It's Bloom Day Baby!

It’s the 15th of the month - Garden Bloggers Bloom Day . I haven't had anything actually blooming before to contribute to this day, but this time I do. It's not pretty, but it's all I've got and I'm going with it.

We have tomatoes (pictured above) and very droopy sunflowers. These sunflowers were supposed to be mammoth 8 to 10 foot tall sunflowers, but they hit about 3 feet and fizzled out. Well… at least they made a valiant effort. They've attracted some bees to the garden, which is a good thing since we haven't seen any bees before. This makes me think I should always have some flowers planted in the vegetable garden to convince bees that it's the place to be.

Happy Belated LAPCPADPOUB Day

I can't believe I missed LAPCPADPOUB Day. Going to the petting farm and fantasizing about chickens and the whole family being sick recently... it just overtook me and I dropped the ball. I suppose a belated LAPCPADPOUB Day is better than no LAPCPADPOUB Day at all, right? Here is my contribution to LAPCPADPOUB Day.

Ahem...

Ode to Damian

I have crossed eyes and a crooked tooth
And a kink at the end of my tail
I am known to eat the strangest things
Like ribbon, rubber bands and mail

I'll also eat broccoli, peas and green beans
Or anything covered with glue
I'll eat tulle 'till I'm sick and it's caught in my throat
And my litterbox has decorative poo

Don't you celebrate LAPCPADPOUB Day? You should. Visit the Inelegant Gardener to find out the details of 'Let's all post cat photos and dire poetry on our blogs' Day.

Enjoy!

(And before you think I've gone off my gardening rocker, tomorrow will be the second installment in the Great Garden Experiment with updates on my tomato and bell pepper plants)

The Petting Farm on Travels With Children

It's no secret to anyone who really knows me that I have a thing for chickens. I don't know where this came from, but I do. I have a fantasy of owning pet hens that I let loose in the garden to prance around pecking madly at evil caterpillars, beetles and weeds. So when we took the boys to Green Meadows Petting Farm this past weekend I couldn't get enough of the chicken pen. It was such a fun trip and the boys had a blast petting all sorts of animals. You can read the full story on Travels With Children where I was a guest author this weekend.


Seeing our boys with the ducks was bittersweet. They were the same breed that we used to own and I got a bit sentimental thinking about our pet ducks that we were forced to give away after their enclosure was destroyed in the 2004 hurricane season. It was just a fun place to visit and seeing all the farm animals (the pigs, donkeys and cows were great too) just made me realize that I'm a closet farmgirl without a farm.

A Healthy Eating Game for kids (with a Halloween twist)

I came up with the Healthy Eating Game so the boys could "fish" for healthy foods that grow in a garden (not necessarily our garden since we have yet to grow anything you can actually eat). And since they're kids and it's Halloween soon we added some fun Halloween items for a Halloween twist. The idea for this game came from a few things: My boys like catching anything with a magnet. They're interested in the garden. And they're getting to the age where they're starting to prefer candy and junk to fresh fruits and vegetables, so a game that reminds them what's healthy and what's not seemed like the thing to do.

Object of the game: Take turns fishing for healthy food and putting it into your basket. No points for getting junk food. When it's your turn, if you get healthy food, you put it in your basket. If you get a piece of candy, you have to throw it back. When all the healthy food is gone, the person with the most wins. If the kids are in doubt about whether something is healthy, we ask "Can you grow this in a garden?" If not…it's probably junk you want to throw back.
Halloween twist - kids take turns fishing for fun Halloween candy and treats and putting them in their Halloween Trick or Treat bags. No points for healthy food. The kid with the most candy wins. (When Halloween has past, we'll ditch the licorice bats and witches hats and I'll add some foam fries, hamburgers and random candy as the "junk" we want to avoid and we'll just keep the game as just getting the healthy items).
Ages: My 2 and 4 year old boys love this. If I leave the 2-year-old alone with it, he'll definitely get into trouble with the paperclips and magnets, so this should be supervised closely by an adult.

Here's what you need:

Foam crafting sheets
Markers/pen
Scissors
Glue
Magnets
String/yarn
Wooden dowel or popsicle sticks
Paperclips
Small baskets (one for each child)
For the Halloween twist - add 2 brown paper bags

Draw some food shapes onto your foam sheets with a pen. Cut them out and decorate them with markers. You can add a piece of foam for stems and other adornments, like the husk on the corn and the peel on the banana. I learned the hard way that you should not make anything thicker than two foam sheets. Don't be tempted to use three sheets of foam for anything - the magnet won't pick it up.
Glue a paperclip on the back of each foam fruit, veggie or treat. Leave this to dry overnight..
To make your fishing pole you can buy a wooden dowel, cut it into small fishing rod lengths (about 12 inches), sand the ends and paint it (like I did). Or you can always use a popsicle stick or a wooden ruler or even a pencil - all will work just fine. Tie some yarn onto the end and glue the yarn to a magnet. I used Elmer's School glue for this and let it dry overnight as well.
We just used small found baskets from around the house to put the healthy food in - any little bowl or basket would work.
To make the trick or treat baskets for the Halloween treats, we just got a small brown paper lunch bag and cut a handle on the top and taped it, and then the boys decorated it with Halloween stickers.
They had a great time playing the game about 10 times in a row and enjoyed switching between getting the healthy food and the Halloween food.
I've got to say, the boys seemed to enjoy picking up broccoli, peas and strawberries for the healthy eating game. I was a bit worried that they'd only want to play the Halloween portion of the game, but I don't even think they'll notice when the Trick or Treat bags disappear and they're just fishing for healthy food. Maybe for Christmas, we'll add some candy canes and fake cookies and let them put them in a little felt stocking - they are kids after all and you've gotta mix it up a bit.

The game is a real hit and it's become a favorite activity for them. It's a quick and painless game and they both seem to have pretty even odds of winning.
Because my boys are my boys, they did decide that whacking each other in the head with the fishing stick was fun after awhile, as was trying to feed the foam food to the dog, but at the end of the day the pieces held up well and it's been used at least once a day since we made it.

Nuttier than Squirrel Poo

Aidan and I were quite surprised to see that our peanut plants that were not thinned and were planted too close together are actually growing pegs. I'm originally from England so to me "pegs" are what keep your washing on the whirlygig (Translation: clothespins are what keeps your laundry on the rotary clothesline). But in Peanut-speak pegs are the stalks that come down from a flower into the ground and eventually grow a peanut on the end.

I'm not sure how I thought peanuts grew before we decided to grow them. I think I pictured a bush with nuts on them - sort of like a blueberry bush. I know for a fact that I did not think they grew underground like potatoes. And I did not know that peanuts are not nuts, but a member of the pea family.

To grow your own peanuts, you simply go to the grocery store and buy a bag of raw peanuts in the shells. You open up the shell, take out the nut and plant it about 2 inches deep, about 4 to 6 inches apart, in rows about 36 inches apart. And that's pretty much it. We read that you should "hill" the plants when they get bigger, which we did, but some websites say peanut plants don't like to be hilled. The plants grow up and get yellow flowers on them. When the flowers wilt pegs form and gravity pulls them downward until they bury into the ground. The peanut pods grow underground on these pegs.

It can take 9 to 10 weeks for the pods to grow into mature peanuts. This long growing season is why they are usually only commercially grown in the South. I have read that they will not survive a frost. So let's see…it's October now…so we should be able to pull these peanuts out of the ground in the beginning of December (if we don't kill them first.) We should not get a frost until well into January or February so I think cold weather is the least of our concerns. Our big concern is keeping these things alive for another 9 to 10 weeks. Well I'm up for setting a record in the garden.

When you harvest them, you have to let them dry for a few days before being shelled and roasted. This is because raw peanuts (taken straight from the ground) contain a very mild toxin. To eliminate it, peanuts are dried as the final stage of the production process to prepare them for consumption. We'll see if we get to that point. I'm just excited that we've gotten this far. Maybe my peanut-butter making fantasies will come true?

More Dragonfly Love

We didn't make it out to the garden yesterday because our household seems to be stricken with the back-to-school bubonic plague. I actually laid in bed last night imagining hoards of hornworms stripping my tomato plants clean and then playing volleyball with my new baby tomato. Then I had a dream that I planted barley as a trap crop (I really plan on doing this with millet for other garden bugs) and when I went out and looked at the barley it was covered in hundreds of walking sticks. So we're not only physically sick, but I'm dreaming about bugs in the garden so I'm officially sick in the head.

So I thought I'd post a couple of pics of my new garden friends. Farmer B wandered out into the yard the other day and caught me photographing them and talking to them. "Hello little blue one - who is that stripey one chasing you?" he caught me saying. I had one of those moments where you realize you just looked like a complete freak and the look on Farmer B's face confirmed it. I won't write what he said, but it was something about me being in-freaking-sane and needing some human friends.
(Look at the little hairs on his back)

Because I have an insatiable desire for knowledge, I learned that most of the dragonflies we get in the garden are types of skimmers. The males are usually the pretty ones and the females are usually the brown ones. I've mentioned on here a few times how great dragonflies are for mosquito and gnat removal, so they are my new best friends.
(Their eyes and heads are quite expressive in an odd way)

I also learned that out of about 5,700 known species of dragonflies, as many as 50 species fly to warmer places for the winter, just like migrating birds do. Unlike birds, however, dragonflies appear to migrate in only one direction. Mom and dad may migrate south for the winter, but it's the next generation that probably makes the return trip.
(I am fascinated by this one's back and how the wings seem to 'attach' to the body)

To confirm that certain dragonflies migrate, a researcher used eyelash adhesive to attach tiny radio transmitters to individual insects. Even though the devices were very small, they still weighed about one-third as much as an adult dragonfly. Luckily, dragonflies can carry heavy loads. In their experiment, the team used an airplane to track 14 dragonflies carrying transmitters. Twelve days of observations confirmed that the dragonflies did migrate.

When temperatures dropped two nights in a row, the researchers found, the dragonflies took off southward. In less than 2 weeks, some of the insects covered about 60 kilometers (37 miles). Some dragonflies go even farther and have been known to show up on ships hundreds of miles out at sea.

So there you go - another dragonfly tip of the day. More than you ever wanted to know.

Pass the cigars!

Aidan and I were out in the garden yesterday evening inspecting our tomato plants for the dreaded green horned caterpillars of death - our pet name for the hornworms that seem to love our garden. Aidan is better at finding them than I am and much less squeamish, so I let him root through the tomato plants searching for the fat green buggers. Then he screams "A BABY MATER!" and he's jumping up and down pointing at a tiny green ball on one of our tomato plants. Holy crap. We did it. A plant produced fruit in our garden. It is a real live baby tomato.

To anyone who's ever successfully grown anything before, this seems quite mundane. I read the other gardening blogs where people need help from their neighbors to help them haul in their massive loads of vegetables and then they're canning and freezing and cooking to use everything up before it goes bad. I do realize how pathetic our excitement is about our one tiny pea-sized green tomato. But understand that we planted this garden in July and it's October now and this is the first actual fruit that's come from a flower in our garden. I have low confidence that this tiny little green tomato will turn into something edible, but it gives us hope. I assure you, we were low on hope before this.

And did you see what's next to our baby tomato? Two more little yellow flowers, giving us more hope that they'll turn into baby tomatoes too. I knew when we started our garden - and this blog - that there was a chance we'd fail, but I never dreamed it would be as hard as it is to get things to grow. We have another tomato plant that looks very weird and as I thumb through the Organic Gardening book I realize it looks like every picture in there. I have diagnosed it with 6 different viral strains, 4 bacteria and about 12 insect infestations. That is proof that Gardening Without Skills is not an easy task. But we did it. Somehow we got one tiny little tomato to grow.

Hoo.

Ray.