Thursday, March 5, 2009

I ♥ Jon Stewart!

As Promised.

A gardening update. My little baby seedlings are growing into fine young adults. I have transplanted all of the veggies into bigger pots and they seem to be doing ok. I have had to move them out to the table that I have in my kitchen which thankfully is under a very large window.

My flowers are all (except for my sweet peas) still in the seed tray. A couple of my zinnias have kind of withered up. I guess they should have been transplanted. They grew up pretty fast though and I have seeds still, so once the ground thaws out, I'll plant some more seeds out in the garden.


My kitchen garden. They are patiently waiting to go outside.

My zucchini. I am very happy with how these little guys are looking. I can almost taste the zucchini casserole and zucchini bread now.

30 tomato plants. There are 15 red and 15 orange heirloom plants growing here.

A little mater. I'm cautiously optimistic about these tomatoes. I am so curious to see how big these plants get outside. I will be shocked and amazed if they grow into full size shrubs that produce fruit. Fingers crossed.

Some green beans. There are four plants in that one pot and three of them are dying. I was trying to figure out why. It then dawned on me that when I transplanted them into bigger pots, some of the roots were kind of ripped out of the dirt. Ooops. I guess I need to use a more tender touch. Again, these grew pretty fast and I think once we can plant outside, I'll throw some more seeds into the ground. We are going to plant these babies out where our potato patch was last year. I have plenty of room to work with. The question is, do I really need all that many green beans? Although, I have been loving eating my dilly beans that I canned last year. They are PERFECT on a salad. Yum.


So, now we just wait until this shows some warmer temps. I can only hope that it's around the corner in a couple more weeks. I'm tired of the cold. Oh, that reminds me. I need to research if the time changes on Sunday. On our city calendar it's listed as changing on Sunday. Didn't that change? I guess I'll have to go figure it out. Yay to longer days though!

I'll leave this post with a couple of cute pictures. The first one is of Patchy. Yesterday he put his front paws up on my legs and stayed like that for about 2 minutes. He was watching the crazy squirrels in the back yard. As I type this right now, I'm watching 8 different ones race back and forth on the power lines, into the trees, into the rhododendron and on the to the fort. They are crazy. Patchy enjoyed watching them too.

Patchy

This next picture is of a bird we've seen recently out on our front tree enjoying some suet. I thought it was a woodpecker, but now I'm not so sure. I'm going to have to dig out our bird book and see if I can figure it out. For now, we just call him zebra. =)

Zebra...woodpecker?

I hope everyone is gearing up for a warm Spring.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Handsome little devil.


Handsome little devil.
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

This is a test of my using Flikr. I've been playing around over here with some of my pictures.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Quick Post.

This is just a quick little post because I'm getting ready to get into bed and try and warm up.  It's been way to cold today.  At least we didn't get all the snow that others around us have.  I'll grumble about the cold and the wind but at least I'm not out shoveling snow right now.

I wanted to post a picture of the cake that Tim and I made for Aidan.  Now, history on this.  We had a hamster up until two weeks ago.  She died peacefully in her sleep and honestly, we weren't that sad to see her go because she was mean.  Aidan had said that for his party he wanted a hamster cake.  When he had made this request, Rhino was still alive and he was watching dvds of Hamtaro.  So, he had hamsters on the brain.  After Rhino passed we asked Aidan if he wanted to change the theme of the cake.  I was thinking maybe he would change it to Kirby or Bolt or something that is relevant to what they are watching/playing right now.  Nope.  Aidan just said, "Let's make a dead hamster cake".  Voila.


I made the cakes on Friday.  It was a fiasco.  I made four round cakes and the 13x9.  I sprayed all the pans and thought it would be ok.  Every single one of the cakes stuck to the pan and broke as I tried to ease them out.  We, at this point, also realized that I should have made 6 round cakes so that the hamster would be taller.  So, I redid all of the cakes.  We crumbled up the broken cakes and fed them to the birds.  This time I put parchment paper on the bottom of each pan and they came out beautiful.  I was beat after all of the baking though. 12 cakes in one day is a bit much.

Saturday morning Tim got up and pieced the cakes together.  I made a huge batch of buttercream frosting and he stacked everything up.  He carved the shape and then covered it with frosting.  Then he covered it with fondant and painted it with edible paint (corn syrup and food coloring).  All in all, it was a great success.  The cake recipe was very tasty and moist.

I think that is all for now.  I promise I will do a gardening post soon. I got a bunch of my seedlings transplanted into bigger pots and now I am in a holding pattern until spring.  Oh Spring, where are you?