Oh, how the weather has been so nice! If only it could be like this most of the winter, I’d be so happy! Since it was so nice out I decided it would be the perfect time to get out in the garden and prep it for winter. Yeah, over half way through winter and I’m just now getting it prepped for winter. Better late than never, right? I’m attempting to try the no-till method, so I really should have gotten it all cleaned up in the fall. But at the time, everything was producing so well that I couldn’t bear to tear it out. Then once frost came, it was too cold to go out and clean it up, plus I was just done with the garden and needed a break so I left it. Luckily with this nice weather, I’ve had a chance to get it done before spring.
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Being able to grow vegetables year round is a fun project to do, especially during those dreary, drab, cold winter months. There’s just something about watching plant sprouts appear through the dirt, grow, and bloom that helps get us through the worst part of the winter until we can start growing things in the garden again. From growing plants on a window sill to building a walipini, there are a lot of options when it comes to growing vegetables year round. The most interesting to me is using a walipini… oh, how I’d love to have a walipini!  A walipini is an earth sheltered green house. It’s built into the ground, and then covered with a plastic sheet roof to allow the sun in. They are more efficient to use than a regular green house because the earth absorbs the heat from the sun, which keeps it warm through the night. I’ve read they also maintain an even temperature through the summer months, so they can be used to grow year round. Imagine a garden where you don’t have to worry about weeding or bugs during the summer and can continue growing through the winter too… that would be amazing! Building one just might have to be a future project but we need to do a lot more research on it first.
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With our first hard frost of fall come and gone, the growing season has come to an end. A couple days before the frost happened, we decided to go to the garden and pick all the ripe and decent sized unripe tomatoes. My mom and kids helped pick and we ended up with several baskets full of red and green tomatoes. I’ve never tried saving green tomatoes before, but my mom has, so she gave me some tips on how to do it. I also looked online and found a lot of different ways to do it, from wrapping each tomato in newspaper and storing in a cool room, to pulling the whole tomato plants and having them upside down in a cool cellar or basement.
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Beautiful, blooming flowers is one of Miley’s favorite things in life. Actually, she loves anything that involve flowers, whether it’s planting them, picking them, arranging them, smelling them, shopping for them… it all makes her happy. Give her a box of Jiffy pellets, a packet of seeds, a grow light, and she will happily busy herself with planting seeds and tending to them all by herself. After going through I don’t know how many boxes of Jiffy pellets and too-many-to-count seed packets, she filled both our vegetable garden and her own flower garden with many transplants. Now all of her hard work is finally paying off and she has a little garden full of beautiful, blooming flowers that she’s so proud of. Just when she thought her garden was full of all the happiness it could possibly hold….

the butterflies came to visit.

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A while back my mom, sisters and I decided to have a contest to see who could grow the biggest pumpkin. Well, that great pumpkin challenge has been quite a challenge, all right. I figured by now we’d have nice sized pumpkins growing on these beautiful green vines, and each of us would be out there measuring our big pumpkins to see who was winning so far. The challenge would be in full swing, with each of us neck in neck and carefully tending to our pumpkins, in hopes that we’d be the one who could successfully grow the largest one.
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One morning I finished up chores earlier than I usually do. With a couple hours to spare before I had to fix lunch, I told the kids (Miley and my niece, who was with us that day) I was going to go work in the garden for an hour. The weeds in the garden had really gotten out of control with all the rain we’ve had. Since the garden was sopping wet, making the weeds easy to pull, I decided that I would take an hour and see how much weeding I could get done. I started pulling weeds down one row and as I got that one done, I went right to the next one.

Soon I made it to the peas. As I was weeding the peas, I was thinking that I really ought to pull them out because they really looked awful. They hadn’t grown very tall and were yellowish, so I just assumed they weren’t going to produce anything, plus it would make weeding a little quicker. Miley wanted to grow peas last year but I never got them in on time. I figured if I pulled them she’d be disappointed, so I decided to leave them for a while longer and continued to slowly make my way around them. Soon the kids came out to see if I was close to being done because they were hungry and ready for lunch.
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