mathmom's blog

When we got home after 2 weeks on vacation, we had 2 ripe tomatoes! Yay ! They were very yummy, especially with basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar . If I can prevent the blight from killing the tomato plant, (and the deer from eating the tomatoes) we might have more in the next few days. The rest of the house was less productive. The lawn was a jungle, the sunflower had died. The fish were alive, but the water had gotten dangerously low because of evaporation---almost below the level of the pump, which would have been bad. The yellow fish appears to have broken something, she's a bit misshapen now (a humpback? I don't know). The ants found their way under the kitchen table. There are moths living in our pantry. I haven't checked the compost pile, which I need to do tomorrow. Things tend to disintegrate when you're gone, but they're slowly coming together again. Everything except for the laundry to be folded pile, which is glowering at me and reproachin...

One of the commentators said in my last garden post something like "I want to be a gardener." Well, that's where I am. I was in despair for a while about the gardens. The wildflower garden had zilch coming up. My dwarf sunflower was half eaten by a deer. The pumpkins were attacked by little silver bugs. I watched them wilt in front of me, the wilting moving out from the center of the plant until they were all gone. One little gourd had started to grow---the parent in me found this very disturbing somehow. The rose had stopped blooming. The tomatoes had stopped progressing. Here what has developed since. I've purchased an anti-fungal spray called "SAFE" for the tomato, which I have diagnosed with "Early Blight." All the anti-fungal, anti-insect sprays on the market are called some variation of safe, which ironically doesn't make me feel any safer. I actually recognized the bug that killed our pumpkins (a whitefly) from the picture on ...

I haven't written about the gardens for a while, so here's a small update. We planted pumpkins in the back garden. We started the seeds in little cups and then transplanted them into a newly weeded garden with "soil conditioner". They have taken off, and are now almost as big as Eleanor. No blossoms yet, but humongous leaves that threaten to take over the garden. It's very rewarding. Michael managed to hook up a spigot to our irrigation system, so the hose now reaches all of the plants (we've got two dwarf plants that didn't get enough water in the beginning) and also we don't get charged sewer fees for watering the plants, a great improvement. I also started a compost pile. I really don't know what I'm doing, but through reading I've come to the conclusion that contrary to popular opinion, compost doesn't just happen, it has to be engineered. However, nature keeps working and something is happening in that compost pile. In the ...

The other day I was looking over our "lawn" (the weeds are sometimes the only thing that make it look green...) and I noticed little red sprouts, about 4 inches high, peeking over the grass. "That's odd," I thought, and went to pick one up. There was an acorn attached. Looking at the rest of the lawn, I began to notice more and more of these sprouts popping up all over my lawn. Oh no, I thought, they're oak trees... You should understand that last fall our oak trees decided to re-forest all of central North Carolina single-handedly, and dropped a record crop of acorns. My inlaws were visiting while the acorns were falling, and we took thousands of them off the lawn. I thought that the squirrels would take care of the rest, but aparantly they were not doing their job. So now we have hundreds of little oak tree sprouts growing in our lawn, and it turns out to be my job to remove them. Amanda considers it her personal job to remove all the wild garlic gr...

Today Luke went for a walk at a nearby park. He ran up to everyone he met and grabbed them around their legs. It wasn't quite clear what he was trying to do, since he was roaring at them at the time. He gets this from his sisters, who often roar at each other randomly, to try to scare each other. Luke loves the noise, he loves joining in making noises, he loves doing whatever his sisters are doing. The time will come soon enough when he realizes that this is not appropriate, in the meantime, it is very cute. I was sitting on the porch and heard jingling from outside. A cute little dog peeked through the screen door. I went to investigate, and the dog walked as bold as you please, right through the open door. He wanted to go into our house (maybe he smelled the stew I was cooking...) but I managed to get him back onto the porch. I did eventually get a look at his collar and called the phone numbers on it (I would have walked him home, but Luke was asleep). A relieved owner...