Spices Over Yanda Blog (Previously Allyson's Attempt at Domestication)

Warning: Picture Overload. I am very excited about all the blooming going on in my garden and I MUST share. :) Strawberry Bloom My new bell pepper plant is about to bloom. My tomatoes. Those are only a couple of the MANY green ones I have. My tomato plants are blooming. My bush green beans are blooming. My tomato plants are taking over my garden. I sat out at my garden today for awhile in the heat trying to decide how to handle the "problem" LOL! I'll let ya know what I come up with. Feel free to leave your suggestions as a comment for me as well. My cucumber plant is blooming. My peas are blooming...and growing like crazy! Here is my garden....full of tomatoes, bell pepper, broccoli, lettuce, carrots, peas, cilantro, onion, jalepeno and green beans...yay!!! Here is Ray's garden. :) He's trying a tomato plant in the topsy turvy thing. A fun experiement. We'll see how it "grows" hee hee.

That's how my garden looks today! It loves, loves, loves the rain! First tomatoes! I am sooo totally excited! The only thing I'm concerned about is my broccoli plants. They just are growing very slowly. Not sure why. Also, my bell plant didn't come up. Tomorrow I plan on buying a plant to replace that. The picture taker! She HAD to be in ONE of the pictures! LOL!

My husband's birthday is always around Mother's Day, so we usually end up celebrating them together. This year I decided to do some handprint gifts and they turned out pretty good. My husband also decided to do a handprint gift. He got me this great garden cart and let the kids personalize it with their handprints. Priceless! :) Great minds think alike. This is the shirt we made for my mom. I really wanted the blue handprint up and to the right a bit, so it was overlapping the pink one. But he is 4 and this was pretty good. :) I think it turned out very cute. Here is the back of my husband's shirt. A right foot print from each child. I'll add how I did this at the bottom of this post. This is the front of his shirt. I've tried a couple times to get this the right way. On my computer it's the right way, so does it turn when I upload it here? ERggggggg! You can get the idea from it I guess. LOL! I also decorated a frame for my mom. Here are my supplies. 4...

Here is how my garden looks today! I added some plants that I purchased at the local nursery. The jalapeno plant is for my husband since he loves them, the cilantro sounded like fun and seemed useful. In the back right corner I added a cucumber plant since my transplant didn't make it. The strawberries are an experiment. I don't expect them to do very well since they are in full sun and two small plants won't produce much. But, I would love to have a berry box at some point (a 4X4 like this with only berry plants) so this is a good experiment to see how they do. Below I took a close-up picture of the stem of my pole green bean plant that has made it. I was about to pull it up the other day because look how brown it is. However, my daughter noticed that there were new green leaves at the very end! The roots seem strong and obviously something is working, so I left it in! We'll see how it does, I have to give it a chance! I also took a close-up picture of one o...

Here is how my garden looks today! I think it is coming along very nicely. The four boxes with * in them are ones that didn't do well. They were transplants from inside and I think one of the things I have learned this year is that I don't need to start my seeds inside. The carrots, first harvest lettuce and the onion are also seeds I started inside. They are doing well, however I feel they would have done just as well starting by seed. For instance, look at my second harvest lettuce. It's doing just as well and I started that by seed. So far, the only thing that hasn't come up yet is the mixed bell pepper plant. However, it did have a slightly longer germination, so I am still hopeful. My plan with the empty boxes (ones with the * in them) are to plant more seeds for a second harvest. My bush green beans and my peas are doing so well, I think I want a second harvest for those. I think for the other two boxes I will try cucumber by seed and maybe do either a...

When Ray and I were first married, I made him a lot of cheesecake. All it took was him saying he liked cheesecake, and I set out to make it for him! LOL! He would cut the cheescake into 4 quarters and grab one piece on his way out to school. At one point I had to stop making it for him, it wasn't healthy, haha! You do need a springform pan. There really is no way to make a cheesecake properly without the springform pan. You can get them most anywhere and they are fairly inexpensive. I've seen many cheesecake recipes over the years, but my favorite comes from good old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It's called Cheesecake Supreme. I only make one slight change from the recipe. I like more crumb mixture so I use 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs instead of 1 3/4 cups. You can choose how you like yours. The nuts in the crust give it a very unique flavor and most everyone that has tried it really likes it. I also make a fruit sauce to go with it..the picture on the left is a p...

First my handy husband made this wood frame. I think he used 2 2'X8' and had Home Depot cut them in half. Therefore the box is a 4'X4' and has 16 square foot boxes to plant in. He had already put up the fencing you see, so he had fencing wire left over and decided to use that for the grid. In hindsight he would have opted for something easier, but it was still a good use of something that was left over. He also burned the ground underneath for me, to get rid of grass and weeds, then we covered that area with weed control fabric. I place my "box" on that and then filled it with the reccomended Mel's mix which is 1/3 each of peat moss, compost and vermiculite. Mine ended up being about 1/2 compost and 1/4 of each vermiculite and peat moss. Right now it's not very pretty, but it's really new. I have a few plantlings I had started from seed inside, some look good, others not so much. The rest is seeds that just got planted today. I also lef...