garden

My garden is going fairly well.
Every morning I go out and help the squashes out with pollenating incase the bees don’t fly that day, then in the evenings I go out to help pollenate the cucumbers.
I figured out the cucumbers don’t wake up nearly as early as the squash, and the squash goes to bed before I get home from work, so they have to be pollenated at differing times. In the evenings I also do the weeding, the deadheading and picking of the veggies.
I am eating cucumbers and squash every day and looking up recipes so I can eat them in more than one way, so as not to get bored of them.
My tomatoes however are not real happy they are getting blossom end rot. Hmm… need to try to figure out what to do about that.
The blackberries are doing really good; these are wild blackberries and come back every year. Some years are good, others not so much it depends on the weather. Last year looked as if it was going to be good but then it rained so much right before they were ready, and they molded. This year I watched and hoped but didn’t get too excited till they were ready to eat. And now they are ready and coming in nicely. The only problem with wild blackberries is they have a lot more seeds then what you purchase in the grocery store but that’s ok they still taste good. So far I have eaten them straight off the bush, and cooked a lot of things. I have made Blackberry cobbler, blackberry empanadas, blackberry muffins and blackberry barbeque sauce.
So far the hard work is paying off.

T for turtle bread.

This is a recipe I am very fond of. We used to make it quite a bit when I was a child.
The name is a bit odd but don’t worry it has no real turtles in it. Actually, when I mention turtle bread to people they automatically think of a chocolate, caramel, nut topping, but this is basically just a white bread. It’s called turtle bread because it shaped like a turtle!

I don’t know why they chose Turtle bread to represent the letter T; there are so many foods that start with T. Tomatoes, tacos, tuna, toast, etc. But they chose a bread, I guess this is one of those things that is targeted toward children. But even as I child I questioned the choice. Not that I didn’t like the bread. This bread is pretty awesome. It takes an hour from start to finish, has a great flavor and is cute. How can you go wrong with cute?


The one problem we had when I was a kid though is the head is the only part with raisons and even that only has two raisons for eyes. We all liked raisons, so we tended to argue about who got the head.

The raisons made it special and we all wanted it. Perhaps we should have decorated the shell with raisons as oh well how would siblings ever learn to get along if they had nothing to argue about.
In any case we all loved this bread, whether or not we got the head.


I hadn’t made bread in years and realized Kneading takes more arm muscle then I remember. I forgot just how long ten minutes can feel when kneading. It’s probably a really good exercise.

I didn’t quite proof this long enough, but it was still passible and tasted good. I will make it again someday, but probably not till winter. Baking bread in the summer is just too hot.
And let me just say this is nothing like the taste of fresh from the oven bread with butter on top. Yum!

A garden

This year I decided to try out having a garden. It’s been years since I had one and have never fared well in gardening partly because of the soil and partly because feeling I had no time to focus on it, but I thought I might give it another try as I am having a lot more time at home this year.

Gardening is not as easy as people make it look. It not just throw some seeds in the ground and bam you have veggies! Nope it’s a huge amount of work.
I started doing clearing of an old garden spot in early spring; the garden is located on the side of our hill which years ago my dad tiered out for gardening. Being that it been so long since I had a garden there was a lot of clearing to be done. This included cutting down small trees, clearing of blackberries, bamboo grass, honey suckle and several other weeds. Once I got the surface cleared off I had to dig out the roots. All of this was done with a shovel, rake and hoe. I don’t have a tiller and wouldn’t know how to work one anyway. This was absolutely exhausting work, but when we (my sister helped) got it finished I was so proud of the work. The next step was the planting.
We started peas, cabbage, green beans, onions, potatoes and radishes directly in the ground. And Yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and butternut inside to be planted at a later date.
Here is what I learned about cabbage and radishes.
They don’t like heat. We had an unusually hot April and May.
Cabbage has a pretty little yellow flower and radishes have pretty little purple flowers.
Flowering isn’t a good thing in these plants it means they are done and ready to go to seed. So I just let them, there wasn’t much else I could do, so no cabbage or radishes this year.
I also figured out that going up and down a steep hill isn’t the nicest thing for my knees so decided to dig out some steps and put flat stones down for stepping stones. That helped a lot and thanks to my dad for helping me finish them after I dropped one of the stones on my foot and had to stop because of the pain. My foot was bruised but it was nothing major and got better in a few days.

The green beans are flowering right now, and the onions are about ready to pull up. I got a handful of peas, but they are not fond of the heat either so I didn’t get many.
As mentioned above our soil is not great. it’s very heavy and dense red clay without much nutrient so it’s not the best for planting, but it’s what we have so we do the best we can with what we have, yes we fertilize an I have mixed in some garden soil which helps but the added black dirt ultimately takes on the weight of the red clay.
On a brighter note though the soil does host earthworms, we have lots and lots of them. I keep hoping they will improve the soil and they probably do help so I always get a bit giddy when I find a cluster of them in my digging. Go, go little super heroes!
Now on to the squashes.
It rains a lot and so that means the bees are not always out, especially in the mornings when the squash blossoms are open. I realized I needed to start hand pollenating to increase the amount of yielded fruit. I only just started this a week ago so hopefully it will help. We have several squashes that didn’t get pollenated but on the other hand we have several that did and there are a lot of baby squashes.
Plus today we got our first zucchini!

It won’t be long before we have a bunch of them coming in. I just have to keep remembering to pollenate them, and the cucumbers, we have a few little cucumbers coming in as well.


The potatoes are doing well and I am going to do a separate post about them because they have a neat story to go along with them.
It’s pretty exciting to see all the hard work turn into something we can eat. Next year I would like to try an even bigger garden. There is a flat space at the top of the hill that can be cleared for a garden but that plot is even more over grown then the hill side.
All I can say is Hello winter project, because I need the poison ivy to be dormant before I go stamping about up there.