Unexpected Harvest

As I said in a post or two ago, nothing looked like it was gonna be ripe for the next few days at least, but I just went out to water and found out I was mistaken. I guess the plants were in dire need of fertilizing because I did so a few days ago, and each of the tomato plants have actually grown a foot taller and bushier, and so many are ripe! The same with all the peppers (hot and sweet)! And the Ichiban eggplants have grown tons of new leaves and flowers! Nice surprises are always great in the garden, they sure beat out finding squirrels have discovered your plants and dug in your pots. Which are the kind of surprises I'm used to.

So here's today's harvest.

Tomaaatoooesss

dried cayenne

cayenne seeds saved!

peppahs

Even more tomatoes, I just find the different colours so pretty. One cherry tomato plant I have growing was labelled Black Cherry Tomato but sadly it was mislabeled and they're just extremely large cherries.

Some more of the garden:

The darn squirrels keep munchin' on my aloe

Crafts

My initial intention was to make this blog a gardening and crafts blog. I seem to have become overtly obsessed with my gardening lately so it kind of took over. So I shall now add some craft posts since craft content is severely lacking. And by severely lacking, I mean nonexistent.

Anyhoo,

Yay craft!

These are a pair of candlesticks I made a few months ago for my mother for her birthday. It's from the same piece of wood as this:

A project I did for a course last semester at OCAD.

It's structure I built for my Time Based Media class. It's made out of a oak tree branch I found at the side of road from pruning, cut into sections with plywood boxes I built in between each section.
In the plywood boxes I cut and glued together plexiglass to make more boxes boxes to fit into the wood ones. The top and bottom ones with bundles of wires going through them, to look as if the wires run through the tree. In the middle box, there is a robotic-thing I made that when you push the 'on' switch, it spins two slices of the maple pretty fast.

I got a lot of use from that oak branch. I also made this for another class around the same time.

Close up

This was a self portrait for another class. Basically on each slice of oak there is an image that I've transferred on from old family photos and other shtuff I like. Each piece is held together with a thin loop of wool.

More crafts to come including some jewelry I'm selling! Hopefully my Etsy page will be up and running really soon.

Garden Update

Things seem to still be blooming and growing new fruit constantly, but right now besides tomatoes, nothing's really ready to be picked for a while. My zucchinis keep growing baby ones, but the past three times they decided not to actually grow fully, but turn yellow and fall off. The bell peppers seem to have finally started producing lots of little ones, which is great. I was worried I wouldn't get any bell peppers this season because until recently they weren't even flowering and it's already August.
So here's a few plants.

jalapenos, red pepper (not ripe), and sweet banana

'Super sweet 100' cherries, green peppers, and the surprise tomatoes. 

Eggplant, the surprise weed tomatoes, and cherry toms.

While picking my eggplants, I discovered that the top green part of eggplants and the plant itself had thorns/ spikes all over it! I was not expecting that and was pretty surprised. 'Tis hard to pick something with a top of spikes.
I don't know if it'll be obvious from this picture but...spikes!

On the left side, a thorn! Ahh.

 Anyhoo here are some tomatoes I picked today. Mmmm. These golden ones are so delicious and sweet I've picked about five or more a day since the plant started producing (and eaten then right after)! I'm going to try out saving seeds from tomatoes ( which is more complicated than things like peppers and herbs) when the season ends so I can get a plant similar to this one. It's so hardy and amazing.

Mmm so delicious.

Pickling!

I have a one sweet banana pepper plant in my garden, and one jalapeno pepper plant. I have gotten so many peppers from these two plants, I didn't know what to do with them all! 

So I decide to give pickling another shot. I cut up the jalapenos and a few banana peppers and put them in one jar along with some green cherry tomatoes that fell after my potted cherry tomato fell over and broke a few branches. I tried to leave the banana peppers on as long as possible to turn orange, but they seemed just just get yellow or start rotting so  I picked them all at once, and decided to make my own pepperoncini.  I had some extra vinegar pickling stuff left when I was done filling the jars of my peppers, so I decided to make some pickles, and see how they turn out. I didn't have any actual dill for the cumbers, but hopefully they'll be tasty.

 

 I used equal parts cider vinegar to water (1 3/4 cups each),

2 cloves of garlic chopped up,

3 tsp of kosher salt, 

2 tsp of sugar

about 2 tbsp of pickling spice I bought 

(basically cardamon seeds, black pepper, dill seed, and other strange things)

Be warned that I haven't tried what the peppers taste like, but I based what I did on a few different recipes.

For these, don't refrigerate, but leave out in a warm-ish area in your house for a week or more.

For next year, when (hopefully) I'll have many more peppers and cucumbers I really want this.

Today's Harvest

Ooooh rainbow!

And here's everything so far:

Tomato Branch Transplant Success!

 

The tomato transplant took! Looks like it's doing really well, especially after all the coffee grounds I just out into its pot. Yaaay for successful experiments!

Here's the Mulberry tree seedling I got from a friend who's whole backyard is full of trees they also started from mulberry seedlings from their one tree they had in the front of their house. Growing pretty fast! Only had two small leaves when I potted it.

 

I hope this grows to a full tree, I's love to start making Mulberry jams.