Canning Tomatoes and Tomato Juice

We are finally done with canning for the season. We ended up canning 18 jars of juice total, though we have probably another 150 to 200 tomatoes sitting on the vine right now. We’ll be using the rest to make home-made salsa as well as donating large quantities of tomatoes to family, friends, and neighbors. [...]

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Invasion of the Killer Tomato Plants and Canning Tomatoes

I’m not sure what I did, but we have tomato plants to rival any other tomato plant anywhere. Before their mass collapsed the sturdy cages I bought for them, two of them were approaching six feet tall and over 6 feet in circumference. When the cages first started to collapse, I attempted to brace them [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: Too much praise lately

I must be doing something right with my flowers….
In the past month, I’ve had around half a dozen daffodils, a handful of tulips, and now, just last night, two of my best pansies stolen from my garden.
I don’t understand where the lack of respect for other people’s property comes from, but I’m getting tired of [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: Repairing a concrete wall

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted in this particular series, and to be honest, I wouldn’t be posting if I didn’t find myself needing to repair a concrete-faced gravity wall.
We built the wall about two years ago to prevent the tenants in the parking lot next door from parking on our lawn. [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: Highest Praise

One of my blogging buddies (Authorias, aka Messagehawk) once said something to the effect that you know you’ve written something well when it becomes worthy of stealing. I suppose that probably applies to plants too. Well, apparently I’ve done something right.
I’ve always had the worst luck with marigolds, but recently one of my hopefuls really [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: First Fruits

I forgot to mention this precious story from a week or so ago.
We pulled our first fruits from our garden; a couple peppers. We thought that we had planted two jalapeños for Courtney, but we quickly noticed that one of them was distinctly not a jalapeño, and we had only minimal ideas as to what [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: Now how did that get there?

As I’ve mentioned in the past, we are in the middle of a major landscaping project. We also recently found out that a major roofing project, if not a total demo of our house, is in the works. Between those two projects, we’ve given up on trying to restore our lawn, and we are sitting [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: Mr. Tomato Plant

A good friend has been playing with gardening of late, and she recently killed her first tomato plant. We have a great relationship with lots of humor and fun. We used to work together at a former job, and I introduced her to technical writing while she managed to save my sanity. It was more [...]

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Dave’s Gardening Corner: Grape Hyacinths

Very rarely do I find a plant that I absolutely despise. Even dandelions have their own little happy place in life as a favorite flower of small children. We all have to admit the childhood joy of blowing the seeds from the head of a dandelion even though now it causes our hearts to stop [...]

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Spring Plans

Last Fall, I began what I knew would be a long project. We ripped out trees, a large hedge, built a wall, and otherwise made royal nuisances of ourselves. Then the snow came and halted the work. Now that Spring is peaking around the corner, it’s time to get back to work.
First on the agenda [...]

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