Thus Endeth Summer

Today was my last day at home. Sadly, this also means this was my last day caring for my vegetable garden. I leave it in my parents capable hands, but I'll miss having a garden. I'm back to Minnesota in a little more than 12 hours (about 20 house plants coming with me) so my posts will few as the semester gets going. Marching band keeps me really really busy, but I hope to start posting about the Horticulture class I'm taking, similar to what I did with my Thursday Lab posts last semester.
Of course I have to leave the garden right when things are getting really good. I've picked two big tomatoes and I'm sure more are soon to follow. The beans and cherry tomatoes just keep coming and it even looks like we may have a squash or zucchini later this fall.

 

The red pepper just after being picked. It turned out to be surprisingly sweet so we added it to a tasty black bean dip my mom made. 

 

One of the tomatoes a few days before we picked it.

I had a really great time spending this past Saturday morning at our town's Farmer's Market. There's so much fresh produce and local businesses selling breads and pastries, it was making my mouth water.

 

Wild Upper Michigan blueberries and blackberries.

 

Heirloom tomatoes.

 

The market.

 

Herbs.

 

Lots and lots of produce.

 

Michigan apples.

I'm posting late because I've been packing all day and now I need to get some sleep. Starting the 24th until the 2nd of September, I'll be marching and rehearsing with the band from 9am to 10pm and after that school is starting! Summer has flown by but I'm so happy I got to come home and garden for my vacation. Hopefully this semester will be an even bigger step toward that Horticulture major. Math, Chemistry, and another Horticulture course might be a bit challenging, but if I can survive that, I'll have some much needed per-requisites out of the way. Wish me luck!

-Abby

 

The Benefits of a Summer Downpour

Last night brought us one of the first thunderstorms of the month. It rained for at least four hours, if not more, and I woke up to find my vegetable garden practically exploding with overnight changes. Things had started to ripen and beans had popped out of nowhere.

 

 The most startling evidence of this was one of my pepper plants that went from the first picture (take three days ago) to the second picture, taken this afternoon. The rain really got it to start ripening quickly. 

 

These peppers still have a bit to go...

And speaking of peppers, the grocery store peppers are still doing really well. They certainly get more sun than my poor veggie garden that has to endure a bunch of trees blocking some of it's much needed sun.

 

They seem to like it in front of the house. 

I also had my first small harvest of tomatoes. None of the big ones are ripe yet, but I'm starting to see them change color a bit. They're still mostly green though.

 

Cherry tomatoes. :)

 

 

The big tomatoes are still pretty green. Hopefully they'll ripen soon!

The beans burst out after the rain as well. A few days ago, all I saw were flowers, but now I have tons of young beans.

 

Looks like we're going to have lots of beans!

 

Sadly, I only have 16 more days left at home. Which means if things don't get ripe before then, I'll just have to trust my family to take care of the plants. I will have more horticulture posts though, as I'll be taking a course on Woody and Herbaceous plants. :) 

So I leave you with two flower shots of the week. The flower garden is still offering up new plants as the summer goes one. Enjoy!

 

 

The Estivant Pines

Every summer for the past nine years, my family goes camping in the gorgeous north woods of Copper Harbor, MI. This year, my dad took me three miles up a winding dirt road, logging roads forking off in various directions, to the Estivant Pines Nature Preserve.

 

This preserve holds the some of the very last old growth white pines in Michigan and is one of the last virgin stands of trees in the Midwest. Some of these trees are around 600 years old!

 

 

If you can see it, this tree started growing around 1500 and was cut down in 1970.

Walking into the preserve was like stepping back in time. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that the whole Upper Peninsula of Michigan was once like this, never been logged and pristine. The hike became more surreal as we came up on the first remnant of an old tree. This tree seemed to have died naturally and was now standing, hollow and weather worn, in the middle of the path. 

 

My silly lab Molly sitting by the dead tree.

 

You can look up all the way through the tree to the sky above.

Farther into the woods, we came upon the giant trees. The map we'd gotten from the campground guide named this part as "Cathedral Grove" and it was aptly named because they towered over us. It was impossible to walk and crane your neck up to look at them so we did a lot of starting and stopping, my dad holding onto his hat to keep it from falling off as we looked up.

 

 

I couldn't help but hug one of them. It also served the purpose of showing how MASSIVE these trees are!

We went on the second trail and found more of the giant pines but a bit rockier path and had to maneuver up and down some of the hills. The paths are all pretty well worn, but it is rather hill-y in parts. The dog, of course, had an excellent time and ran around smelling everything.

 

 

It was crazy to see trees this big. And, of course, my inner plant nerd and nature lover was geeking out over the history of these gorgeous pines. This forest is also considered a boreal forest and isn't quite as lush as some of the forests to the south. The soil is thin and sits right on top of bedrock, so there's less nutrients here than elsewhere. 

It was a pretty eye-opening hike. And if you're thinking about a vacation for next summer and you love the outdoors, I'd definitely check out Copper Harbor, Michigan. (Or any part of Upper Michigan for that matter!)

If you want to learn more about the pines, here's a link for the page on the Keweenaw Traveler website.

 

A Garden Tea Party

It was my birthday back on the 12th and what did I do? I threw a garden tea party of course. :)
It turned out to be a beautiful summer day, a bit muggier than I would've liked, but we were lucky to escape the rain. I had four of my good friends over, the fifth not able to make it due to being on vacation at the time.
On the menu:
-Tea (English tea and a really good brand of peach tea I've found)
-Cucumber sandwiches (provided by one of my good friends)
-Mini ham and cheese sandwiches
-White cake cupcakes decorated with roses.

I had a really good time decorating with flowers from the garden. The pinks and yellows really looked nice with the tea cups and lace tablecloth.

Since my mom has a pretty cool collection of tea cups, I got to pick out a few mis-matched, but still pretty, cups to use.

This one is actually mine though...

The cupcakes were really fun to decorate. I made my own frosting and set a little aside that I dyed pink and green with food coloring. Once I'd frosted them all with white, I swirled a little pink in the middle with a little green leaf or two to make the rose.

I also went a bit daisy-crazy and stuck daisies in the vines that my dad has trained to wrap around our side porch.

The party went off without a hitch and we all ate way too many little sandwiches and drank way too much tea. But it was a really fun way to celebrate my birthday. :)

Garden Update (because I haven't for a bit): The beans are growing splendidly, I have so many green tomatoes (with a few starting to turn red) that once they all ripen I'm going to need a good salsa recipe to have use for them all and the peppers are doing very well. 

Sorry About the Lack of Posts...

Hello everyone!
First I must apologize profusely for not posting in a while. Our internet connection has been running suuuuuper slow for the last two weeks and I've not been able to get my laptop to connect to the internet sufficiently in order to post.
Second, this post is a notice to say a new post is coming very soon. We've finally acquired a new router and the internet is back up to working speed. :)
Hope you've all been well!
-Abby

Coming Home to Summer Flowers, Vegetables and Weeds...

Minnesota and Wisconsin, despite being incredibly hot and humid, made for a really awesome 4th of July trip. It was really great to see my friends and family again. First I went down to the Twin Cities and got to see all my college friends and march in a 4th of July parade (in the 100 degree weather). Then my family went to Wisconsin and stayed at our family's cabin for a few days, where we went tubing down the river near the cabin and floated around on the lake soaking up the sun.

 

My favorite skyline in the whole world.

 

The sunsets on the lake our cabin is on are awesome...

 

...like, really REALLY awesome. :)

So coming home after 9 days away I should've expected to find lots and lots of weeds. :P

 

I spent the early afternoon weeding out the bean patch that FINALLY has bean plants in it. Thankfully the weeds hadn't really taken a very good hold and were easy to pull out quickly.

The tomatoes have straw under them and didn't need as much weeding. They've gotten so much bigger than they used to be and most have little, green tomatoes.

The peppers are also off to a great start and two of them have peppers on them. They're not quite big enough to pick yet, but they're getting there, especially the green pepper.

Speaking of peppers, the grocery store peppers are doing really well. When I left, they were just seedlings, but I returned to healthy young plants. Hopefully I'll find room in the garden for all of them. It looks like my pea plants failed (which I'm rather sad about) but I'll probably use their bed for the little peppers.

 

 The peppers really took off while I was gone and now I just have to put them somewhere...

 

I had a few that got really big so I planted them in a bare spot in the garden right away. 

 On top of all this, I now have more basil than I know what to do with. Once it gets bigger, I'll probably start giving it away to friends who like to cook with it and try to find some recipes myself.

 

A clump of basil.

The flower garden is looking really nice as well. With all the heat we got over the past week, some of the flowers really popped.

 

I think these pink lilies are one of my favorite blooms right now.

 

The cleome and cosmos came out while I was away and looks really nice under the front window and behind the house.

 

The morning glory has climbed all the way up the fence and will probably have to spread out horizontally now since there's no where else to go. 

 

 I really love this shade of peachy-pink.

The houseplants are still doing as well as ever. I was really excited when I got a text from my dad while in Minnesota with a picture of my hibiscus blooming. It has lots of buds on it and the heat of last week finally gave it the push it needed to start blooming. It'll probably get 3 or 4 more blooms judging by how many buds are still unopened.

 

The rest of the houseplants are still loving the three-seasons room.

My dad has come up with some pretty cool metal hooks for holding plants and sculptures for  the vines on the side of our house. The three seasons room has a few of his new creations like the one now holding my very first spider plant.

 

Most of his metalwork uses rings like these. Even the trellis in the front yard made of giant rings.

He's also made the trellises in our yard, one out in the front garden that holds the climbing honeysuckle and the other that frames the walkway to our side porch.

The trellis on our side porch that leads to the front yard. It's hard to see from this angle, but he created this one with two long rods of metal, connected by small rings.

 It was great to come home and see how much the garden had grown. Now that the weeding is over, I'll be trying my hand at some new recipes for the garden party I'm planning for my birthday this coming Thursday. :) I haven't done a food post yet and, despite the fact that this is a gardening blog, I feel like cooking and gardening go hand in hand.That, tea parties are always adorable to photograph. ...Yes, my friends and I still have tea parties. We've decided we're going to make awesome old ladies. Hopefully I won't be too busy and can take a few pictures.