Friday Fun ~ Bye Television Until Fall; Hello Garden

With television watching, all of my favorites are going into slumber until Fall. Of the new shows only one has piqued my interest...Dracula with Jonathan Rhys Meyers holds promise. Scandal, Arrow, The Following, and the Walking Dead will be back to titillate and tease through new seasons. but until then what to do...

Well, there's my adaptive gardening to take up the slack and preserving. My corn now stands three foot tall and the weather is rainy but above 70 degrees so this weekend the green beans and black-eyed peas get planted underneath them. My zucchini and yellow squash went into the seed starters last week.

I had a thought about the wasted space under my raised beds. I despise wasted space when it could be productive. It's just one of my many quirks. My brain started working on what could grow underneath that required limited sunlight. Plus the weeds have taken root and I pulled up some dandelions, the greens are quite tasty when they are young, but bitter as they age. I didn't want them taking root haphazardly throughout my yard either.

I bought a few more bags of organic soil, and planted pumpkins and cantaloupes under them. The vines will grow outwards as they need sunlight. It's good ground cover to prevent weeds as they grow. If the vines grow over a place I need to stand to tend my raised beds I can train them another way with my shadow cane. Both end products can be dehydrated or frozen. The cantaloupes and pumpkins will be easy to harvest when small. Just a snip with my pruners and drop it into my harvest basket.

My harvest basket used to be one of those pans that you got at a hospital admission for bathing. At one time I had about ten of them lying around my house. I got three with my stroke admissions alone. But they take two hands to carry when full. They'll be re-purposed for the processing aspects after harvesting. By the way the kidney shaped pan makes an excellent seed starter and the drink pitcher can double as a seed sprouter. Nothing goes to waste in our house.

This year I'm actually using a basket with a handle for ease
of carrying. I'd honestly thought about swiping one of those hand carry shopping basket from my local grocer, but that would be stealing. I looked online to purchase one or two but the places that sold them had them in lots of tens or hundreds. Way to many for my purposes and expensive. So I settled on the grapevine basket to the left that I found at the farmer's market. It wasn't cheap, has a very sturdy handle, and should carry up to ten pounds of produce. Any more than that would throw me off balance anyhow.

I only planted forty corn stalks so that's what my harvest will be. This is a trial thing with raised bed three-sisters. I've actually gotten two to four ears of corn on one stalk before, but not really excepting that this year. We'll keep about half a dozen ears for fresh eating and remainder will go into the chicken feeder after it's dried. I don't feed the chicken much corn, but let then free-range for most of their diet.

"Now wait a minute, Jo. This is fun Friday and you are talking about work. Not fair!" I hear y'all out there. This is my fun. I get out of the house, soak up some Vitamin D thanks to the sun. Watch my grandchildren and teach them the finer points of surviving, and producing what they eat. Later we'll grab some eggs out of the hen house and make some infamous Neiman Marcus $250 cookies. What's even better is that we'll eat them warm with cold glasses of milk. **Drool drool!** Is that better?

Have a great weekend.