Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Kneipp Family Victory Garden - Update, July, 2009

My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view. ~H. Fred Ale

I am pleased to note that we are quickly approaching the harvest portion of our gardening chores. However, there were a few missteps in planning the garden that have lead to some unanticipated results.

First of all, I forgot to plant any zucchini. Flat out forgot. And we love zucchini bread so much around here - now we are going to have to get ours from the produce market. Lame.

Second of all, I didn't give a lot of thought to how aggressive the cucumbers that we planted were going to be! They have started snaking their way up the sweet pea stakes and have all but eaten one of my green pepper plants. Not good...I still have one green pepper plant that is holding on for dear life and has 3-4 little peppers budded out. If the cucumber will keep it's distance a little bit, we may be eating stuffed peppers from our own garden yet!!

Thirdly, I gave thought to the fact that we needed to plant corn in rows, so that they could cross-pollinate, but I did not spend a lot of time in thinking about the fact that the growth of their neighbors, our tomato plants, would block almost all of their sunlight. Oops. We may or may not get any corn cobs out of the deal...but definitely learned a lesson or two on that one.

Finally, we have a ton of tomatoes on all 3 kinds of plants, Brandywine, Cherry & Roma...however, just 2 little individualist cherry tomatoes are showing any signs of ripening. I do hope that it's not a repeat of last year when we had to eat fried green tomatoes just to feel like we hadn't failed miserably.

So, there you have it. I would think we're at the mid-way point for the Garden of 2009. Once again, I have learned a lot of great lessons, the greatest one being: I have no flipping clue what I am doing in the garden and if I EVER hope to feed this family of 5 with home-grown produce, I better get some books and read up over the off-season. There's always room for improvement, right?

Tanner in the Kiddie Pool - Finally!!

Wordless Wednesday

Tanner's Walking!!

Anniversary Pics!

A good friend of ours, Dale Chumbley, agreed to take some anniversary pics for us this year. Unfortunately, we had no way of knowing that the day we chose to meet and get it done would be the hottest day of the year so far. It was closer to (if not over) 100 degrees that day. And further "planning genius" led to us meeting at 2pm.

I still think I got a touch of heat stroke after walking around taking pics for an hour or so. Poor Mitch, who wasn't "loving" taking pictures anyway, and was trying "not to sweat", but he wasn't very successful.

Even though it wasn't the best of circumstances, we had a fun time and managed to get some good pictures out of the deal. Here are just a few of the shots that we got - we are looking forward to many more years of anniversaries, but the next time we take pictures, I think there will have to be an understanding that it won't be in the middle of a heat wave. :-)

Once in awhile, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.

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