First BLOG

Gardening and Potato Pancakes. That's what's on my mind right now, but there seem not to be enough hours in the day to accommodate my To Do list.
After discovering a thriving colony of bugs in the last bit of my pancake mix I abandoned the craving for blueberry pancakes and opened the last packet of potato pancake mix. I've never made them from scratch, but even with a mix it's taking the better part of my morning. But cooking is fun, almost as much fun as eating! After taking The Dude out I'll probably park myself back in the kitchen to make a quinoa salad for later.
The weather isn't very ripe for gardening anyway. A storm is coming, and while it's not raining yet, the clouds are pregnant with water from the heavens.

I need more discipline in my gardening. The first garden I had was all in pots on my back porch when I lived on Decatur. The summer was long and warm and I dare say it was a small success. I had tomatoes, broccoli, tssai, garlic, oregano and potatoes. The broccoli plants were plagued with aphids and small heads, the tssai (I can't remember how to spell it) was also sacrificed to the pesky bugs. The potatoes were small but cut in halves or quarters made a great breakfast one Sunday morning.

I had paid little mind to fertilizing and when to plant, but I mothered the plants daily. I watered them when they were thirsty, washed the bugs off when I found them, and moved the plants around as the sun got too hot or the nights were too cold.

Since we've started growing our garden directly into raised beds, I've put a lot more effort into the beginning of the process; double digging the soil, fertilizing, making sure the soil is warm enough to plant, etc. But once the seeds or seedlings are in their new home I tend to neglect them for weeks.

While we got a nice crop of radishes, some lettuce, and few handfuls of snap peas and several small and medium heads of garlic so far... I can see the result of my neglect. My second planting never sprouted. The tomato plants, narcissistic as they are, have nearly overrun one bed AND my compost bin had half a dozen pepper plants and a hearty 2 foot tomato plant growing in it! The carrots are bigger than last year. We have a couple baby cucumbers. The strawberries get eaten before we can pick them though.

The most interesting thing, I think, is our potato crop. We had some success last year, but most of the potatoes were so tiny we couldn't use them. We dug through the dirty picking out as many as we could but eventually just left the bed until this year. Before we even started planting much in this bed, we noticed things growing out of it, a bushy, leafy plant that we could tell was not a weed. Wait... those look like potatoes! So now we have a dozen small potato plants left over from last year's crop. Who knows how they'll turn out. Some of the larger plans are starting to die so we'll probably start digging soon.

Well, the morning is nearly concluded, and my first blog completed. Even though I never actually explained the topic at hand.

Ah well... ramblings.