I thought that this beauty deserved its own post!

This is, I think, the best-looking cucumber I’ve ever had so far gardening on my balcony.  I cut it on Sunday:

I hope it’s as yummy as it looks!

The garden is completely exploding with foliage.  

I can’t believe how big the tomato plants are (righthand side of the above photo)– especially considering I was so worried about them surviving when I first transplanted them this spring! 

What is puzzling to me (though not unwelcome!) is that the peas have started producing again!  

At the beginning of the month, the plants were looking like they were about done… kinda dry and yellowy, no more new blossoms.  Then in the midst of the heat we’ve been having here in the midwest, they’ve started to produce more blossoms and pods!  On Sunday, I picked 8 pods! Crazy.  I thought peas were supposed to die off when it started getting hot outside.  

All of the tomato plants have baby tomatoes starting on them:

Yellow Pear

Early Girl

Tiny Tim

Something that is probably obvious, but I have found very interesting, is how different the leaves look on the different varieties of tomato plants.  We only had Early Girl tomatoes last year, and the leaves looked like “typical” tomato leaves (whatever that means!).  The Tiny Tim has rounded, blunter leaves that are, of course, much tinier than the full-sized plants.  Yes, I’ll say it again, I am constantly amazed at how miniaturized the plant is!  You’ll just have to come over and see it to appreciate it.  The Yellow Pear leaves are much more feathery than the Early Girl leaves.  I’ll have to notice in the future how the shape of the tomato fruit is related to the shape of the leaves of its plant.  

Last, but certainly not least, the strawberries are still producing.  They’ve been flowering a lot more, which is great!  

I haven’t even had to do much hand-pollinating to get them to fruit.  And thankfully, as I think I’ve mentioned before, the fruit is much sweeter and tastier this round.  

I’ll mention the cucumbers in a future post!

I’m thankful that we got to use our master-bathroom shower this morning for the first time since the glass doors broke! It’s not a huge thing to have to use the other bathroom, but it’s awfully nice to have our own bathroom again. It’s been about 2 months with the bathtub looking approximately like this, because it took more than a month for the special-order doors to come in (brass is not a popular bathroom finish these days, apparently), and then another couple weeks for the correct hardware to arrive… Then Husband was very busy at work, so he didn’t get to work on installing the doors until Independence Day, and then the caulk had to dry. It was purely my laziness that kept us from using the bathroom a few days after that– there were still some shards of glass and some grit/dust from Husband’s drilling to clean up, and I finally cleaned it last night. What a luxury to have our master bathroom back in order

On a much deeper note, I’m also thankful for the encouragement I’ve found in reading the book of Isaiah recently. Sometimes when I read through the books that talk about the sin and consequent fall of Israel and Judah (I am reading through a chronologically arranged Bible right now, so the Kings and Chronicles are interspersed with Isaiah) I get so depressed and discouraged. Why didn’t the people repent? Wasn’t it pretty clear that they were disobeying God? Why when they repent don’t they keep it up? Why hasn’t anything changed, even in the present day? So it’s hard for me to read those books. The first ~2/3 of Isaiah is pretty condemning stuff, with the last third being more hopeful. But this time I started noticing that there’s a lot of little bits of hope interspersed even in the first 2/3.  God always is willing to forgive when we repent.  Thank you, Lord!

I am so blessed to have a husband who is an excellent cook.  Tonight he made us a wonderful recipe that he slightly modified from a Taste of Home’s Prize Winning Recipes book (2006) my mom gave us.  The original recipe calls for basil, but alas, we decided not to grow basil in our garden this year.  After a small wild-goose chase for a basil plant this afternoon (all sold out, no surprise this late in the season), we decided that parsley would be a good substitute.  Next year, we’ll definitely grow a basil plant or two

Chicken in Parsley Cream

1/4 c. milk

1/4 c. dry, plain bread crumbs

4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (4 oz. each)

3 Tbsp butter

1/2 c. chicken broth

1 c. heavy whipping cream

1 jar (4 oz.) sliced pimentos, drained

1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese

1/4 c. minced fresh parsley (original recipe calls for basil here)

freshly ground black pepper.

Dip chicken in milk, then dredge in crumbs.

In a skillet over medium-high heat, cook chicken in butter until both sides are golden brown and juices run clear.  Remove and keep warm.

In the same pan, add broth and bring to a boil; stir to loosen browned bits.  Stir in cream and pimentos; boil and stir for about 1 minute.  Reduce heat and add Parmesan cheese, parsley, and pepper.  Cook and stir until heated through.  Pour over chicken to serve.

We served the chicken over macaroni pasta (a nice spinach fettuccini would have been nice but we didn’t have any on hand).  YUM.  Thanks, Husband for a lovely supper.

Let me just say, I love cucumber.  So I was pretty excited on Friday when we had a cucumber big enough to cut and eat on our salads at dinner.  It was pretty short, but I didn’t want to let it get much fatter.  

We also had a strawberry!!  This one was about twice as big (at least) as the first round and actually tasted sweet and yummy!  I think a bird had pecked at it a little bit, but we cut that part out and enjoyed the rest.  

I’m thankful for beautiful weather outside (a bit hot sometimes, but beautiful nonetheless)

I’m thankful for the continuing motivation to work out 

I’m thankful for tomatoes and cucumbers and new strawberries growing in my garden

I’m thankful for lightning-fast (in the refereed-journal world) comments from the referee on my paper

I’m thankful for the support my husband, family, and friends give me, and for their faithful prayers, especially as I struggle with my research

I’m thankful that J&C got their car running again after the episode with the “puddle”

I’m thankful for a weekend coming!

I have recently discovered the website for BurdaStyle, a pattern company. On their website (www.burdastyle.com), they even offer some free patterns that you can print out on 8.5″ x 11″ paper, glue together by the edges, and cut out! Score!! I was pretty excited about this, since patterns can sometimes be kind of pricey. Many of the patterns are by Burda, but quite a few have been posted by really talented registered users who have designed their own items. Plus, any registered user can post photos of their finished item right with the pattern, so you can see how well it works. (I have found the key to ensuring a satisfactory product at the end is to see a real-life version of the object, not just a designer’s sketch!) There are loads more cool things about this site that I haven’t even begun to explore….

So, friend of mine from church works at a local furniture store and has access to the discontinued upholstery swatches that would otherwise be tossed. She had offered to bring me some fabrics if I wanted them, and I was going to ask her when I saw her last Sunday. But she beat me to the punch! She brought me a bag of goodies– a nice pile of fabric swatches! I was *so* excited. I of course had found a pattern for a cute handbag on the BurdaStyle website and had grand plans for these swatches!

I finished my bag yesterday. It would have been finished on Thursday night, had I not broken a sewing machine needle sewing through about 8 thicknesses of upholstery fabric (I should have known better! I bought some leather needles to sew through the thick parts now) I am hoping to use more swatches to make more of these bags in the future– my mom has already requested one– without even seeing this one finished

It takes about 7 12″ x 24″ swatches to make the whole thing out of upholstery fabric… though in the future I may use some sort of muslin or cotton for the lining.

I’ve been jealous recently of all my friends with gardens who have had tomato blooms and little green tomatoes starting.  Well, finally we have some too!  I noticed the first tomato flowers on July 1:

I am very *very* excited at the prospect of fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes!  Ahhh and tomato-and-mozzarella salad!! I know it has a fancy Italian name, but I just call it yummy.

The Tiny Tim even has a little flower blooming!  It’s pretty unbelievable how tiny that plant actually is– it’s so cute!!

And I found an unlikely pollinator in a cucumber flower that morning, too!

This little spider was there even later that afternoon when I watered the garden after work.  He didn’t like the water so much, and when he crawled out of the flower, I realized he was a lot bigger than I had thought!

(Our balcony is basically overrun by spiders.  I don’t mind them as long as they don’t try and come inside, and as long as they don’t try to crawl on me!!  We must get plenty of little insects– though no bees that I’ve ever seen– to keep the spiders happy and coming back for more!)

I am thankful for the marvelous freedoms that we are blessed to have in this country. I am thankful for those who have fought to defend these freedoms.

Happy Independence Day!

or, “A brief photo tutorial on hand-pollinating cucumbers.”

A bit of introduction:

Last year, I was having problems with getting cucumbers to grow. I’d see the flowers, I’d see the baby cucumbers (which I later learned were female flowers, more about that below), and then the baby cucumbers would shrivel. I posted about it in the “Shriveling cucumbers” post, which has consistently been the top-viewed post on this blog. Between the suggestions of a friend of mine and people commenting on that post, I learned that my cucumbers weren’t being pollinated properly. This is probably because my garden is about 4 stories above ground where bees are unlikely to fly (why fly 4 stories up when there are all kinds of nice flowers right near the ground? ) People with traditional in-ground gardens or container gardens at ground level are much less likely to have problems with their cucumbers remaining unpollinated. I had some success with hand-pollination last year (and got all organized with red and blue strips of t-shirt fabric!), but I never actually described my technique. For the sake of completeness, I decided to write this post.

First, you need to know the difference between a male flower and a female flower on the cucumber vines.

Male flowers look just like little yellow flowers with pollen-holders in their centers:

side-view of a male cucumber flower

“center” view of a male cucumber flower

Female flowers are also yellow, but are easily distinguished from male flowers by the mini-cucumber that is right behind the base of the petals. The center of a female flower is also different from the male flowers. Instead of containing pollen-holders, the female flower has a pollen-receptor.

side view of a female cucumber flower. note the miniature “pre-cucumber” just behind the base of the petals.

“center” view of a female cucumber flower

I use a small, soft paintbrush to pollinate my cucumbers. I gently grasp a male flower at its (his?) base and swirl the paintbrush around to collect pollen.

collecting pollen from male flower on soft paintbrush

If you’ve done it right, you’ll see a dusting of yellow pollen on the bristles of the paintbrush. To deliver the pollen to the female flower, gently grasp at its (her?) base and brush the pollen into the center of the female flower.

delivering pollen to female cucumber flower

It’s also worth re-posting some of the links that were given to me in comments of the “Shriveling cucumbers” post, because they were really helpful:

http://ask.metafilter.com/65155/Cucumber-woes

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/news/story.php?S_No=991&storyType=garden

I found another method for hand-pollination on this blog:

http://gardeningwithwilson.com/2008/02/23/pollinating-cucumber-flowers/