Quick! Am I shopping for lady bugs after work, or mixing up some pepper soap? Or will diatomaceous earth do the trick?

It hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit today. The strawberries have been growing slowly, white with green seeds, for weeks. This silly strawberry turned red today. The bottom is still white. Perhaps I should install some reflection apparatus to brighten the underside 😉 I even found time to sow tomatoes and peppers the other evening. It’s a month late, but we do what we do when we can do it around here. Five weeks until the wedding! I’m getting more excited for the celebration (and more anxious about the event details) by the day. I have to say it is absolutely splendid to have nothing but joy about the actual marriage part, even if I have quite solidified the self-knowledge that I gain no pleasure (nor am I very good at) coordinating colors, creating timelines for good flow, or otherwise planning such a large (albeit small by wedding standards) party.

The heat bed gained a new tenant a few months back. It promptly lost all flowers. Then it froze. Flowers returned. It froze again. More flowers. In a generally drab landscape, this little lady makes me smile.

I think this plant should work harder. It obviously has no idea how to make leaves big enough…

I know I’ve always wondered what 49lbs of sweet potatoes looks like in a bathroom. Surely you have as well? There’s even a pan hiding in this picture! The pan on the toilet will hopefully become next year’s sprouts. The large pan in the foreground (with the monsters) is actually the injured potatoes that we’ll need to eat first. Not bad for our first attempt at digging them gently. Now for the million dollar trivia question: out of the 49 lbs harvested, how many pounds were from purchased starts, and how many from pantry potatoes? (Hint: There were 11 successful plants from the purchased sprouts and I buried seven pantry potatoes.)

Yesterday morning, my lovely and talented brother and sister-in-law became parents! They waited until they met her to find out that they were having a “her” and what a great surprise! She looks so much like my brother (as I hear babies are set to do). The most adorable little alien baby (all newborns looks like aliens or lizards to me) that I have to wait a whole two weeks to meet…

I’ll survive on pictures until then.

And until I hear otherwise, I’m saying she got all that hair from my side =D If she takes after her Auntie at all, it’ll get thicker, fall out, and come back shock-white for her toddler years 😉

…anyone know any good pickling recipes?

I love seed catalogs, as I’m sure many of you do. I can easily mark the new veggies that I want to try. The funny part, or the hard part, is how I end up marking almost every bean and every tomato… What gives you the hardest decisions in your garden variety planning?

My first Texas Cosmo Success!