August 2012
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July 2012
10 posts
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Surprise! More Corn!
Jill: Our garden has three stalks of corn—and we thought we’d only be getting a cob out of each of them, because that’s how many have been growing up until today. Today we found a one definite and few new potential cobs! :D
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Cabbage Stir Fry!
Jill:
Earlier I mentioned not knowing what to do with Claire’s and my napa cabbage, and after a little Googling, I discovered that the white stalks can be used in Chinese style stir fry. (We added some carrots from the high school garden, which we’d swung by to water earlier in the day, so that’s what the orange is!)
We added two different stir fry sauces, and threw in some...
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June 2012
15 posts
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Peas and Green Beans!
Jill: Claire’s and my mom was going to prepare some peas and green beans for dinner, both of which we’ve been growing in our garden. Since we had some ready to pick, we prepared and cooked our own!
As small a harvest it was, it was cool to see that we’d grown peas and green beans that looked and tasted just as good as grocery-bought!
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Technology Advances! (Not really, but still!)
Claire and Jill:
Today our dad hooked up the hose near the garden. At last, we won’t have to carry two watering cans’ worth of water to our thirsty plants!
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WatchJean Claude in his larva days, munching on some carrot leaves. (Sorry about the low quality!)
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Random Pumpkin
A pumpkin plant has popped up among our peas! It’s probably a seed from the pumpkins we were growing there last year. It hasn’t gotten to be a problem yet; the peas are flourishing. So for the time being we’re just going to keep on watering, and see if we get any pumpkins! (We do have six or seven little pumpkins growing in pots on the deck, but they haven’t really taken...
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Garden Harvest!
Claire and Jill:
Since the family’s eating salad tonight, we finally got to harvest some of our lettuce and the rest of our radishes!
To explain why some of the radishes are so small, the plants started bolting, meaning they were directing all their growth towards making a seed stalk, not growing bigger radishes.
Washing everything was a little tiring, especially when, since the...
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“The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.”
– Our garden club supervisor likes to use this quote, because we would tend to the garden every day.
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Summer Gardening
Jill:
Claire and I, with the help of our mom, expanded our garden into three beds from one bed. When we’d set everything up and stepped back to look at it, Mom said, “Oh, you have to plant things right now, it looks like we buried three bodies!” The dimensions were rather unfortunately similar to a grave… but it looks much better with the lettuce, peas, beans, etc.
Our...
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May 2012
22 posts
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Empty Nesters!
Claire and I stopped by the garden today to check on the killdeer family, only to find the nest deserted! We had last checked in on them on Friday, and it’s possible that all three eggs hatched on Saturday (we found an eggshell fragment), but it surprised us that they did not seem to be near the garden.
I wonder if the family was tired of us hanging around and decided to get the heck out of there...
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Cabbage Worms Strike Again!
This is one of the Napa cabbages at the high school garden. In our (Claire and Jill) personal garden, our cabbages have been getting holes in their leaves and staying relatively small. Upon inspection today, we found they had some big caterpillars on them! However, these caterpillars aren’t cabbage worms—we dealt with them last year on our brocolli, and these seem to be another...
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WatchMama and Papa Killdeer
*We know they are nervous; this is somewhat of an everyday thing, considering their living space is our gardening space. This fear of us began to subside earlier, but after the disappearance of one of their eggs, they began to become much more protective of their babies. We do not antagonize them or try to run them off, and that is the best we can do in this shared garden.
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First Day of Summer Vacation
Claire and I (Jill) checked on the garden today—mostly to take pictures and to check on Mama Killdeer.
While nervous as usual, Mama Killdeer has been doing well lately. She and Papa haven’t lost any more eggs, so it looks as though we’ll have three baby killdeer pretty soon. The mulch around the nest has been gathered by both Mama and Papa, and a little while ago we found a...
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School's (Almost) Out!
Summer break starts tomorrow, but many of the plants in our garden are just starting to bear fruit! Our strawberries have been producing for two weeks, and we’ve harvested some lettuce, but everything else is still growing steadily! The weekend must have been a bit too hot for some of our outdoor plants—our strawberry bed looked deflated, and our different-leaf clover patch was downright crispy!...
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
– Margaret Atwood (via timeywimeyyardfarmer)
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The Killdeer Family
On one of the first days of May, Sarah, Claire, and I (Jill), were checking out a new plant that we presumed one of the Ag classes had put out, when Sarah cried out, “What’s that?!” We all looked to see what it was, and Claire responded, “There’s a killdeer nesting in our spinach!” So it was! A strange little hollowed out area we’d seen in one of our...
