Not So Crafty

Category: Gardening

  • Praying Mantis Update

    It’s been a few months since my Praying Mantis egg hatched. For a while I would spot them everywhere in the garden. But now I can only find one or two. I do have one that is content to live in my mint plants. I like to check on her in the mornings while I…

  • What To Do With All of Those Cucumbers

    As I mentioned before, my cucumber plants are out of control. Lately, I have been enjoying a lot of summer salads. You can’t beat the combination of cucumber and tomatoes. This is my usual recipe. Cucumber and Tomato Salad 1 cup of cucumber peeled, seeded and diced 2 cups of tomatoes diced (or cherry tomatoes…

  • Let’s Talk Cucumbers!

    After we constructed the Earth Trainer for our tomatoes, I was left with half of a storage container. I thought it was best not to waste it and I turned it into a bed for my cucumbers. I placed it next to my raised bed and used one of my old tomato cages as a…

  • Summer Garden Tomato Edition

    I have a confession, last year’s tomato crop was horrible. It was terrible. The combination of putting underdeveloped seedlings out too early, not providing them the right nutrients, and erratic weather patterns resulted in a pathetic amount of tomatoes. This year I vowed it would be different. I have been doing the following and it…

  • Surviving A Heat Wave

    Last week we had a week long heat wave. The temperatures were over 105 and I had to come up with a fast way to create shade. I resorted to using my umbrella and propping it up in the bed to protect my new seedlings. My lettuce still bolted but the seedlings are still hanging…

  • Summer Flowers

    I hope all of you are having a great and safe Fourth of July. Here is a little peak of the flowers in bloom in the garden. Cosmos: I didn’t grow these last year and I missed having this wild, low maintenance annual. My hybrid sunflowers are in bloom. A few rebelled and grew over…

  • Garlic Harvest

    Wow, what a difference a month makes. I finished my second harvest of garlic and shallots last weekend. This crop was called Brown Tempest. The produced huge heads of purple striped bulbs. Once they were harvested they were rinsed off, roots cut off, laid out to dry in the sun for a few days, and…

  • Garden Tour

    This was a spur of the moment video we made with the Iphone video feature. The yard is a little messy but I thought it would be fun to show off what’s growing in the garden this season.

  • Sage Flowers

    This is a first, my sage is actually blooming. It has these long stems with multiple purple flowers.

  • Squash Flowers

    This is my first year growing squash and it’s been a great learning experience. I am growing Sweet Dumpling Squash . It’s a sweet winter squash similar to butternut or delicata. It’s also fairly hardy as I’ve almost dehydrated it to death on more than one occasion. I noticed something else the other day and…