garden update

 If you have been sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for another garden update post, this is for you, bestie.  <3

Since my only other garden post this year at the beginning of July, the tomatos grew nicely.  This area is all cherry tomato plants, and then we have one roma tomato plant in a pot.  We have been very lucky and had a ton of cherry tomatos this year!  Probably our best tomato crop ever.

The potatos did ok..... I sort of expected more.  I think we need to add more dirt to this bed next year and make it deeper.  I forgot to weigh the tater haul, but we probably made our money back in what we paid for the bag of organic seed potatots that we planted.

Potatos above, potato plants before the kids ripped them up below.

The Mister planted some sweet peas for me.  When I was a kid my mom always planted a ton of these in our backyard, and when I was in grades 3 and 4 she would cut little bouquets for me to take to my teachers.  I'm sure that made me look like a sucky kid, but whatever!  Sweet peas make me think of my mom.

Here's what we harvested that day.  Lets see, what else  - the rhubarb went hard early in the season and then dramatically died off.  I know rhubarb is an early harvest, but our evil plant usually keeps giving and giving much longer than this year. I'm sure the heat and smoke did it no favors.  The blueberry plant only ever produced a couple of handfuls of berries, but it is new, so maybe that was to be expected.  The kale did not grow.  The zucchini did not grow.  We do have some pepper plants in a planter box with small peppers on them, maybe as long as your thumb?  I wanted to give them more time to grow, but it's getting cold at night, so we might pick them soon.  The lettuce bolted early.  We did get 2 small cucumbers that were pretty tasty.  The herbs were pretty stunted.  I'm sure it's mostly due to the terrible heat and fires we had this summer, but I think we will have to add some new dirt and fertilizer next year to try to boost things.  Maybe this winter I will become obsessed with garden tik toks to fill my time.

stuff and garden update

 Here we are, halfway through 2021, fresh out of the school year and a week long terrible heat wave.  We've jumped right into fire season now; the village of Lytton was destroyed by fire this week and last night there was an evacuation here in town, after a thunderstorm rolled in and started quite a few fires by lightening.

We had a strike somewhere behind our house last night and the noise and vibration through the house was very scary.  The storm kept us up half the night and today I will be making a list of things we should grab if we have to be evacuated this fire season.

I did a quick search and found 3 Go Fund Me pages to help people from Lytton - 

 Love For Lytton

Helping Our Friends In Lytton 

Help For The Victims Of The Lytton Wildfire 

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I won't judge anyone on how they spent yesterday, but this year we did not celebrate Canada Day.  We did talk about ongoing residential school news with the kids, watched some videos about the schools as well as  some videos of walks and demonstrations that happened yesterday.  I MAY have left a few comments on the social media of some politicians and public figures that decided they wanted to show everyone how ignorant they are, but let's not go down that road right now.

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In my last post I mentioned an online course on Indigenous Canada from Coursera.  I am in week 8 of the course, and am so glad I'm doing this.  The course is free, should you be interested.

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 I don't much positive to say, this last while has been rough.  Let's end with a garden update, shall we?

Our raspberry patch is sparser than in prior years.  I think it needs some new soil and fertilizer in there, but for this year we're just letting it do what it wants.

The Mister planted a few peas in these 2 planters next to the tomato plant planter.  They have not enjoyed the up and down temperatures of the year so far.

Our garden this year became mostly potatos and tomatos - we bought some veg plants from a fundraiser and they weren't the best looking plants I've ever seen.  We planted them in the ground the week before the May long weekend, and bam - we got a late frost that killed a bunch of them.  We weren't happy with the amount of money that we'd already spent so we got a bag of seed potatos and more tomatos - The Mister's favorite crop.  We have one lone lettuce and a few cucumber plants that I doubt will do anything.

The Mister bought me a blueberry bush this year, and it's sitting next to a couple of zucchini plants in this section.  The kids discovered the blueberry bush has some blueberries and so now it's a full time job keeping them away from the bush to let the (very small) handful of berries have a chance to ripen.

Rhubarb, oregano, some other herbs.

My mint.

Our garden is absolutely full of butterflies this year!  I haven't seen this many butterflies in years.  They are so beautiful.  The Mister took this lovely photo yesterday.