Jack frost paid us a visit this morning. It’s very difficult to capture that in pictures, but close-up shots are kind of neat.

catnip

willow

maple

In April, 2010 we ordered two truck loads of compost from a company in Elk River, Minnesota. They helped the garden quite a bit. This fall, Chris decided to order three more truck loads (30 yards) before it snows, to give our garden an extra jump start next spring.

Puck checked it out. He approves. (This is him sitting in front of one truck load, 10 cubic yards).

Chris is putting in a new garden section, so this should help with that. We also cut out quite a bit of sod and top soil to prepare our current garden – and I put in a bunch of concrete block raised beds, so this black dirt will be nice to fill the rest of those in. It’s going to be a lot of work incorporating this, and hopefully the ground will stay free of snow for a couple more weeks so it will get done!

I added a tofu ricotta, cream sauce, and mushrooms. Topped with nutmeg and cinnamon. Chris wasn’t a huge fan, but I thought it was pretty good. Next time though… I think I’ll leave out the eggplant. Hah.

A few days of 100ºF heat is all it takes to turn asparagus into a giant, flowering bush!

This is our third season gardening here, so we haven’t harvested asparagus yet. Unfortunately, it is planted in a bad location; it was one of the first things we put in the yard and didn’t give much thought to where the garden would go before we planted it, so it is awkwardly right between the garden and the compost pile, and it gets walked over a lot.

I’ve read that asparagus is difficult to transplant, but I may try moving it to a better location.

A lawn care company left a flyer in our door yesterday. We are part of the 57% of families in our neighborhood who don’t use herbicides on their lawns.

I prefer watching gold finches eat dandelions to the noxious smell of weed killer. I think we’ll try making dandelion wine this year.

When temperatures are in the 60s for long enough, hundreds of tiny mantis will emerge from this egg case. They will seek out aphids and other tiny insects – and eat eachother if there are not enough to be found. They wait in stillness until their prey comes close enough, and with incredible speed catch and devour.

They have the ability to mimic leaves and ants in order to escape their predators.

I secured this egg case to one of our daisies in the garden, so it won’t blow away with the wind. I hope to catch them hatching.

I spend my days being a semi-nerd by profession.

In my spare time, I garden. And just to tie the two together, I make spreadsheets.

Here is what my garden looks like now:

And here is the sunflower planting schedule, so we are guaranteed to have flowers in bloom on September 10th:

I realize now that I am addicted to growing cole crops. I have 18 tomatoes, 16 peppers, 8 eggplants, and a variety of melon/zucchini seeds that I wanted to plant. I need a bigger garden!

Before the weekend, we still had 6″ of snow covering the ground. It’s amazing how fast things change this time of year! Of course, CBS says that we may see 3-5″ of white stuff again this week… but the season is definitely changing. Chris has found a lot of neat things sprouting in his garden already and has plans to put in potatoes soon. Actually, he may have been out there seeding lettuce and other cool crops this weekend.

My garden is finally cleared from snow, so I took some time to investigate.

Apparently we missed some onions. Last year we also found some onions we missed, and they produced some stunning flowers. Here’s our resident model showing off what happens if you don’t harvest your onions:

They are the long, green stems with pretty white flowers on top. Here’s a link to a close-up picture of the onion flowers. (He’s a 95-pound dog … those are some big onions!)

If you know me well, you know I’m not into kitschy items or nicknacks… but I have been looking for mushroom statues for the garden for a long time now. Specifically, red-capped mushrooms. Everything I’ve found is either really small or kind of ugly.

I had a gift certificate to Pier 1 Imports, which used to be one of my favorite stores. I spent nearly an hour there a few weeks ago trying to spend the gift certificate, and the only thing I could find was a mirror. (Which Chris thinks is ugly, hah).

Last weekend we went to Sawatdee for dinner and passed a Pier 1 store. We stopped in, and just about left without purchasing anything – when I spotted these:

They each stand about a foot tall – not as big as I had originally wanted, but a nice size. I’m not sure I’ll ever find exactly what I had in mind, but these finished off the gift certificate, and I think they’ll look great in the herb garden!

We took advantage of the nice 25ºF weather last weekend and brought Puck out for a lot of long walks. Apparently, my legs aren’t used to that kind of exercise yet, and I now have a stress fracture in my right leg. There isn’t much that can be done about it, except for staying off of it and walking lightly for 4 weeks. Fortunately I spend 10 hours at a desk every day anyway, so that shouldn’t be too hard.

It was a chilly 10 below when I woke up this morning, with wind chills well below that. Bitter cold, but a heat wave compared to the -27ºF air temps we had a few weeks ago. The forecast is suggesting that we may see 40 by the weekend though! Unfortunately, I won’t be able to enjoy it with this silly new leg injury.

I wanted to share a couple of summer photos from our garden two summers ago. It always warms me up to look at pictures of sunflowers. Enjoy!

And our random two-headed Skyscraper sunflower, which was kind of neat: