Just a Little

Our cherry tomato plant is producing! Audrey has not liked tomatoes this year until she tried our cherry tomatoes. Now she loves picking them and eating them. It is so cute. On Saturday Brandon picked some yellow zucchini and a few peppers. He cooked dinner with the yellow zucchini and they were delicious!

The peppers he picked are a mystery. They were supposed to be green bell peppers, that is what the tag said. This, however, does not look like a green bell pepper to me. What do you think?

I have a whole bunch of pictures and new info to post but have not gotten around to taking the pictures yet, sorry. So for now a few random pictures will have to suffice. 

Happy gardening my friends. 

This is not supposed to be black and white. Picassa keeps doing that to one of my pictures every time I upload :(

Picking tomatoes with Dad

Look how big this sunflower is. The best part? It is even bigger now!

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A Few Links for Info on the Wallow Fire

A Facebook page for the fire specifically

A Greer FB page

And a picture of Greer :( Please pray that this gorgeous little town is not ruined.

The App That Saved This Culinary Artists Life

I used to spend hours browsing the Internet for new recipes. My husband and I were getting tired of the same ol' tacos and rice, or beef stroganoff dinners that were my go-to's for the first few years of marriage. It was time to mix it up a little.

Thank God for smartphones. I was browsing apps on my iPhone when I came across one named Big Oven. I read reviews and after seeing several positives I decided to download it. One of the best decisions of my entire life. That is not a lie. Well, maybe it is, but nonetheless it is an amazing app!

So far, all the recipes I have gotten from this app have turned out to be so delicious! One of the best parts of this app is recipes that have been tried have ratings. You have to pay attention to how many reviews the recipe has in order for the star rating to be adequate but it has yet to fail me.

Another wonderful feature of Big Oven is that it is also available online! So, if you do not have a smartphone just head on over to Bigoven.com and check it out. You will not be disappointed.

Lately

Hey everybody!

On Saturday I worked my booty off in the yard. I trimmed and fertilized my roses, which now look lovely. I watered EVERYTHING in the yard. I also cut down all the suckers that popped up everywhere seemingly overnight. Now that I have typed out everything I accomplished, I feel as if I hardly accomplished anything...

Oh well, because I know I did a lot. I did so much in fact, that it took me the entire day to finish. Fertilizing and trimming roses is not an easy task. You have to trim all dead flowers and branches, then place measured amount of fertilizer around the roots, then scratch it into the dirt, then water. It takes quite a bit of time. Especially when  you have a toddler that is trying to 'help.'

I ended up planting some Pansy seeds in the flower beds next to my carport. This flower bed only receives morning sun for a few hours. I thought this would be a good place for pansy's as they do not prosper in full sun. We will see how it goes..  The hydrangea that is planted in this spot is doing wonderfully. I will have to purchase more next year.

Pansy seeds are so small!

There are a few rose bushes in my yard that I am in love with. One of them is a coral color that is low maintenance. I LOVE low maintenance. I also love the color coral. It is my favorite. I love that I have more than one rose bush in my yard that is of a coral hue. It makes me a very happy rose bush owner.

This rose comes from a bush next to my carport. The last few years that I have lived here it has only had 1 bud every summer. It is thriving this year. It is not big because it is still recovering, but it is growing back wonderfully.

I do not know if I have told my reader this previously but all the landscaping in our yard is not our work, or our choice. Our home has been in my husbands family since before he was born. His Mother and Father bought it and they did all the landscaping. All of our rose bushes, trees, shrubs, etc. have been here for years. With the exception of a few trees and a rose bush that my husband and I planted.

Over the years a few things have died, a few things have come back from near death, and a few things have been born. Some or all of it, may or may not have been our fault :) I know we have both learned quite a bit over the last 5 years about taking care of our yard, but I am sure the learning process is not over.

On another note, I would like to share a picture of one of my favorite flowers. A petunia. I love petunias because they are so easy to take care of! They are pretty and low maintenance, which by now we know is my favorite trait in a plant.

I keep petunias in my window boxes every summer. The front of my house has constant full sun so I have to make sure whatever is planted up there can handle the heat. Even though I live in NE AZ it still tends to get very hot here. Zinnias and petunias are flowers I have had the best luck with in the hotter areas of my yard.

Buggies!

My poor roses, every year they become covered in Aphids. If I were smart I would have sprayed them BEFORE the Aphid intrusion. I know they come every year so why, why did I not spray them before hand? I will tell you why. Every year I check and hope and pray they will not come. They even arrived late this year, tricky little turds. I was thinking I got lucky, HA! Because they came! And they came with a vengeance!!

I have learned that with Aphids it may take more than one spray to completely clear them. I use Malation in a garden sprayer, attatched to my hose. I do two sprays a week apart and it usually does the trick. We have already done the second spray and I am happy to say my rose bushes are aphid-free. Now if only they would have gotten away unharmed (sad face)