so the pics were a great success! we managed to dodge the raindrops and do about an hour and 1/2 worth of pics. you can see them here. (i'm not sure if that will work if she didn't specifically share them with you?) tracey is a great photographer. i love the expressions she caught and the way she cropped them (or maybe she took them like that..i don't know, i'm not a photographer) but i like them!
alena has gotten into a bad habit of not being able to sleep in non-home places. she hasn't always been like this, i guess this past christmas was the real first time it's happened, but we manage to forget she's like this in between traveling. but we rolled into my brother's house about 10pm and my 8yr old niece had waited up to see alena. we figured after the long drive, she'd do good to play a little bit before bed. fast forward through everyone going to bed, many tears, screaming, wanting to romp, taking turns holding and rocking her...it was about 1am before she finally fell asleep..only to wake up (wide awake) at 6am! so aside from the rain, i was worried about an emotional meltdown during the shoot. but as long as we didn't try to hard to make her pose or stay in a certain spot, she was happy.
i visited my garden this afternoon. it's about done for this season, i think. we started out with 4 cherry tomato plants, 4 regular tomato plants, 1 rosemary, 3 basil (well, i had 4, but dug one up and gave to a friend mid-season b/c i had TONS of basil!) 6 stalks of sweet corn, 4 pole beans (green beans) growing up around the stalks of corn and 4 summer squash plants. (the corn with the beans up the stalks and the squash around the outside is a trio called "three sisters." they work well together--the beans give the soil nutrients for the corn and the squash leaves hold in moisture in the soil for all 3 to thrive) i got exactly 1 squash before squash bugs and vine borers killed all the plants. i got 4 ears of corn, only 1 was completely full of kernels, the others were about 1/2 full. this could either be due to not having a ton of corn planted like you're supposed to, or just bad seed. either way, i scraped the kernels off the cobs to eat and they were GOOD! after that, i ripped up the corn stalks, unraveling my beans from the corn stalks. i was getting just a few beans at a time. we put in stakes and trained them to grow on that. (apparently, you're asking for trouble when you unwind and re-wind bean stalks, but we did just fine.) after that, i was getting handfuls of beans every time i visited the garden! i blanched the beans and now my freezer is full! today, the bean stalks were all dried out and no new beans. so i ripped those out.
on to the tomatoes. when i planted them, i knew that tomatoes had a high yield. but i had trouble imagining i was going to need those big stakes! but wow! tomatoes coming out my ears!! and my plants have long outgrown the stakes. a couple times a storm has completely blown them over and we've had to pick them up and retie them to the stakes. we've made a couple batches of salsa, i have some crushed tomatoes frozen that i'll hopefully use for chili later. i've had sliced tomatoes on my sandwich every day and alena has had her fill of the cherry tomatoes. they have totally taken over my garden.
my basil did pretty well and i got a little bit of rosemary, but both herbs have been overshadowed (and blocked from the sun and rain) by the tomatoes. the rosemary plant died and today's basil was pretty wilty.
we're having a harvest festival next weekend, so i'll leave the tomatoes, but after that, i'll rip them up and return my plot to just soil in preparation for next year.
next year, i'd like to do corn and beans again, maybe 2 regular tomato plants and just 1 cherry tomato plant. i'll probably do the herbs here at the house, i've seen where you can put several herbs in the same planter. and i'd love to do some root veggies--potatoes, sweet potatoes, a couple beets, maybe some carrots. i'm intrigued by berries, but i'm told they're difficult to do in this type of setting. i was also told i was wasting my time with the corn, but it grew and a couple other people even planted corn after they saw mine sprout ears, so who knows.
the plot is just 4x12, but it's been a blast, this the first time i've grown anything! next year, alena will be even more able to "help" and enjoy it.
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