Plants are taking over!

I’ve been a little slow at updating this blog lately.  Mostly because of the fact that I’m not feeling too well and that doesn’t seem to motivate me to find stuff to post about.

So I’ve decided to show all of you how the veggies and flowers are doing.  When I planted this stuff at the end of May, I thought I might not have put enough stuff to fill all the flower beds and vegetable planters.  Bahahahhahaha!  It’s been really hot and humid for the past month with virtually no rain so we have to water twice a day.  All the plants are reacting to the sun, heat, and humidity as if they’re jungle plants.  They’ve all gotten huge!

These are my 2 huge mutant tomato plants.

This is 5 tomato plants.  This spot usually gets tons of sun, but this year my tree has more leaves so they didn't grow up.  Instead they spread horizontally.

I have 4 pots up there with tons of tomatoes.  You can't see them very well, but they're definitely doing well.

 Here are my flowers in the front.  They've gone wild too!

These plants were tiny when I planted them and now they're taking over everything!

You can't see that many flowers here, but a lot of them just bloom for 2-3 weeks and they all kind of take a turn. 
Very pretty!

I love these.  They're so gorgeous and full of color. 
Ignore the fact that my tomato plants are trying to invade them.

I didn't take any picture of all the veggies we have growing in the backyard.  I have another hanging tomato plant, lots of potatoes, onions, green onions, romaine lettuce, carrots, green beans, yellow beans, garlic, and cucumbers.  Of course, now that we're going on vacation our garden is producing like crazy and we don't know what to do with all the food.  It's a good problem to have!

Now, I have to figure out how we’ll keep all of these alive for the 10 days that we’re gone to the Maritimes.  My SIL has agreed to come and water every other day, but that’s not enough for the tomato plants.  They won’t make it.  I’m thinking of maybe buying plastic plates to put them on so that the water doesn’t all drain through the bottom holes, but some stays in the plate and the plants can use that water.  Also I think we’ll transfer all the planters to the backyard which gets less sun.  This isn’t ideal for tomato plants, but it should let the soil retain more of its moisture.

I also have to fertilize a lot of my plants.  In the last few days, it’s been 40-47C (104-117F) with the Humidex and they’re struggling so I’m going to give them a little boost.

Now I’m going home and starting my weekend in style.  No idea what style it is yet, but it will come to me.  Saturday, I have a girl’s day at one of my friend’s farms and if I remember to bring my camera this time I will take some pics of her gorgeous place.

Gardening plans

Do I actually have something to say today?  No, but I’ve been told that I don’t post enough anymore;-P

Dre and I are debating whether or not we’ll make a garden this year. Last year, we made one at the bottom of our tiny yard—most of the yard is taken over by a huge deck and the rest is sloping down—and we found that it screwed up the drainage of our land.   

So on Monday, Dre dug up the raspberry bushes and planted them somewhere else in our yard and covered the place where we had our garden and raspberry bushes.  And folks, it was like magic…the water instantly disappeared.  Amazing!



I know it still looks wet, but it was raining when I took this!



Now, we don’t know if we want to dig up another area of our tiny yard to make a garden because we’d also have to deal with the fact that the ground under the grass is in fact 100% clay.  So we would have to mix that crap with organic matter as the online articles say.  What the articles online don’t dwell on is that that organic matter is usually sheep crap!

Lovely picture isn’t it.  Digging around in clay/sheep crap this summer…makes me want to garden even more!

I could make the garden right by the stairs.

The other option I have is to plant potatoes in a great big garbage bin—apparently that works really well—while planting everything else in great big planters on the deck or in the backyard.  I think we’ll go visit good, old Canadian Tire again this weekend and see what we should do.

I also convinced Dre to go with me to Costco this weekend.  I love Costco!  I went with Dre’s sister—she’s my Costco buddy—on Monday, but I can always find more stuff to buy over there.  Also, Saturday is food sample time at Costco and I LOVE samples!  A lot of the time, I don’t want to buy a huge jar or pack of something that I’ve never tasted before…this is where food samples come in handy!

The real reason we’re going to Costco though is to buy to huge bags of fertilizer and seeds so that we can reseed our lawn and seed the patch of lawn we destroyed with the garden last year.

So Saturday should be really busy for me since we’re going to go visit Costco and Canadian Tire.  Then I need to clean my house and cook for my girl’s night that evening.  I haven’t figure out what I’m feeding everyone yet, but never fear there will be alcohol…lots of alcohol!  Hmmm, first I need to figure out what to cook for the girls…

Plants, temps, and nerves

It is Friday people! Rejoice and dance a happy dance with me!

Then go listen to this...it will stay in your brain forever and you'll want to stab yourself with a rusty knife though.

Ok, you're back...didn't say I didn't warn you:-)

So my sciatic nerve is acting up today.  I get this when AF is about to visit me or while she's visiting me; it's one of the ways that I know that it's coming.  Of course when I dressed this morning, I didn't realize that my sciatic nerve would bother me so I wore my skinny, tight jeans.  This morning I kept having to convince my leg that I hadn't cut off the blood supply.  Fun times!

That along with some plunging temps this morning have pretty much convinced me that this month AF will be visiting me.  I was going to POAS (pee on a stick) tomorrow, but now I think I'll wait to see what my temp is tomorrow and decide whether or not I'll wait it out.

It's really nice outside today...about 14C and sunny.  The weekend and most of next week is also gearing up to be really nice and warm so Dre wants to go scour all the garden centers this weekend. 

What?  Nope, we're not starting our gardens now. Way too early for Canada!  Learned that lesson last year. 

Dre wants to get a head start at building me boxes for our garden this year.  Last summer, our garden spent most of its life swimming in water (it rained and we found out that our backyard doesn't drain that well) so now we're making a raised garden.  I want it enclosed in wood and at least a foot high which should allow all the extra water to drain out this year.  Or so I hope!

Also, I'm going to plant all my tomato plants in planters that I'll put on our front balcony since it gets more sun.  For the garden, I was thinking tomatoes, yellow beans, salad, cucumbers, onions, garlic, potatoes, and maybe broccoli.  It's the veggies I think grow the best around here.  When we get a bigger house with a bigger backyard, I'll probably start planting a lot more stuff, but for now that's good.

This morning I brought our car to the dealership to get the summer tire put on, and oil change, and the windows tinted.  We bought a Mitsubishi Outlander 2010 in September of last year and I haven't had the time to get all the windows tinted.  The back windows did come with what they call a Privacy Tint, but that's not much help for us in the front seats and I thought the Privacy Tint was way too light. 

Now, I'm kind of nervous to see what the car looks like when I go pick it up in an hour.  Hopefully, we like it!

Plans for this weekend include doing nothing, drinking some wine, going to browse garden stuff, and possibly watching a movie or two.  I really enjoy this kind of weekend and now that summer is coming there won't be too many more.  Summer is our really busy time...we usually have something planned almost every weekend.