Runaway October

Hey guys. Remem­ber me? No? Dan­git. I don’t blame you.

I have lots of excuses, but no real rea­sons. Maybe it’s my short atten­tion span?

Sum­mer is on full blast here in Ari­zona. When I say full blast I mean you walk out the front door and are lit­er­ally blasted with Sum­mer Heat. My poor gar­den has seen bet­ter days.

Today

Con­sid­er­ing we get to plant some­times as much as a whole sea­son ear­lier than other parts of the coun­try, I can’t com­plain. We ended up with more toma­toes then we knew what to do with. We made many batches of salsa and lots and lots of fresh tomato slices. I even exper­i­mented with ketchup, but it turned out way way too sweet and pretty much ined­i­ble. Boo.

The boys wanted in on these pic­tures.

This is one of a few big har­vests. We basi­cally ended up with a lot of squash, jalapeños and tomatoes.

Does this look like a zom­bie ver­sion of that guy from Veg­gi­eTales to you? Me too!

We also planted ONE “hon­ey­dew” plant and ended up with a few good sized mel­ons off of it. It’s still going strong though. It LOVES the heat appar­ently. It takes up a huge amount of space still. It’s not a hon­ey­dew by the way, I’m think­ing maybe a Cren­shaw or Casaba melon.

Those leaves are about hand sized, for ref­er­ence. In the bot­tom right, is my Span­ish laven­der bush. It seems happy to have a lit­tle bit of shade.

The heat is caus­ing the jalapenos to be red and small from the start.

Some strag­gler toma­toes. About 70% of the cherry toma­toes ripen okay, the oth­ers suc­cumb to the sun and shrivel up.

I’d say all in all, the gar­den was totally worth it. There’s noth­ing quite like find­ing your boys nes­tled in your gar­den fill­ing up on tomatoes.

Some things I’ll do dif­fer­ently next spring:

• Space out the toma­toes a smidgen more.
• Cage them imme­di­ately, and con­tinue to sup­port them as they grow.
• Read up on cucum­bers. I think that by the time my pick­ling cucum­bers came up, it was too hot. You can find itty-bitty inch long cum­bers one day and the next they’re shriv­eled and gone.
• Plan for sprawl more. The toma­toes over­took the green beans, dill and car­rots. The one squash plant took out the lemon thyme, cilantro and most of the spearmint.
• Pos­si­bly plant a week or two ear­lier. I don’t have to worry about frost much, but I do have to worry about the sun killing things right as the fruit matures.
• Pos­si­bly some kind of shade cloth over the whole thing too.

So, that was our gar­den this year. Still debat­ing on when to rip things out to pre­pare for the win­ter garden.

How did yours come along?

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Yep, you heard right. My plain jane kitchen has had a facelift.

Here she is before, look­ing pretty… neutral.

And after! A cou­ple wash­ings with TSP, a cou­ple coats of Valspar Jaunty Green, and doesn’t she look so pretty? To the left of the fridge is where the chalk­board wall will be. I’m excited to get that done. But first I need to fill in the knock­down wall tex­ture and slap on some thick coats of primer before even THINKING about start­ing that endeavor.

Rowan’s being coy.

I didn’t paint the wall with the win­dow and sink in it because it’s one con­tin­u­ous wall the goes into the boys class­room. I don’t think I could han­dle THAT much bright green.

Oh hey! Why yes, yes I am wear­ing only under­wear, a hoodie and Ketchup.

If you look closely at  the first after pic­ture there is a very small space above the upper cab­i­nets that’s use­less still unpainted. I think I’ve decided it needs to be painted too, even though the only thing small enough to fit up there are the cats.

So there ya have it. My other color thoughts for this room were an aqua (but that seems to be my first thought for every room) or a smoky pur­ple. What would you have done?

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Please don’t for­get to vote for me daily, if you would be so kind. Thank you!