New surprise friends!

Dorian and I were out perusing the garden the other morning as we tend to do. And we made some exciting discoveries. Dorian had spotted a tiny mantis in our broccoli on day, but on this day we found TWO baby Mantis...mantisess, manti...I'm unsure of the plural...Mantids? This one is so little the silver circle is a nail head.

This is my version of where's Waldo.... Mira Mantis? I think I've been watching too much Dora the Explorer with the tots I get to babysit haha.

 I'm not sure who found who!?

Beautiful.

 Of course we love the Ladybug, because they love munching aphids! This one is hanging out on my bolting cilantro, I didn't mind at all that the cilantro decided to go to seed. Bees love the flowers, and flowers make me giddy! I have buds on my stained glass flowers and a couple zinnia...talk about bugs in my britches, I don't want to pressure my flowers but I sometimes feel like camping out for a few hours to watch them.

 Damselfly hanging out on some lettuce. While I was working at Emandal I had a Damselfly land on my hat and stay there for almost a whole day! I took it into my room with me that night, and upon further inspection I found its wing to be crinkled :( The next morning it was gone. I'm certainly glad it came to stay with me a while. 

Yeah, I know. Super badass....right!? This plant makes me so happy! It's my Darlintonia Pitcher plant. Also known as the Cobra Plant and is native to Califorina whom also has 'cool root' requirements. Its a carnivore, yea it eats bugs! Hopefully not our friends mentioned above! This plant is so well adapted! Check out the windows on the bulbous head, once the ...lets say fly crawls in by that cool looking forked tongue and realizes it wants out, it flies up into those windows and can't find the hole it crawled in! Pretty narly... I am especially pleased because 2 of my other carnivores perished after some hard freezes and cat perils this winter, my beautiful white trumpet pitchers and my california sundew...

 the brassica homies, under their awesome shade structure.

 there she is looking nice and green!

Recently I have noticed my consumerist tendencies. I have also felt a bit of disconnect with my intuition and a general lack of focus. A bit hum drum if you will. Dorian and I made a trip to a local farm today, Raft Swamp Farm. Where Louie the proprietor lead us on a jacked up golf cart tour. It was so inspiring, he was truly a survivalist, using awesome cover cropping techniques, drip irrigation, and running things almost totally off grid! Who wouldn't want grapes, peaches, persimmons, blueberries, strawberries and mulberries! YUM! We also got to taste some purple passion asparagus! YUM, uh the mulberries were so delicious! What a wonderful place. Oh and the birds, he built tons of birdhouses for the birds and says they take care of all his flying insects, especially the purple martins they eat 3,000 bugs a day! Plus he has one of the only 3 registered natural apiaries in North Carolina! Yay for bees! and not using chemicals on them :) He also has I think eight 3.5 acre plots that farmers can come and use! He's a farmer incubator! He is full of wonderful ideas!

Louie was full of wonderful stories and even picked us some sassafras so we could make some tea...which reminds me its ready! Y'all remember what sassafras makes right?? I thought it smelled like licorice, and it does a bit but its root beer! 

Thanks Louie for a wonderful day! And for all you do!!

Much love xoxo

-L

New Roommates, New Garden Structures, someone is getting FAT, and I have to Pea!

Yep, I've been thinking about all of you and how much you have been on the edge of your seats just waiting for me to post again. WAIT NO LONGER!


I have been so busy this past week or so. Three markets last week, a custom bag order, tons of garden work....... My sentence length to busyness ratio seems a bit off..... Well I know if you are like me you just mostly want to see pictures anyway so take a look! I may have had my sentence/busyness ratio off but I believe my words to pictures ratio is much better.

A little peek of the Farmer's Market table. Ogle away.

 

On a Farmer's Market related note, I was requested to make this little number. It turned out awesome! And for size reference, I believe a mini schnauzer would fit inside....Thank you Katy & Justin!

I told you someone was getting FAT! haha YAY fat little blueberries!!

We built this awesome little hoop shade structure! We are so excited. We look like garden pros now! Hopefully the lettuce, brassicas, and spinach will like it! There were a few scary parts when we were setting it up and we definately would make some adjustments upon building another one but its not too shabby for a first attempt!

Dorian attaching the shade cloth.

BAM! Super cool! We might even be able to turn it into a greenhouse so this stuff can be grown during the winter. All we need is a thick clear plastic tarp to cover it, and maybe a little heater.

We totally pea-d! Dorian was telling me all about sugar snaps and how fast they grow. He said I should take a picture everyday to see how much they are growing. Well this was the best I could do.

The first clinger!!! Go pea go!!!

The peas are now 6-7" tall and haven't quite gotten the hang of our hillbilly fence yet.

 

Above and below are our new roommates! I had a Farmers Market event at the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens' Plant sale! Of course we needed and aloe.....we are going to be in the sun all summer, and have already had one little sunburn incident...

And the ORCHID! So beautiful! I wanted one that was a little different then most you see. This one reminds me of some of the ones I saw at the Berkeley Botanical gardens! It smells wonderful too! Yay Plants!

Clap your hands for orchids!!

It was a warm day....and there were transplants at the Seed Store....

Can you blame us? It was a gorgeous sunny day in the 70s and the seed store said they had strawberries and rosemary.... So we went and came back with not only strawberries and rosemary but a ton of romaine and a few red lettuces! So we went to town on one of our smaller beds. With a slight bit of organization, and a bit more intuition we started plopping the plants in. Dig a little hole, add a handful of composted cow poopoos and tuck em in!

We used some companion planting techniques I learned in the book, "Carrots Love Tomatoes". Essentially there are some plants that when planted together benefit each other. Like in our bed, members of the cabbage family, get along with spinach and lettuce, and benefit from onions because the onion's aroma keeps the aphids at bay. Our bed also contains a  two strawberries, who like to hang out with spinach! Diversity is the spice of life... and apparently very beneficial!

And then there is this bugger! Natalie, one our friends beautiful children brought it over to us. She said if she planted it and took a picture with it when it was big that she could get a $1000 scholarship! And she wanted to plant it in our garden! I was so excited that she thought of us when her teacher talked about the plants! Her O.S. Cross cabbage makes 30-50lb heads!!! Hopefully we can keep it alive and happy! If you can see there is a baby in the picture on the tag next to the giant head of cabbage....this thing is going to be huge if all goes well!
I asked Chris and Paige (Natalies' parents) what they were going to do with 50lbs of cabbage, we decided we would use it like an atlas stone, which might looks something like this only instead of that really heavy cement stone it would be a cabbage.... I feel a Lonnie Video coming on.....

OK gotta go out back and fashion some sweet pea trellises and chuck some poppy seeds around to see if they will come up! And check on the lettuce to see if it has been blown out of its bed yet...it was super windy yesterday! There may be some interpretive garden dancing too.

OH we watched a super 70s awesome film called The Secret Life Of Plants. If any of you have netflix, and enjoy time lapse video, Stevie Wonder, polygraphs, and science I highly recommend its an instant play! Also very interesting....it speaks about plant consciousness... c'mon it cant be any worse than the crap they show on the news.....i know you are intrigued why polygraphs are in there hehehe

Lots of love and warm weather wishes!!

xoxo

Big Garden Changes in Less Than a Week!

Our 'mid leafing' shot

We sat outside eating breakfast in the sunshine one mornoon( we tend to sleep in so we eat breakfast around 11 sometimes haha!) looking at our straw covered beds. Dorian wasn't too convinced anything would really grow in the straw. We, after all, have only experienced plants grown in dirt, so the straw is a bit of a foreign concept. I started poking around and found a surprise! Straw was growing in the straw! So our passions were re-ignited! We shifted back into "bulk materials collection mode".

We had used much of our straw and needed some more bulk material to lay down... so we headed off in search of leaves! According to the books I read on sheet mulching the leaves are supposed to be chopped up, but it also says that sheet mulching is very forgiving, so we just went for whole leaves! 

The 'leafing' is finished!

We poked around a neighboring subdivision on super bowl sunday and decided to rake an empty lot! We chatted with the neighbors  that walked past (who were harassing me that I wasn't watching the game...hahah), picked up some trash, recycling, and about five bags of leaves that we packed into my truck. Dorian also picked up an obsession with collecting bricks to border the beds in. The beds look much cleaner and more organized, but we still need a bunch more bricks! We found a gold mine of bricks in some old empty lots with houses that had been demolished. The Truckalier was looking more like it was fully equipped with hydraulics and they were set to looowww! (cue "Low Rider" song,    doot doot doot doot doot doot doot, doot doot doot doot dooooooot!)

On Tuesday we went on some more adventures looking for bricks, after we got some letter stencils so Dorian could make a personal training sign for the front yard. We were tooling around good ole fayetteville, as we stopped at a light eagle eye (yours truly) spotted some bags of leaves! HA! Perfect, we didn't even have to rake them! We stopped by the house and they had a table there too! I had mentioned a day or two ago that we needed an outdoor table to have some space to do seeding and transplanting. It was so amazing, our brick hunt had turned into finding the perfect table and  more bags of leaves than we knew what do do with! Yet another example of how life unfolds perfectly :)

We had eyed up some awesome composted mulch at our local yard waste facility, but as you know a bulldozer load of composted mulch probably won't fit very well in my Chevy Truckalier....(remember this??) We felt a little frustrated and unequipped, and antsy, wanting to get our beds ready.

Recently I had a family contact me about baby sitting (don't worry this actually relates I'm not going on a tangent....). They live really close so its very convenient and the family is so sweet! I happened to mention to the father that we were trying to get large amounts of mulch into our back yard and he immediately offered his truck and help!! I've only met these people for a total of about 3 hours! He let me know that Friday the 18th he didn't have to work and would have time to help us out! (Ok this whole unfolding life things is getting a bit blatant.....These people first SEEK me out, provide me with a wonderful job, and then offer to help us haul a bunch of compost!!??)

Dorian it looks like you are planting nothing...

AH! ok, Yellow Wonder Wild Strawberry seeds! So tiny!

We were hoping to have the mulch a bit sooner but decided that we could look for bricks, and start some seeds in the mean time. We started a bunch of seeds on Friday afternoon, and let the broccoli, cauliflower and spinach out of the greenhouse to bask in the unadulterated rays of the sun for a bit, we were thinking about leaving them outside for the night (they are getting big!). At about 10 or 11 pm Dorian asked me if we had zipped up the greenhouse.......I couldn't remember.......I was feeling confident about our little seedlings and their outdoor adventure, but I checked the weather anyway. EEEK! It was supposed to get to 29 degrees! I ran outside picked up the frosty seedlings, got them back into our chilly greenhouse (which was left unzipped, gar!) and figured that we probably had just killed them...

Red and Yellowish Onions and Ground Cherries!

Peppers!!! Hot and sweet!

We awoke early on Saturday morning to check on our frost victims. Dorian reported they were still frozen and so was the soil in the trays we had just planted....ruh roh.... Since we were awake at such an early hour we decided to get our morning 1 hour meditation in and eat breakfast at breakfast time! 

Almost as soon as our sit was done my phone rang. (this was surprising itself because of my reliance on texting) It was the people I started to baby sit for. I answered and it was the father, he said he would have time today to haul some mulch for us!! (Ok again...the unfolding of life and its synchronistic qualities..... is this becoming more obvious to you too??) So we tossed on some workin' clothes and drank our breakfast (Dorian sometimes prefers drinking his meals in the form of milk, bananas, apple, peanut butter, cinnamon, and oats in a blender...haha!) and headed over to get a bulldozer load of mulch!

Dorian watering the leaves....so they don't blow away!
 "Bella, what do you have? DROP IT! Stop eating dirt!"

We had a nice full load of mulch for just $10! The unloading was the fun part. We have no wheel barrow.... We had cleverly dumped each load onto a tarp and carried it across the lawn and dropped it onto the beds. Woof! We had gotten about half the garden covered and said good bye to the boys, they were in need of lunch and getting ready for the circus later that day!

We were excited and wanted to finish what we started. We had heard that our other friend was in town this weekend and we may be able to use his truck, and as luck would have it, he was headed over to work out! And sure enough he brought his truck, and we had a bunch of other people over at our garage gym that were going to keep those guys busy for a while. Just enough time for us to get a load of compost! (seriously.... do I even have to say it again? I will, synchronistic unfolding!)

Yay! All finished! There's one of our helpers too! Thanks!

Ta daaaaa! We got another truckload of composted trees, and finished up the beds! It was a lot of work, hauling tarp-loads of composted trees around the yard but it looks GREAT! I hope our plants appreciate it!

Thank you SOOO MUCH to our friends for their help and use of their trucks! We appreciate it beyond comprehension, we couldn't have done it without you! Be prepared, hopefully we have some garden skills and will be sharing our bounty with you!

I will leave you with this:

Nice mustache Farmer D.....

Lots of love, happy thoughts, and dirty fingernails!

xoxo L