Gardening Obsession!

Happy Summer! Well, after graduating this spring, I allowed myself to indulge in ~All Things Gardening~

My garden in early July
5 boxes (front to back):
-Green beans/Tomatoes/Sunflowers
-Pumpkin/Watermelon
-Pumpkin/Watermelon/Green Beans
-Lettuce/Tomatoes/Cucumber/Sunflowers
-Nothing/kitty's roll-around box

SO: I started out by germinating seeds in plastic bags, putting them in little plastic growing containers or peat moss cups underneath a Happy light in my kitchen, and then finally planting them into the ground. This was all done in hopes of speeding the growing process.
Let me tell you what: It didn't.
Ok, it helped a couple of my plants (the cucumbers, green beans, watermelon, pumpkins) but mostly it actually stunted the growth of the rest of my plants (sunflowers, basically all flowers, green beans, catnip, basically everything else).

Seedlings sprouting in plastic container in house

Greenhouse in my kitchen!

Green Beans- Funny thing, they actually grew really well inside the house... until I transplanted them into the garden, and their growth has basically been blah. BUT: The green beans that I sowed directly into the ground actually flourished!  Today, the bean bushes that started directly in the ground are much healthier, greener, happier, more vigorous, and more successful than their counterparts. It's actually quite amazing. It taught me that not every plant needs or even wants super special attention inside the house.

Green Bean Bushes garden box

Sunflowers- They started growing strong inside the house, then when transplanted outside, they also struggled to acclimate and basically were stunted for a while. They are doing WONDERFULLY NOW, however, and many of them are growing TALLER THAN ME! CRAZY! Also, note: a plant does not have an automatic designated height that it grows from the ground regardless of how deep you plant it... What I'm saying is: I planted some of the sunflower peat pots too far into the ground (because the stems were weak and I wanted to plant them deep to protect the stem), and consequently some of my sunflowers are more like moonflowers, meaning they don't reach ALL the way up to the sun... they actually are about only 1-2 ft tall. wat wat.

Mini- Sunflowers (only mini in height)

Catnip- Found it on clearance at ShopKo, so I bought 3 of them, planted them around the front/back yard... and all of a sudden I'm hearing cat fights in the middle of the night, I run outside, and essentially the entire neighborhood of cats is over at my house with poor little Kitty (our quasi-adopted/cared-for stray cat named Macey but we call her Kitty) trying to scare away the intruders with her scary scream/squeal (because she's declawed and can't fight against the other cats effectively). SO: long story short, I dug up the Catnip plants and gave them away on my Freecycle.org site. ---I guess I should explain what Catnip is. Catnip is a member of the Catmint family of plants that have an extremely aromatic, invigorating, enticing, euphoric effect on cats. Cats can smell it from far away. They sniff it, bite it, lick it, eat it, roll around in it or near it. It's actually quite adorable. Sooo, that's why I kept 1 little piece of a Catnip plant and put it in a pot near kitty's waterbowl on the porch. :) It's kinda hidden from the street, so it's her own special little treat :)

Kitty protecting the Catnip after I dug it up

Kitty laying by the Catnip after I dug it up

Kitty laying against the house, garden boxes in background,
 hammock and duck pool in background

Lettuce- I bought a dozen or two lettuce starters, they grew so fast that I actually had to harvest some of the leaves (aka feed them to them Duckers!) before I even got a chance to plant them. Well... I planted them... and who do you know go into the garden and ate my lettuce down to little greens and some were even pulled out of the ground. SASSY DUCKS! Yes, the lettuce is for them, but no they can't have it until it grows! So I re-plant the ones they pulled out, I add some little lettuce sprouts that I started inside the house... and what do you know... the ducks got into it again! This time they ate the lettuce ALL THE WAY DOWN to the STUBS! lol! Every green leaf was pulled off of those babies! Thankfully they were too distracted doing this and did not eat up the little sprouts that were growing. SO, I did eventually get a healthy harvest of lettuce (after finally fencing the ducks away) from those sprouts I started inside, and that lettuce kept regrowing (after you pick the outer leaves to eat, it keeps producing) and I got a good couple weeks of lettuce for the ducks, and a yummy BLT for me :) Then, the plants were big enough that I felt good about letting the ducks roam free in the garden... and now... back to stubs. No wait, I don't even see stubs anymore :) lol! That's ok though, because lettuce doesn't really do well in the HOT of the summer, it gets bitter and starts trying to reproduce through bitter flowers (and yes it's been hot here in Utah, weeks over 100 degrees and now weeks in the mid-90's).

Lettuce on the left

Lettuce on the right

Other- There are a few other plants I haven't written about that I will include in 'Gardening Obsession! Part II'  (including cucumbers, tomatoes, rose bushes, raspberries, and the Virginia Creeper vine).

Duckys- So I fenced the ducks out of the garden for the 1st month while the plants were young and weak. Occasionally I would take the ducks on a little field trip and they would get garden privileges for about an hour, but then back they would go into the yard. Well, this week I've decided to open the fence and give them day-time privileges in the garden, even unsupervised! That's a big deal. I had to wait until the plants were taller, stronger, and healthier before I could submit them to the ducks big flat webbed feet and wandering beaks. At a certain point of maturity, the ducks stop being interested in tearing and eating the leaves off of plants. So now, the sunflowers are too tall for the ducks to rip the leaves off!! Today, however, they did start biting and eating the pumpkin leaves (which are huge). With their new garden privileges, I'm hoping that they spend alot of time in the two pumpkin patch garden boxes, because the leaves get SO numerous and vigorous that they can start to harbor bugs underneath them... which the ducks love.


~Gardening with the duckys this summer has been so much fun. I can spend from morning until late evening gardening and doing yard work with them, for some reason they just make everything outside so much fun. :)

~Important~ The most important facet of my gardening I have not yet written about. This special facet will get it's own blog post next: Strawberries :)  

I'm Back!

Hello! Yes it's been way too long since I last blogged. But that's because I have not allowed myself writing privileges until writing my paper was done first! (Which has taken me about a year... lol).

ELECTION DAY: *All you need*

::::::Wisconsin::::::: :::Find Your Polling Place: - https://myvote.wi.gov/Address/AddressSearchScreen.aspx **********Invite/Forward this page to ALL your friends, every single one of them!!!******** IMPORTANT NOTES: -You can register on the same day as the election. .......Just bring the printed out form. .......Or just go to vote and they will have forms. -Whether you are pre-registered or not, click on the "Find Your Polling Place" link (above) and make sure that you go to the right polling place. -In-person absentee voting (also known as early voting) runs for two weeks before an election, ending at 5 p.m. or the close of business (whichever is later) on the Friday before the election (Friday November 2nd) NEED HELP:  2012 Election Survey:  (link)  http://uvu.qualtrics.com//SE/?SID=SV_1AYkTFO16symZpj Please take 2 mins long

This election is SO important. I don't want anybody to miss out on the opportunity to vote in this historic 2012 election because they didn't know WHERE/HOW to vote.
SO:  Here is everything you need:
Where/How (all states): https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/vote (try this)

Wisconsin:

YouTube 4 Ducks!

I crack myself up with this post Title. Because the YouTube channel is about/for my ducks, BUT, I also have 4 ducks!!! LOL LOVE IT

www.youtube.com/user/EmJaysDuckys

Check it out,
You'll Laugh
You'll Cry
You'll scratch your head???

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Well, I didn't exactly have a whole day like this, but I had some moments like this- on Saturday night and then today Monday morning.
First-watch the short YouTube video of the book. I grew up with this book.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p09_ULvFBlA
I felt like this for no good reason other than I tripped over my plants twice :( Saturday night I was leaving to go to Rite Aid and when I walked out the door and walking down the patio stairs, I tripped on my green plant cart, and the whole thing flew over and all the plants toppled over onto the ground :( my heart sank. I wanted to just sit down and, sit. My boot buckle had caught the wheel of the cart as I tried to walk past it. I went back inside and told Jordan, and he helped me stuff the baby plants, sprouts, and dirt back into what we thought were the right containers. It was a mess, all of the roots were just overturned and strewn all over the place, and I just wasn't up for the whole situation and I was really discouraged.
So then, this morning (Monday), I woke up really early for some reason, oh yeah, caus the pretty wood duck that hangs outside our front door was being knocked against the door by the wind, and so to me, that reminded me that a storm was coming this morning and I needed to protect my plants and ducks.  So I got up, (sun wasn't even up yet) first took the duck off the door caus it was getting annoying, and then went outside, checked on the ducks, they were asleepin' , much to my surprise, I see little Snowball cuddled up on a newly made nest hole in the dirt behind/under a rosebush by the back porch. She's dug herself a hole in the dirt, which I covered up last week because I thought it was just a hole dug by our neighbors dog, but now that Snowball was laying in the re-dug hole! Sooo adorable. Well, so the rest of the ducks, the boys, were bored without her so they were just kinda buggin her, so I re-fenced the area so that it went in front of her nest so that she could have some privacy while she was back there. So after I re-fenced the area, I turned to protecting my plants. so while I'm walking down the stairs, what'd'ya know... My boot buckle caught onto the wheel of the cart...again. Flipped it over:(
Cleaned it up again, extremely discouraged because I knew that some of my peat moss cups had newly planted seeds that probably spilled onto the ground, un-distinguishable from the soil (unfortunately I didn't germinate them like I usually do because I just followed the directions sent with them) that I had bought specifically on Ebay to grow for indoor plants/greenery to improve the indoor air quality (cheaper than an air purifier, lol!). So I clean it up again as best I could, knowing that all of the plants were mixed up and I didn't know which was what, and what was which was witch was a sandwich. Haha :) (attempting to be light about a discouraging situation).
So then, I went about hanging up a tarp over my porch and over the plants. But, just as i'm staking the tarp down, I can hear the storm come in. It's quite amazing because I could hear the wind pushing down the valley toward our house, it was weird how I could hear the wind blowing in before it got to my house, so I braced for the initial heavy hit, quickly finished the stake I was putting in.  As the cold wind in shooting through and around me, it occurs to me that the tarp hooked up over my porch catching like a sail  to pick up the house and fly it away!!! It was seriously an aggressive situation. I quickly attempted to undo it all, but the strong strong wind is just blowing everything so intense, and the tarp was about to push against and push over all of the  plants that it's supposed to be protecting!!! Ohh my goodness, so I undo that, move and bundle the plants up onto the porch and into the house.  Huge mess.  Starting to drizzle, now wetness flying through the air.  I was worried the ducks tent was going get picked up and blown away, so I zipped it so the ducks couldn't go in. plus, the ducks get really shaken up when the wind whips the tent. I get worried about the ducks though caus I don't know what the really violent wind is going to do to them, and I look over at them, and Snowball is laying and hiding in her nest with Oreo laying with his chest against her, both behind the little fence, while the rest of the ducks are standing/laying in front of fence. I thought that was interesting. So, I wake Jordan up to help me move the ducks crate over next to the porch, where the porch would shield them from the wind. Then, I cover the top with a tarp to protect them from the rain, (thankfully because it started to hail during the morning too).
So, onto the project of fixing my plants. Long story short,, I'll explain another time in another post, but basically the plants' roots were maturing more than the capacity of the little cups and pots they were in, and so the stems have started to wilt and weaken, so they needed to be re-potted deeper. I am not ready to plant them outside because I'm still clearing out the area for the garden, right now it's covered with a huge pile of brush, I've been trying to burn it all away, but now I'm left with the predicament of a whole lot of ash. Yikes! Where can I put that? I can't burn anymore until I shovel out the pit, because my last fire was overflowing onto the grass! Yikes!
OK, so I'll write about my gardening later.
For now, I need to:
-Work on my stats class labs and quizzes
-catch up on my Buddhism books for my Buddhism Science class (probably done of the most difficult reading of my life, especially the science portion of it, quantum mechanics, trying to comprehend the Buddhist philosophy of 'nothingness' and 'emptiness')
-start  (more like plan) my final project on music meditation. First I've gotta learn more about it, and then practice it.
-write my paper from last semester for my Philosophy of Education class, about the philosophy of music education. Watch it, that will be pretty heavy and confrontational
-buy the ducks a new pool
-fix or get a new vacuum
-buy a mop (the swiffer mop and sweeper really are no match against the dirt that my plants track in, and that I track in when I'm playing with the ducks or doing yardwork
-use the fertilizer I just bought on all my new plants and my ones already I the ground
-clean/clear out the 2nd bedroom caus my sister Anna is coming next Sunday for a whole week as an indentured servant to my property :D haha  no but seriously she is going to help me get prepared for summer, And... Coupon like Krazy!!!!!! And she can help me newspaper-dumpster dive for coupons, and I will teach her to not be afraid to price match at Walmart.  Don't bother price matching at Target, you literally have to go to customer service to do that. Basically, don't bother doing aNything at Target, they are as difficult to deal with as a robo-call. Pointless.
Ok I'm done.

Outside :)

I'm obsessed with couponing. But there is only one thing, (ok probably a couple things), but mostly one thing that breaks the couponing addiction::: outside:::      :)
Outside.
Outside is here.
Outside is happening.
Outside is  bright.
Outside is warm.
Outside is pleasant.
Outside is busy.
Outside is fertile.
Outside is exciting.
Outside is full of opportunity.
Outside is relaxing.

Couponing is exhilarating.

Roll that in your pipe and smoke it. Aka plant that in your garden and grow it.
Aka screw in that light bulb and turn it on.
Aka throw that in you're blender and smoothie it.
Aka stick that on your juicer and juice it.
Do you catch my drift?

:D
For the past month, while waiting for the Spring to grace us with it's presence, I've started germinating and growing my plant seeds.  Then, when it has gotten nice out, I've been clearing out the area that is soon to be our garden, burning dead shrubs, watering the grass, playing with the duckys, playing with the duckys, playing with the puppy Rupurt,.hanging out with the duckys.

I'm tired. talk to you tomorrow
<3

Sleep

Back to 8 hours of sleep instead of 12-14. Ill explain later