Wordless Wednesday - Oh Christmas Tree

My daughter went to Toronto and all I got was...

Let me start by saying I didn't want anything from Canada. I have enough things in my home. But being the thoughtful daughter she is, when she went on the tour of the Steam Whistle Brewery and found out that the cups they serve the sample beer in are 100% compostable, she immediately thought of me and brought them home for my compost pile.  I love it!
Steam Whistle Brewery uses all natural ingredients in its beer and renewable resources in its brewery. It has won awards for being green. If I drank beer, I'd probably lean toward a conscientious company like Steam Whistle.
In the meantime, I will proudly add their cups to my compost pile. They are supposed to break down in 50 days.

We'll check back on them in two years. I use a three bin pile, so the current pile will be stewing and composting next year. I have no intention of digging through it to see if the cups have decomposed.
But hat's off to a company that cares, and thanks to my daughter who hears compostable and thinks of mom! <3

A New Year

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when we all set goals - to lose weight (check), to get more organized (check), to post more regularly in my blog (check)...
It is the season of planning.
This month my gardening goals are:

• Go through all those seed catalogs by the side of my chair and place a timely order
• Sharpen and oil all of my gardening tools
• Plant some onions late in the month since they took so long to grow last year!

Aside from the Halloween snow, this has been a mild winter. Thanks to that, I still have rosemary, thyme and parsley available for picking in the Potager.

And still blooming in the potager are the lenten roses I bought on a clearance rack at my grocery store. Don't you love when a clearance rack whim performs well?
It is so nice to see flowers at this time of year.

The turnips are still in the Potager - for a day or two.

The temperature is supposed to drop next week, so the turnips will be picked for dinner or soup tomorrow or the day after.



2011 was a challenging gardening year. I am looking forward to 2012 being more successful. With every passing year, I gain more experience.

I wish all of you a happy and healthy New Year.

November Garden

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

The November garden is stark and bare, with almost no growth to bring me in daily. But there is a bit of life still clinging. The strawberries are still green and lush beneath their layer of straw, promising yummy berries come Spring.

The Roses, which will be moved in early spring, still show signs of life, although the leaves tell a different story and are falling off the branches rapidly.






There are a few red onions that summered over and decided to start growing in the fall. The turnips are still growing.

And one lone head of lettuce that didn't get the frost memo. It's not big enough for a salad for one, and I wonder if I can keep it going with frost protection until it is big enough to eat. Or is that just a waste of time.

The Perennial/Herb garden is bare too. Most of the perennials have died back, there is garlic and shallots planted in the former squash bed, now covered in wood shavings to protect them.
Most of the herbs are still growing. I picked most of the sage to dry it, so the poor plant looks skinny and half dead, but it's still producing green sage leaves. The parsley is surprisingly still growing well. I don't think mine has ever lasted through multiple frosts and a little snow storm before. The Rosemary will hang on until the temperature drops too low, as will the thyme. The oregano and marjoram are still green, and I don't think they lasted this long last year.
Tiny flowers still bloom unexpectedly. What a delight to find them.

Lenten Rose 

Miniature Rose

Inside the house, the carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey is slowly turning into a rich broth, simmering in a pot along with herbs freshly picked. Soon the turnips pulled up this afternoon will join some fresh store bought organic vegetables and make a lovely soup for a November dinner.  

I fail at weather watching

I do not watch or read the right weather forecasts. I heard we might get snow Saturday night, but I never heard that it would rain all day Saturday. I had planned on getting all the veggies out of the garden Saturday morning. But it poured all morning. Hubby couldn't believe I didn't know it was supposed to rain all day. I never gleaned that bit of information from the forecast.
Around noon I heard something hitting the glass. I ran out front and saw sleet.

Sleet gathering on the ground! I ran back to my garden and began picking like a mad woman. The rain/sleet mix was numbing my hands, but I gathered everything that was fit for eating.

Peppers, jalapenos, lettuce and one turnip.

Flat leaf and curly leaf parsley and rosemary. I could have gathered more herbs but by then my hands were so cold and painful from the ice, that I couldn't move them.
That night it began to snow.

October 29 and we are having our first snowfall. That's unusual. We haven't even had our first ground frost!

The next morning the sun was shining and melting the snow away.  We have our first frost warnings for this evening. At least "all is safely gathered in" now.

Still eating from the Potager

We have not had our first frost yet. A friend who lives in the same town as me, but in a more rural area, has had two light frosts already. I am watching the weather closely and I think Saturday night's temperatures may be too close to frost to be comfortable. So I have plans to harvest everything I haven't yet harvested on Saturday morning and put the garden to bed. Just to have this weekend free of any other plans is amazing to me! This has been such a busy gardening year!
But for now, I still am enjoying what is left in the garden - fresh herbs, peppers ( hot and sweet), one Ambassador Zucchini plant is still going, lettuce, scallions and an occasional Juliet tomato. The turnips were attacked by bugs, so I'm not sure how they are doing. The snow peas didn't do as well as they had in the spring - I really only got a handful from them. I harvested a small basket of small sweet potatoes and about a pound of white potatoes that look funny but are quite tasty. We've eaten the last of the  stored onions and have about three garlic cloves left. This wasn't a stellar gardening year for me, to be sure, but I enjoyed it. I am still enjoying it daily!

Sweet potatoes roasted with rosemary and parsley, sauteed zucchini and a side of pork. Yum!

The battle of the Sunflowers

They were beautiful. Towering over the 6 foot fence, 10 to 12 feet tall. Cheery yellow faces following the sun.

At the end of summer the weight of their seeds made them droop over, looking like giant shower heads in the garden. We didn't harvest the seeds - we were enjoying the birds and squirrels gathering them. The thing I didn't know about sunflowers is that eventually the heads come crashing down, scattering seeds everywhere.  Smashed sunflower head on the swing - another on the pathway. They need to come down.

The trunks on these sunflowers were almost 3 inches across. I tugged and I pulled. Hubby came and knocked them down. But they still needed to be lifted out of the ground, have the soil knocked off their roots and taken out of the Potager.  Yes, those are my long handled clippers hanging off the sunflower stalk I was trying to cut. They are stuck there. This was no easy task!  I did about three sunflowers and gave up. Exhausted. It was late in the day.
The sunflowers may have won this battle, but they are worse for the wear. I will win the war.
Earlier in the day. When I have more energy. And a chainsaw.

And in case you were worried about the birds and the squirrels  - there are sunflower heads all over the yard tied to or wedged into trees, as little feeding stations. I hope they realize how hard I worked so they can eat this winter!