BANDITS!!!!!!

Rascals....that's about all I can think of at the sight of this evidence.

The botanical garden being as large as it is, it becomes quite the animal habitat. So...due to the safety factor, there are literaly hundreds of groundhogs around the place. Probably a dozen or more around the garden area. So even though there is a game fence where the garden is, the burrowing critters seem to make themselves at home. Talking to the locals (people that gardened here last year) one of the critters made his home near us last year, well apparently he is a creature of habit and has made burrows in the same places as last year, which happens to be in the plot behind us.

Which leads me to suspect him as the culprit.  I guess the neighbors tomatoes weren't good enough anymore and he wanted some of the delicious looking sweet corn I"ve been waiting patiently for.  Well the critter got ahold of probably 5 or 6 of our stalks and just helped himself to a good meal. No different than his tomato diet he doesn't finish anything, just eat half and move on to the next.  Someone should really teach this critter some manners about finished what he started.

So the lessons in organic gardening here is no matter what the pest, it seems your faced with challenges from the git-go. If it's not small cucumber beetles, stink bugs, cut worms, tomato blight, squash mildew, or the 4 legged larger variety, something is always keeping you on your toes.

A fence would have helped with the critter but due to the way it all worked out we didn't put one up, a) because of the cost in doing so with a temporary first time plot, and b) the critters were only attacking the big large fruitfull gardens at the other end to begin with. So we will know next time.

But to fight the mildew and cucumber beetles this stuff works wonders.  Promised dad I would get the info for him so here it is.  Neem oil is classified as organic and in comparison to some of the other stuff isn't really that bad on price.  

Neem oil and sprayer we have been using, the sprayer was like $7 and change, and the oil was like $9 or so but is a concentrate so a little goes quite a ways.  Lowes here carried both of these, but we had to go to 2 stores to find it.

Here are some pretty pictures to end my ramblings....

My beautiful bride out watering the mess we call our garden.  (this picture is from the south side which we never take a picture of since a plot of weeds is in the way.)

Neighbors sunflowers, just a nice end of summer image.

Hope everyone finds themselves enjoying the blessings of the day!

Can Can Can you do it?

What do Tomatoes....

A sink with 11 pounds of green beans....

A grill full of roasted veggies......

One of these space age contraptions...

and a couple dozen of these things have in common?

Well when you put them all together, with a little time and sweat equity, you get winter time goodness...well at least that is what we are hoping for. Huge thanks to mom for the care package with the pressure canner and book to get us going.  We found a new seal locally without too much trouble, and thanks to craigslist, we got a bargain on a few dozen jars.

Amanda coring the tomatoes before we took the skins off.

The peppers are from the local farmers market we go to on Saturday mornings, but the eggplant is from our garden, This was for several things here.  Roasted the chilis just because we kind of get a hankerin for some green chili occasionally since we left the green chili state. The rest was for a roasted veggie tomato sauce.

 

And well...after you work your booty off canning all day, this is what you end up with. Ignore the mirror shot, it was easier than moving them all away from the wall. It's been nice having the canner, and we certainly look forward to all this food come winter.  (The beans turned out to be about a pound per quard, 5 pints of tomato sauce, 4 pints of crushed tomatoes, which was somewhat of a learning curve, should have put a lot more in those, then 4 little 4 oz jars of roasted green chilis. Looking forward to those on eggs in the near future.

All in all it's been a great experience, and hopefully the garden keeps giving us more to put in the jars. We have been very fortunate to have a space to grow some produce.  The food has been wonderful so far, and our grocery bill has certainly plummeted since the garden has been producing.  So until then, love you all, hope life is treating you as well as it has us.

 

 

 

 

 

Harvest time is approaching

Well we have learned a lot about organic gardening this year for sure.  Even through the battles with the cucumber beetles and weeds that seem to appear overnight it has turned out to be quite the experience. Our squash is starting to look a little sick, hopefully it will decide to kick out a little more before giving up on us.


The spaghetti squash has FINALLY decided to start bearing fruit.  Pictures to come on that one. we have 3 on the vine, after months of battling the mildew that attacks the leaves.

Nothing exciting here just me being goofy, but you can see the corn behind me.

 

Enough of the previews... so we went out last night knowing we had a few green beans that needed picked.  With the sun setting a little earlier everyday we knew we needed to go out and just pick what we had before it got dark.  Weellllll....it got dark before we were done picking beans. But I think we got them all, at least for the first round of harvest.

Combination of our 4 different types of beans. Really not certain on names, but obviously there are the wax beans  which I think are a type of string bean, part of a package of gourmet beans, a green and a purple as well. Which we found doesn't stay purple :( it turns green like the others. Then there are a mess of regular garden beans in there as well.

This angle is deceiving. This JCrew bag is actually pretty full..

Last one for tonight, but if you ever wanted to know what 11 lbs of green beans looks like in your kitchen sink.  Not a bad start to our little organic garden.

 That's all I got for tonight, kinda pootered out after packing and canning all day, I'll update on the canning experience tomorrow.  Maybe I'll find the book I packed on writing skills while I'm at it. 

A Hunting we will go, a hunting we will go, high o a merry o.....

After an exhausting journey of hunting for houses and putting offers on 2 before this one, we finally hooked our house.  The sad part of life here is that as soon as you mention Michigan most people automatically think, Detroit. But that really isn't what most of the state is like. It is actually a really beautiful state filled with very old cities with beautiful landscape and amazing old architecture. But off of the soapbox, overall it is depressed and mainly because 9 of the dozen eggs they had were all in one
basket.

But the good part, and what has caused us so much headache lately has been that 1. the housing market right now is ripe for the pickins, and 2. people who do have jobs are buying houses. So when it came to putting offers on houses, we would start with a really good deal, but soon come to competing for them, some going for 10's of thousands over the asking price.

All in all we look at it all as God putting us where we are supposed to be.  If the house wasn't right it wasn't meant to be. So on to house #3. (the 3 is just house 3 we put an offer on, certainly not in the list of houses we looked at, that number is probably closer to 30 in person and closer to 100 online)

It's a lovely little neighborhood, 1 block from downtown farmington, so the "walkability" score on this house is superb. Date night will no longer always have to require the car.  Dinner, movie, and a night on the town is just a few steps away.

Built 1918
3 Bed, 1 1/2 bath, full basement, detached garage

By now I'm sure you just want to see the pictures....  We will post more when we get em, so far we have only been in the house a few times.  But the inspection is done, the finance paperwork is done, and we just have to sit and wait for all the behind the scenes stuff that comes with house to get done.

Living Room 

Dining Room 10' ceilings

Kitchen Looking into Dining Roo

Kitchen

Kitchen

Downstairs 1/2 bath

Master Bedroom

Part of the upstairs bath

Sitting area on back porch/mudroom off of the kitchen

Back Door from Outside and Stairs to the Basement

Back Deck, what you don't see here is the pavers that wrap around to the garage and the little yard area