Baby cucumber spotting!

There are 2 baby cucumbers starting on one of my cucumber vines! Yay! I tried to pollinate the one that had bloomed, but it had just rained and everything was pretty wet. We’ll see….

I’ll be posting a detailed post on hand-pollinating soon…

Polka-dot dress update

I’ve been pretty unmotivated to finish this polka-dot dress… But I made a rule with myself that I couldn’t work on scrapbooking until I finished the dress, and that has helped Last night while Husband and I were hosting a game with a few of our friends, I kept my hands busy finishing the snaps and hem of the dress (I have found that if I don’t have something to occupy me between turns, I tend to hanker for and often eat too many snacks).  So the good news is that the hardest (read- tediously boring hand sewing) parts of the dress are finished, and now all that’s left is adding decorative buttons and finding a belt!  Yay!

One of the things that was contributing to my un-motivation was the fact that the dress didn’t come out looking as nice on me as I’d hoped.  But when I tried it on last night after finishing the snaps and hem, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it doesn’t look as bad as I thought!

When I get the buttons and belt, I’ll post a few pics…

Thankful Thursday

It’s been a while since I’ve written a Thankful Thursday post…  

This week, I’m thankful that I got to spend some time with J and her beautiful new baby E!  I’m so glad that you both are doing well!

I’m also thankful for the wonderful time Husband and I had visiting his family in Iowa.  We got to spend some good quality time with his parents, his sister & her boyfriend, and some of his good friends from high school who planned to be in town just because we were going to be there!  The purpose of the trip was to throw a (semi-surprise) retirement party for Husband’s parents, and that was a great success.  I really had a good time getting to know some of their church friends, too!

I’m thankful (still!) that my paper is resubmitted!  I’m now hard at work making figures for the second paper to determine what will end up in the final version.  I have new motivation now that the first paper is back to the referee– I’d like to get my figures sorted out by the end of July, and have a workable draft by the end of August.  I’ve felt really dragged out about my research so far this summer, so God is so good to fire up my motivation again!!

I’m thankful for the growth we’re seeing in the garden!  I just love going out onto the balcony to investigate the plants.  I am starting to see cucumber flowers bloom (just male flowers for now), and hints of buds on the Early Girl and Tiny Tim tomato plants!  I’m also trying to root the two strawberry runners, but I’ll probably post on that separately.  

My, how you’ve grown

Husband and I just returned last night from a long weekend trip to the great state of Iowa. I was reminded again of the beauty of the vast stretches of farmland with rows of corn or soybeans starting. There is such a sense of peace in those fields– I could really enjoy sitting and gazing into that calm beauty.

Before we left, we plucked another strawberry, as well as our first pea pod!

Husband and I shared the peas straight out of the pod…

Boy, were they sweet! This was my first taste (ever) of peas fresh from the garden, and I am addicted The pod was probably not even fully ripe when we picked it, but we wanted to test one (and have one before we left!)

When we got back last night, I flipped on the porch light and peered out onto the balcony– the garden is definitely significantly bigger! At least, parts of it are. Sadly, even more of our strawberry plants have bitten the dust

As you may or may not be able to see in the photo above, all of the plants in the top basket have completely died, as well as all of the plants in the ice cream bucket at the bottom of the plant stand. One of the strawberry plants is hanging on in a small pot, but the other one has died. And the second parsley plant is looking pretty woozy. At least we have one parsley that is still vigorous!

The strawberries in the hanging “window box” basket are still doing okay. I found a new flower on one of the plants today (you can kind of see it at the far left) and pollinated it with my paintbrush.

These strawberry plants are the most lively by far!  You can see a few more berries getting red, and there is even a little runner visible (maybe not too easily in this photo…).

The rest of the garden is growing splendidly.

We’ll be eating peas tonight for supper, and I think I spotted a couple buds of male cucumber flowers!  Yay for garden growth

Resubmitted!

At long last, I have resubmitted my paper for peer-review in the Astrophysical Journal.  It was a long haul, but God is good, and the paper’s sent in.

Praise the LORD!

Strawberry harvest

We ate our first four strawberries yesterday!

They were very tasty– though so tiny!  There are more ripening on the plants– and we saw a couple birds alight on the “window” basket of strawberry plants.  I’m going to have to put my netting out there– and soon!

New fertilizer

Until now I’ve been using Miracle Gro (the multi-purpose formulation) to fertilize my garden. It works fine, but I ran out So I went to the store today, and started looking at the fertilizer options that they had.

I’ve learned that fertilizers mainly contain three nutrients necessary for plants’ growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (for leafiness, floweryness, and rootyness & vigor, respectively). The package will give a ratio that tells how much of each three (in ratio) are present in that particular formulation.

Because I have only fruit-bearing plants left (the lettuces have bolted and are basically done), I want to promote the flowering/fruiting part of the growing. So I decided on a 9-12-12 fertilizer made by Pennington:

The instructions on the back were kind of minimal, so I interpreted them as best as I could– I sprinkled about 1 Tbsp of those granules around each pot, then watered them all thoroughly. The package said give each plant 2-3 Tbsp every 3-4 weeks, but I thought I’d start out slowly, since the plants are in pots–the drainage might be different, and I don’t want to burn the plants’ roots.  I’m going to have to be good about watering those plants every day!

Pretty garden

Well, I think it’s pretty, anyway  Here are some photos I took yesterday in the beautiful, but fading, evening light.  

 

the peas reach for the sky

I managed to capture a pea pod unfurling

the tomato plants continue to thrive as the lettuce “season” ends

the cucumbers are growing quickly!

the italian parsley is thriving!  (unfortunately the other one isn’t doing so well)

the strawberries continue to ripen

 

More on strawberry pollination

Husband was inspecting the strawberry plants yesterday morning and noticed that we have some blushing berries!!  Here’s a photo that I took when I got home from work yesterday:

I’m hoping they get bigger as they ripen, since these are looking pretty tiny still!  I’ve actually never witnessed strawberry growth on a plant, having always bought my berries.  So this has been pretty exciting for me.  

So, those strawberries seem to be the product of successful strawberry pollination.  We also have non-berries– flowers that must not have gotten pollinated at all and are just sort of there.  They haven’t grown or changed much, and I expect that they will fall off or something (should I clip them?  I need to look into this).  

We also have bulbous berries (isn’t bulbous such a wonderful word!  It’s onomatopoetic — if being bulbous had a sound… and i think there’s a word for that– a word having a sound that the thing would sound like if it had a sound…  but I digress… back to bulbous berries).

Husband thinks that these are a product of uneven pollination.  They’re definitely growing into berries, but they’re ugly little malformed things.  Hopefully they still taste good!  

Some of the plants are starting to put out new growth!  I’m hoping that this means another round of flowers (and another chance, hopefully, to perfect my hand-pollination technique).  

Baby peas

I mentioned pea flower buds in my last post, and of course, they’ve started blooming.  So pretty!

And even more excitingly (is that a word?)– there are pea pods forming!  It happened so fast– one day there was a flower, and by the next morning, there’s this whole mini pea pod hanging on the vine!  Amazing.

I noticed the first one yesterday….

And this morning, there was another one!