Happy New Year! !

Its 2010 and we are COLD!!!

We are going to be down to -7 tonight and we still have about a foot of snow on the ground that started on Christmas day. We are seeing weather that hasn't happened since 1982!

We had a great Christmas and are ready for the new year.

The pups got new toys, jackets and sweaters. Good thing too, they don't like the cold very much.

This time of year they just bury themselves in a blanket on the couch and sleep. They have gotten fat too! Izzy has gained 6 lbs (she was only 6 lbs to start with!) and Rud has put on 5 lbs of winter laziness.

In November we winterized the garden and covered the Carrots, onions and garlic with straw to keep them cozy till spring. We tilled the main area so we are ready to plant once the ground thaws.

We cant wait!

We hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and is keeping warm!

Happy New Year!

In the down swing

We cant believe Summer is over already! Feels like we just got started! Hopefully this time next year we will be about done building the house on some beautiful land!

We have tilled in the garden for winter, most things were spent and looking pretty ugly. Mom G had the Corson Family reunion on September 20th and we didn't want the garden looking gross for moms guests.

We still have broccoli, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips and lettuce growing. Next year the garden will be a bit simpler since we will be securing some land and building. We have narrowed down some favorites that we grew this year and will focus mainly on those. We felt we had to many varieties of everything this year and some were not as good as others.

We have been busy otherwise. We went to Virginia Beach for Adams Grandpa Atkins 90th Birthday, he looked great and had a good time. He had lots of friends and family show up to see him. It was so nice to see a lot of family I had not met before. We got some time to jump in the ocean and walk on the beach before we came back to this cold Missouri weather!

Last weekend we went out for Adams birthday. We went pumpkin picking! There is a neat farm locally we like to visit each fall that has a hayride out to a pumpkin field and lots of cute animals to play with. We each got to play with a little chicken and pet some goats, Adam was a happy little farm boy! Cant wait till we have our own!

Harvest Time!

We have been picking and pulling up all our spring time hard work.
There were a few things that didn't turn out the way we wanted but we are learning and that's the whole point. We found several types of beans we don't like, tomatoes that just aren't as good as others and we lost almost all of our summer squash (except for a few at the beginning), and all of our pumpkins and now our winter squash to squash bugs.

We did get a few Watermelon that he raccoons didn't eat. The White one is a sweet Cream of Saskatchewan and the red one is an old variety called Moon and stars.
We are just starting to get our red and yellow peppers and lots of Cayenne's and Jalapenos.
Today I pulled up all the remaining carrots, there are purple and white ones that are just as great as the orange.
We pulled up all our potatoes a few weeks ago and they are awesome! We have a plain white potato, Yukon gold and red potatoes.
Some of the most prolific and hardy items that we will definitely grow more of next year is the peppers, eggplants, okra, onions, plain green beans, and just 4 different types of tomatoes. We had 9 different ones this year to see what we liked and we have narrowed it down to the 4 best.
I got a new shirt a friend at work found for me. Of course Adam just HAD to try it on.
I don't think he realizes that I have the power to put it on the blog! He he......

Busting at the Seams!

Garden is doing great! We are starting to pick something every day! Still waiting on the tomatoes though, they are all still green but abundant! We have several watermelons that are getting bigger by the day. This one is our "Moon & Stars" with the big yellow "Moon" and all the little yellow "Stars". They are known to be one of the sweetest.

This is the pesky raccoon that just last night ate the above watermelon and 4 others that were almost ready to pick. We have set out a trap and sprayed a smelly organic mixture around the garden to protect everything else. We have a ton of Peppers, all still green but will have yellow & red Bell, Jalapenos, and Cayenne.

The Okra has to be picked almost everyday, it grows so fast. We have 5 plants, wish we had more, love Adam's fried Okra!. Eggplants are all over the place. We have 3 on just this one plant and we have 5 plants. Mom will be making lots of Moussaka this Summer! (Yummy Greek Dish)

Sunday we spent the day canning. I had picked 8 lbs of beans a few days before and we needed to get them canned. We got 8 jars of green beans, 4 jars of southern "Chow Chow" made from our cabbages we picked last week and 3 jars of our Jalapenos Pickled. I got Adam a pressure caner and it is awesome.

Today I started our fall garden. I worked at the hotel Saturday so I took Monday off. :)

I turned the emptied beet bed into the new herb bed. I turned the old broccoli bed into the new beat bed. And I made the old cabbage bed the new fall squash bed.

We have also learned from some mistakes this year, as we do every year.

1) We didn't stagger our plantings every two weeks so that we have a constant yield all summer.

2) We didn't space the tomatoes far enough apart. They are to close together and are very heavy on the trellis. It is also bad if one should get a disease they all get it.

3) We didn't give the watermelons enough room to spread and we put the pumpkins to close to everything. They are taking over!

And

4) Don't stand to close to a burn pile....

Dane was a bit to close while burning a pile of dead limbs and was burned on most of his right arm and lower right leg. This picture is 1 week after he was burned. He had to wear gauze completely covering it for 1 1/2 weeks and it is finally looking pretty good today and his pain is gone. He also learned from a mistake this year.

Vacation Time!

We just took a nice one week vacation and got some much needed R&R. We headed to Virginia Beach to see Adams Grandpa for a couple days and lay on the beach a bit. Then we came home and drove to Eureka Springs AR, and Stayed in a Tree House!

We had some fun of our own too.....

When we got home Saturday the Garden had exploded....we spent most of Sunday getting it tamed.

We have Zucchinis that may be ready this next weekend, we had enough peas to pick and saute for diner, we dug up a few baby potatoes, and we tasted a not so ripe Cayenne pepper that burnt our mouths for a few hours. (It was all Adam's Idea of course...)

We picked a fourth of the herbs we have and dried them in the dehydrator, we also took the Basil and some of the fresh basil and olive oil and froze them in ice trays for easy cooking later.

We have Big Texas Sweet White onions that are about as big as a tennis ball and they should get as big as a softball. The Pumpkins are about to take over everything, we made the mistake of putting them to close to the watermelons which are also slowly taking over too.
All the tomatoes have about 5-10 little green tomatoes each and are about 3-4 feet tall.

Exciting!

Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow......

This is the fun part...

Now we watch it grow.

Planting is done!

Whew, we finally got everything in the ground last week and it is all blowing up already! We can barely keep up with the lettuce bed, cabbage and the potatoes are huge! We already have broccoli heading up!

We have 20 tomato plants and in between them we planted Basil (makes the tomatoes taste better and keeps bugs off) and other herbs like parsley and dill.

We have 10 watermellon plants, 4 different varieties, and several pumpkins and Okra in this row that is mounded up and covered in plastic to keep it wet and warm.

We are now just watering and waiting to start Picking! Thankfully we have some rain barrels that we collected rain water off moms garage and that has been a life saver the last few days since is is 80 degrees and DRY! We will need to get 5 or so more barrels to get us through the summer. Its amazing how fast a 55 gallon barrel fills up in 10 minutes of rain. We feel like w are wasting it when they overflow!

We will keep updating as it grows!

Oh and a pic of the pups... dont want to leave them out!