Our Wild, Overgrown Mess of a Garden

Hope everyone had a great fourth of July weekend. We spent our time fawning over our little baby, Leela.



She’s very timid for an almost eighty pound bear. Gunshots, thunder and fireworks terrify her and we had to do a lot of cuddling and comforting to get her through the night. She is now afraid to go outside after dark. Sigh.

Today I wanted to show you all how the garden is doing.



It’s a wild, tangly mess that is doing very well! We are getting so many cucumbers that I'm surely going to need to figure out how to can pickles. Lately we've been enjoying them on salads and sandwiches and also as “cucumber salad.” I'm not sure where this came from – could have been from my mom’s head – but we ate it all the time as kids and I still enjoy it today.



We are starting to get raspberries! The harvest this first year is sure to be low, but here are the first small batch:



Four whole raspberries! Pretty dirty too – the bush is still pretty low to the ground.



If you couldn't tell by earlier pictures, our garden is an out of control mess. There are things I can't even get to on the hill because there are so many tall weeds! On terrible aspect of all these weeds are bugs. We have been lucky enough not to get mosquitoes, but I'm pretty sure the wild parts of our garden are infested with chiggers. I have eight bites on my body that itch constantly from gardening this past week. We need to get rid of the weeds pronto!



The corn seems to be doing well. As with most of the garden, the plants didn't get thinned very well, so there’s a lot of corn in a really small space. We'll just have to wait and see how it goes because the plants are too big to thin out now.



The beans are a tangly mess that beg for organization. But everything seems to be going well here. There are some peas starting to form and lots of flowers, all good signs.





Bed two is where one variety of eggplant lives. I can't remember which went where. Thriving and close to producing fruit!



The Brussels sprouts look pretty much the same, except bigger. Both Mike and I expected them to grow taller by this point, but we are trying to be patient.



The cucumbers have pretty much taken over this bed. I try to give them direction and there are some offshoots that vine down off of the garden bed. Pretty neat! Like I said, we are now harvesting cucumbers and it doesn't look like it will let up anytime soon.



The carrots and beets are getting bigger and more out of control. Very little thinning done means the yield will probably be low. The spinach and salad greens are needing harvesting. If I cut the salad greens, it should continue to grow for a while. The spinach yield is so low that I’ve just been giving most of it to the chickens, who love it as a treat.







The tomatoes and potatoes are fighting for space in the small bed. Both are huge. I plan on building something for the tomatoes soon. The pepper plants seem to be surviving with the other plants hogging up all the space and sunlight. There are some peppers on the plants, but for the most part, I haven't seen much from those guys yet.



If you look carefully, you may be able to spot catnip, basil. tomatoes, and potato plants in this picture! Having a successful garden has been so much fun this year. So far, the secret has been lots of rain (haven't watered my garden once!) and a good mix of organic potting soil and compost. I’m sure that it could be much bigger and better yielding if I used fertilizers, but I'm content with this after my lackluster garden last year.

To see how the garden looked one month ago, check out this post.

Summer To-Do List

We've been officially into summer for more than a week, but things at our little homestead are so behind that I'm just now getting around to figuring out what I want to accomplish this summer before going back to work. Too many things.



1. Finish the garden.

You know, like actually getting the fence done. Putting the rest of the mulch down. Weeding out the mess.

2. Clean up the basement.

The workout room is pretty much finished. And the bathroom is functional. But the main room is a disaster. Boxes and broken items, a stove and a refrigerator, a huge pile of recycling lie around waiting to be taken care of. This needs to be done before winter hits again (Hey, four months comes sooner than you think!).

3. Get the craft room organized.

It’s in the same state as the basement, minus the old appliances.

4. Finish those curtains!

Yeah, the fabric is still sitting on the cutting table waiting to be sewn up.

5. Paint the living room.

Gray.

6. Kitchen

The current plans are to refinish the countertops with concrete and paint the cabinets. This will be a semi-big project so this will probably be the focus of the second half of July.

That’s it. Only six items on the list, but most of the projects are pretty lengthy. This week’s focus is the garden. Then we will be heading on vacation, so by the time we come back, it will be time for the kitchen. If we are able to get that done before the end of July, that will leave only two weeks in August to complete the rest. Eek! Better get on it!

The Girls: A Three Month Update

Not much different with these ladies, but everyone loves adorable photos of chickens, so I thought I'd pop in and let you all know that the chick(en)s are doing well. They are nearing thirteen weeks and are as precocious as ever. Whenever I come down to the garden, they run to the door and chirp at me. The only real complaint I have about them is that they peck at me as if I’m food. But they're so darn cute I can't stay mad at them :)

They are eating mostly chick crumbles still. In a few weeks, they will be switching over to chicken scratch. They are spending a bit of time each day foraging around in the garden. They dig for bugs, peck at weeds, and sample scraps from the garden. They love corn leaves. Beet, not so much. They mostly eat the grass that pops up from under the mulch. I feel like a broken record, but really, we love our chickens. They are easy going and fun! Without further ado, the chickens at thirteen weeks:

Buh-Bye Google Reader

Just to quickly remind everyone that Google Reader is donezo as of Monday, July 1st. I waited until the last second and decided to go with Bloglovin to use as a reader. A really nice feature is that they import all of your favorite blogs from Google Reader so setup is super easy. Also, you can now follow me on Bloglovin:

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

So get on out there and find a new favorite place to read your feeds!

Big Winner

Mike likes to think that he’s unlucky. He frequently complains that he never wins anything and he sucks at gambling and that everyone else has an unfair advantage while playing Halo. Yup, he’s pretty optimistic. He should now consider his luck changed.



Mike got a text from a coworker on Friday to bring his SUV to work to pick up his recliner before it rained (her vehicle is a truck). Umm, what? Mike thought maybe it was a ploy to get him to bring the new car to work so his co-workers could put truck nuts on the Escape, but after a few minutes realized that he entered a raffle a couple of months ago for a Flexsteel recliner, valued at $1000.

After telling him that no, I wasn't going to switch cars with him (we have a tandem garage, the Escape was parked first), he got to work and told me that he had, in fact, won a recliner and I needed to come pick it up. I tried to put Leela in her crate but she was having none of that so I brought her with me.



Some co-workers loaded the box into the back and we squeezed Leela in there too. Then I had the pleasure of taking the pieces and hauling them up to the family room. Our staircases make a sharp right turn, and boy was that a tight squeeze.



Some huffing and puffing and a few choice words later and it was time to assemble. That part didn't take too long.



The end result is this beauty, as modeled by my handsome hubby:



So, about the chair. It’s a Flexsteel (the factory is a mere few blocks from our house!) Eclipse in brown with hidden recline function. Not my choice of color or style or anything really. Plus it’s leather, and not the durable kind. It’s the kind that your dog and cat will ruin in a week type of leather. But, marriage is about compromise. Mike is already in love with the recliner. He immediately came home Friday afternoon and re-arranged the furniture to fit the recliner in our family room. Sigh.



Since we're youngins and pretty newly married, I suppose I can’t complain about a free (well, $10 if you consider the entry fee) chair, especially when the husband has been complaining for months about our couch and even tried to convince me to buy a new sectional (with a puppy, are you crazy?). So consider this a semi-permanent addition to the family room for now. Despite this thing being an eyesore to me, it’s actually the nicest seating we have in there right now. Check out our dog-destroyed couch and chair. Duct tape has become a decorating staple around here.



So there’s our big win! Maybe this means a curse has lifted on Michael and he will start doing better at the slots! Or maybe we should just not gamble. Hmmm.

Queen of the Jungle

Our gorgeous girl Gizmo doesn’t get a lot of notice on this here blog, mainly because she shies away from the spotlight and hides from the dog; but she’s a member of our family and we do, in fact, take pictures of her. Proof.

Just ignore the fact that this picture is two years old. She’s not the most photogenic cat in the world.

Told You. Let’s try that again.

Our girl just got a haircut. Out of the 6 summers she’s been around, she’s been cut three times. She’s so darn pretty with her long hair that sometimes it’s hard to let go. But we both have terrible seasonal allergies (Mike is actually allergic to cats) and snuggling with this girl in summer is like being suffocated. Hair everywhere. In the eyes. In the nose. In the mouth. It’s agonizing. This year has been particularly bad for cat hair torture. We put it off for a while and then realized we couldn't live like that anymore. We had to cut her hair.



We did it in shifts this year and it took something like five different sessions to finish. She actually really likes it at first. She loves to be groomed and this is like an upgrade, what with a vibrating comb and all. So for the first ten minutes, she’s happy. Walking around, purring, rubbing up against anything she sees. Then she starts to get impatient. The purring stops and she looks annoyed. She doesn't say anything, but we can tell she’s over it. If we go on too much longer, we get meows and growls, hisses and nips. She’s not happy anymore and she wants to leave. That’s why we try to break it into so many grooming sessions. Gizmo is a lot easier to cut if she’s happy. Telling you now that it took over an hour to cut her hair makes me think that we should get new clippers. We're not professionals over here. We use the same trimmer for Mike’s hair on our cat. It was probably $30 at Wal-Mart five years ago, so we might be due for an upgrade.





Anyway, she’s finished (again, we're not professionals, we're just calling it done). I don't know if the Lion Cut is stylish, but that’s what we do. It’s easy and gets rid of almost all of her hair, but still leaving her some to trick her into thinking that she isn't completely naked.The real benefit of cutting her hair is that she is cuddly again. She loves to snuggle in the winter, but it is much more of a loner in the summer. Now she is back on our laps and sleeping in between us at night (Yup, we're mean. Gizmo gets to sleep in the bed but Leela has to sleep in her crate).

Lemon Chiffon Cake

It feels good to be baking. It’s the summer and we're currently at 90 degrees and muggy weather here. Usually that means grilling outside and eating ice cream, never running the oven. But I was in the mood for something that screams summer to me. Citrus and cake. My birthday was a couple of weeks ago and I was lucky enough to celebrate it a couple of times but I never had a cake. I felt the need to have cake.

Enter the lemon chiffon cake. I found the recipe here.

Recipes always call for stuff I don't have, like buttermilk and cream cheese. Or cake flour. That’s the worst. Who keeps cake flour laying around? This recipe was pretty good about not needing a lot of random things. And luckily I happened to have cream of tartar on hand to be whipped with the egg whites.

Make sure you whip the egg whites and the cream of tartar long enough. And fold it into the batter right away. If you spend time photographing it, your egg white peaks might turn into puddles and you'll have to whip them again.

I took several liberties with the frosting. And what I put down is approximation so play around with it a little. The original recipe calls for cream cheese in the frosting. That might be tasty. I didn't have any cream cheese and really, I don't like cream cheese frosting, so I took it out. I went for soft, light frosting, almost like a glaze, but thick enough that it stays on the cake.

It was pretty easy to make and took only a few minutes of prep time. Nice and lemony, the perfect summer treat. The whipping of egg whites was definitely worth it. So was running the oven in the afternoon.

Lemon Chiffon Cake with tangy lemon frosting, adapted from Taste of Home.

Ingredients:
One cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 eggs, separated
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup oil
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
Frosting:
4 tablespoons butter, left out the night before
4 tablespoons milk
3 teaspoons lemon juice
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Directions:
In a medium sized bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, whisk the egg yolks, water, oil, lemon peel and vanilla; add to dry ingredients. Beat until well blended. In another bowl, beat egg whites and cream of tartar on medium speed until soft peaks form; fold into batter.

Gently spoon into an eight inch cake pan. Bake at 350° for 30-35 minutes or until top springs back when lightly touched. Immediately invert pan; cool completely, about 1 hour.

In a small bowl, beat the butter, milk and lemon juice until smooth. Gradually beat in powdered sugar. Run a knife around side and center tube of cake pan. Remove cake to a serving plate; frost. Store in the refrigerator.