Green Thumb (or just lucky?)

Yesterday and today there hasn’t been much activity. We are waiting on an inspection next Thursday, so thinks won’t pick up again for a few days. We will have some more fill brought in for the back of the house on Monday.

With a bit of down time we have been spending more time over at our other property, tending to our garden, fruit trees and other plants.  We are just amazed at our garden. We thought planting it was almost a waste of time as we would be gone for a month, back for a few days and then gone again for two weeks. We figured it would be taken over by weeds and without TLC, lost of the plants might not do well.  All I can say is, the garden is doing fantastic! Love to think we have some kind of miraculous green thumb, but I’m sure it more likely just good luck on our part.  I’m going to share some photos so you can see for yourself.

Look at the height of the potato plants, neither of us has seen them grow so tall before. Hope they actually produce potatoes under all that foilage.

The corn has also grown so big and so quickly. I think we might get more than we can eat!

We planted a bunch of strawberry plants (we’ll miss our ones from Alberta, they produced lots of delicious berries each year).  At the other end of the bed I’m going to try and find some dwarf blueberry plants for next year.

The monster plant at the back is an indigo cherry tomato plant, it is huge! The tomatoes are dark purple and start to turn red when they are ripe. In front is a nice Roma tomato plant. Beside that is our green pepper, green onions and a yellow zuchinni. The only thing that didn’t do well was the garlic we planted. Next year we will do better with that.

Here are the peas, 3 kinds, and two kinds of beets. The carrots are just starting to come up.

Here is the green beans, I’ve just planted another row and will plant more in a couple weeks. In front is spinach and three types of lettuce.

I also planted some flowers, gladiolus, cana lily and dinnerplate dahlias.

I took a real chance and planted some pumpkin (not for carving but for making pies), watermelon and cantelope. Normally these should all be started inside early and then transplated, but I planted them from seed and am experimenting to see if we can actually get anything before the end of the season. They are pretty small still, but we have some hot weather coming up and I think they might like that.

Also, we have more grapes this year on our grape plants than last, so we are excited about that.

And although we didn’t grow these, we sure love to pick them and eat them. We picked 3/4 of a gallon of saskatoon berries the other night and have been enjoying them on icecream, in pancakes and in a pie shortly. Yum!!! we plan to pick more to while we can.

Last but not least, Aron thought I should mention that we had our first big delivery of building materials the other day. They are sitting all tarped up right now, waiting for next week.

Aron also wanted me to mention a couple of incidents that happened last week and he says we should ‘keep it real’ on the blog and not make it look like everything is going perfect all the time. Our property is located adjacent to a former rail line, now called Rails to Trails, owned by the gov’t and used for hiking, biking, etc. Our road has to cross the Rails to Trails and so with all the activity last week, one lady came down to yell about it, especially as one worker had parked their vehicle off to the side and she was having none of it. She said she would report us. Then a day or two later a guy came down our road yelling something and taking photos of the construction. There was yelling back and forth between him and the workers ( not sure what was all said), but he claimed we didn’t have a permit to do this and he was off to report us. The end result of all this was that it did upset me and Aron a bit, not knowing if anything would result. Our contractor wasn’t really worried, but we are the newbies here and always waiting for something to ‘go wrong’. We did end up with two site visits, on regarding worker safety and the other regarding the safety of the Rails to Trails. In the end, the visit were quick and nothing really came out of them except we had to post caution signs on the trail during our construction, which we have done. Whew!