something happened tonight that I just have to write about.  I was going to write a tweet to Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, and realized that what I wanted to say wouldn’t fit in a tweet. A little background story first, in my new house, there is a family that lives next door who has several children (four or five? I’m not sure).  Based on what I know, let’s just say, they don’t have a very stable home life.  They spend a fair amount of time in theirRead More →

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Well, it seems that the fainting I mentioned in the previous post is here to stay.  I’ve had four different medical tests to determine the reason for the fainting and they revealed both good news and bad news. The good news is that my heart is structurally sound.  This was a concern due to the fact that I have been diagnosed with Stickler Syndrome.  A related disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (another genetic connective tissue mutation), often affects the heart’s structure.  After a echocardiogram and a stress test, they have concluded that as of right now, my heart looks good – both at rest and during exercise.Read More →

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I finally got my vegetables all planted.  The tomatoes and squash have been out for a week or so, and I just planted the eggplants today.  The tomatoes grew very tall and fairly spindly from being inside so long while I was waiting for the closing on the house, but they seem to be recovering.  The summer squash lost all of it’s leaves but is growing new ones so I still have hope for it.  The eggplants had some leaf burn from a very hot day in front of the glass window with too direct sunlight (I think this is what caused it) but seemRead More →

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My secret prayer partner gifted me with a beautiful Asiatic Lily, ‘Orange Matrix’.  I kept it inside until I closed on the house and it lost it’s beautiful petals, but I have hopes it will be okay and come back next year – and for many more years to come.  I wasn’t sure where to plant it, but decided to put it right outside the garage door so I could see it whenever I came home. There was already an area that possibly had annual flowers before, but it was grown over with weeds, so I went to work with my hoe to chop themRead More →