The holidays...

Long time, no post!

I knew this would happen. I'm bad, epically bad, about updating blogs and Katherine just finished up her masters. So this page has suffered for it. But I bought a domain today and redirected to here and that warranted an update. Katherine and I are now the proud owners of thejarnigans.com and will hopefully have a website on it eventually. For now though it will lead you here, to our lovely, and neglected blog.

Quick update: the garden died. One weekend we went out of town and a nice little heat wave came through and roasted everything. We'll give it another go in the Spring and hopefully do a little better with our layout and planning.

This weekend will be our first of four family Christmas events. The Brians clan will be assembling and celebrating Christmas, at my parents' house I believe. We'll be attending Katherine's graduation the following Saturday and then we'll do Christmas with my parents, then her parents, and then the Jarnigan clan. Not to forget Chris' birthday (my brother) and Kristie's (her sister) somewhere in that mix.

Alright, that's enough for now....

Laters,
Dan

Watermelon

We now have 5 watermelon growing in the garden!!!  I can't wait for them to grow big enough for us to eat.  Yum!!!

More Green Things!

Well, we keep getting more and more hopeful about our garden. Maybe we are at least doing a couple of things right? Our watermelon plant is trying to take over the garden. We also noticed this morning that there is one watermelon growing on the vine. It's hard to believe with all of that vine there is only one growing and not ten. The watermelon plant is already invading the cucumbers space. And speaking of cucumbers, we now have two that are almost full grown. Plus, there are at least two more on the way. Some of our pepper plants have more peppers on there. I think Dan is pretty excited about that. He pulled off four hot peppers the other day, and used two to put on his pizza for lunch.

So we are really excited that we have more fruits and veggies growing in the garden. I guess the heat is giving them an extra boost! Here are some more pics....

Our token watermelon...

Cucumbers!

Oh, and last but not least, Ayda has taken to laying down on the other side of the garden near the fence.

More to come later!

Green Things

Okay, so we're not so good about updating the blog. Kinda saw that one coming. It's now June and although our blog was neglected, the garden definitely has not been! We've got four tomatoes coming in and one green bell pepper. Katherine picked our first four beans, which aren't quite enough to cook, but we'll get there.

We've also now picked up my granddad's old Troy Bilt tiller. It's not a full-size one, but we don't need a big one anyway. I'll go ahead and tell you, using it is a whole lot better than hoeing the garden. Anyway, here's a few more shots of our watermelon vine and peppers.

And an update photo of the blackberry bush...

We'll try to post more later.

First Plantings

Quick update....

Well, we finally got a few plants in the ground. We went to Lowes and bought actual plants of peppers (and one for a watermelon) in case our seedlings didn't turn out that great. So we planted those in the garden, and also planted some of the cucumber plants and pole beans. So far the last two haven't done a lot, and the cucumbers didn't last. We just replaced those with some other seedlings, which will hopefully do better.









Our blackberry plant has a flower on it! It's pretty and pink, and just bloomed today. It has grown a lot over the past week. We are ready for the fruit to start developing on it.




My dahlias and peonies are coming up too. I'm excited about these because I am ready for a little more color to get into the yard.




Ciao,
Kath

Getting it started

It's planting time! Kinda... Not willing to trust our luck with growing our garden from seeds, I bought a tray of peat pellets to start our seeds. The tray has 72 peat pellets, each about the size of a tea light candle. Once you add water, each pellet soaks it up and expands about 3-4 times their original size. Then we put 2-3 seeds in each pellet and covered them over.



Knowing my wife, I also picked up some labels for our budding garden...



Now we wait for them to sprout and transplant them to the real garden! Which needs to be broken up again....

*sigh*

Settled Dirt

OK, so for those of you that may or may not know, you can't let the ground settle after it has been tilled. That is why the hoe was invented. Now, I decided since I had some time that I would use the hoe to break up some of the dirt in our little garden. Dan has already done this once, and then the rain set in and it needs to be worked over again. After about 15 minutes of stabbing the ground with the hoe, all I can show for my efforts is about 1/5 of the garden with turned up soil and two very sore hands! The upside: there is only 4/5 of the plot left to work, and if I keep this up then I might actually develop some arm muscles!!! I'll admit, that is an exciting thought. Who needs a gym membership when you can just have a garden in your back yard? I don't think I have a future in landscaping, but I'll take the benefits when I can. :)

While we have not planted anything in the garden yet, we did plant the blackberry bush. It doesn't seem to have grown that much, but maybe after the next good rain that we get it will show improvement. Hopefully we will be able to plant our vegetables soon, but Dan's schedule makes that a little difficult. Plus, my class is coming to an end and the next two weekends are kind of claimed with school. I suppose if all else fails then we can plant it piece by piece whenever we get time.

The good thing is that the days are getting longer, and they are also getting warmer. Summer days will be here soon! Hurray!

Kath