Gardening Lessons Learned

My foray into vegetable gardening has not been a total bust this year.  We ate quite a lot of lettuce, and are currently eating purple beans.  I had a few cucumbers before the plants got run over by the squash plants.  I have several promising squash and an abundance of tomatoes...although they haven't turned red yet.  The little ones in the picture were ripened on my windowsill.  I'm not sure if the big ones will ripen, but they had pretty well overburdened their stalks and were sitting on the ground when I found them.  We'll see.

I've learned some lessons about vegetable gardening this year.

1.  It is possible to humanely evict a family of groundhogs that have made your garden their home, with the help of this neat battery-powered stake apparatus that chatters everytime the ground moves.

2.  It is best not to tell your neighbour where that new family of groundhogs in her garden came from all of a sudden and why.

                          

3.  Plant half of the lettuce that you think you will need and plan for salads every night.

                          

4.  Don't plant squash in your little 10 x 6 garden...you will end up with a jungle of squash plants.  Next year I will throw some seeds in the old manure pile and let them grow wild.

                          

5.  Pick the beans sooner than later or they get tough.

                          

6.  Pick the runner branches off of the tomatoe plants so that the stalks bearing flowers will grow big enough to support the tomatoes. (Who knew?  Now I do!).

Today, I baked a Blueberry Cake.  Delicious!

I rinsed out the alpaca fibre that I dyed yesterday.

I rinsed out the alpaca\merino blend lopi yarn that I dyed yesterday and then dyed some more.

And best of all...
I had a gentleman caller for lunch. (He brought his own).

Too cute, isn't he!