Well it is that time!! You Tube garden update and harvest. Please forgive for the shakiness of the hand and the camera all over the place. Hubby is fighting a sinus problem. He is going to shoot another video Wednesday.
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I just wanted to take a moment and wish everyone a happy new year! I hope y’all had a wonderful holiday. I know I kind of got side tracked as far as blogging. Once Thanksgiving came and all that goes with Christmas, blogging was the last thing on my mind. It was also cold here in Florida up until about the second week in December and the garden stalled. I really think our tomatoes are going to over winter. The week before Christmas, we finally started having the tomatoes ripen. They have been amazing since. About every 2 days, we are able to harvest 50 or so tomatoes. They are smaller ones but never the less, tomatoes. We have harvested our last cucumbers from our September planting and are about ready to start a new planting of them. We have had a lot of bok choy and lots of great meals on them. The peppers are starting to turn red and orange now which we love. We would much rather raise red and orange peppers because the greens are so much cheaper. Anyway, take a look at 1/2/2009 harvest picture (minus the pumpkins, we harvested them in early December).
Because it’s time to replace tomatoes but we don’t want to kill the super huge tomato plants we have, tomorrow’s mission is to put in 2 more 8×4 beds. We have plans for about another 6 or 7. If the dirt wasn’t so darn expensive, they would all be planted now but we are really trying to only do what we can afford when we can afford it.
On the debt front, I made a major change for us and it is really working out good. I used to wait to pay the CC bills until the very last minute and then if I forgot, you always end up with same day payment fees, etc. Over the last month, I used our Christmas bonus and transitioned into paying all CC bills the moment they arrive at the house. It has been a huge pressure reliever. It also saves us some money as you are not paying interest fees on the money that gets paid down sooner.
We have also started back on our diet again. Cross your fingers for us. It is pretty hard to stick with it when you have the kind of schedule we have. It is going to take some organizing but I will leave that for another day.
Tomorrow - look out for a youtube garden update!
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It’s been a little while. Time for another video update. The garden is just growing leaps and bounds. The tomatoes are covered in babies and we have harvested cucumbers, mustard greens, radishes, salad greens, and eggplant. Anyway, here is the video courtesy of Marc.
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Marc decided to take a little video of our garden. You can see what we are growing and how big some of the plants have gotten.
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Well I decided to organize our seeds as we had a lot of seeds come in at once some time back. It is a good time to tell you exactly what we are growing in our garden.
Tomatoes - Golden Nugget, Mr. Stripey, Heat Wave
Onions - Red Creole, Yellow Sweet Onion
Peppers - Cubanelle, Sweet Stuffing, Mixed variety
Cucumbers - Dasher II and Boston Pickling
Radishes - Pink Beauty
Lettuce - Mescalin Mix from Baker, Buttercrunch Head Lettuce
Luffa
Beans from a 14 bean soup bag
Sugar Snap Peas
Calabrese Sprouting brocolli
Purple sprouting brocolli
Peanuts
Eggplant - Ichiban and regular
Pumpkin - Jack Be Little and New England Pumpkin Pie
Watermelon - Sugar Baby
Citrus
We have beets, carrots, more lettuce, parsnips, and some other winter veggies still to plant. Strawberries are going in soon.
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We have an Eggplant! 2 more raised beds install, total of 6 so far
2 more raised beds install, total of 6 so far
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I am so sad to see this weekend nearly be over. We had a really productive Saturday which I will share more about when I have time to write a little more and get some additional photos. We spent about an hour Saturday morning exploring the superhuge empty lot area behind our house. In Florida, we occasionally have fruit trees that you will find growing randomly and we have been on the lookout. What we have found though is Florida Passion Fruit. During Tropical Storm Hana (I think it was Hana), it lost all of its flowers but it the fruit is still growing. We broke one open and its filling with its fruit. It used to be pretty hollow inside. Not ripe yet but beautiful.
Passion Fruit Vine with Fruit
We also believe we found some wild fennel herb. We are afraid to harvest some of it but it smells absolutely wonderful. We will be watching it and if it starts seeding, I will definitely take some. Fennel herb in stores is extremely expensive and we have a Weight Watchers recipe for oven fried pork tenderloin that calls for a lot of fennel. It would be so great if we didn’t have to purchase it. We plan on putting in an herb garden in the front yard but we have to wait until the back yard is done.
What we believe is wild fennel.. Smells great!
We found some air potato plants which are usually considered a weed but they are really crazy to look at seeing little baby potatoes hanging in the air. We found some American Beauty native vines with berries but they are nonedible. We also found some Lantana. I can’t stand the stuff but up north everyone loves the stuff. The butterflies love it. Our best find is below. Is he not absolutely amazing.
Isn't he absolutely amazing. I have never seen one like him.
Anyway, thats all for now. Mark and I are going to watch a taped episode from tonight of Greensburg on Planet Green. Its a pretty good show. I really wish they would go over more green stuff and not as much drama but its good. Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment!
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I am so excited about our luffa that is growing. Out of all the plants we have growing, that is the most exciting to me for some reason. I find it so amazing that the plant grows out a kitchen sponge or body luffa. There are also so many craft projects you can do with them too. Cut them in slices and infuse glycerin soap into them and you have an abrasive sponge with soap all in one. That is just one project. I have lots more.
In their early form, the luffa gourd is edible and often called chinese okra. Our luffa has been growing approximately a month. One hardy plant will grow enough sponges to last a single person for years, we have 6 plants growing. I didn’t expect them all to do so well but they are. It took approximately 10 days for the seeds to germinate and was afraid I wouldn’t see any but all but one lived and I can’t bear to thin the bucket. Here are some pics.
Luffa approximately 2 weeks old showing their first true leaves.
There are some pretty cool videos on youtube if your interested in checking out the luffa. Check it out.
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I don’t know if there is any right way to install a raised vegetable bed but this is how we do it. The plants seem to be liking it and it works out well for us. The beds are made from untreated pine wood. We opted to not use pressure treated wood because the chemicals could possibly leach into the ground and be absorbed by the veggies and with my sensitivity to chemicals, why take that chance. We are well aware that the beds will not lasts but a couple of years but are okay with replacing them as they need to be. We opted to use 6″ tall wood for this bed but you can use any height you need. We also have some 10″ and 12″ raised beds and it works the same.
For a 6″ tall, 8′ long, and 4′ wide bed, you will need three 2×6x8 pieces of wood. Take one piece and saw it exactly in half and just use 3 or 4 screws to attach the pieces together. Its a really quick process. You may need to predrill your holes if the wood seems to be wanting to split. With our 10″ tall ones, we had to do that but the 6″ ones were fine. The 6″ tall beds we used required 11 Scotts Hyponex Earthgro Organic Humus/Manure Compost 40lb, 10 bags of Scotts Earthgro TopSoil, and a half block of compressed peat moss. To install the bed…
First Marc is weed-whacking all the grass low to the ground.
If you have a tiller, the process may go a lot quicker with breaking up the soil underneath but using our Black & Decker Edgehog (which has a trenching feature) and the weedwhacker, it only takes about 30 minutes. If there are any stubborn grass areas left underneath, we line it with newspaper. Only a few blades of grass have come through on either of the 3 others. As you can see in the background, we have some others to go. Love to hear your comments.
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Most of us have heard about the car that runs on water or perhaps tofu or some fool thing like that but we dismiss it out of hand because it is hard to imagine life after oil. Oil has been with us all our lives, after all it made the Clampits unbelievably rich and has been the subject of soap operas and folklore since our granddad wore his pants below his navel, it’s always been this way, hasn’t it? Well, actually, no! Oil and gasoline are only one of many ways we have made cars run. In fact, many of the first cars were steam and electric too! So why can’t we do that now you ask? In fact we can, it just takes putting the pieces of the puzzle together. In my mind, the electric car will be the future of automobiles, but right now they don’t have the range most people want and they are expensive. We may be 25 or more years away from an affordable, long range electric car but we can’t afford to wait that long. We need something we can do right away to finally get rid of our oil habit that is draining our economy and keeping us tied to some countries that don’t have our best interests at heart. The facts are that we have plenty of energy right here in America but no will to use it. It’s not just all about oil in Alaska either. It’s all of these things- solar, wind, oil, and clean coal, and natural gas. Not long ago I stumbled across a video on you tube who knew all about this. At first I thought he was a politician but soon discovered he was making WAY to much sense to be one of those. His name is T. Boone Pickens and he has an actual plan to wean us of oil. Take a look an let me know what you think!
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