Spring's a comin'

I haven't blogged here in forever so here's a little catch-up. We moved from Whidbey Island Washington to Wickliffe, KY where we bought our first home. A super cute brick 3 bedroom, 2 bath with a big shop and 3 acres. And it's the 3 acres that I'm so excited about. 3 acres means a big garden! YAY!

We'll have two separate garden areas- each 25x25feet- connected by a path with an arched arbor where the beans will grow. It's going to look wonderful when it's all finished. I'm doing a lot of research on the best kinds of flowers and herbs to plant among the vegetables to deter unwanted visitors to the garden but also attract butterflies and bees. I'm very excited about getting started on it but with the weather the way it's been I haven't been able to do more than stake out the space.

We plan to have a little bit of everything growing this year, from artichokes to zucchini. I'm hoping I can get the hang of starting seeds and hardening off the starts. Usually I just buy plants from the nursery but I want to become as self sufficient as possible and start saving seeds from what I grow so that means learning all I can about starting plants from seed.

Here's hoping!

You say Tomato...

One of my very favorite vegetables to grow and eat is tomatoes. I love to put them in salad, make salsa, chop them up and use them in spaghetti sauce or simply slice them up and eat them fresh. My children, three out of the four of them, love tomatoes as well and keeping them from picking the newly red fruit is a challenge. They'd have the bushes picked clean in half a heartbeat and I'd never have any to use in our meals. I always try to keep a good supply of cherry tomatoes growing so they can have their fill and hopefull leave my larger ones alone for cooking with. I like to grow beef steaks for salads and sandwiches, romas for sauses and salsa, and cherry for picking and eating raw. None of us cares much for grape tomatoes because of the sweetness.

Here in Washington, our tomato crops have been notoriously poor because of the short growing season. We get a lot of fruit that sets but it rarely gets ripe until we move the plants indoors. So we grow the tomato plants in pots so they're portable. Once we move to Kentucky, I look forward to having a good crop of tomatoes that will ripen outside in the sunshine. I look forward to having too many to eat and being able to give some away. So many things to anticipate as we're preparing to move. In fact, I've started receiving plant catalogs from the seed supply companies and I've been drooling over them for days. Burpee and Park's Seed catalogs are my favorite so far. So many beautiful things to plant and harvest.

More lovely melons

Cantaloupe melons are another of my favorites. I've never tried to grow them here but when I lived in southern Oregon they grew alright. I had a patch of them growing and the melons were about the size of a softball and my black lab decided he needed to play fetch with them. I came out to water the garden and found little melons all over the yard. You can bet we got a fence up right quick but my plants didn't seem to be able to recover from the early harvesting.


I love using a melon baller and putting little balls of cantaloupe and watermelon together in a nice fruit salad. Chill it and serve on a hot summer day...very tasty. Cantaloupe with vanilla yogurt is wonderful for breakfast. So many delicious things to do with such a sweet fruit.

Heavenly Melons

Here in Washington, growing melons of any kind without a greenhouse is a huge challenge. We simply don't have a long enough growing season for them to ripen. So this is one plant I fully intend to grow and enjoy once we move. I love watermelon but paying 59 cents a pound for them is kind of difficult especially when you're pretty sure it won't taste anywhere near as good as home grown. Store bought melons are usually mealy and dry or mushy and watery with no sweetness to them at all. I look forward to tending my own as they grow and digging into all that sweet stickiness that drips down your face as you dig in. Is there anything better than that? I sure can't think of anything right now.

Having never grown watermelons, it will probably take some learning on my part to get it just right, but that's the beauty of gardening, there's always another spot of dirt, another summer, or someone else who knows more that is willing to help out. Gardeners are such friendly people!

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Danielle and I love to garden; some flowers but mostly vegetables and fruit. Where I live now- in the Pacific Northwest- gardening is difficult because of the short summers and long winters. For example, this summer I planted tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, kohlrabi, radishes, and green beans...and all I got for all my hard work were a few scrawny tomatoes. Our summer was even shorter than usual this year and nothing had time to ripen before it rotted on the vines. Very frusterating.

So, in a few months I'm moving to Kentucky. This move isn't because I can't garden here, there are lots of other reasons but I won't go into them here, but gardening is high on the list. I love getting my hands dirty, pulling weeds and watching the fruits (and vegetables) of my labor ripen and grow. It's kind of a passion for me.

Kentucky has nearly six full months of growing season- compared to 2 or 3 months here. I'll be able to grow things there that I can't grow here without a greenhouse. Things like watermelon, cantaloupe, celery, broccoli and Cauliflower, real tomatoes and potatoes...even peanuts if I so choose. The thought of it leaves me dizzy with anticipation.

In the next few months, until I move, I'll be posting images of different things I'll be growing in my new home state, along with what it is and why I want to grow it. I know, kinda lame, but I'm so excited that I simply have to do something pertaining to gardening right now or I'll burst!