Fall? What happened to fall?

So as some of you may have noticed I missed a couple months. Oh my goodness, we've been busy. Here are some highlights.

 

Poured new patio in back and the middle window has since become a door!

 Cooking class on Parisian Macaroons. Beautiful and delicious,

Celebrated Mom's birthday with a cork and canvas class in Anamosa. Great fun - she's got talent!

 

Tabor Wine Festival - celebrating our birthdays.

 

Fantastic cooking class with author Tamar Adler in October. 

Got to walk around the NewBo market and pick out all of our ingredients for the class. So much fun and I learned a lot! Her book is wonderful I highly recommend it if you're interested in cooking.

 

Dustin's sister Dena is pregnant and due next week! We are SO excited! In addition to that  my lovely girlfriend Ashley (above) is due in Feb. Flew out to Oregon where her parents live for her baby shower.  This is her loot!

 On October 30th, Dustin asked me to marry him. :-)

 

Had a great fall party (albeit a little chilly) the first week in November. This is the awesome fireball my brother sent to us for our birthdays.

 

Taking down the garden - no easy task.

 

Got a truck load of compost tilled in and we're ready for next spring.

 

Beautiful birdhouse built by my dad. 

 

 Trip to Ft. Collins, CO to spend Thanksgiving with John at his house.

 

Ready for the holidays.

Some final highlights not pictured - So much fun to see Dena, Joe and Juliet this October when they came back to visit one last time before the baby comes. Little Gavin should be showing his beautiful face next week and Dustin and I couldn't be more excited to greet him. 

Dustin's Grandma Bev came and stayed with us for a week. It's been a crazy busy time for us (Dustin especially as he's working on his MBA through night classes at U of I) but we really enjoyed getting to spend some time with her.  We're heading up to spend some Christmas-y time with the Sults before Rhonda (Dustin's mom) heads out to be with her new grand baby. Hard to compete with that. :-)

Hope you are all having a wonderful and peace-filled holiday season. I feel extremely blessed and thankful for my friends and family. Blessings to you all and thanks for stopping by my blog. ~Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

August Garden Post

I was reminded that I had been remiss at updating the progress of the garden on my blog. It is rocking. We have had fantastic luck with cucumbers, broccoli, snap peas, sugar snaps, green beans, egg plant, bell peppers, okra, kale, and tomatoes. So if you're in the area give us a call - we'd love to share. Currently we're flush with cucumbers, tomatoes and green beans.

 

Nineteen tomato plants seemed like a good idea.....initially. Now we're canning tomatoes, pasta sauce, salsa, and pizza sauce - weekly!

 

The green beans have been especially great. We've harvested gallons and gallons and have started blanching and freezing some for winter. (Please ignore the weeds - I obviously do.)

Cucumber patch - we could have done a little more thinning out to start.

 

Asparagus. We planted some roots and transplanted some from Dustin's great-aunt Gerry. We may even have edible asparagus next spring!

 

Pears, pears everywhere! Looking in to pear chutney and other canning options.

These were our favorite finds of the summer. They are Mexican Sour Gherkins from Seed Savers. They taste like cucumbers with a little sour bite to them. We will plant a ton of these next year!

 

 

Seed Savers - Decorah

Mom and I drove up to the Heritage Farm for Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, IA last weekend. It was beautiful and overwhelming. This is a preservation group who collect heirloom varieties of seeds to preserve and continue the growth of 1000s of varieties of vegetables, flowers and herbs. Reading through the histories of some of these seeds is both touching and a tribute to the spirit of gardening. While I'm not quite to the stage of saving seeds from my garden, I'm researching and will probably start implementing saving my favorites next year.

Here are some of the highlights from the farm.

 Quintessential Red Barn

 

 

 

 

 

Garden - Early July Post

So the garden is trucking right along. We've had nice rain this year and few pests (knock on wood.)

We also have a pear tree.

Tomatoes are rocking. We have 17 tomato plants with 10 different varieties.

Sugar snaps, snow peas and green beans are producing. Next year we'll trellis the snow peas - much easier to harvest!

Jalapenos and bell peppers are coming along as well. This beauty is a Garden Salsa Jalapeno.

Cauliflower Cutie!

Beautiful Broccoli  - this tastes even better than it looks!

Tonight's Harvest: Bok Choi, Cauliflower, Kale, Green Beans, Broccoli and Snow Peas/Sugar Snaps

Garden is growing!

Our garden is growing! We've had luck with just about everything - well after I killed almost all of the tomato seedlings.... Thank goodness for awesome neighbors/ friends/family who provided their extremely successful tomato plants to help subsidize ours. Of course a lot of our seeds/plants came from Gurney's and Seed Savers too! We've planted tomatoes, bell peppers large and small, egg plant, cauliflower, broccoli, okra, Brussels sprouts, carrots, radishes, beets, Bok Choi, kale, squash, about 6 types of cucumbers, jalapenos, sugar snaps, snow peas, green beans and sweet corn. We will DEFINITELY be planning a harvest party sometime late summer/early spring. Hope you're hungry!

 2000 sq. ft.

 Green Beans - the ones not eaten by deer.

 Sugar snaps!

 Apparently, all of these cucumbers want to live.

None shall pass....

Tomato Experts

Ok, so I've been reading up a lot on tomatoes and one site said the stems of tomatoes are weak because they are used to fighting natural winds. This blogger solves the problem by turning a light fan on a couple times a day for short intervals of wind. So I tried it. Anybody ever heard of this? Am I just merely using more energy to make the most beautiful $40 tomato ever? ;-)

The tomatoes are all doing really well. In fact, I planted 3 seeds per cup and had to pull out 2 in almost every single one. This will be an easy cost savings for next year.

These are Moonglow from Seed Savers. I'll have extras if anyone wants to plant some.

 

Another Highlight - Gurney's Hybrid Zephyr  Squash. It seems to be really happy inside. 

 

Now if it would just stop raining long enough so we could get some nice compost put on the garden we'd be really ready to go. Here's hoping this weekend dries out a bit! Cheers and happy gardening to all. 

Seedlings!

We've had a cold and long winter, but the sun is now shining and it looks like this whole spring thing might actually happen. Whew!

Dustin and I have been collecting seeds for GARDEN 2013 and this year we decided to start out some plants indoors. Last year we bought all of our tomatoes and peppers as plants, but this year we're trying out a number of varieties from seed.

We planted the seeds on Thursday and as of this evening (Sunday of the same week) we already have some sprouts!

Garden Fair and Valentine's Day

Garden Fair is tomorrow and I am so excited. I must be excited considering I'm getting up to be somewhere by 8:30 on a Saturday morning....

Our sessions - Fact or Fiction of Lawn & Garden Myths, Container Gardening, Drought Superheros, The Most Important Garden Advice Ever (keynote by Pat Stone) From Seed to Table, and A Taste of Herbs. Updates to come later.

So Dustin rocked our Valentine's night dinner with steak, lobster, wild rice, and asparagus. I rocked attempting to take food photos. See below. (I did dishes too, if that counts? - And made drinks...we lead with our strengths in this house.)

 Monster Lobster

 Who said the Pizza Pizzaz was only for pizza?

 Ahmahzing steak.

 Steak, lobster, rice and asparagus - way too much of everything. We did have leftovers!

Peanut butter, chocolate chip cookie, ice cream sandwich. Words cannot describe.