Category Archives: inside jokes

experiments, gardening, inside jokes, Luke, success

The first weeks are always the hardest

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The growing season is now underway, with the plants doing remarkably well:

Main gardenMain garden 6-26

I love that picture because it’s a beautiful shot of an Adirondack chair I never get to sit in.

There’s also a critter in the garden:

Luke Main Garden 6-26
Luke

This is our neighbor Luke, who arrived with the new neighbors when they moved in across the street last spring.  Can’t have an updated garden blog without photos of a neighbor’s cat.  He’s reasonably helpful:

Watching for chipmunks
Watching for chipmunks

He’s actually a better birder but we’ve seen him snag a chipmunk or two.  Good kitty!

He’s not much help with the rabbits, though:

Frolicking
Frolicking

Fortunately this year we have not had a moment where I’ve spotted them in the garden because they can squeeze through the fence.  It seems like our bobcat from years past may not be around, because there are a lot of them.  It was a mild winter, however.

Even the Back 40 is coming along nicely:

Back 40 Second Photo

As part of our new crusade to pay more attention to this garden, we’ve been watering.  It’s pretty dry here – there was very little snow this year, and it hasn’t rained much at all.  It’s a pain to walk out there to water, but we figure it will give the seedlings their best chance.

inside jokes, monsterous vegetables, radishes

We should really watch more television

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So by now you are undoubtedly familiar with our obsession with Halloween and burning pumpkins.  We only sacrificed two pumpkins this year:

We actually burned the second one on Halloween night, as our (meager) trick-or-treaters were tailing off.  If I’d had marshmellows, I would have roasted them over that fellow.

A few posts ago, I talked a little bit about how some of the vegetables got completely out of hand this year, particularly the radishes out back that were mixed in with the pumpkins and watermelons.  A few of the radishes in the front also got away from us, but our determination to leave them in the ground was deliberate in the main kitchen garden, as opposed to just missing them out back.

This past Sunday J turned over the gardens with the rototiller since frost was predicted for several nights this week.  Turning the ground just before a frost helps kill off any bacteria or bugs that might be found in the soil.  It’s not a guarantee, but most farmers follow that rule of thumb.  So finally the last of the radishes had to come out of the main garden.  This one doesn’t even look like a radish at this point, it’s so monsterous:

And because we cannot leave well enough alone, we decided to allow the radish to express its true personality.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you……Count Radicula:

Yes, we are completely ridiculous.  Hello, we have a blog about gardening.  What will be worse is when we do it as part of the decorations next year, because we have lots of sets of fake vampire teeth.  You probably don’t want to know the story behind that.