gardening

The little garden that might actually grow. Maybe. We’ll see.

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 25 Comments

I don’t have a ton of hope for my garden to excel this year, but a few things are popping up at least. I don’t think the soil we bought from a local place in the beginning of the summer to fill the raised bed was very good because the plants in it are growing very slowly or not at all while anything I planted in the actual soil in the backyard (in the space my dad rototilled for us) is growing fast.

People kept giving me tomato plants but I don’t have room for them in the garden so I planted them in pots and they’re starting to take off. I have a feeling we might have a lot of tomatoes this year. What I am really hoping for is a lot of summer squash because we can freeze that throughout the year. I also hope the butternut squash yields a bit so we can use that for butternut squash in the fall.

My green beans are definitely struggling. One row is coming up but the other one isn’t really growing at all. My dad left a pathway between the two beds and either I or Little Miss dropped some lettuce seeds there so lettuce is growing in what was supposed to be my path. I am not really sure when to pick it but I think I am going to pick a few leaves today or tomorrow and toss it in with my salad for lunch.

I plopped four broccoli plants in the one bed and they look healthy but I don’t know if they will grow actually broccoli or not. I have very little hope for the carrots. Only one tuft of the three rows I planted is actually sprouting at this point.

I gave up on the Swiss Chard. It wasn’t growing at all. Instead of growing, it shrunk and turned yellowish. I think I transplanted it too late in the season so I dug it out and replaced it with the basil and cilantro I had in another container.

I also have a zucchini plant that is trying its best to grow from an old seed my dad gave me. We will see if it can make it or not. Right now my goal is to remember to shut the gate to the garden so the little rabbits that have been hoping around don’t hop in and get my lettuce or other plants. My dog chases them when she sees them but she has little legs so she usually can’t catch up to them.

Dogs in this area aren’t allowed to chase deer (if hunters see a dog chasing a deer they will shoot the dog) but I wish she could chase the deer that is eating my hostas plants in front of the house. That deer seems to only come out at night, though because I’ve yet to catch her in the act. I double checked with my neighbor that it could be the deer and she confirmed that the deer do eat the Hostas each year. I plan to Google and see if there are any natural ways to deter the deer from doing that.

I did catch a pretty little young doe at the back of the house earlier today. She looked at me with wide eyes, chewing grass while I calmly told her, from about 30 feet way, that I’d like her not to eat my Hostas in the front of the back of the house. She didn’t look too concerned and finally trotted away. My dog was standing next to me but she was completely distracted and somehow missed the entire exchange.

Some guard dog she is. She can warm off the bunny rabbits, but not the Hostas eating doe who seems to think she’s part of the family now.

Sunday Bookends: Trying a little crime fiction, garden progress, and spending time outside

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 13 Comments

I decided to break up some of my light fiction this week with crime fiction suggested by my husband (after I asked for a recommendation.) I needed something different than what I usually read. So I’m trying Earl Stanley Gardner’s The Knife Slipped and so far I like it. I love his character descriptions. Here is one of my favorites:

“Her face was the color of a tropical sunset with rouge over the cheeks, and crimson lipstick trying to turn the upper lip into a cupid’s bow. The thing must have been weird enough so far as the average spectator is concerned, but to a detective who trains himself to look closely and see plenty of details, it looked like an oil painting done by Aunt Kate or Cousin Edith, the kind that are hung in a dark corner in the dining room where the open kitchen door will hide ’em during mealtimes.”

I also loved this dialogue:

“To hell with that stuff. I’m objective, Donald. I have no more feeling than the bullet that leaves a rifle barrel. If it’s a charging elephant that’s in front of it, the bullet smears him. If it’s a poor little deer, nursing a fawn, the slug tears through her vitals just the same. I’m like that Donald. I’m paid to deliver results, my love, and by God, I deliver ’em.”

I’m still reading my daughter Paddington books at night and right now we are re-reading Paddington Abroad, which is one of our favorites. I’m also finishing up Sweet On You by Becky Wade.

We are loving our new house and the children are too, especially Little Miss who wants to spend just about all day outside as long as it isn’t hot. I love that she loves to be outside, even though sometimes I need a break to do things inside. She was never outside this much at the old house, which had a smaller yard, was in town, and where we always felt uncomfortable because people drove and walked by and watched us (or maybe that was only in our heads.)

There was a lot of concrete and asphalt there and it wasn’t as friendly. Here we have neighbors who love to pet our dog (one of our neighbors up there did love our dog), welcome us to the neighborhood with hanging plants; wildlife to watch (I caught a toad the other day for my daughter who promptly decided it was her pet and she didn’t want to let it go), we also have bunnies hopping through the backyard, a space for a garden, and all kinds of plants and flowers popping up all over. And for my son, the best thing is that we are 5.3 miles away from his best friend’s house.

We have discovered peonies on one side of the house, which delighted me because I had peonies at the house I lived in when I was a child and they were over 100 years old. I’m so excited for them to bloom I just want to sit next to the bush and wait. My mom says they usually bloom around my brother’s birthday which is June 9. She said when they did bloom they would bother her asthma and a friend told her to have them pulled up so they would stop coming back each year.

“I can’t have them pulled up!” she cried. “They’re over 100 years old!”

I think there was some story about my great-grandfather being very sick one time and when he woke up and was healthy enough to leave the house, the first thing he saw was the peonies. It was some relative anyhow. Later this week I will have an interesting story involving my great-grandfather and his sister Mollie. (I know. You’re just on the edge of your seat waiting to read it, aren’t you? Ha. 😉 But it has to be better than the news these days.)

We spent a lot of time outside on Memorial Day weekend too. It’s a family tradition to visit the cemetery down the road from my parents behind a 150-year-old (or so) church where my ancestors and sister are buried. My mom gave birth to my sister prematurely four years before I was born and she did not survive.

My daughter seemed oblivious to the fact she was dancing on the final resting places of her ancestors as she ran around, twirled, jumped and sang Frozen songs and occasionally helped my dad plant flowers. My son told her she needed to stop but I told him if the dead people could see my daughter they’d probably be delighted to watch her with all her en


We found a pigeon when were there and my daughter loves all animals so I thought she was going to try to take it home, especially when she saw it was injured. It couldn’t fly at all. Instead it would try to walk, limp and then fall forward on it’s face. We decided to let it go it’s own way since we weren’t sure what was wrong with it, but it was very sad to see. I wish we could have helped it but I think it was sick and not only injured.

My son thought he was funny to lean on the gravestone of his namesake (his great-great-great grandfather who was a Civil War veteran) and call him a “boomer” but then realized he shouldn’t joke since without the man he wouldn’t even be here. I agreed and that’s when I launched into a Biblical-type lineage speech.

“Yes, son, because John begot J. Eben who begot Ula, who begot Ronnie, who begot me, who then begot you.”

My son didn’t find me humorous. Why would he? He is a teenager now. (Don’t let the smile here fool you…his laughter was at his own joke, not mine.)

I finally finished planting our garden after my dad, son, and husband finished building the fence around the raised garden beds my son and Dad built. I have one more plant to . . . er. . . plant. Broccoli I almost forgot it. I’m really not sure what is going to grow and what isn’t at this point but the green beans and some of the lettuce are already sprouting. My dad finally found us some summer squash. The garden centers around here were wiped out. Summer squash was what I really wanted in the garden because that was the one plant that survived at the other house and actually produced a veggie I could use.



I’ve also planted tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, and potatoes. We will see if any of them come up or not. It will be fun to watch.

So that’s about it for me here this week. How about all of you? What have you been reading, watching or doing this past week? Let me know in the comments.

The garden is indeed a disaster

/ Lisa R. Howeler

You might remember my prediction that our first attempt at a garden may be a disaster.  

That prediction has proven to be fairly accurate as shown by the weeds attempting to choke out the few plants that did survive the initial stages of planting a month and a half ago.

First, I missed the memo about planting everything in neat little rows. There definitely isn’t anything neat about our garden and not really any rows at this point.

I didn’t read packages right and failed to space the seeds far enough apart, as well. Then there was the week long rain that started the day after I planted. I’m convinced it washed away a good portion of my carrot seeds.  

I am a total garden newbie so when I started yanking out weeds and didn’t see carrot tops sprouting where I thought they should have been I ended up ripping out a few carrot seedlings. I thought they grew a lot faster than they actually do. Whoops. 

One side of the garden never even got planted and the weeds know it and have taken residence there, creating what is going to be a town violation at some point if I don’t get in there and yank out more of those pesky, pointless plants. It seems as soon as I weed one part I return the next day to find 1,000 more. Who knew weeds could grow so fast.

This week we harvested two little summer squash and you would have thought I’d won the lottery. Little Miss and I ran in the house and proudly displayed the little veggie to the boys, who were appropriately impressed but not as over the moon as we were.

There is currently something growing where I thought I planted cucumber. I thought it was zucchini but now it’s rounding out like watermelon and I truly do not remember buying watermelon seeds at any point, let alone planting them.  A quick message to my dad and he said it’s a pumpkin growing, which is very upsetting to me because we now have four official pumpkin plants and two more trying to grow by my house. I had no idea simply dropping pumpkin seeds could lead to plants sprouting up all over the place. 

I guess I’d better start searching the internet for pumpkin recipes now. And now to freeze pumpkins, carve pumpkins and convince others to take pumpkins away from us.

So at this point, I’m fairly certain we’ll have at least some summer squash, no cucumber, maybe some butternut squash (need to Google and find out when that usually starts to make an appearance) and I’ve learned that I can plant spinach and kale later in the season so I’ll be trying that too.

How about you? Do you garden? Does your garden thrive or barely survive?