One attribute (of the many) that I really appreciate about Mike is his love and curiosity for gardening. He's done an amazing job of working part of the yard into a prosperous garden full of delicious fruits and veggies. We've spent some time the past couple of weekends digging up potatoes, harvesting peppers (green ones, habaneros and Thai peppers) and plucking watermelon from their vines. Still out there to be plucked and processed: basil, oregano, rosemary and sage.
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| From clockwise: large crate of sweet potatoes, green peppers and three bowls of habaneros. |
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| Mike checking out the habanero plants. |
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| Habaneros on the vine. |
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| Our best looking watermelon this season! (We only had two that didn't die on the vine- the one above and one below) |
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| Yes, folks, that's a baby watermelon... and a confused man. Aww! |
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| It wasn't the sweetest watermelon I've ever had, but it was pretty good for being harvested in mid-October! |
If you'd visited our house this week, you would have noticed the smell of peppers as soon as you walked in the door. From Sunday until yesterday we had the dehydrator working its magic on Thai and habanero peppers. Mike dried the Thai ones and I did the habaneros. We only had a few coughing and sneezing fits between the two of us!
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| First in the dehydrator: watermelon. Mike claimed that dehydrating it would make it taste sweeter. |
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| Watermelon jerky! And Mike was right- it tasted sweeter. |
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| So many habaneros!! |
The yard has been a source of entertainment for us and there are many times I can't believe that just a year ago my yard consisted of a patch of grass that was "mowed" with a weed-wacker and before that it was even smaller- sporting a small bush, a tree, some wild mint and whatever flowers we'd managed to plant that season in the 3x6 foot patch of yard outside our row house.
When we have veggies, fruits or bread that goes bad before we can eat them then we have the luxury of throwing it to our "ladies"- the four chickens that will eat just about anything you give them (although they surprisingly don't eat peppers). So, it's kind of nice to know that some of our food doesn't go to waste, but rather gets turned into eggs! In case you were wondering what a chicken prefers between spaghetti noodles and bread, noodles trump bread. I think it's partly because they probably look like juicy worms. Mmm.
Below are pictures of some yard "friends" we've come across in the past couple of weeks. (Warning to my grandma: the last three (of these six) pictures have a snake in them, so don't scroll to the very bottom!).
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| We have these huge brownish red spiders all in the yard and eaves of the house. Gross! |
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| A rather intimidating in size garden spider. It was probably about 1.5 inches long! |
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| Cool web designer though! |
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| A corn snake! |
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| We let him go into the fig tree. |
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| What he thought about us holding him... |
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