Who needs rain anyway....?

It is nearing that time of year where I become overloaded with veggies and subsequently give half of them away because I can't keep up with all the canning. Last year we were inundated with squash and zucchini, this year we seem to have too many cukes. Sadly there seems to be a lot fewer options for fun ways to eat cucumbers compared to squash and zucchini...anyone have any suggestions? Actually, I have eaten so many of them that I feel like I am in a perpetual state of "cucumber bloat"... maybe I ought to lay off the cukes for a few days :) Anyway! So here is what my garden looked like on the 5th of June (the day I left for Maine)...


And here it is 2 and a half weeks later on the day after I came home from Maine (many many thanks to Shawn for weeding while I was gone!!) What you can see in the picture is that things are growing fast (especially the tomatoes and corn!), what you can't see is almost all of my peas and many of my green beans either died from the 100+ degree heat wave or got eaten by rabbits, bummer! It's embarrassing to say I have had to plant my green beans three times this year, but I will have fresh green beans dammit!! Also we have had a major infestation of Colorado potato beetles which nearly was the demise for our potatoes, but thankfully we have it under control now with the help of Sevin Dust (not the band).

We have also found an effective solution to the heat/lack of rain problem...it was a bit on the pricey side, but is a one time investment that we will reap the benefits of for years to come. We purchased a large amount of used irrigation equipment from Shawn's grandfather, and now we are able to keep the garden alive no matter how hot or dry it gets without draining our well, yay! We are very lucky to have a farm pond on our property that is currently only being used for fishing, so this makes it possible for us to have a nearly unlimited (and renewable, since it is spring fed) source of water. Since we don't have quite enough pipe to reach all the way from the garden to the pond, instead we fill up a 1000 gallon tank and haul it up to the garden where we hook it to the pump and wala! We have water! The first time we ran it we discovered we can put down 1000 gal of water in about 40 minutes, incredible! I was so excited I was dancing in the "rain" (along with the dog) :) Check it out:


And as for our rabbit problem, well that solved itself once the wheat got cut, now they have no where to hide from their predators, so they seem to be staying closer to the woods these days. And that is fine with me! Here is a shot of the combine harvesting the wheat from our back deck:

The month in pictures

Wow, it's been over a month since I have blogged, which is really awful since I don't even have school as an excuse right now...BUT, even without being in school I have managed to stay pretty busy and so I thought I'd cover what I've been up to over the past month with a photo blog....

For starters, I have been working as a TA for an online course called "Principles and Methods of Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology" (a mouthful I know!) It's actually a course I took a couple years ago as part of the Certificate in Field Epidemiology program, so it's nice that I am already familiar with the material. I don't have a photo for this one, but who wants to see me sitting behind my laptop in my pajamas anyway? :) To make up for the lack of a photo, here is a fun outbreak investigation game that I find very entertaining, so if you're bored here is something to keep you occupied for 10 or 15 minutes (after you finish reading my blog of course!) http://www.mclph.umn.edu/watersedge/

I also got to spend almost 3 weeks in Maine visiting my family and attending weddings, we lucked out and got some great weather (almost 90 degrees in early June, wow!) so that meant my sisters, Dad, and I got to do a lot of fishing at his camp in Belgrade... and I was even brave enough to take a dip in the lake (I think the ice had only gone out about 6 weeks prior!)


On our last day at camp my Dad and I were fortunate enough to get to see both of the bald eagles that live on the lake, it was an incredible experience! Gotta love the magic of camp!

Allison, a childhood friend and the daughter of friends of my parents who I have known since I was 5, got married in Biddeford on June 7th...her dress was lilac colored...I am so jealous!!

EJ, a friend from college who was also dubbed as an unoffical third roommate our freshman year at UMaine, got married in Windham on June 21st. I also got to see Emily, my "official" roommate freshman and sophmore year, and her husband Ryan at the wedding. I can't wait to meet their new baby Lizzie next time I visit!

During my visit I also got the chance to visit with one of my closest friends Barbie and her husband Sean and also two of my friends from elementary school Jessica and Lisa (I hadn't seen Lisa in over 14 years!!). My Mom and I picked out my wedding dress while I was in Maine too, but I can't show you those pictures, it's bad luck!

What's that smell?....oh... it's me

As I was making a futile attempt to clean out the grime from under my fingernails, I realized that my black fingernails were a symbol of my favorite kind of day, a day spent getting completely and utterly filthy :) Here is my recipe for the perfect day: start out with sunscreen (on such a perfect spring day I knew I would spend every last second outside), then add a lot of dirt and sweat from weeding the garden (holy crap where did all these weeds come from all of sudden?), then add gear oil (time to find the source of the leak in the rear axle), and top it all off with some DEET and fish slime (we only caught a couple brim, but it was still a blast). And as a added bonus, tonight is the NASCAR all-star race...what more could a girl want?? :)

Seeds of wisdom

One of my favorite things about gardening is watching my carefully sown seeds start to sprout. It never fails to amaze me how you can stick a tiny dry little seed into the dirt and a week or 2 later there is a beautiful little plant growing in it's place. I understand the science behind it, but for some reason, even after our very successful garden last year, I still feel that I don't really know what I am doing and that there is no way all the seeds I planted will actually sprout. This year, when 90% of the green beans I planted didn't come up, I knew it was my fault for somehow not planting them right and that I was a failure as a farmer. Shawn told me that it was becuase we had so much rain in the week after we planted that some of the seeds may have drowned, but I was skeptical...how come the corn he planted on the same day came up just fine then?? So on Tuesday I decided to swallow my pride and try to replant all the green beans. As I dug up the dirt in the row, I discovered that Shawn had in fact been right, I found many of the seeds I had planted, and they had sprouted and even had some tiny leaves, but they were yellow looking and they had never breached the surface becuase they got stuck under the hard crust of clay that builds up after hard rains, and so they drowned...poor little things. Sad as it was that there was a mass drowning in the garden, I still felt happy becuase I knew that it wasn't directly my fault, it was just the damn weather, again! And I also realized that the reason the corn didn't drown was becuase it had already come up before the several days of downpours came. OK, so maybe I'm not a failure after all... but won't be sure until I see my new set of green beans come up, keep your fingers crossed!

A time for celebration

Even though this week was finals week for me, it was one of the best I've had in a while. To start, my college roommate Emily and her husband Ryan were able to bring home their new baby after many months on the adoption waitlist, I am so thrilled for them both and can't wait to meet Elizabeth Marie when I'm in Maine in June (check out their blog "Brinkley Parker"). I also found out that my sister Sarah got a management job for Aramark that she was hoping for, you rock girl! Shawn has completed his third week in his new planner position at Miller and is exceeding all expectations already (I knew he would), I am so proud of him. :) As for myself, I have successfully completed my first year of the PhD program (who hoo!), and I also have a meeting with the state public health veterinarian and the state pest management director to discuss a collaboration on a potential dissertation project on tick-borne disease in NC (probably Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) I am so psyched!

Now that the semester is over I am planning to spend most of the summer working in the garden and catching up on some non-epidemiology reading. Any book suggestions would be welcomed! I will also be a TA for an online course for the Field Epi Certificate program, which is really nice since I won't have to commute into Chapel Hill except for maybe once a week. Of course, we'll also continue working on the mud truck over the summer (Shawn installed a new stereo and speakers today, now we can crank up that country music!), the next project is replacing the brakes.

As for the garden, we planted the tomatoes, green beans, peas, corn, cukes, squash and potatoes on Monday, the rest will go in tomorrow (no rain in the forecast, finally!) I also planted a bunch of gladiola bulbs in the front yard, but the bulbs were from Lowe's so I'm not sure if they'll actually come up or not, we'll have to just wait and see....

Usually I love thunderstorms....

...but not this week! Once again my planting plans were foiled by the weather, as we had numerous thunderstorms over the weekend which reduced our lovely garden plot to a muddy mess. We did get a chance to make up the rows and fertilize the garden before the storms hit, which was good. From the photos (below) you'd never know that we were about to get dumped on, but I guess that's the way it goes with thunderstorms this time of year, they sneak up on you real quick! Anyway, we made 4 rows (about 150 feet long) and the other half of the garden (which is not cut into rows) will be for the corn, which you plant in flat ground. The fertilizer we are using is triple-17, which is actually pretty heavy duty stuff (usually used for tobacco), but Shawn's grandfather swears by it and as long as you put it deep enough in the rows it shouldn't burn the plants (also, a little goes a long way!). Maybe someday I'll have enough time to do the composting thing so my garden is a little more earth-friendly, but for now this will have to do.

We also made a trip to a local greenhouse to pick up some seedling plants, hopefully they'll be OK under the carport for a few more days until it dries out. We had planned to scale back on tomatoes this year (we had 48 last year, waaaay too many), but somehow we still ended up with 42 plants when we got home...I have no idea how that could have happened, but I think it starts with a "S" and ends with a "N".... :) Anyway, we also picked up our pepper plants and this is where I may have gone a little overboard myself...4 jalapeno, 4 cayenne, 4 green bell, 4 yellow bell, 4 red bell, and 4 banana peppers....can you tell I like spicy food? I plan to can a few batches of salsa and jalapeno jelly, and I may even try pickling my own jalapenos this year. But for right now, I should probably get back to studying for my finals...

Springtime in the south

As usual, I haven't posted in months, but now that it is springtime and the semester is almost over (2 more weeks, yay!) I have been inspired to use my blog as a garden journal since that topic is something that's actually fun to write about (as opposed to school, which is just torturous and no one wants to hear me complain all the time anyway). This past weekend was supposed to be the best weekend for planting according to the farmers almanac (which was independently confirmed by Shawn's grandfather, who is a walking farmers almanac). My plans were thwarted due to the heavy rains last week, which made the ground too wet to make up the rows with the tractor (although it would have been fun to play with the tractor in the mud, but Shawn was not enthused with that idea, dang it!) So hopefully I can plant this weekend, although it's been getting down to the low 30s at night, so we'll have to keep an eye on the weather forecast. It sure seems like spring has been playing hide and seek this year, we even got a freak snow shower a few weeks back and it had been in the 70s the week before, very strange! Many of the trees are in full bloom right now (as well as the azaleas) and I thought I'd share this picture I took Sunday (it's actually the view from my kitchen window, pretty sweet huh?)