Hey guys! I'm back at it with my garden. I have been away and some things have come up, like WINTER! haha, but weather aside things have kept me from updating on my gardens.

So anyway, Can you guess what is in the above piture , the white out of focus thing. THATS right! it's a sunflower seed!

 My sunflowers are reaching the end of their days. And what a mighty time they have given me. From just tiny seeds to mamoth towers of leaves and yellow peddels. So nice to look at , and fun to watch grow. But alas all good things must end. My sunflowers are on their last legs and are drooping to and dropping seeds! However this is a good sign for me.

Once you get a majority of the flower to have mature seeds it is time to harvest. If you look at the pic to the left you can see all the lines of white leading to the center. As well as the darker spots, those being the places where seeds have fallen out. This is good and bad. Because it means I will have larger seeds, but less of them.

Then the time comes to sever the head of the flower! And I have just the tool! That is correct, a hand saw!

Although my job at cutting went well I only got about 1/6 of the way through before the weight of the sunflower head broke the steam and it just fell. Lucky I caught it, because the process of drying it out is what is next to come!

I am drying my sunflower head upside down, so all the fancy sap and juices drain all the way into the seeds. this means that it will take longer to dry , but will also be more tasty! In just about 2 weeks time I should have my own home made sunflower seeds to munch on!

OK! Thank you for being a reader of my blog. And come back soon!

What Is and Heirloom Tomato?

 Hey everbody, I know I have been away for some time, but I'm Back! I have had a few things going on, like a mix of school starting, my phone dying, my boss leaving so I had to run the shop, and a few other things. But enough with my excuses , I'm here to show off the stuff growing from my garden!

First, Let me define a word for you that I will be using . Heirloom: (in the context I'm using it) A tomato that is the same since or before the 1940's . So if you took one of these tomatos and time traveled back to the 1940s and compared it to one from then it would be almost the exact same thing! This is only important because some people have created these varieties for their taste , size and appearance, and have kept them pure, so they are the classics, where as the new genetically altered stuff nowdays might grow better but they typically dont have the same character ore appeal.

Now on to what I have been doing!

Here we see a Tomato, the pic above being one week prior to the picture to the left. As you can see this tomato is not a normal tomato, and if you care to guess at the name then do so now before scrolling down.  It is of the Heirloom variety

 That's right! It's a Black Krim! These babies are so good! and the strange thing is they almost always split. If you look at the above photo you see the split in the tomato, that is usually from over watering when the tomatoes is fully grown. Over waterting forces the plant to drink more water and it "pops" the tomatoes on the plant, but this variety is weird in that it pops all on its own.

Next up is a Non Heirloom Variety, and again I will show you the progression of the ripeness of the tomato. As you can see it's typical in ripening, starting green and gradually working it's way down to bright red!

 Well now, if you would like to guess at the name I'll give you a hint , the name does not really describe the size of the tomatoes shown, however the color is a better way of describing it.

This one is ripe an ready to be picked!

That's right! You guessed it, it's a Watermelon Beefsteak Tomato!  Now look again at the wonderful color scheme, can you see the cool watermelon like coloring! So cool. Although it does not taste like a watermelon, it was still great on my turkey sandwich!

Then to end on a bright note, my sunflowers are doing wonderfully! They are however more droopy then I would like, probably a lack of nitrogen, but That's just fine. They are doing what I wanted them to , attract the bees for my tomatoes!

Ok guys Thanks again for reading, and putting up with my absence, My next blog will cover two more tomatoes I have been growing! So come back again soon!

I'm growing things I can eat!

Sorry I have not been blogging too much recently, but With school and finals in the summer its been kinda crazy. But I'm making a come back!
As time goes on the garden starts to produce food. This makes me happy! The food grown from the garden generally tastes better then stuff from the store, and it is cheaper too! And thus far I have a small harvest of stuff other then chard!
I have me some Green Beans! they have a wonderful snap to them when bitten!
Then I have a a bunch of cucumbers, all the right size for pickling! But That is for another day.

Then You can see the green beans have out grown the cage, and actually toppled the cage over . Now it's leaning on the cucumber cage. Silly plants! I gotta get some wooden stakes to anchor it down!
Then I have a bunch of blueberries growing! They are so sweet! yummy.

Then something that is taking longer then I had hoped it would. The tomato plants! they are doing well, but still smaller then I had hoped, and not producing tomatoes yet. There are about 20 on all four of the plants, but they are still very small and green. I'm thinking I got too late of a start with these guys.

But here is all that I got . from last week! A WHOLE BUNCH of oregano, 4 crook neck squash (the yellow things) , 5 Cucumbers, about 15 green beans, and a small handful of blueberries! 

The blueberries were my favorite of the whole harvest. Mostly because they are tasty, small and easy to eat. No prep work, and they are super healthy for you too! I think the soil PH is still too high , gotta lower it for the blueberries to really love the soil and produce!

 But this is about all the tomatoes I have grown. There are a few more just like this one, but they are all still green, and rather small. They could easily fit in a 1 Cup Measuring cup. still too small, but gotta go with what you got!

Then as usual, there is a butt load of chard as well, I did not include this in the main pic up above because it would dominate the picture. Oh and say hello to KUNKUN ! so cute!







OK! thanks for reading about my garden! come back soon ! I'll have more fruits of my labor to show off!

Pretty good start for Chard

Who knows what Chard is? Well, I'll tell you then. It's a leafy plant in the lettuce family. It is more closely related to beets though. It is simply a bunch of leaves growing from a base of roots. Then you hack them off and eat them when they are about as big as the picture on the right.
They go great chopped up in a salad, or if you want you can stir fry it with bacon! yummy!

 Now dumb Me I did not get a close up of what chard looks like before you cut it. Only the single leaf up above. But each individual stem you see there was a full fledged chard leaf.

This is another view of what it looks like when you harvest it. The nice thing about chard is that you can cut it back and within about 1 week it will be ready to harvest again. The first harvest takes about 3 weeks to get going, but once it has a root system in place it just goes like mad!

 The harvest from this was a 18 Gallon Garbage bag full.  When I picked it up I would say it weighed roughly 15 pounds? Now that is a bunch of chard. The daft part of this was that I only took about 60% of what was growing. The other half will need to be picked soon. Then soon after that the stuff I trimmed back will need more trimming!

 A whole bag of that stuff... no idea what to do with it all... any suggestions?

To end on an even happier note, I found a volunteer Tomato plant. It is a cherry tomato and it is growing in one of the cracks in the cement. HAHA, crazy little buggers. It is not too big yet, but It's getting there!

Here is a point of reference for you folk out there, KunKun . oh, and if you look just below the tomato plant and to the left of my doggy is a snail. gross. LOL.

OK! thanks all for the reads! come back soon and I wont let you down!