Short and sweet, this photo compares a fresh dug red potato to one from the grocery store.
Which red potato is fresh from the garden?
For some reason I am having a lot of trouble growing summer (yellow) squash here in Florida. Maybe it’s too hot, too humid, or something else. But I have had 2 small squash, and they were the sweetest, most delicious squash I ever ate.
Everything fresh from the backyard garden tastes a hundred times better than the bland, old stuff from the grocery store. I just had to take that potato photo when I saw the beautiful bright red color of my fresh-dug potatoes. Unfortunately most of them were really small because worms ate the potato leaves, so I dug them up early.
Potatoes are easy to grow if you have the space to grow them. Unfortunately I do not.
In life and gardening, we must be ready to face a challenge and persevere to overcome and move on.
I will not get into the series of unfortunate events that have been my life thus far, but I have learned to always be ready for a challenge. Challenging times come more regularly for some of us and I am currently under the impression that we are either born lucky, or unlucky.
The unlucky ones face adversity often in whatever form it takes. Non-quitters will face the challenge and do their best to overcome. We persevere until we get it right, or acknowledge that we simply don’t have what it takes to do so.
And move on.
Gardening is in my blood. Like so many people who simply enjoy digging in the dirt, planting and watching the miracle of plant growth happen, I can’t stay away. Making a dull yard come to life with plantings is exciting. It is also a lot of work and costs money.
My current yard is the biggest gardening challenge I have faced. This is one of the only places I have ever lived where I don’t want to go outside and see what is going on in my yard. This makes it hard to plan, and plant, and grow things.
I can picture a nice backyard in my mind. In involves a fence, pool, patio, potted citrus trees and other Florida native species enclosed in my little oasis. In my younger years I would have gladly taken on this challenge. It could have happened a little at a time. I’m not so sure these days.
Backyard Paradise
Trying to be positive in a bad situation means putting on blinders. Be blind to what I don’t like. Focus on what is good. Eat that elephant one bite at a time. Story of my life. The thing is that life runs out. Time runs out. Will I still be trying to get to where I want to be on my dying day?
No matter. The first bite I take will entail garden soil readiness. In March I can plant tomatoes, zucchini (in a fabric bag because of it’s size), beans, peppers and cucumbers. First I need more soil added to the raised bed, and for the fabric pots.
Being prepared for planting is necessary if I want to attempt to grow vegetables. I’m not thinking about the vegetable stealing raccoons (except to write it here). They will be a future challenge.
Once that first bite is swallowed, on to the second. This is a good way to face a challenge. Circumstances can seem too overwhelming to move forward unless changes happen a little at a time. Making progress is what keeps us going.
My Backyard Garden – 2014 (NH)
Gardeners always face challenges. I’ve found that yard difficulties are easy to deal with than life difficulties but every problem can be faced the same way. And it teaches patience. One year I had a ton of beautiful tomatoes growing in my New Hampshire backyard. Then blight struck. I ended up with NONE! After months of waiting and wondering what I would do with all those beautiful, fresh tomatoes, they rotted before they could be picked.
Often we have no choice but to go with the flow and make the best of it. Learn from our mistakes and say, “Maybe next year”. It is disheartening, but we get over it. Dwelling is not a good thing. It changes nothing and saps our energy for overcoming the next challenge. And they keep coming…. stay strong.
(Thanks to the artists and photographers at Pixabay for the images on this post.)
A week or go ago here in central Florida we had about three nights in a row where temperatures got into the twenties. Tropical plants do not like a Florida freeze.
They can handle a short stretch of cold, but not the constant, ongoing cold. One day I went out to dump out the ice in the bird bath and filled it with new water – which froze over again. That is unusual. Daytime brings warmer temperatures, but not that day. It was too much for plants which love sun and heat.
The saddest example of death in the yard is my beautiful croton. I have a few “baby plants” started from it and they have survived the cold. If I have to I can replant.
This was a beautiful croton and hibiscus
These banana trees sprung up at the edge of my yard and I’ve watched them grow for the past year. I think the house behind me threw some old banana trees over into the woods and they simply grew. They were getting tall and looking good and then the hurricane hit. The wind shredded the long leaves on the banana tree. Now we’ve had cold which has turned all the shredded leaves brown. Poor thing doesn’t look too good now.
Banana Trees
The New Guinea impatiens that have been growing in the front garden – and survived throughout last winter – are brown and wilted.
My hibiscus is planted right next to the house, which usually helps when cold temps set in. I also covered it on two of the really cold nights. That didn’t keep the entire front part of it from turning brown.
Front part of hibiscus is brown and dead
The bougainvillea which had just recently begun to grow larger is now a spindly brown vine.
First my eggplant died along the top. I covered it, and that didn’t seem to do much good. After the second night of low temps the rest of the plant turned brown. I’m not too sad because it has given me only one eggplant. That’s it in the background of the picture below.
Eggplant is dead, but pepper lives on for now
I always believed that pepper plants loved heat, but this bell pepper plant is still nice and green when everything else has mostly died. I don’t know if it will continue to grow, but I hope so. I had been getting small green peppers from it fairly regularly.
I took a walk around my neighborhood the other morning and got this photo of an oak tree with a huge vine crawling up through the branches. I’d seen it before, but noticed this time that many of the big tropical leaves were brown.
Vine of big leaves growing up an oak tree
It is possible that these plants will come back. If the roots have not been killed, green will show up once again. The eggplant already has some little green leaves sprouting at the base of the plant.
I found a “Cold Hardy Plant List” for central Florida on the Central Florida Gardener site. I’ll have to look into it further when I decide to upgrade my landscape.
We have had some cold weather here in Florida recently and I guess it’s so we don’t feel left out this winter. With temps in the minus 20’s back in New England, I won’t get any pity for the cold I deal with in Florida. But for us here in the south, ice is not so common.
It felt like 22 degrees overnight for three nights in a row and that has done some damage to plantings.
My eggplant stalks are now dead at the top and it looks like the poinsettia is totally dead. I could have gone out and covered the plants each night, but I just didn’t care enough to do so.
Frozen top of eggplant
This plant has grown like mad but given me only one eggplant to eat. I am not so sure I want this plant taking over my tiny garden area without giving me any vegetables to eat.
Winter is only beginning and if I want to save my outdoor plants they will have to be covered every time the temps drop below freezing. I have sheets and towels ready to use for covering, but I don’t have anything that important to save. Only my lime tree is worth the trouble and I can bring it indoors on cold nights, which I did.
The birdbath iced over for three nights and my cat, Skittle, was confused as to why she couldn’t drink from it. I took a short video with my iPhone which you can see below.
The image above is not from my dinner table but it contains all the necessary items for a decent Thanksgiving meal, in my humble opinion.
My son smokes the turkey on the grill. He just bought his favorite Jack Daniels Wood Smoking Chips which are made from old oak barrels that once held whiskey. The turkey was delicious last year, so I am leaving it up to him.
This will be our second year together for the holidays and the guest count total is three! Yes, it’s a small gathering. So the focus is on the food.
Our dinner planning has begun. Turkey, stuffing and gravy are a given. It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without them. Also high on the list is mashed potatoes, Acorn squash and rolls. I don’t eat much bread these days, so I will most likely skip adding the rolls to my plate.
Personally I can’t eat any of it without cranberry sauce as an accompaniment. Last year I made my own cranberry sauce and I will do so again this year. I added the recipe to this blog so I would remember how to do it.
Boiling the cranberries
Another new thing I did last year was to make my own broth. I used the turkey innards / gizzards or whatever all that extra stuff is called that is packed inside a big frozen bird. The broth is used in place of water in gravy and stuffing. And boy does it make a difference in flavor! Any leftover would make an excellent soup stock too.
Making Stock
Many people already know to do all of this, but I didn’t grow up with a mother who was a good cook. Most of my life I had to make most of the Thanksgiving meal myself, for my husband and kids. We never had much family around. After all the cooking, serving and eating, I had the clean up.
Thanksgiving meals of old, back when I was growing up and tables had to be pushed together to seat all fo us, the menu was larger. Aunts and grandmothers slaved for days to bring their homemade specialties to the table. Boiled onions, turnips, carrots, homemade breads, and many pies and desserts we included. My grandmother made cookies called monkey faces. There were so many before-dinner appetizers I had to be careful not to fill up.
Our simple menu will also include apple pie which I will make.
I need to find some recipes for after Thanksgiving. Usually sandwiches and soup use up the leftovers nicely. This year we have a new refrigerator which means plenty of room for keeping the carcass until I can use it to make soup stock the next day.
When I visited New Hampshire recently, one of the first things I wanted to do was get outside and take a walk.
Fortunately my daughter lives in a rural, wooded location with a walking trail nearby. We could have walked down the road to reach this trail, but we decided to take the (nonexistent) path through the woods instead.
We only got lost once, but at least we were headed in the right direction! The section of the trail we walked is only a small part of the 6.5 mile long path. No motor vehicles are allowed, but walking, biking, cross-country skiing, skating and fishing (it follows a river at places) are allowed.
There wasn’t much foliage to view, but this cool “tree tunnel” was interesting.
Walking Trail
Tunnel of Trees
Moose have been seen in this area and I would love to see one. On the other hand, I have heard about how they can be aggressive. It could be scary to come face to face with such a huge animal and have nowhere to hide but behind a tree!
Covered Bridge
This is the river that the trail runs parallel to. My daughter’s boyfriend was nice enough to take us out on his boat and we cruised up and down this section of the river. The water was icy cold!
Hydrangeas Blue 