Random Nonsense and Garden Notes

Kind of a cheater blog tonight. We’ve been pretty busy around the Evans casa lately. We’ve been doing all kinds of stuff-not necessarily creative stuff, but stuff nonetheless. This time of year is what I like to call the “perfect storm” for our family.

Sports are in full swing, school programs and field trips are lined up until school gets out and recital is on the horizon. Below are some moments from dance photo day and our weekend of 10 games-ended with the oldest winning 2nd place in her tournament and the others playing some great softball and soccer.

Everything is also growing fast in the garden, including the caterpillars and weeds, so the garden needs daily attention. Here are some pictures of what is growing in the garden right now.

Tomato vines

Eggplant blossoms

Cherry tomatoes

New red potato

Tomato blossoms

It is exciting to go out to the garden each day. The tomato vines are so big that you almost have to crawl inside the tunnel of plants just to see what’s going on.

'Purple Cherokee' Tomatoes

Baby bell pepper

I don’t mind sharing a little produce with my wild neighbors, and when you grow organically you have to expect it, but I don’t need them cleaning us out, so I do a daily inspection for caterpillars. With as many butterflies as we have seen around here this year, there should be a bumper crop of caterpillars to match the bumper crop of veggies.

Onions

Whenever I go out to the garden, I trail a string of kids behind me. Sometimes they drift over and ask questions about the garden, the herbs or the bugs they find. Sometimes they bake me a delicious loaf of zucchini bread (sand with leaf garnishes) and serve it garden-side. The peppermint and lemon balm are so prolific that the girls always use plenty of it in their “cooking” and sometimes they just chew on it!

The bummer of this week is that the temps got up to 90 and the lettuce bolted to seed. The bonus is that plenty of little veggies are on their way and the sugar snap peas even gave me a sweet surprise with a tendril heart!

lettuce bolting to seed

Sugar-snap pea tendrils

So, we have been pretty busy-but not too busy to do something truly stupid. Thanks to our good friend Dave, we were introduced to the weird phenomenon known as “cat breading”. Do not send emails to me, comments telling me how terrible I am, or put calls in to the SPCA.

No harm, no foul. Seriously, look at these pictures and tell me that you aren’t laughing your head off (the dog ate all the bread-some of it straight off of the cats!)

It took the kids about five minutes to get breath back enough to speak after they saw these animals “breaded”.

I will tell you that my sister-in-law, Kerri, sent us a great project-to-do-with-the-kids-and-blog-about-it project. There is a pin on this on Pinterest here. I’ll describe our experiences here next time. Meanwhile, I’m going to go make dinner! Nighty-night all!