July 3, 2012 Catching up on picture posts

 

You might wonder what the fish has to do with this blog, but really the fish is quite important. Every time we go fishing we go and buy a box of worms. Once the worms are gone we take the left over “dirt” and pour it into our houseplant pots. It is making a huge difference, they love it.

 

Then once we catch fish that qualify as a keeper we take them home and hubby cleans them for us. What is left over goes out to our compost bin and is therefore recycled and ends up in our garden. No part of the fish is thrown away, we use it all.

Aside from all the uses of the fish we absolutely enjoy going fishing. We go as a family and enjoy our time together. Often times we have a hard time leaving to go home and have been caught walking back to the car in the dark, staying until we have no choice but to go home.

Going fishing started out as hubby’s hobby. Our daughter and I have learned a lot from him about fishing and have worked hard to be good fishing partners for him so that he can enjoy himself instead of always having to take care of our stuff for us.

We even learned to put the worms on our hooks. Mind you we do not like doing that but again we want to be good fishing partners and not be little sissy’s about putting the worm on the hook. LOL

Before we left I got these pictures taken. These are our Radish’s. They really came up good and strong. We tried to thin them out and they didn’t do well. Since the soil/compost mixture is so loose we are just leaving them, we think they will be able to make the room they need to grow.

This is the 3rd bed of green beans that we have started. These are Blue Lake Bush Green Beans. We were so excited about them, but as you will see in the following post’s I’ll be making they are not doing near as well as they started out.

They started out so well and had such huge leaves on them. They did get planted right before the triple digit heat hit and that could be why they are having such a hard time now despite the fact that we are diligent about keeping them watered and taken care of.

This is one of the first beds of green beans we started out with. We thought they were Blue Lakes but we now know they are not. They no where resemble the above pictures. Not sure how we got them all mixed up.

The Tomatoes continue to go crazy. We had one plant that had a tomato on it that got so heavy that it actually broke the branch it was on.

As you can see here the plants are just loaded. In this small space there are 7 Tomatoes.

It’s a bit hard to see in this picture, I’ll try to get a better one. The Strawberry Patch is really doing well. The plants have been sending out lots of runners and really are spreading the plants. I’m hoping by the end of summer this bed will be full and we will need to start another.

The number of Strawberries that these plants are putting out this year is by far our best year ever. It may not sound like a lot but we are getting around 20 per day on average, and they are much larger this year than they were last year.

Our grandson just loves checking on the Strawberry Patch. At 4 yr. old he can tell me if they are new/babies, if they are big and not ready and if they are ready to be picked. He has a sincere love and fascination for the garden’s and their produce. It brings me such joy to watch him and our daughter learn so much about the plants and how to care for them.

This is one branch of a Cherry Tomato Plant. As you can see on this one branch there are 9 Tomatoes showing. Each plant in total has on average about 40 per plant.

We are still averaging about 2 Asparagus coming up each day. Normally they are done by this time of year. Since we changed the way we are watering them and the amount of water we are giving them they have done very well. They continue to produce, it’s impressive. I always like to mention that if you are going to start a patch you must salt the ground.

My sister was telling me yesterday that she loves White Asparagus. I had not seen that before so now I have to see if I can find seeds for those and start a patch of them.

You will always want to maintain your patch. In case you are not aware they will continue to come up each year. Normally you will get your first plants that are big enough to eat in about 3 years time.

The Loofah plants are still doing well. They have continued to climb quite well. We have not seen any blooms yet, I’m starting to get concerned that we may not get any Loofah’s this year. I certainly hope I’m wrong. They are so useful and I have no more left from the last time we grew them.

The Cucumbers are doing quite well also. They are climbing well and really starting to put on the cucumbers. However, due to our heat some of the cucumber starts have dried up on the vine before they could get started well.

This is a side shot of the Cucumbers. Not only are they growing in height but they are nice full plants. That is helpful as they are loaded with blooms and soon we should have more cucumbers than we know what to do with them.

This is another shot of one of the Tomato Plants, as you can see there are so many tomatoes on this plant. They are hard to even count anymore, I gave up trying to figure out how many were on a plant.

This is a picture of our small garden bed, it is located under our Hummingbird feeder. These plants really attract the birds to the area. When we started this bed, in case you didn’t see the pictures of it, it looked terrible. We started with about 15 small plants. It looked so empty but in just a few short weeks it really starting filling out.

Now we are taking advantage of the seed pods that each of the flowers make. We have collected so many seeds from the different flower varieties that we will not have to purchase plants next year. We can plant from the seeds we have.

This is a new rose from our Double Knot Knock Out Rose Bush. I really enjoy this rose bush, it is so pretty and it blooms fantastic. At any given time it will have many blooms at the same time.

This is a group of three Roses on the same plant pictured above.

 

I’m in great hopes that I will soon have very nice pictures of Roses to share with you. We happened to be at Wal-Mart when they had a huge sale going on. We got 2 each of Red, Pink and White Rose Bushes and paid a grand total of $1.25 for each of them.

That put us at a grand total of 6 large Rose Bushes and 4 additional Double Knot Knock Out Bushes that we had pictured a few days before. We took the 10 Rose Bushes and have planted them along our driveway. I think it will end up looking very nice. I’ll get pictures of them tonight so you can see what I’m talking about. They are just about naked though, after I cut off all the dead leaves from them not taking proper care of them. They should spring back quickly.