Project 365: 03/08/09

We have some confused flowers on our hands. After weather in the 60s over the weekend, I noticed these pansies in bloom in front of our house. Poor confused pansies; don’t they know it’s still wintertime?

King Harvest has surely come…

We harvested two out of the three pumpkins on Halloween night:

That’s Matt in his Halloween costume. He was the failing economy, with a noose instead of a tie. He was also handing out money to everybody. He was wearing a suit and hat and the suit was purchase for only $13 at a local thrift shop!

Somehow I think the picture seems awfully creepy…Matt with his hat and noose, on a crisp Hallow’s Eve.

We still have one pumpkin that’s not ripe for picking yet, but it will be soon!

Earlier:

Baby pumpkin
Growing pumpkin
Ripening Pumpkin
Dying Pumpkin Patch

Hopefully next year will be a better one in terms of pumpkin crops, but hey, three pumpkins isn’t so bad.

Return of the raspberries!

I was checking on our tomatoes to see if there were any worth picking yet (there weren’t…might be time to pick the rest and let them ripen inside) and I noticed that we have raspberries again! I was surprised, as we haven’t had raspberries since July and we never got raspberries again in the fall before. I just ate one and it was scrumptious! :-)

No Great Pumpkin this year…

Yep. That’s the pumpkin patch. Well, the picture is from two weeks ago, so we now have three orange pumpkins (almost ready for picking?) but the pumpkin patch is looking fairly dismal. I read that it was not a good year for the pumpkin crops, probably due to our very own miniature monsoon season in August! Well, I guess three pumpkins isn’t bad. And there’s always next year…I’d like to plant a variety of squash next year.

On a happier note, our mums are doing well, with one mum getting absolutely gigantic:

Our tomatoes are still doing pretty well, but I imagine that within the next few weeks we may have to pick the remainder and let them ripen on a window sill.

I have a few daffodil bulbs to plant, but other than that, I think we’re pretty much done gardening for the season. (Aside from the Aerogarden…we still have tons of basil, but the next crop I think we’ll do is lettuce)

I think we did pretty well, considering the fact that this is our first time really gardening. We had lots of pretty flowers, crisp lettuce, juicy tomatoes, and three homegrown pumpkins. We’ll see what’s in store for us next spring!

Bye Bye, Dahlias.

See the little pink flowers on the right of the azaleas in the photo? Those were our lovely dahlias in the spring. They were thriving…they had gotten pretty big and they were looking incredibly pretty these days.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who was admiring them, because today I noticed they were gone. Someone uprooted it. Someone STOLE our dahlias. I am absolutely livid!!!! How dare someone just come up and steal our flowers.

The worst part is that this isn’t even the first time this has happened. About 2 1/2 years ago, someone stole a tigerlily from the front of our house. Just went and uprooted it. We weren’t into gardening back then, so we didn’t replant something until this spring.

Newton tends to make it into the top five safest cities list every year, but I wonder if they take in FLOWER THEFT when compiling this data?

I’m never planting anything in front of our house again, aside from maybe just doing some wildflower seeds, which I think people would be less inclined to steal.

I just can’t believe someone would steal our lovely little dahlias. :-(

Autumn Gardens

Well, I know it’s not officially fall yet, but even though it’s barely mid-September, our garden is beginning to look very fallish.

We have sunflowers galore, currently:

Our sunflowers usually begin blooming in August, but by September they’re amazing. The sunflowers have really taken over the back corner of our yard. When we returned home from California, I couldn’t believe how many sunflowers were in full bloom!

These mums are insane:

We had many potted mums decorating our wedding last September. A huge bonus of using potted mums as decorations is that after our wedding was over, we were able to come home and plant them. In fact, these mums are what got us into gardening this year. That one mum is GIGANTIC…the rest are fairly humble. A few didn’t come back this spring, but for the most part they are doing well. Something really nice about the mums is that each time I walk past them I am reminded of our lovely wedding.

AND…looky here:

Can you believe that’s the very same pumpkin that wasn’t even tennis ball sized a month ago? We have a few more pumpkins coming, but this one is truly the star of the show.

I expect one last great tomato harvest before the weather cools off more. We also have some daffodil bulbs to plant. From then on, it’s just our indoor Aerogarden (and the fantastic basil that comes from it!) until next spring. I think I’d like to get a dwarf apple tree to grow in a barrel, as dwarf apple trees don’t take long to begin yielding fruit. That would be something else to enjoy into the fall. We shall see. :-)

Look at this big pumpkin!!

We’ve got lots of tiny pumpkins starting to grow, but this one is getting REALLY big!! I wonder how early it will be ready? Maybe Matt can make a pumpkin ale with it, and then we can cook the sunflower seeds. :-)

And yes, this is the same pumpkin that I posted a picture of in a blog post just a little over a week ago. It’s growing at a rapid pace.

Baby Pumpkin!!

Look! It’s the beginning of a pumpkin! :-)

Mahoney’s

As you know, Matt and I are really into gardening this year. Matt’s also a homebrewer, and this spring he began growing his own hops. They’re growing very rapidly, so we needed to buy a few trellises for them to climb.

We decided to go to the Mahoney’s in Wayland. Matt bought two trellises and the brand was called MATTHEW. And Mahoney is Matt’s last name.

So Matthew Mahoney bought Matthew brand trellises at Mahoney’s!

He made a little joke to the cashier about getting a discount for being a Mahoney, but the cashier just looked perplexed.

Aerogarden so far

The cilantro is the only one that hasn’t come up so far, but everything else seems to be doing well. Only a few more weeks until we can start harvesting! Mmm, basil!!!