Okra & “Fire Lilies”

May 28, 2020

Okra & “Fire Lilies”

Today we planted okra. Three long rows of okra plants just far enough apart to walk through the rows with the mower for easy weeding, pruning, and harvesting.

Yesterday and Tuesday were the 6 by 4 corn patch. The 5 by 4 corn patch already has rows of little green stalks pushing up and it was planted Saturday! We also did a patch of mustard greens and our trio experiment over the weekend. The “trio experiment” is onion seed, three inches, beet seed, three inches, carrot seed in a patch 3 by 3.

Oh, all numbers are in feet… so far.

And my favorite of my blooms at this house (since my gardenia has been reluctant to bloom) is this –

– it’s a bulb with a single straight stalk that ends in this fiery flower! We call them fire-lilies but I know that can’t be their official name. It’s a takeaway from Grandma Jeanette… a little piece of history carried along and the blooms make me think of her every time I see a new one exploding with color.

(oh, and if you know what it is, please comment! We’d love to know what it really is!)

Lucas and Thea ate all six ripe tomatoes themselves before they got inside. I managed to sneak one away for the egg scramble I made for brunch. (I eat shakeology breakfast at 5:45 so at 11am I was practically starving and had to grab something filling and nutritious!)

We have little pets who poop breakfast… and Becky made more of these:

YES!

Worked at gym yesterday… REC CLASSES OPEN MONDAY!! Camp fills up quickly & starts June 1st (I can’t wait to see my gymnasts!) and we get to have gym party (Parent’s Night Out) this month!! (Third Saturday of each month: our coaches entertain and feed a boocoodle of kiddos so their parents can have a night kidfree… here)

I’m excited about coaching again! I’m thrilled about our garden! I even got to play Age of Empires with Jillian and Lucas today while big sisters went shopping!

We had a lovely day!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tart

Peppers

May 20, 2020

Peppers

Have you ever seen a pepper seed? If you’ve had crushed red peppers shaken on your Italian food, you’ve seen the small whitish yellow seeds; the crunchy non-red parts of the seasoning.

They are very small – not carrot seed small, but almost four times smaller than a squash seed.

We do have little tunnel diggers in our yard so we plant each seed separately in its very own little cup. These sprout into two tiny leaves holding the seed coat above them like a rocket punching through the atmosphere. Then we have sprouts! (the picture below show a mix of tomato and pepper sprouts)

We planted our second wave of pepper sprouts into a close bed of 4′ by 4′ with just enough spacing between each one for the plants to grow. They have a few small branches at this point as the picture below was taken about three weeks after transplant and about five weeks from sprouting.

Here they are seen with several little peppers hanging off of their branches. Can you spot them?

We’ve had one supper of stuffed peppers over rice, I harvest one to chop up and toss in my eggs or leftover rice for second breakfast, we even used some to make a salsa along with our fresh tomatoes!

I’m loving the peppers from our garden! (And both Lucas and Thea eat them right off the plant – at least Lucas will wait until they are big!)

Thank you for Reading!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tart

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