Candy Roaster Squash

This year I ordered some Candy Roaster Squash seeds. This large squash is a bit of a cross between a sweet potato and a pumpkin. Fruits can grow to well over 10 pounds,

 enough to feed this motley crew!

I planted exactly FOUR seeds to grow up a chicken wire trellis.
They've grown up, over, around, and seem hell bent on world domination at this point.

Somewhere under that mass of leaves is a grill 
and my husband is not happy about that.

I used to have a small bed on the side of our back porch that was growing black eyed peas, tomatoes, and is home to a rosemary bush...

The candy roaster has decided to take over that bed as well.

I wouldn't mind pruning it back a bit, but there are more than a dozen of these beauties growing all over and I can almost taste that
candy roaster squash pie!

I know my blog posts have been sporadic, but if you don't hear from me again in a week, send in reinforcements...

The candy roaster may have overtaken us!

(I'll be the one laying on the couch with pie crumbs on my chin.)

Elephant garlic harvest

The other day I noticed that my elephant garlic greens had turned brown and wilted.  So I asked Doug to dig up the garlic patch to see what we could find.

THIS is what we found!

14 baseball sized elephant garlic!

The cloves were bigger than my thumb, and the smell was divine.  Elephant garlic is supposed to be much milder than traditional garlic and I cannot wait to cook with it.  I might even try pickling some.

Here are some of the "babies" the bulbs left behind.  You can bet they are going right back into the garden, or out to a few friends.  Because you don't want to be the ONLY one eating garlic, am I right?

And from the size of these monsters, 

we're going to be eating LOTS of garlic

(and probably lots of Tic-Tacs, too!).

Sewing for summer

I've been spending time this past week sewing up Mary Grace's summer wardrobe.  I've settled on  precious little peasant dresses and lazy days skirts with matching tanks.

Both of these are super simple patterns that go from cutting to ribbon encased hem in 30 minutes or less.

 (Depending if I'm fueled by sweet tea or not!)

They are the perfect light summer outfit for helping in the garden, playing around the house, 

Or watching big brother's baseball games!

Links to patterns here:

Peasant Dress

Oliver+S Lazy Days Skirt

Lucky boy!

Our church bazaar was this past Sunday.  

Doug handed John Paul a ticket and he won a cake.  

Doug gave him another ticket and he won a plant.

We are kicking ourselves for not letting him pick Powerball numbers and are currently thinking of taking him to Vegas.

(He did the exact same thing last year!)

Lemon Verbena Jelly

I love lemons ~

 the scent, the flavor, that happy yellow color, 

EVERYTHING! 

 I won't have lemons to harvest for a few more months

 but I will have the next best thing, 

lemon verbena.

My lemon verbena plant got a little crazy in the herb garden, so I decided to giver her a trim and make some jelly with the fragrant leaves (thank you PINTEREST for the idea!).

I used the exact same recipe to make this jelly 

that I did for my rose petal jelly :

2 cups of packed lemon verbena leaves

3 cups of water

juice of one lemon

1 box of powdered pectin

4 cups of sugar

Start by gathering and rinsing your leaves.  

Place the leaves in a saucepan and add 3 cups of water.  Bring to a boil and remove from heat.  Allow this tea to steep for 10 minutes then strain into a large measuring cup.  If you don't have exactly three cups of liquid when you're done, add water.

Add the juice of one lemon and dissolve 

the powdered pectin into the mixture.

Return this mixture to the saucepan, and on the highest heat possible, bring to a rolling boil while stirring continuously.  Add the sugar all at once and bring back to a rolling boil.  When you get to the rolling boil, stir constantly for two minutes.  Remove from heat and ladle into hot, sterilized jars.  Process in a water bath for 10 minutes.

Makes six half pints.

I have to be honest, 

I thought this would taste like lemon Pledge!

I was wrong.

This is the lovliest, lightest flavored jelly.  

It has just a hint of floral taste, 

and then deeper tones of honey and lemon.

  

IT IS DIVINE!

Now to go search Pinterest 

to find a scone recipe!

DIY Hummingbird feeders

You know I'm all about the PINTEREST!

So when I happened to see wine bottle hummingbird feeders, 

I had to give them a try.

They are extremely simple to make.  All you need is a wine bottle, some heavy gauge copper wire, wire cutters, and some stopper/feeder tubes (I got mine off of Amazon:  HERE)

It's a simple as wrapping the wire around the wine bottle and making a hanger at the top.  You can make swirls, curls, or just criss cross like I did.

Then fill your clean wine bottle with a sugar and water solution.  Use one part sugar to four parts water and stir until the sugar is dissolved.  No need for any of that red dye stuff.

Hang your feeder and you're good to go!

This feeder is right outside my kitchen window.  I love to watch the little guys while I'm cooking and doing dishes.  It may take up to a week for the hummers to find your feeder if this is the first time you're putting one up.

I made three feeders from old bottles I had stashed.  I'd love to make some for friends and family, so you know what that means.....I better get to drinking some wine!

You know, for the hummingbirds, 
'cause I'm a giver!

And while I'm sipping on that wine,
enjoy this little video we made of our hummer feeding frenzy!

Small successes

After blogging about my epic failures in the last post, I'd pretty much ignored my garden for a week. Then came the weekend where I worked, and then a quick family excursion on Sunday. Monday it rained and rained. So today, Tuesday, I decided to venture out and check on things. I was NOT disappointed this time!

TOMATOES!  I have tomatoes!  

The nursery plants I bought are all in flower or have baby tomatoes.  You just know summer is coming when you see these beauties. 

 I can almost taste that fresh salsa now!

My second batch of seedlings are thriving, 

so far.

And my little "kitchen garden" closest to the house is doing very well.  Onions, garlic, spinach, chard, carrots, lettuce, and kale are really coming to life after the monsoon rains we received lately.

I am very excited over this Cara Cara orange tree I recently planted.  When I bought it from the nursery it was loaded with fruit.  I expected it to drop all of them when I transplanted it, but it has hung on to most of them.  I have about a dozen oranges on my little tree!

My lemon tree is doing very well, too.  There are several dozen lemons growing.  They say it's best to thin your fruit to one or two on a branch but I can't seem to do that.  I'm just so excited over LEMONS!

Seeds that were planted are now growing now that the weather is consistently warmer.  This is a candy roaster squash vine I'm training up some chicken wire.  The squash from these vines are going to make some awfully good "pumpkin" pies this fall.

And even my Chinese red noodle beans have sprouted.  I thought the seeds had rotted in the ground, but here they are!

But my biggest success of all are the first batch of seedlings that had stopped growing earlier in the season.  Seems all they needed was total neglect on my part!  A little more than half of them died, but the ones that survived are now appearing strong with new sets of leaves.

I'm very happy with these small successes in the garden, I'm hoping they continue.  Now I'm off to try to accomplish a BIG success in the garden.....getting these rotten boys to help me pull weeds!

EPIC FAIL!

I should be well into a lush, green growing garden right now but 

NOOOOOOOO! 

I am struggling to grow anything in my garden. 

It seems as if Mother Nature hates me.

It all started with these:

These are the tomato, eggplant, pepper, and herbs that I started from seed over nine weeks ago!  They should have already been hardened off and transplanted to the garden.  I have repeated the exact same process year after year but this year something is out of whack.  They either died or stopped growing all together...all of them!  

I would have blamed it on a poor batch of soil but then this happened:

That is a dead pepper plant!  

I'll admit it.  I caved and bought some pepper plants from the nursery because I was so discouraged with the failure of my seedlings.  I transplanted them into my raised beds and then noticed something (likely snails) had been munching on the leaves.  I dusted them with some food grade diatomaceous earth and about three days later they were dead.

  

Strike two against me!

I could have even bounced back from that until I saw this:

Those are some seriously jacked up bean plants.

I had to replant the whole lot of them due to a late freeze and then I dusted them with the DE because the snails seemed to love them too.  Most of them died and the few that are left are looking pretty sad.

I feel my green thumb turning brown by the minute.

So like any good gardener, I went to the nursery and bought myself a garden!

My favorite nursery on earth, Enchanted Forrest, had plenty of heirloom tomatoes.  So I brought some home and planted them up in some homemade earth boxes (check out YouTube!  LOTS of ways to make these and most of them under ten bucks!)

I really had my heart set on some of the heirlooms I started from seed, so I started all over again and planted more seeds.  Thankfully, we have a really long growing season here in Texas.  By the time my purchased plants are spent, these from seed should be producing.

Now barring any natural disasters or plagues (I'm not holding my breath!), I should be harvesting tomatoes well into October. 

The only thing I seem to be doing right is flowers.

I've never had much success as a flower gardener, but I've had some beautiful results so far this year. They make me happy while enduring my vegetable failures.

Gardening is never boring, that's for sure.

Every season is a new adventure! 

Boston

"Deeply grieved by news of the loss of life and grave injuries caused by the act of violence perpetrated last evening in Boston, His Holiness Pope Francis wishes me to assure you of his sympathy and closeness in prayer. In the aftermath of this senseless tragedy, His Holiness invokes God’s peace upon the dead, his consolation upon the suffering and his strength upon all those engaged in the continuing work of relief and response. At this time of mourning the Holy Father prays that all Bostonians will be united in a resolve not to be overcome by evil, but to combat evil with good (cf. Rom 12:21), working together to build an ever more just, free and secure society for generations yet to come." 
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone Secretary of State

Focusing today on combating evil with good 

by praying and performing random acts of kindness.

Our prayers are with you, Boston.

Growing ginger

Now I think I've already grown two of the cutest "gingers" known to man (i.e. Danny and Mary Grace!) but this post is strictly about the ginger plant.  Thanks to several pins on Pinterest, I've seen that growing your own ginger is very easy to do!

I started by taking the freshest ginger root I could find at the store and soaked it in warm water for about two hours.  Most of the Pinterest posts skip this step, but it's a root, a dried root, and a good soaking is a really good idea in my opinion.

I broke the root into two pieces and planted them in two different beds in the garden.  The bed in the upper picture remains moist, is partially shaded, cool, and heavily mulched.  The bed in the lower picture has super rich soil that is well drained and gets lots of hot afternoon sun.  We'll see which environment the ginger prefers!

I am very excited to grow our own ginger.  It has such wonderful health benefits and tastes so good!  If I'm lucky enough, I may be posting soon on making our own ginger beer...YUM!