Gardening Update 2015

This is our third year independently gardening. It's been far better than last year when a very wet spring left much of one of the plots under water.

Still, the early spring led to early planting in general and the growing season has been...awkward. The spring came so fast the gardens needed a massive weeding weeks before anything could be planted. And then one weekend it took ten hours to weed. Which made it just go crazy immediately and everything shot up overnight. 

Some things have been producing faster than others (when they should actually be producing slower), and some are just caught in a stalling pattern.

This also marks the first year for starting some plants indoors, instead of buying them all, and then transplanting. Mostly squashes - which was a success - and tomatoes and peppers - which was not a success and yielded two surviving pepper plants and one tomato).

The south plot is officially out of control. At least the squash (we think it's one plant, but it seems like it should be two), and which was added after two of the melon plants didn't take off, so it didn't get recorded on the garden map, has taken up a good third of the roughly 220 square foot garden and is producing at least eight squashes of various sizes. They seem to be buttercups. In any case it's wrapping itself around everything in comes in contact with...potatoes, green onions, eggplants...it's trying to take down everything.

The first eggplant has a bulb, and there should be 7 more by summer end.

We watched a bee pollinate one of the melon plants this morning. It was totally cool. (we have two small watermelons growing, from the seeds of a grocery melon, no less!)

The broccoli was a bust this year. We pulled two of the six up because they just can't stop bolting. Also, spinach and lettuce bolted too fast for the third year in a row, so it seems like it's time to give up on growing that. It takes up too much real estate.

We have a slight pieris rapae (cabbage butterfly) problem. We need a butterfly net. Because chasingbutterflies around the backyard wouldn't look crazy at all...
Not sure if it's them, but something has chewed tiny holes in much of the swiss chard and potato plant leaves.

In the west plot we now have loads of baby tomatoes, some plum tomatoes. The others are starting to ripen. The peppers, sadly, are not doing so well.

The other squash plants are not producing as much (save the spaghetti squash) which has encouraged us to research hand pollination for next year. Yep. We're gonna help the plants have sex next year.

There's more, but we'll wait for another day.

So far this year we've picked:

- Zucchini (not as many as hoped)
- Bean
- Green onions
- Snap peas
- Radishes
- Broccoli
- Green peppers
- Tomatoes
- Potatoes
- Various herbs (sage, basil, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, tarragon)
- Parsley
- Swiss chard

Oh, we used a measuring wheel to determine how much bigger we're making the garden next year. We're adding 228 more square feet, for a grand total of 858 square feet. :-)

And we're considering a small greenhouse to start the plants in...because lining them all up in big totes around the dinning room for weeks on end...with cats in the house...is not ideal.

This has been your 2015 gardening update. :-)

Various Photos From This Year's Garden
(most recent was taken about a week and a half ago)

West Plot

South Plot

Squash Blossoms from the West Plot

Produce

Spaghetti Squash and a Buttercup Squash

Shisito Peppers

Our Tree of If

What out tree of If looks like.

That was no typo...it's supposed to say Our Tree of If.


Well...here we are.

In The Mother's basement...

We already feel like we've put on 10 pounds since Friday morning. Fast food here is so much cheaper than where we came from. Food in general, at least the unhealthy stuff. Where we just came from (yeah, you don't have to be a genius to figure it out, but we're still not outright telling people too much about where we were living) junk foods were expensive, and healthy foods were high quality and fairly affordable...now it's opposite, and the healthy foods? They aren't very good quality here (as in, they taste like crap...or nothing) and lets be honest, we're low income (poor, unemployed, not eligible for any social services) and junk food and convenience food? Well, it's cheap.

No excuse...we will not let it be an excuse. We will just all learn to dislike eating.

This is going to be a disaster.

The wine we love? They don't have it anywhere here...we're going to have to import it...at least three cases at a time.

Maybe we'll just stop eating completely and create a new 'Wine Only" diet...it was basically the diet we had before The Boyfriend came to live with us and cooking anyway (yeah, we know we are a trained cook, that doesn't mean we want to cook for ourselves...)

There is nowhere to walk to here, at least not in under 20 minutes, and then we're pretty much talking about a gas station. So we have to depend on transportation we don't have...(no bus services where The Mother is located in this city).

Basically we woke up feeling like we'd rather be dead.

We'll try to make the best of it. We have to.

We have to go back to the city we used to live in and tie up loose ends for the house sale this weekend...but beyond that?

We have no idea where to go from here...so much of our future depends on "ifs"...if "this" happens then we can do this...if "this" happens then we can do this/go here...and around and around the tree of ifs. And if you know about our physical and mental issues, then you know it's harder than just going out and getting a job, particularly in an job related, and economic climate, such as America finds itself now.

The Boyfriend only gets to stay here until January 20th or so, at least he got to be there...but then he is basically being sent back to the UK for a couple of months...then what?

At least we have plenty of time for writing. And Twitter. Thank fuck we have Twitter and our friends there. If you think that's stupid then clearly you don't know us, and what the people there mean to us...which means you've never read much of our blog, about out life, about us...in which case you should read yesterdays (actually Friday's, the last post we did) - it's got links of information and stuff. Or don't read it. Who really cares anyway.

Meanwhile, we feel like we're just going to waste away in this basement for foreseeable future.

But we promise, our writing won't be this negative, we can't stay this negative...it's almost impossible...we have people for that :-)

~Frank et al

A Week In Review

Tomorrow we're going to do a cooking post, if all goes as planned (meaning if we feel like eating)...tonight we're writing this, and having some wine, because it's Saturday and we've been headache free for almost 24 hours. And our kidney isn't hurting us today.

It's Saturday night, if you're in, like we are, catch up on the last week or so of what's been up around here:

Last Saturday we wrote two blog entries, one of which was a review on the movie The Ward. Sunday Frank did a Podcast interview. Monday our boyfriend left to go back to the UK AND we got put on antibiotics for a kidney infection. We wrote about Bethany's flashback/dream, Cassandra shared some information on what dissociation is and and Emmie wrote about sex & erotica, and James, our boyfriend, wrote about his last weekend with us (it's two-parter). Also, there is a shit ton of writing on here if ya feel like reading more about us. Probably it'll help if you read the stuff about why we are who we all are, which is over there on the left under the heading 'The Chapters of Frank/How We Came To Be/Addressing We'...it's a mouthful.

Some Twitter stuff "worth mentioning"...this week we changed #TeamAwesome to #TeamSublime, seems lots of people use that hashtag and we want our team to have a more unique hashtag. We're also working on trying to figure out a way to spread all of our #ff's throughout the week because now that we are working full days on Fridays, away from a computer, we hate the clutter of our timeline...plus, it probably bugs the shit out of some people.
Also, worth a note, yeah, we may take Twitter seriously, but we also approach it with a different mind set than the average Tweeter...our mindset ('Birds of a Feather, On Twitter, CAN Flock Together' http://just-call-me-frank.blogspot.com/2011/03/birds-of-feather-on-twitter-can-flock.html...and if you think that's wrong, or we're wrong, then read: 'You're Doing Twitter Wrong' http://just-call-me-frank.blogspot.com/2011/08/youre-doing-twitter-wrong.html 

Today we started working on a website, so we can take our copious blogs (not including Tumblr we have three others, and Emmie wants her own too) and move them to one place; though we're pretty sure this blog will stay here, some of the information will be moved to the website, this place is just getting too cluttered with information.

We had thought about moving the entire blog, but this one feels too much like home for us and we hate being confused.

Most of us are really missing James (but sadly, not all) - we've meant to write a state of the union type entry but it causes some literal headaches and so we'll be delaying that for awhile.

We're going to go drink some more

~Catherine, Frank and some of the et al

(even when Franks not in charge of the vehicle she gets notations if she's a passenger, everyone else pretty much gets an et al designation)

Not Interesting Enough For A Title

We're planning on posting a little something about James' (@mr_jmm) first five days with us, it's almost done. It hasn't been a complete bed of roses for anyone involved, but it hasn't been too terrible...yet. It all still has that "new car" smell about it.

Yesterday was spent writing a four page account for the Human Rights board on why we feel we were discriminated against by the people who fired us at work due to mental illness. If they hadn't mentioned out Twitter account which is tied to this blog...and there was a way to even ascertain our identity without reading the contents of our writing...in conjunction with out firing we never would have concluded, just remained confused, as to the various reasons they stated they shit-canned us.

So, we have the paperwork to fill out, which shouldn't take long, it's mostly check boxes, and the four page account of our employment there, which is basically a condensed and more lucid/detailed complication of the posts we have written about getting fired.

It was a week on Monday. We still feel lost; we don't know where to even start. Luckily James used to help people with their resumes/CV as part of employment so he has told us he will help us fine-tune our resume this week. All is good and well as long as someone posts a job we can do. There are many physical labour jobs we wish we could do but with our back problems from the car accident we are unable to even withstand working in kitchens for long, and culinary arts/food related job positions are about the only ones we are eligible for, and we probably don't have enough management job experience from the last one to be eligible for a restaurant management position  and given their bullshit claims about performance we are feeling less than capable to do the job of a manager again at all.

So, all that to say that yesterday we didn't do a blog post because we spent our writing energy on that other thing, and we started a 5 day overview which should be posted today, but we have a doctor appointment across town and we figure we should probably show James something other than a small portion of the city and the inside of our apartment...we all just might go stir crazy.

Another Day, Another Dollar; Fuck Our Life: Update

An update, because we want to make sure everyone is on the same page. Well as much as you can be.


Last night our "manager" went to the board of directors and presented our case, minus the mental disability information.


We are indebted to this young man for coming back to us this morning saying we get to keep the 32 hours. It will be interesting to see how it plays out because he says that they want us to work on performance; confusing since our performance review from last month was stellar, except for the "working with people" concerns, something we know we need to improve.


Anyway, come back later tonight. We've got a post we'll be editing later...about out first girlfriend.