Exhibit B

Exhibits C and D

And Finally…

Life is good.

All of my tomato plants have bunches of green tomatoes, I just don’t know when the red will start showing through!  I hope its soon, my patience for home grown tomatoes is growing a bit weary!

The Patio Tomatoes

Jellybean Tomatoes

And the Roma tomatoes…ah the Romas.  They are absolute beasts!  I spent an hour tonight re-caging and re-staking them.  They’re always outgrowing their support structures!

Marzano Roma Tomatoes

The Tomatillo plants are turning into elm trees…is that normal?  I’ve had to put several stakes around them to prop their giant branches up.

Tomatillos

And moving over to the crawlers…

The butternut squash is positioning itself to take over the entire garden.  Its spreading in and among the tomatoes and tomatillos, they’ve all but overgrown the eggplant and okra.  They are tactical little guys and I have the feeling I’d better watch my back otherwise they might try to steal my car.

Butternut Squash

The cucumbers have finally been trained to crawl up the trellis, fancy as it is.

Cucumbers

The jalapenos are still chugging away:

Jalapenos

And then we turn to the zucchini…oh, the zucchini.  They are absolutely gigantic!  Pretty soon we’ll be up to our eyeballs in zucchini.  Got any good zucchini recipes? Send ‘em my way!  Enjoy the zucchini photos, and I do apologize in advance for any, um, phallic looking photos.  Its just the nature of the beast.

Zucchini plant

And there’s the mid-June garden update.  Our hard work is really paying off in leaps and bounds now!

My First Harvest!

And the winner is…….Broccoli!!

I'm Gonna Eat YOU!!!

After all of our heartache and toil dealing with the bunnies and their lust for our broccoli, it turns out that our broccoli will be the first thing to make it from our garden to our dinner plates.

I’ve had trouble with my broccoli quickly turning from this:

pretty, edible broccoli

To this, in a matter of a day:

Flowering, inedible broccoli

One cannot properly enjoy broccoli once it has gone to flower…duh.  So I got out early this morning, chopped the head off and let it hang out in my fridge until dinner time.

the violence

What shall I do with my bounty?  I certainly know that my favorite way to prepare broccoli is to roast it with a bit of olive oil until it gets a little brown and crusty.  Fabulous.  It seem a bit fancy to eat alongside our sloppy joes, but I don’t care.  It came from our garden and it deserves to be made fancy!

Get in my BELLY!

What a rewarding experience, and there’s just so many more goodies to come!  Its only a matter of days until we’ll have zucchini coming out of our ears.  Rolls up your car windows, the zucchini are coming…

Pepper and Zucchini Garden

But even though I’m busy, my garden is not neglected.  I find it to be some of my favorite times of my day when I visit my garden in the mornings and afternoons.

Tomato Garden

And I’m sorry to have kept everyone on pins and needles, but YES, the blood meal WORKED!!!  Grandma really knows her stuff.  The garden has remained free of bunny scavengers for over a week (knock on wood…HARD).

Broccoli Plants

The three other broccoli plants are doing quite splendidly, with some nice florets even forming.  The plant that the bunnies attempted murder on decided to flower, I can’t blame it.  If I thought I was going to die soon, procreation might be high on my list of things to do too.  But there are some new leaves coming out on it.  Time will tell how it recovers!

More beautiful plants going down the line:

Tomatoes:

Patio Tomatoes

Roma Tomatoes

Cucumbers – which have really taken off finally!

Cucumbers

Tomatillos – which I had to re-stake because they are becoming huge trees!

Tomatillos

Butternut Squash and Eggplant – The butternut squash leaves are like elephant ears.  HUGE!

Butternut Squash

Zucchini – these guys put on a few new leaves everyday it seems.

Zucchini

There are lots of peppers, all of which are looking lovely.  The jalapenos however, are winning the race for the first to fruit, so they get the glamour shot:

Jalapeno

And last but not least, I finally planted the flower pot in the back corner.  So pretty, a much needed splash of color.

Flower Pot

Wew! A whirlwind tour of the garden.  This is a wonderous time of year for gardens.  Plants are growing like mad, new fruits are appearing everyday, and it isn’t yet so bloody hot that the garden (and the gardener) are wilting.  Now if I can just keep ahead of the weeds and keep those bunnies away!

Its…NAKED.  Those little jerks ate nearly all the leaves off of my champion broccoli producing plant.  Thankfully not all of my broccoli was attacked.  I’ve heard the bunnies like the tender little plants.  They attack the weakest of the pack, the cowards.

And then I uttered the words I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself saying: “Honey, GET ME THE BLOOD MEAL!”.  We’re on to the last home remedy before putting up a chicken wire fence around our entire garden.  Grandma says bloodmeal works and by god I hope she’s right.

I wasn’t chintzy with the bloodmeal either.   Maybe its bunny bloodmeal and it serves as an omen for things to come if they keep eating my plants.

Unfortunately, our neighborhood is absolutely SILLY with rabbits and there seem to be no natural predators around here.  Hmm, I’ve never thought about having a pet coyote, but the idea is becoming more and more appealing!

As I was preparing to start gardening, I heard a little commotion on our back fence.  I looked up and walking towards me on the top rail of the fence was our sweet little neighborhood bird-hunter.  He is the sweetest kitty and I love when he comes to visit us!  And being the crazy cat-lady that I am, I had to snap some pictures.  I have to say that I really loved the kitty company.  Greg was gone today and I’ve always wanted my own kitties to come outside with us, but for a variety of reasons, we keep them exclusively indoors.  Look at this little guy!

And please don’t think I was torturing him with the photos.  The second he saw the camera he ran over to see what all the fun was about.  That’s when I snapped the top left photo.  Just look at him snoozing in the grass!

His little visit to our backyard did not go unnoticed by a certain house-cat.  I think it is safe to say that Phil (our kitty) was none to pleased by the intruder!

Jealous Much?

Panzer and I were having quite the morning together until I spied him a bit later walking along our other neighbor’s fence…He started rubbing on the POISON IVY as if it was a piece of Salmon wrapped in bacon coated in tuna oil.  He couldn’t get enough of it.  As I saw him frolicking in the poison ivy and a shiver went down my spine.  Oh…My…God…*shudder*.  Needless to say, there was no more cuddling after that incident and I took a 2 hour long shower.  Have I mentioned that I’m deathly allergic to POISON IVY?

Well before all that business went down, I did actually get some planting done.

I planted two new tomato plants (on the left photo, the two plants flanking the photo) and two new green pepper plants along with a Thai Chili Pepper plant (on the right).  All of the plants look beautiful and healthy and I hope they like my garden.  I also got a row of onions in the ground…finally.

I also did another deck-planter full of cilantro and some French Thyme.  Did you know that French Thyme leaves are purple underneath?  Pretty.

And lastly, I found our first rose bloom trying to hide at the back of our rose-bush.  You cannot hide from my camera!  Have a great weekend everyone!

P.S. If by some one in a billion chance Panzer’s owner sees this, just know that I in no way harmed or imprisoned your cat during the making of this blog post, unless you count baby-talk and ceaseless photography “harm”.  I really think you have one of the nicest out-door kitties ever!

It is so beautiful out on this fine Friday evening.  The kind of beauty that was just screaming to be shared with the world.  So here it is…my Tiger Marigolds.  They just remind me of tigers.

As for the rest of the garden, would you like the good news or the bad news first??  Executive decision from Dr. Domestic: let’s get the bad news over with first.

Former Bell Pepper

Some…thing has been up to no good in my garden.  Whoever the culprit was, they knew to only target the little weaklings that I had planted myself.  Yes, 3 out of the 6 or so bell pepper plants that I grew from seeds were assassinated sometime in the past 24 hours.  I’m pretty sure its not bunnies, because they have been physically banished from the yard.  I’m leaning towards insects since they targeted only the tiny plants.  Lets hope they’ve had their fill for a while, although I’m doubting that fact pretty hard.

And as promised, I do have some good news.

Itty Bitty Broccoli

Signs of good things to come from the broccoli plant.  Do you think its big enough to chop up and steam yet?  Me too!!

Happy Friday!

Here’s the full garden, in its full newly planted glory.

The Garden

The part on the left has been done for over a week, but it was really hard to get motivated enough to finish that big corner on the right.  Yesterday after work, I got out there and planted the rest of the plants I had waiting for me in the garage.  And then Greg came out to help mulch, which we only finished (or mostly finished) tonight after buying several more bags.

So here are the newest additions:

On the top are peppers, I think that particular photos is of Poblano Peppers.  I planted Jalapeno, Poblano, Banana, Red, “Mandarine Orange”, and Green Bell peppers.  Think that’s enough?

On the bottom is cucumber.  I planted several varieties of pickling cucumbers.  This whole Summer garden feels like one big experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, but I’m looking forward to things being much easier next year.  Oh wait, do you hear that? Its Future-Me from next Summer laughing because things never get easier as you might expect them to.  I’m sure next Summer I’ll try a whole new crop of things that will be a huge pain in the butt, like strawberries and melons and lord knows what else.

Notice how optimistic I am about the onions?  We even left a nice un-mulched space right in front for the little buggers.

And while I was outside photographing the garden, I couldn’t resist snapping some pictures of all the pretties.  Enjoy something beautiful on this rather dreary Spring day!

The top left is Spirea and the bottom right is a Jalapeno Pepper flower.  I know I should pinch the buds off of the Jalapeno to stimulate leaf growth, but I just can’t bring myself to do it!

Mulched Tomatoes

I also uprooted the zucchini corpses and planted some broccoli.  It looks much prettier!

beautiful broccoli

And while I was at it, I planted the eggplant and butternut squash.  The squash is still very little, I hope it fares well outside.

Eggplant

Baby Butternut

We are just pleased as punch with how the mulch has transformed the garden.  I am glad we took advantage of the few hours of sunlight to work outside.  It has been so rainy here with more to come.  Its what Spring is all about!

The Garden

The day has come.  Some plants are finally IN THE GROUND.  Such excitement around the homestead.  Now here, I must be completely honest.  The seedling project has not worked out well.  It makes me so sad that my time and energy has gone down in flames, but I’m not gonna sugar-coat it.  The seedlings did not fare well when taken out of their cushy garage dwelling.

I made an honest effort to put my zucchini plants (the ones whose stems hadn’t yet snapped, which was only 2, well, 2.5) but after a couple of Spring-time Kansas storms, those stems had also snapped.  Clearly I’m doing something wrong.  Oh boy this picture is sad.  Tips???  Please???

A Zucchini Corpse

And as I mentioned before, the seedlings were not doing well in the natural sunlight.  The tomatoes were brown and wilted and I just didn’t see them coming back to life.  So we did the next best thing.  We went to our favorite local, family owned farm (that just happened to beautifully do our wedding flower arrangments) Pendleton’s, and stocked up on vegetable plants.  I was fearing the worst as far as the money we’d be spending.  We had scouted out plant prices at the local big-box hardware store and were looking at spending $3-7 per plant.  And for as many plants as I wanted, this would have run the price up pretty fast.  But Pendleton’s really came through for us.  We got beautiful tomato and pepper (many varieties of each) plants for $0.99/plant.  That’s right, less money than I’d spend at the grocery store for 1 stupid bell pepper for a whole, big, beautiful plant!!

Tomato plant (Patio variety)

So although I made every effort to save money by growing my own plants from seedlings, in the end, we found another cost-saving measure.  Find a local nursery/farm/gardener and get some high quality plants for a more than reasonable price.

Tomatillos

We also visited another local nursery, Sunrise Garden Center, and purchased Okra, Eggplant, Cucumbers,Tomatillos and Banana Peppers, as well as some tomato stakes and bone/blood meal.

Okra

And I got the official word from Grandma, my family’s expert gardener (and MAN did that woman have a beautiful garden) – BLOOD MEAL = BUNNY REPELLENT.

Tomatoes, Mountain Fresh Variety

And last but not least, we planted three deck planters for the herbs.  Basil, Rosemary, Cilantro, Parsely, Peppermint and Thyme.

Herb Planters

The Rosemary and Basil Forrest

And then the rains came.  And they kept coming, with a vengance.  But my plants remained standing.  They are marvelous creatures!

The Morning Dew