Potato Boy and I learned to make the most out of the girls’ afternoon nap time over the weekend. Since we had ignored the garden for the last week, we made sure to make the rounds and see how things had changed. It may be the first part of July, but the temperatures make if […]

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What a difference a week makes! The Dear Wife (DW) was discharged from the hospital mid-week and sent home on bed rest. It took the rest of the week for the kiddos and I to adjust to the new “normal” – we’re hoping for at least 5 or 6 weeks of this. I must admit […]

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So here’s the view from my temporary “bed” – For those of you that don’t know, Kinnick Stadium is the home of Iowa Hawkeye Football — which means we’re located across the street in the University Hospital. Apparently, the kiddos little sister didn’t feel like waiting until September to make her grand entrance and thought […]

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Most of the weekend was pretty quiet. I was able to get caught up in the garden a bit on Saturday. I noticed there are green peppers and summer squash that will be ready in a couple days. There are also tiny green tomatoes, and blooms on the cucumber, zucchini, and green beans. I picked […]

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It’s almost a year since we closed on the house. The DW and I were looking at some of the pictures last night we took during one of the walk-throughs prior to the closing. We originally took the photos, along with measurements of all the rooms, to help with planning what we’d need prior to […]

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We were told by the previous owner of our house that along the fence line across the road there were several patches of black caps. Around here, “black caps” normally means wild black raspberries, though wild blackberries often get lumped in the same pile. Either way, they’re normally a sweet purple berry hidden between thorns […]

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Shhhh… don’t tell Potato Boy, but as I was walking through the garden last night, I noticed that the potato plants were starting to show signs of drying down. That caught my attention so I thought I’d look a little closer. I noticed a couple spots in the hilled soil around the plant where it […]

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The peas didn’t get much attention this year. The most time I spent with them was when I was picking up seeds and wanted to make sure I got a variety that produced a good garden pea and didn’t want to climb. I took a closer look the other day and was amazed at how […]

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It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve shared progress on the pasture. Now that the pasture fence is almost complete, it’s starting to look a little more like pasture and less like a random patch of weeds. It’s getting easier to spot the clover and the alfalfa. The various grasses are filling in. If you […]

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One of the great things about having a larger garden this year was that we were able to try a few additional varieties of some vegetables. One example of this would be the sweet peppers. We planted 2 varieties of sweet peppers this year – 4 plants of each. They looked exactly alike on the […]

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