My spring garden

Knowing full well that this is probably my last full growing season in the US, I wanted to get a good head start.  My veggies patch is not huge, about 3x6 foot.  But it is very practical.

Pinterest is my friend when it comes to gardening.  Heck, Pinterest is my friend when it come to most things!  I spotted this when I was planning my garden, so borrowed it 

Using this seed starting chart enabled me to plan what and when I was going to plant.  As you can see, I have adapted it of myself.  I actually started planting in January in milk jugs using this method. It worked for most seedlings, but damp rot got to a few varieties.

Despite this, I still planted some seeds in the ground, peas and sugar snaps, as these prefer cool weather.  This was in late january.  Typically it snowed in february, but I was able to protect them using plastic bottles.  

Thats all i can say about the planning really!  I love gardening, and can't wait to have my own garden so I can do with it what I want.  I would like it, that when we got back to the UK, I was able to grow a lot more of our own food, but we will have to wait and see on that one!

So this is what my veggie patch looks like this week.  I have a lot of strawberry plants.  I bought these last year, but was a little slow to get these in the ground.  Consequently, they did not fruit, but sent off loads of runners.

I now have strawberry plants at both ends of my veggie patch.  Most plants have had flowers on them.

I am just waiting on the sun now to turn them red.  These plants should keep Isaac in strawberries for about a week (he is the only one who eats them, and has them everyday!)

This is a row of carrots and radishes.  I probably should thin the carrots, but am loath to do so.  Our soil is full of clay after about 6 inches in depth, so I do not hold much hope for them.  I have grown radishes this year.  They are so quick and easy, and have been a wonderful addition to salads and sandwiches.  I will be planting more of these, later in the year.

I picked up this long pot from Big Lots for $6.50.  Bargain!  They are usually one of the cheapest places for gardening stuff.  In this pot is a pepper plant, 2 marigolds and a tomato plant.  I purchased these from the local high school, Hillcrest High.  They run an agricultural  program, and every year the students put on a plant sale.  Some nice kids, and cheap plants.  Well worth going to if you are in the area.

Two of the plants that grew successfully from seed in the milk jugs were cucumber and zucchini (courgette).  They are similar plants, I think they belong to the same family.  I have grown cucumbers with moderate success before, same with zucchini, though not in this country.  I have planted them either side of my trellis, with additional plants in pots for now.  If any one wants the plants in pots let me know.  One thing though, I am not sure which veggie is which, so it would be pot luck.....

Below is some sugar snap peas I planted in a milk jug.  These thrived before I transferred them to the pot.  They don't like being transferred, so I initially planted the seeds in toilet rolls in the soil, and kept all the soil together when I transferred them.  It worked, and they have been harvested already.  You can also see some chives in the photo.  This is from a plant I bought at Walmart from their vegetable section.  I split the pot, so I now have 2 plants to take from.  Great in salads, or egg dishes.  Yes, more strawberries in the pot behind!  In the bottom corner is my lettuce patch.  I have a foot square covered in lettuce.  I regularly take from this for lunch and dinner.  It probably has about a month before it bolts and becomes too bitter.  I will replace it with tomato plants from the milk jugs.

Below are more plants from Hillcrest High School, a sage and oregano plant.  Not herbs I have tried before, so am intrigued to see how they do.

Below are my pots.  They it behind the veggies patch.  I have a pepper plant at the back in the orange pot.  This has spinach and arugula plants around it, which are just starting to poke their heads up.  Strawberry in the red pot.  This is one I moved from the veggie patch in January.  no flowers = no fruit so far.  It initially had radishes planted around it, but i think the snow got them.  Blue pot is my mint plant. Again, purchased from a supermarket, pot split and replanted in to 2 pots.  Hopefully I now have enough mint to keep me in mojitos all summer long....  The red pot at the front with the tiny seedlings are chili plants.  These are seeds taken from last years harvest.  I am pleased they have sprouted, will wait to see if they fruit.....

This is another sweet pepper plant, from Walmart.  I have not had great success with these.  only green peppers really.  I need to discover the secret to getting big, coloured peppers.  These are a staple in our house, and if I could grow them successfully, they would save me a fortune!  In the back ground you can see the peas and beans

I may have gone slightly overboard with these.  I reckon I have about 20 plants all in the ground.  They are thriving.  And going slightly crazy!  But they do have a fairly short season here, as they don't like the heat.  I reckon they will stop producing around the end of June.  That is where succession planting will come in.  I will most likely put some radishes/carrots/parsnips there once they are done, ready for a fall harvest.  

But for now they are producing like crazy.  I did my first proper harvest last night.  I will be eating these for a week!  If anyone local would like some, let me know!

Oliver wanted to get in on the action this year.  Was I giving up valuable space in my garden?  Heck, NO!  So he did his own plan, looked at the seed packets, and decided what he would plant.  I picked him up a storage box from K-Mart, on sale (in fact I got 2, he has more planting to do this weekend!).  He is growing lettuce, broccoli, spring onions peas and sunflowers. 

His is also going well.  We enjoy gardening, and knowing we can provide some food for ourselves makes it all the more sweeter. 

General update/ photo drop

Oh my gosh, how long has it been since I did one of these?!?!  

About 6 weeks. I seem to be writing more on topics than general ramblings.  Better change that quick smart.  Try and keep up, while I bombard you with photos of our lives.  I apologize if I repeat myself in any way shape or form.

So a couple weekends ago we went to Lake Conastee Nature Park.  We have been to Conastee Park before, they have loads of play equipment and plenty of baseball pitches.  This is the other side of the Lake.  It is more of a bird watching / nature reserve place.  It was a beautiful day, and we had lots of fun walking / running on the paths.  They form part of the Swamp Rabbit Trail, which they are constantly updating and maintaining here in Greenville.

This is an adorable picture of two of my favorite people. They both look so happy here.  Notice the garden furniture is out?  It is finally getting warm here.  Although it is rainy today, it is still 76 degrees......

We recently took a trip to Helen in Georgia.  You can read more about that here.

Th boys had a great time hunting for eggs on Easter Sunday.  Even if they were in their pajamas still

Sebastian was more inclined to eat what he found straight away, rather than hunt for more.....

I have been doing a shed load of baking.  We have stopped buying bread, as it just wasn't very nice.  I am now making a loaf a day to keep up with what we all eat.  At least this way we know the majority of what goes into our food.

I am also making a batch of about 40 cookies each week.  I found an awesome recipe on the choc chip pack from Costco.  A slight tweak on the time and temperature, and they make awesome snacks.  Not sure I have bought any packs of cookies or biscuits for about 6 weeks.  I am also making my own rice crispie treats, with decorations, which the boys love.  Next up is fruit jelly snacks.  I have tried one recipe, but they end up as jelly blocks, rather that gummy sweets.  Again, a slight tweak on the ingredients will probably do it, but we have to eat what we have first!

Isaacs behavior had been better for 6 weeks.  Until yesterday.  Funny, he started eating a certain snack type yogurt over the weekend, after not having it for six weeks.  We introduce it, and boom, email home about behavior.  Think we will be knocking them on the head for good.

Do you like my painting?  I went out on a Friday night with some ladies form a local Facebook group to Corks and Colours at Southern Galleries in Simpsonville.  It was a bring your own bottle painting evening.  It was great. I am really pleased with my picture!

Cocktail Friday is still going strong.  Don't forget to check back here every friday to see what concoctions we have been drinking recently!

This is a screen shot of a photo I pasted on Instagram.  See those likes???  They are all Monster Jam drivers!!!!!  If only they could know how truly OBSESSED Sebastian is with monster jam. We have a few recorded, and that is all he wants to watch.  He plays with the monster trucks when he is not watching them.  He thinks he is a monster truck and uses the sofa as his course.... 

This is my friend Amber.  She is another Zumba instructor.  We recently got together and choreographed 'Chica Practica'.  You can check it out here on her YouTube Chanel.

Check out the flower on my strawberry plant!  I got these in the ground too late last year to fruit, though they did send off tones of runners.  I have so many flowers this year it is ridiculous.  There are load of little strawberries coming along.  Yaaaaayyyyyy!!!  Think I will do a full post on my veggies patch soon, it is certainly coming along.

And in case you missed it, Oliver had the titanium plates laced in his ear recently.  You can read more about it here.

I did my Zumba Gold training this weekend.  It was awesome.  Ali the trainer was really good, I had a lot of fun, and learnt a few more rhythms.  

                                          

I am so enjoying my Zumba at the moment, and am looking out for a subbing opportunity very soon.  I am leading a song at a Zumbathon this weekend.  It is a charity event for the Make a Wish SC, so if you are in the area, please come along

Thats all for now! 

My garden

I want to take a bit of time to talk about my garden.  Those who know me well, will know I love to grow stuff.  I am not particularly green fingered, so I don't tend to grow things to look pretty.  I grow vegetables, fruits and the occasional flower.

Back in the UK, I would grow tomatoes, peppers, chilies and strawberries.  One year I grew enough tomatoes to make sauce for chili, spaghetti Bolognese, lasagne etc.  It lasted for 3 months.  I have also been known to grow mangoes and avocado from stones in fruit I have bought in the supermarket.  These went quite well, and I had to give them to family and friends when I left.  I would love to know how they are getting on.  I never had an area laid out for a veggie patch, I just used the flower beds.

When we moved here, I loved the fact the house has a vegetable patch.  The owners had some success growing things, but the previous tenants did not.  As we moved in in October, I have had plenty of time to plan what I wanted to do.  Pinterest has been very helpful in this.  I got inspiration and tips here, here, here and here.   If you want to check out my gardening board on Pinterest it can be found here. 

So I started in february.  Isaac and I took a trip to Big Lots, just to be nosy, and see what they had.  We came away with strawberry seeds, chili pepper greenhouse, and some bulbs or flowers.  As time went on I purchased cucumber, mint, lavender, cat nip, rosemary, thyme, basil and sunflower seeds.  I also collected seeds from the copious amount of peppers we get through a week.  I planted the chili peppers, strawberry, tomato, cucumber and pepper seeds in containers inside at the end of february, in the hope of getting them outside at the end of April.

About a month later, I planted the rest of the seeds.  By now, my cucumbers had come up, and died.  Tomatoes did well, as did the chili.  The peppers seemed to be fairing well too.  I planted more cucumbers, some of these came up.  

I started putting things into the garden around March.  Most of the things I put in the veggie patch had some broken egg shells go in the holes before the plants did, in the hope it would help nourish them in the clay soil we have 

And the results.......

My veggie patch

About 3 of my cucumber plants survived the move to the garden, though none have done well enough to give any fruit.  I purchased some cucumber plants from Isaacs school.  These are doing well.  One has a couple of fruit on in.  

The other two appear to be ball cucumbers

This is the only mint that grew from the many seeds I planted.  I did invest in a bigger plant from a local garden centre.  I need mint for the jugs of mojito's I make 

This is my herb pot, it has basil, rosemary and thyme.  The seeds I planted did nothing, so I invested in these from the same garden centre.  Perfect herbs for cooking.

My chili plants have done very well.  I have 5 plants in the ground, 3 in a pot, and have given one away.  They are not quite ripe yet, but there are plenty of them.  I am looking forward to using these in cooking

My tomato plants have about 10 fruit on them.  Because of all the rain we have had, they have got very large.  We just need some sun now.....

Our grass is looked after by Trugreen.  There was a lot of weeds in there, so much so that the housing association sent our land lord a snotty letter basically saying we had to get the front sorted.  Funnily enough, he got the letter about 2 days after we employed Trugreen to take care of our lawn.

When Paul cut the back garden on Friday, he cut a race track into it.   The track also has a NASCAR circuit contained inside it.  

Our boys love racing cars.