Cockadoo!

"Cockadoo!" "Cockadoo!"

That was the sound that greeted me this morning. Little Miss Raelee, in her eagerness to be up and about, had crawled into bed with me and was crowing away. "Cockadoo!" It took me a few moments to comprehend that she was trying to say, "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" She was just the absolute cutest thing.

I asked her if it was time to get up, and of course, she said yes and "Cockadoo!" once more. She had the biggest smile on her faced and was very pleased with herself for waking up before Mommy. She made quite a cute rooster impersonation.

I tried the same technique on her this afternoon when it was time to wake her up for her nap. No such luck. She is a sound sleeper!

Those Pesky Critters

Well, I found out what those large green caterpillars were. They are tomato worms! Thanks, Meredith, for setting things straight!

I wrote about our tomato worm (and by the way, I found two more of them this evening, ugh!) on the other blog, Balancing Act Basics. Sorry, folks, I just don't have the energy to type up another post about these so-called "worms". Getting late.

However, if you'd like to know a bit more about our garden and our family, and our tomato worm invasion, please feel free to click here to learn some more. :)

See How Our Garden Grows

I apologize for yet another garden post. Raelee is spending the night at her grandma's house, and Joshua took a trip up to Minnesota, taking Daniel with him. So I'm here all by myself. Well, me and the kitties. Not a whole lot worth taking a picture, other than the garden, I suppose. So it was a garden post, or a kittie post. I thought everyone might enjoy garden pictures better. :)

Our cucumber and squash/zucchini plants are starting to burn off. I pulled up 3 or 4 squash plants a few days ago. They didn't have any veggies, and all the leaves and stems were dying off. So it wasn't worth keeping them any longer. I haven't thrown out the cucumber plants yet. There are a few cukes growing, and I want to give them a chance before completely giving up on the whole thing. We'll see if we get anymore cucumbers.

Our watermelon plant continues to get larger & larger. It's grown into the walkway. I went ahead and cut some of it back. I didn't want it to reach the strawberry plants & take them over! We do have one watermelon that's actually growing in this giant plant. It's doing really well, and I estimate we'll be able to harvest it in a few weeks. I'm a little disappointed that we don't have any more watermelons, especially considering how large the plant is. But one is better than none! And perhaps more will start growing. We'll see.

We lost one of the cantaloupes (left on above picture). At one time, I counted 9 cantaloupes. Most of them didn't make it. They fell off the vine due to their location and just becoming top-heavy. I found our largest cantaloupe had fallen off the vine as well and was very ripe. I picked it up and tossed it into the woods. We still have two baby cantaloupes that are doing really well, and we new baby cantaloupe. So hopefully they will all cotinue to grow until we're able to harvest them.

Garden spiders have popped up throughout the garden. They are the UGLIEST creatures! But they're supposed to be good, eating up any bad bugs, so I tolerate them. I just try to keep my distance.

I had to put two eggplants into the compost tonight. The branhes they were on had snapped. Fortunately, I have a white eggplant still growing strong (not pictured) as well as these two large black beauty eggplants. They are ready to harvest, but I know that I won't be able to eat them anytime soon. I think I'll go ahead and pick the larger of the two and chop it up and freeze it for later use. But I figured I'd let it keep growing a little longer since it's doing so well. I'll check it in a couple of days.

Our green bean plants have stubbornly decided that they like the roof of the house better than the ground. They haven't blossomed yet, so no bean pods. But they look healthy enough. So hopefully there'll be something soon.

Our compost pile keeps getting larger and larger. I toss in vegetable scraps from cooking, and even egg shells, which are compostable. The squash plants I pulled up also got tossed into the compost. I know these things are supposed to be turned over to promote decomposition, but I'm not that motivated a person. I'm satisfied with just putting things in there.

I was really disturbed to find this on one of my bell pepper pants. It is probably the largest caterpillar I have ever seen. I couldn't tell if these white things were eggs or parasites/larvae from another insect. As far as I know, butterflies lay eggs, not caterpillars. So I have no idea exactly what this white stuff is. The caterpillar has been eating this bell pepper's leaves. So I didn't want to take my chances. I squashed the giant caterpillar and its parasitic egg things with the bottom of my shoe. I nearly cried doing it. As a child, I was always fascinated with caterpillars, but I certainly don't need them eating up my garden.

If anything, I can certainly grow mushrooms. These are not the edible kind, mind you. Living right on the edge of the woods, we always seem to have one variety of fungi or another, but I've never seen these particular varieties before. Thanfully, there aren't any in the garden, but they are out & about in the yard.

I did manage to harvest a large handul of raspberries and two summer squash tonight. These raspberries will be really good in my raisin bran in the morning!

Garden Update

Lots more goodies from the organic garden tonight!



Raspberries (these will go in my cereal in the morning!)
Bell Peppers
Zucchini
Summer Squash
Tomatoes
Jalapenos (will make Pepper Poppers with these & the 8 or 9 we picked a few days ago)

Our watermelon plant has taken over about 1/4 of the garden. That thing is HUGE! It finally has produced some melons. Found two so far, probably more hiding but can't get a good look because the plant is too big. I should have taken a picture, but it started raining by the time I was done picking the fruits & veggies.

Cleaning Haus'

We recently created a chore list for the kids. Simple stuff, like making their bed, helping with dishes, getting dressed without help. Daniel did such a good job vacuuming up the mess after his birthday, and he's vaccumed a couple times since then, so we added vacuuming to his chore list. He loves it! He asks to vacuum, begs to vacuum. Kinda' crazy, but, okay! Who am I to argue? Let the boy vacuum!
Look at him go!! Daniel's really good about making sure to get every inch of the carpet.

Raelee, too, wanted to vacuum, so she pulled out her toy vacuum and started "cleaning" the area rug in the dining room. She kept saying, "It's not working." So we had to teach her about pretend cleaning.

Getting underneath the coffee table real good...

Raelee wasn't satisfied with just vacuuming. She wanted to dust, too! Again, who am I to say no? haha

We've Created A Pyromaniac

Happy Independence Day!!

We sincerely hope that you have enjoyed your holiday weekend, and that you ate enough hot dogs and hamburgers to fill the Potomac. :)

We enjoyed a pleasant evening at Bette & Bill's house (Joshua's aunt & uncle). They grilled up the 'dogs and 'burgers and some really yummy sweet corn. Also lots of side dishes, including watermelon that was super satisfying to the taste buds. We finished up the evening with sparklers for the kids' enjoyment, as well as the adults.

Our first mistake was letting Raelee hold a sparkler of her own.


She quickly learned how to hold the sparkler just at the very end of the wire. She absolutely loved the sparklers and kept asking to do more "sparkles."









We even had to do another sparkler when we got home!

Daniel also did some sparklers, but he stuck with the long, colorful sparklers that started out a red color, then halfway through changed to some sort of spit-fire, then ended as a white color. He really liked this particular kind, and didn't really want anything to do with the traditional sparklers, except to watch someone else use them.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed your 4th of July celebration!!

Garden Update

Oodles & oodles of vegetables in our garden. Seems like we're always harvesting something. And we're not complaining, not in the slightest!

Definitely got a lot of cucumbers. We were able to make a batch of pickle spears & hamburger pickles. Our very first attempt, too. Joshua helped out. We were both a little nervous, you know, having never done this before, but the lids sealed up! Woohoo! Joshua gave away half of what we canned. But that's okay because we've harvested probably twice as many cucumbers since then.
Here's some of the cucumbers, jalapenos, zucchini & smmer squash we recently harvested. It's amazing how quickly some of these vegetables grew, almost overnight. We'd go outside to check on the garden, see a little vegetable growing, and think it'd be ready to harvest at the end of the week. Then at the end of the week, we'd go outside, and bam! That little vegetable grew into a monster. Notice how large some of the squash are below?

Another day's harvest in this picture below. More cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, and a couple bell pepper.

Our sugar snap peas, which we thought had failed, actually surprised us. They were planted a little too late, and although they started growing right away, they stopped when they reached abot 6 inches high. A few weeks ago we saw some small white flowers on the peas, but didn't think anything of them.

That is, until Joshua's mom pointed out several pea pods that were growing. Can you believe it? I've never heard of peas on 6-inch high plants. Oh well! Again, not complaining! So we'll just add peas to the list of veggies this year. We'll just let these ripen a little longer on the vine so they can get good & sweet, and then we'll be harvesting them before we know it.

Here's our green bean trellis. They've shot up to the roof, much higher than I would have ever believed they'd grow. Just hoping they'll start blossoming soon so we can have some green beans.

Joshua started this little garden late in the season. He planted corn, big boy tomato plants, bell pepper, zucchini & summer squash, green beans and sugar snap peas. A recent storm kncoked over the 3 big boy tomato plants. So we had to resort to creative means to stabilize the tomato cages. One of the "stakes" is an inverted rake. Hey, if it works, right?

And here's the most recent monstrocity we've harvested. Joshua found this zucchini hiding under another zucchini which was hiding under a zucchini leaf. Have you ever seen a zucchini leaf? They are bigger than mine & Joshua's heads side-by-side! The leaves get HUGE! And so do the zucchini. I don't know if I can ever go back to grocery-bought zucchini and summer squash. They're so puny, compared to what we're growing.

I wonder just how big the zucchini & summer squash would get if we left them on the vine? Probably big enough to carve into a jack-o-lanter. I'm SOOOO tempted to leave at least one on the vine and see just how big we can get it to grow. :) Neither Joshua nor I could wrap our fingers all the way around the neck of this particular zucchini. I wasn't kidding when I said that it was huge!