Garden progress

I should post pics of the garden now that we've reworked the potato patch...had plants cramped in too much but now everything is in straight lines.
Tomatoes are doing great, cucumbers have recovered.
Corn is pathetic. Don't know what happened- only 12 came up plus 4 others from a later seeding project. Maybe the crows/ravens? Bad seed?
Carrots are coming along nicely as are garlics...I have heard different things about planting times for garlics (and onions) but since I'm a first time gardener I 'what the hell, why not try it?' quite a bit.
Peas are doing awesome...spinach and cabbage less so as they were planted late...over a bed that had pepper seeds planted in it which only now have decided to make a showing- after I had given up and bought pepper plants- which are stunning. Leafy, green- don't known if they will produce peppers in our climate but we shall see! If nothing else they are great for greenery-lol.
Onions are growing as is Swiss chard. Broccoli is producing like no tomorrow. Beans were a huge disappointment. Fortunately I have the ones that sprouted from the germination project to fill things out and a few beans in the back plot although I don't know how well they will ultimately do. Have some more seeded indoors for another what-the-hell.
Lots of beets coming up although they had started poorly.
Potatoes are the pride and joy- doing phenomenally.

Trees and flowers: The gladiolas are coming up betwixt the cedars. 46 out of 49 planted- not bad. The cedars themselves look a lot healthier and it's probably because they are retaining more moisture due to the cover we put on the ground (bark mulch that we collected from a slash pile from the logging works!) Calendulas will flower soon as well so there will finally be some colour there.
My twisted willow saplings have almost crapped out. Shame. Loads of poppies awaiting bloom- columbines did super well from seed - quite unplanned. Lot of the wildflower mix seeds will soon flower as well.

Berry bushes are doing fine plus the heat loving plants nearby.
Sunflowers are EVERYWHERE.
Planters out front are doing great.
Herb pots are doing super except for lemon basil which has almost crapped out.

In the back plot are the other beans, loads of radishes, 3 kinds of salad...good stuff. In a sheltered box of earth are bird house gourds, squash, more seeded salads.
Grape has little grape clusters started; cantaloupes made a bit of a recovery.
In yet another plot are the nettles (brilliant), second stage salads (almost decimated by local cat) and still another plot has strawberry's which are also doing well.
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Compost heap is rebuilt and getting sifted for soil- long story.

I scrounged/scavenged lots of free and nearly free lumber in preparation for next years garden. Probably raised beds and a proper cold frame fitted to the plastic lined frames I built. I literally packed the back of the Compass to the roof with low grade two by fours- twice in two days.

Wow. I said a lot. I will have to update this post with pictures. To tired tonight even to cook however. McDonalds got our money.

A Will and A Way

I had been struggling with wonky html editors for more than 2 years because since version 8 of IE Notepad couldn't edit Explorer web pages when I found out that it could be forced to do so thru some obscure command called 'Developer Tools'.

I had looked for help on this before but none of the tricks had worked till yesterday I found the answer. Stupid Microsoft programmers are the tools that need developing since it doesn't even occur to them that the only people who look for these commands are computer geeks (who will find it) or WEBMASTERS- duh!- who will first say WTF???!!!, Look for help, get impatient, and use the next best thing to get the job done.
Why couldn't they have just put 'Choose source editor' under the View menu???!!! No, you have to go thru:

Tools>
Developer Tools...
(you are now in ugly editor)
File>
Customize Internet Explorer View Source>
Default, Notepad, Other...browse for it.

Seriously, once Firefox gets it's act together for html coding I am SO ditching this stupid IE.

3 examples of "Where there's a will there's a way":

Corn
I didn't think it would come up. About 2 weeks ago I dug into the soil and found that the corn had indeed started to make that journey into the word above. Some would say I am impatient and that would be true but I am also concerned in that I made a mistake as I am a first time (veggie) gardener. A lot of work and still only 12 out of about 36 corn came up so I was somewhat justified but proud at the same time.



Nettles
I have only found nettles in one place around Merritt and actually it's rather far away. Dilemma. What to do. Last summer I gathered nettles on the coast, brought them home to dry and at the bottom of the trash bag were all these...seeds. Hmmm....could it work? I split the seeds (thousands of them) over two plots and the this spring the one with the better soil erupted with something like 200-300 nettle seedlings! Ha Ha! (Those who grow nettles know why they're doing it- look it up online if you're curious)



Beans
My beans are a disappointment- the yellow wax beans. of which there were possibly a dozen in the packet, gave forth only 2 seedlings. I suspect the crows ate the other ones ...I didn't have the heart to dig around and check to make certain. But because I'm sentimental I decided to see if any of the seeds that Mama had kept could be germinated. I wasn't optimistic about the beans of all things- all of the seeds I had from her were gathered in 2005 from her own stock and had gone thru several moves. But suffice it to say some of the 5 year old beans were viable and the ones in the photo pictured here have been transplanted into the garden.

Dogs and Cat

I was going to write about the garden but that shall wait for a bit. I felt like sharing some info: it is not a crime to threaten to take a gun and shoot someones dog. At least that's what I've been told and I can understand that to a degree. It's one of those things that could be regarded as an empty threat.

A woman threatened to use her gun to shoot my dog this morning if I didn't move him away from her fence.
The fact is there is no sidewalk in front of her house and my dog was within a foot of her property I suppose...more like two feet but that's not the point. There was no point. She had two dogs that came tearing across her yard yapping in that nasty shrieking way little dogs have and I probably did pause for a moment since I was shocked. I couldn't recall ever seeing dogs there before today but now this evening I do remember a rather curt sounding man talking to his wife (?) last year and there were little dogs there.

Anyway after hearing the threat and the second or third 'fuck' being hurled out a window I marched to the front of the house and called her to come out and say what she had to say to my face.
She did come around the house and tried to call her dogs in and threatened me again with shooting my dog for getting near her 'fucking fence'. I walked away in a rage and later on asked the RCMP if there was any point in filing a complaint and what to do.
Basically I'M SUPPOSED TO AVOID PROVOKING HER and WALK ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET. I kind of expected to hear the second part but not the provoking bit since I explained that there was nothing to cause this...although I speculated that she might have been drunk and her dogs had woken her from a hangover.
I don't intend to go out of my way to avoid walking past there- I don't walk that way often; maybe 1 a month or so and she had better never say anything to me again because that would be harassment. It was just a really enraging experience that seemed to have absolutely no point.


Anyways, later on I went to a friends place and took one of the last two kittens from a litter she had rescued from her woodpile (we have a big feral cat issue in Merritt.) What an adorable little creature- great temperament, beautiful tabby markings...overall almost too perfect!
I had been wanting a cat for quite some time and now we finally have one. She likes Othmar and he gets all mushy over her- lol! The dog doesn't like her and the feeling is mutual but I have every confidence they will learn to tolerate one another. That's it for now. :)

Pie, Gardening, and Printing

I started a garden last month. My husband framed up the beds which are a cross between raised and in ground- essentially it's structured to keep the water from evaporating before it actually gets into the ground.

I decided to draw my front garden.
I suppose we could have dug it right into the ground but there's just so much rock just down underneath it's not funny. Now it's June and stuff is starting to show in that garden which is a learning experience for me...I will have plenty to say about it in my next post but for now I want to mention that if you have never had rhubarb and strawberry pie you don't know what your missing.
A neighbor's rhubarb grows out of control each year and a couple of weeks ago I decided to harvest what was growing outside of the fence.

processing rhubarb
My mother used to mix rhubarb with strawberry for making jam but I decided to try it as pie filling since I now know how to make pies. :)
OMG it was delicious. Never realized it would be so good because the jam I remembered was more tart than sweet. Definitely something everyone should try!

Closeup of pie- yum!
The weather lately has been ghastly- non stop rain it seems like. It's just like Vancouver! The only good thing is that the newly seeded lawn needs less watering from me since Mother Nature has been so generous with the precipitation.
Lilacs are almost finished in Merritt. I will miss the scent- a shame you can't get that smell in a garden flower!

Lilacs In Lane
I mentioned in my previous post that I sold a small original art work- I decided to post a picture my husband took of me standing with some of the others that I had in the community art show.

tee hee! Artemis - 12monthsOFwinter
I'm shopping my photography around with a fresh start and have decided that my niche is- or will be- western themed. I have a very diverse portfolio of work but it's really time to focus on what I do well that is relevant to this location- cowboys, horses, heritage, landscapes. That and portraiture...I just finished a photo shoot last week and enjoyed it and hope to get more work of that kind.
Shopping for a new print shop as well to handle large format photos...there's a promising place in Kamloops that I checked out today and will return to tomorrow to see how the panoramic shot I took of that fair city turned out.
I feel I should get in the habit of writing at least once a week so will do what I can...let it get loaded into Facebook automatically and copy/paste this blog to other locations like DA...still one of my favorite online haunts. There's a sight called Tumblr that I am checking out which looks nice...neater that FB or that useless Twitter. Flavor of the week I guess!