Gardening 2022 {Recap}

 As you can imagine, we put out a very large garden this year. We kept everything in the upper garden and have pretty much permanently done away with the lower one. Last year it was a waste of the lower garden because we put out a lot that we didn't really eat (like okra) and then most of the cucumbers were destroyed by beetles. 

Since we didn't do any green beans this year, we had two extra rows to put the things from the lower garden, minus watermelon and okra. We also decided to be fancy this year and put down landscaping fabric and a watering system. I can't even begin to express how nice it was to not have to worry about weeds this year! The only downside is sometime you can over or under water things if you're not careful. Like our peppers, for example. They all did horribly this year except for a couple sweet banana pepper plants. 

Naturally, we went way overboard with the tomatoes. Not so much the larger ones, but the cherry and grape tomatoes. Like we had such an excessive amount of tomatoes - roughly 48 plants or something like that... yikes.  

Aside from tomatoes and peppers, we put out cucumbers, hybrid cucumbers, spaghetti squash, scallop squash, yellow squash, zucchini, potatoes, onions, eggplants and I believe that's all... I think, lol.

Here are the heirloom tomatoes I got from Frank's Produce:

Pineapple tomatoes - delish! Also my new fave tomato.

Candyland tomatoes - these guys are SO tiny and so cute!

Old German tomatoes - these taste a lot like the pineapple tomatoes, so good!

Not an heirloom, just grape tomatoes.

Chocolate Cherry tomatoes - these guys taste a lot like Cherokee purple tomatoes.

These aren't tomatoes, my bad. These are Candy Cane Chocolate peppers and they did horribly. I honestly don't even remember eating one.

Sunsugar Cherry tomatoes - these guys were delicious!

Green onions.

I didn't get very many pictures of the entire garden - still no clue why.

This was just a couple weeks after planting the tomatoes.

Some of the tomato plants grew to nearly 6ft tall.

We had two fences run along the length of the garden - one for tomatoes, one for cucumbers and spaghetti squash.

I wish I had a better view, but I don't.

Baby thyme sprout.

This was my first go with the thyme.

These guys never did very good.

The mammoth basil did great though!

This was just a couple weeks after planting them.

Some curled parsley.

Some squash sprouts.

I love any type of sprout.

Close up of the mammoth basil's secondary leaves.

Water drops on basil.

Water drops on parsley.

More mammoth basil water drops.

Our first zucchini of the season!

One of the many batches of picked cucumbers.

This was all in a days harvest. Like so awesome!

Some grape tomato macro photography.

The lighting was almost perfect.

Sunset/golden hour make for the best pictures.

Especially of growing tomatoes.

Our cherry and grape tomatoes did so well this year, we were truly blessed.

Some more growth!

And so it begins...

Since we finally got both of our new cages today (yes, they came!) we decided to sew up a couple new cage sets. Not for the new cages though, one is for our new boys and one is going to be for our girls. When intros are all said and done, we'll have a boy trio and a girl trio. This is just taking place until everyone is old enough to go with their mates.

Anyway, we ended up sewing until like 20 minutes ago. We ended up just sewing one set and cutting out another one that someone ordered. We were slacking! After that, we headed to the store and grabbed a soda.

Now it's time to clean cages, assemble the two that we got in the mail, and complete clean out the glider room. I'm talking move out all the cages, wipe the walls down vacuum, and everything else. Should be a blast... not!

After that's all said and done, we have to get things ready for our drive to Kentucky tomorrow. Get bonding pouches, treats, and most importantly...directions! Unfortunately, we don't have to luxury of GPS, so we have to do things the old fashioned way and write them down. Sometimes it can be hard, but most of the time we're successful. We made it all the way to STL and back with written directions. I'd say that's a win.

Okay, random though, but the tomato plants that my aunt got us a while back are HUGE now! And they have tomatoes on them. Like loads! And they're big! Now if only they would ripen up...

Well, until next time...

Love & Peace

-Megan

The tomato plants, with tomatoes: 

A spider in it's web:

One of our cages in the box, the other was inside:

And lastly, the cage set we made for the boys:

This, that, and the other...

Hey everyone. I know, it's been forever since I've wrote a good solid blog. Well, it's time for a change. I've got a lot on my mind and I feel the need to share. Everyday is still very hard for me. There's not a minute in the day that I don't think of my grandma. I still can't believe she's actually gone. It doesn't seem real. But, as John Mellencamp would say, "Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone." That's my motto for the day. Hopefully I can stick to it. Well, here we go...


First, I'm going to start out with a couple movie reviews. And the first on my list is, The Unborn. We rented it a week or so ago. All in all, it wasn't a bad movie. But, I've seen better. I didn't care too much for the lead actress, Odette Yustman. She just couldn't get her screaming voice right. Her co-star, Megan Good, totally rocked the scream queen vote for me. And that's bad, considering there's only like one part where she had to scream. I don't want to go into too many details. Anyway, it's about a girl who kind of gets possessed by her "unborn" twin brother. That's pretty much all there is to it. So, I give this little number a 6.5/10. It's a good one to watch when there's nothing else at the movie store. Ok, now for The Girl Next Door. And I'm not talking about the one with the ever so foxy, Timothy Olyphant. I'm talking about Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. It's about two young girls that have to live with their aunt after their parents pass away. And the thing they have to go through are so bad, it was hard for me to watch. And I can watch anything. I highly recommend this movie. You can either watch it on Chiller or rent it from Netflix. We've done both. But I have to say, the rented version is better because it's unrated. So, I'll give this little number a 9/10. Please, watch it. Lets see, what else did we watch? Oh yea, we watched Gran Torino. But I'm not going to go into details about it. We watched this movie the night before our grandma passed away and I really don't want to think about it too much. So, I'd give it a 7/10. Oh yea, we bought A Haunting In Connecticut. I don't really remember this one too much. We were still really upset at the time, so it made it kind of weird. But I do remember that it was good. So, for now I'll give it an 8/10. At least until we get a chance to watch it again. Ok, that's all the movie reviews for now...


What else has been going on... not too much really. We've been swimming a lot in the past couple of weeks. And so far (fingers crossed), we haven't got burned, lol. But summer's not over yet. We still have a while to get wet. The only downside, the place that we swim at isn't as deep as it used to be. I'm mean, you can still do some pretty cool flips and handstands, but that's about all. Hopefully, we'll get a bunch of rain one week and it'll get deep again...

Hmm, what else? Oh yea, we got Gossip Girl season one in the mail like a month ago. We watched it all in about a week, lol. I never thought I'd say this, but it was pretty good. It definitely kept me wanting more. I know one thing, I will so be in line to get season 2, lol.

And also, we got The O.C. The Complete Series in the mail like 4 days ago. We got it on eBay for like $49. Extremely cheap. We just started watching The O.C. towards the end of last year. We've pretty much loved it ever since. We've only watched about 5 episodes though.

Ok, I think that about sums it up for you. Not everything, but almost everything. Until next time people, you know what to do. Peace...

-Megan

Song of the day: Lifes Been Good to Me So Far by Joe Walsh





This is our awesome tomato tree. This picture was taken like two months ago though. It's like taking over teh porch now, lol.

Another awesome shot of it.

This is some of our big tomatoes.

This is some of our cherry tomatoes. We've got like 50 off of it already. And there's about 100 more on there still.

This is a great face shot of Milla. I took like 50 of her about a week ago. This is one of the best ones.

Oh man, I love this picture. The coloring turned out so great. One of my faves.

This one is SO beautiful. I love everything about this picture.

This is John Rambo's newest head shot. He is so BIG. He's like a baby rat now, lol. But oh so pretty.

This is some of our tomatoes. We got all of these with like 3 days of each other... I think.

And last, but defiantly not least, The O.C. box., so beautiful...