Garden

*B* has been diligently working in the garden this season.  I must admit that I've done little more than ask for certain foods to be planted.by and large, the rest of the garden is his this year.

*B* has been putting vine scraps that we don't want growing into a trashcan.  I noticed that there were some ants around the top of the can.  I don't know if you can see it, but the left side of this pile is swarming with ants.  No wonder they're getting into our house!



On a good bug note, it looks like a ladybug laid eggs on this plant.  There were tons of pupating ladybugs there today.


*B* has had this cactus for many years.  It's thriving and putting out new pads all the time.


The honeysuckle I got a couple of years ago is really taking over.  We need to find a way to trellis it further than we already have.  It's a native honeysuckle, so we don't want to cut it back too far.


My Mister Lincoln has some buds on it.  I'm hoping to get a good crop of red roses this year.



My JFK rose is doing fantastically.  One is almost ready to open, and four more are on their way.


*B* planted red clover in with our asparagus to help out the soil.  I thought it would never flower, but it's proving me wrong.


I tend to get bit up by bugs in the summer.  Knowing our luck, the baby will inherit my "sweet meat".  This year we're trying a potted citronella plant on our table to help keep the bugs away without having to spray. 


I'm a hoarder of mint.  I've got four main types (spearmint, variegated peppermint, pineapple mint, and chocolate mint), and the little pot down in front is called Mexican mint, but it's tarragon.



The downside of being a mint hoarder is that it sometimes appears where you don't plant it.  This is a tote of arugula that was taken over my mint.


This is one of *B*'s babies.  It's called crosne or Chinese artichokes.  It's related to mint, but you eat the tubers.


This hard to see group of plants is scorzonera.  The leaves and roots are both edible.


Another *B* plant is stinging nettle.  I won't touch it because it can hurt, but it's apparently very nutritious if prepared properly.


The last of the weird plants is this grove of sunchokes in our former compost pile.  It will put up pretty flowers, it's hard to kill, and the tubers are apparently delicious!

 
Speaking of tubers, this is something I picked up off of pinterest.  It's a bin made of potatoes.  *B* made a chicken wire bin and filled it with layers of straw, soil, and seed potatoes.  Apparently, two pounds of seed potatoes can produce up to 25 lbs of eating potatoes.  When the greens die back, you pull the wire away, and all of your tasty potatoes come falling out!


For a while, I thought these were junk seeds that volunteered.  It turns out that *B* did a three sisters experiment this year.  We'll see how it goes.


The tomatoes took over our raised bed last year, so this year we did the lazy man's raised bed:  *B* opened two bags of potting soil and stuck our tomatoes straight in.  They look pretty happy.


We have royalty purple pod bush beans in the open cold frame.  The seeds were two years old, so I'm just happy they germinated.


We didn't pay attention to the rhubarb this year, and it took off on its own.  I'm not sure if it's even edible at this point.  But it sure looks happy.


We have one whole pepper this year.  It has flowers, but I'm not sure if it'll end up making it.


Our garlic should be ready to pull soon.  This is garlic that overwintered, so I have no idea what to expect.


Our snap peas are doing well.  We got a full snack for our first harvest.  We've got three varieties (sugar ann, sugar snap, and sugar daddy) and they're coming in perfectly staggered.


I read a post over at Choosing Voluntary Simplicity about perpetual celery plants.  At the end of the season, we're going to dig them out and bring them inside.


One of the easiest ways to get good carrots and parsnips is to replant the tops after you've eaten them.  The short carrots came from seeds.  The tall ones came from organic market carrots.


We had snow peas in our seed stash.  We don't love snow peas, but they're pretty good in stir fry.  We hate our hibiscus plants, so *B* let the snow peas climb the hibiscus.  If something comes of it, great.  If not, oh well.




This is my only raspberry bush to really take off.  The other ones are only about 8 inches tall.  I have no idea why one is happy and the others aren't.


The blueberry (which is just to the right of the above raspberry) is small, but slowly getting bigger.



*B* adores nasturtiums both for their taste and look, and this is the first to flower this year.


My mom made this strawberry planter for us two years ago.  The strawberries we have in our front yard are junebearing, whereas these are everbearing.  We've already had 8 or so berries off of it this year.

*B* has worked so hard on this garden.  I was convinced that with me expecting a baby, nothing would get done.  The way things are going, we have a very nice supplement to our purchased food!

Nursery

I haven't been posting because my camera is practically dead.  I take pictures with my phone, but for some reason the app won't publish my posts correctly.  I'm really hoping this issue resolves itself soon!  But I've gotten this post to go through somehow, so I can show you all pictures of our (soon to be occupied!) nursery :o)

 

 I love this crib.  It converts into a toddler bed, then into a twin bed when they're older.  After we bought it, I read about how it's better for the baby to be on a mattress on the floor, but we're going to use it anyway.

 

 Where we live, crib bumpers are banned.  But we got mesh bumpers so that there's no risk of limbs getting caught.

 

My best friend ever helped me decorate the nursery with pictures of frogs.  I wanted classic, gentleman frogs.  What we came up with was perfect:

The first one on the left here is perfect because it goes so well with the lamp in the room.

I have a thing for frogs in top hats, what can I say?  It works for a boy or a girl.

The band of frogs on the right are my favorite in this grouping.

We repurposed a bookshelf (where you can see that frog lamp).  My BFF and I painted a dresser that *B* had as a kid.

On the other side, we've got a night light, the monitor, and some houseplants.  As we get books for the baby, they'll go on this shelf.

A friend of mine gave us her old glider.  I have a feeling I'll be sleeping in it very soon.  The lights on the wall are fluorescent.  At first it bothered me that they took awhile to get bright, but now I think that'll be a good way to get my eyes to adjust to the light.

These are our cloth diaper inserts.  We registered for FuzziBunz.  My mom, for our baby shower, made diaper cakes.  She ordered WAY too many inserts - 105 to be exact!  She thought they were like gDiapers where you could just pull the inserts out and leave the diaper on the baby.  I haven't figured out what we're going to do with them.  For now, I'm just going to keep them in the closet until we decide what to do.

Scary Day

Okay, so it's been a while since I posted.  Life has been insanely busy. 

On Saturday, *B* and I went to a flower mart that a neighboring town hosts every year.  There's always good food, so we had lunch while we were there.  *B* and I split a virgin pina colada. 

I'm usually pretty picky about what kind of frozen drinks I have.  Slurpees (and pretty much all drinks that come out of the rotating vats like Slurpees) have really messed with my heart in the past.  In college, I went to the ER because I had palpitations for 6 hours after drinking a small diet Pepsi Slurpee.  But I heard the guy using a blender, so I figured he had a bottle of mixer (which has never hurt me in the past).  It occurred to me later when I thought back to the drink stand that the fluid in the drink did come out of one of those vats.

At the end of the drink, my heart went haywire.  It was so erratic that I couldn't get a pulse to read on my heart rate app.  The beats were fast, slow, big, small, and generally crazy.  Of course, then I started freaking out because I was afraid of hurting the baby.  So my pulse and blood pressure increased. 

My heart rate was up for almost an hour and a half.  Thankfully, it came down.  If it had been up for 20 more minutes, I would have had to go to the hospital.  I don't even want to think of what they'd do to me there.  I would imagine they'd recommend induction (which I emphatically don't want).  I've tried doing research over the years about this issue (palpitations and Slurpees) but I haven't found any medical data, only anecdotal evidence.  When I was in college, the cardiologist just shrugged and said "so don't drink them anymore." 

It really worries me that we feed our children these drinks when they can have such drastic health implications.  Any thoughts on what the specific trigger mechanism is for this reaction?