The "Whatever" Garden...

Took a deep breath and went into the garden this morning...

I was going to clean this pigsty of a house today, but it looks like now I have other plans.

Salsa, anyone?

Snapped this one last night while out running the kids to music lessons, check out the time!

Just stupid hot, time to break out the old Redneck Heat Detector, one of my favorite web images :)

Today's harvest brings me over the 100 lb mark finally!  With no peas, carrots or garlic this year and a short bean run I was worried that I'd reach that mark at all!  I don't even want to speculate on what the end of summer total will be since every day I get tomatoes with the heat and disease and drought is a bonus day to me.  

Interesting difference to this year's garden, no water!  I can't quite believe it myself, but since I wasn't feeling so into gardening this year I decided to try the lazy approach and see if the plants would just "toughen up".   In other years, I'm out there batting mosquitoes and watering almost every day but I haven't watered yet this year, and it's not raining either - our grass is so dry we haven't mowed in 3 weeks!  No soil amendments, just throw away the blossom end rot veggies and shrug "whatever", when the wind blows the tomatoes down they stay down, too lazy this summer.  Yet nice tomatoes are still there, and as a matter of fact none of them are cracked like usual years.  Interesting.

4th of July Celebrating

We had a fun morning yesterday - we had a nice potluck breakfast and children's bike parade at church. Really nice that we were at it by 9 am and done by 11 before the heat got too intense.  Before breakfast our congregation sang an impromptu National Anthem without accompaniment and I'll admit we sounded pretty darn good - lots of wet eyes during that one :), of course we are a largely military congregation so we are patriotic to the nth degree!  It was a great morning and lots of fun for the kids and grownups.

Having a little fun with the 4th of July harvest:

I was up early to assemble the annual Patriotic Trifle...

yum!

Finn with his scooter all ready for the parade!

Did someone say it was for kids?  I didn't catch that!  Of course my Beach Betty had to be decorated for the 4th of July too, she lives for this stuff!  (And I made the hubs put some flair on his roller skates!)

Kids all lined up and ready to roll...

The Bike Parade!  

(hubby is bringing up the rear on his skates)

Afterwards, I spent the middle of the day inside catching up on my magazine pileup, hubby and the boys went to the pool on base for awhile, I don't know how they can take the heat.

After dinner, the hubs and Finn went out for a paddle around the inlet near the oceanfront.  Loch stuck with me, I guess we are the wimps who can't take the temps outside.

We all headed to the beach to watch the fireworks once it got dark (still 93º at 8:30 pm).  I'll spare you photos of fireworks, I know that's kind of annoying so I don't take them.  I really wish I could have better captured the stunning moon we saw rise up over the Atlantic, it was bright orange and really pretty, but you will just have to take my word for it since my little camera doesn't do fancy moons :)

Trust me, it was orange and awesome.

And what is it with RUDE people today?????  The entire time we were watching fireworks all the people around us were blinding us with camera flashes and lit up phone screens in the dark, ugh!!!

Hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July full of time spent with family and friends and good food!

Now where's that towel I was going to throw in?

I'll have a couple of posts to catch up today.  After the storms and temps consistently above 101º for the past week, I'm suffering a bit of a funk and actually contemplating ripping out the whole garden, even though I am harvesting!  I just don't want to go out there.  At all.  I consider myself lucky though, because as of this morning there are still 199,000 folks in Virginia still without power.  For days... I really feel for them.  I still suffer PTSD from one year of over a week without power or water in 90 degree temps, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, ever.

I managed to harvest a few armfuls of things over the past week, I know it's not ideal but I was picking at about 9 pm instead of first thing in the morning.

Tomato Lineup:  Brandywine, Brandywine, Hillbilly, Old Virginia, Orange Wellington, Orange Wellington, Virginia Roma, in the center are "Currant Tomatoes". 

 If you have room to grow just one of the Currant Tomatoes I HIGHLY recommend it - they are really tasty, tiny and well behaved in a pot even though they are indeterminate.  They are perfect for snacking and salads and if you get a bunch just pinch each one between your fingers to get out the excess water and dry for excellent sun dried tomatoes in no time.  They are really tiny, about the size of your thumbnail or smaller.

Another day saw more tomatoes, cukes, zucchini, squash and the last of the pole beans.  I will start another crop in a few weeks hopefully.  These just fried in the sun the past week.

Brandywine Tomato, last of the lettuce (bitter!), and some refrigerator pickles for veggie burgers one night.  I did not touch up the color at all - Brandywines continue to amaze me every year and are probably the only thing that keeps me peeking into the garden in the evenings during this heat!

The rest of the tomatoes were made into fresh salsa with bell peppers, jalapeños, onions and cilantro from the garden, these jars went into the freezer for yummy salsa this winter.  It's the one reliable way to get fresh tomato taste onto burgers in the off season.

Tuesday I woke the kids up super early to hit the blueberry farm for some berry picking before the heat got too intense.  This year is the earliest crop our area has seen since 1980, and the 6-8 ft tall blueberry bushes are bending nearly halfway to the ground loaded with berries.  The farm we normally go to was closed so we found another I didn't know about before and picked about 4 lbs before it became insane, 93 degrees by 9:30 am no thank you.  This place was awesome, the berries had a taste that was more like the northern berries which I like best :).  The stand was run by a handsome young man in his early 20's and while we were chatting a lady drove up (maybe mom?) and told us that he tended to those bushes like they were his babies LOL... it shows, they are delicious!  So nice to see part of the younger generation passionate about food & farming and actually doing it.  He also gave us several ears of corn that is starting to come in at no charge while we were there, thank you to the folks at Beatson's Blueberry Farm, your berries were even better than the farm we used to go to and we will be back and tell everyone we know about you!  Bonus is that this farm looks like a smaller operation than what we used to go to so I am happy to help support them.

Even I can't reach the tops of many Southern Highbush Blueberries, but Loch was giving it his best shot despite me telling him the best ones are underneath it all.

On the way home we also stopped by another stand to get some local peaches.

The photo doesn't do justice to the size of the sweet potato below, but trust me it was jaw dropping!

Home to freeze the blueberries and prepare treats for the 4th of July...

Muffins!

I'll put the rest in a 4th of July post and am still promising Loch I will get his camp photos up soon... this heat has just sucked the wind right out of my sails and I am in desperate need of motivation and energy, as I am sure you all are right now!

...just ran out and got the mail, it was too hot to touch!  I also want to apologize for being so bad about catching up on my blog reading this week, I am scheduling time this evening to sit down with a cold drink and catch up on how this heat wave is affecting the rest of you and find out how you are staying sane!

Camp Finn draws to a close...

The last 2 days of "Camp Finn" consisted of, you guessed it - the beach.  When you live at the beach it is what it is LOL.

Day 4, headed to the Chesapeake Bay side of things...

What, me - photographing dune grass?  I have a thing for dune grass.

Ok, never mind - this one is the ocean!  Bay, ocean... whatever - it's all a blur this week.

Perfectly camouflaged 

After-dinner shell hunting

Pelicans... my favorite!

Day 5... we had to get out very early since temps were forecasted for 105º

Waiting for my ship to come in :)

In the afternoon it was difficult to entertain with the heat.  I really wanted to take advantage of the summer clearance (already?) sales to get some shorts for the boys so I decided to escape the heat by going to the mall.  The MALL.  I go there about once every 18 months, I hate it - but apparently Finn hates it more.  About 30 minutes into our trip to Old Navy Finn announces "This is the worst day of Camp Finn so far"!

After sitting around the rest of the afternoon we decided we'd go out to dinner, with Loch gone it's cheaper LOL!

We took Finn out for Mexican, and he had his first taste of Churros.  Finn's day brightened up significantly.

After leaving the restaurant at about 6:30 the thermometer still was pegged at 100º, shooting down our plans to kayak at sunset, but that didn't deter the hubs, who took a quick paddle out near the house to get some photos of the sunset.  He missed it by just a couple of minutes, but got some great evening shots anyway.

Camp Finn 2012 is over, and Loch will be home this evening full of stories and dirty laundry and hopefully pictures, so stay tuned for one more camp post!

(I also harvested several perfect Brandywines last night!)

Camp Finnegan

That's what we are calling this week.  Since Loch is lucky enough to be away at camp, we are having "Camp Finnegan" where we go swimming, to the beach, he gets to stay up late and if he wants to eat nothing but 6 Clementines for lunch he can (he did that LOL!).

It's hard to do any canning when you are attending Camp Finn, but I managed to get it done.  I did spicy dill pickles and dilly beans in the morning.  I normally do refrigerator pickles so I'm not used to the color change that happens to pickles during the canning process, I'll have to get used to that but I thought I'd do something different this year, especially since it's been awhile since I had the canning equipment out.

The jalapeños had to wait until evening since Finn wanted to go to the beach and honestly I was sick of the vinegar smell in the kitchen so I was ready to get out of the house myself.

Excuse my obsession over Live Oak trees, they are my favorite and only recently has it dawned on me that when we leave the military I will probably never live near them again.  So I take photos of them whenever I'm at the beach, lots of photos.

Sailor Dad has been working from about 7 am until well after midnight every day this week, so we thought it would be nice if we surprised him with a chocolate shake before we headed home for the evening.  Finn calls it "going to see daddy in jail" LOL I guess because of the coveralls he wears when he works on the jet and that he's always standing behind a tall fence and gobs of concertina wire haha!  They were nice enough to open the gate this time so we didn't have to throw his dinner over the fence :)

I feel kind of bad, while we are at the beach cooling off hubby gets to do things like crawl around on the hot metal of a jet in 100º heat, but as he points out it's way cooler than doing it in the Persian Gulf in 120º with jet blast in his face and full gear and helmets on!  I guess it's all relative.

(hard to see, but there's people on top, looks like a big ol' cookie sheet to me, ouch!)

After getting home I was able to deal with the jalapeños, I pickled and canned 4 pints of rings and picked out the biggest ones to seed and halve and those went into the freezer for stuffed jalapeños at a later date.  My kitchen still smelled like vinegar this morning.

Finn stayed up late watching Hawaii Five-O, his new favorite.  We just finished the first season of the new one and Finn is an addict, after his shower last night he decided to do his hair "like Danno"!

I didn't feel like shelling out the bucks for season two quite yet so I started the "old" episodes from Netflix and Finn was even glued to those!  I have a 7 year old obsessed over old Hawaii Five-O episodes, can't believe it.  I'll have to see if Netflix has Magnum P.I, or Knight Rider episodes LOL

With hubby at work almost 24/7 it's just Finn and I attending Camp Finnegan this week, it's supposed to be over 100º for the next 3-5 days so I have no idea what I'm going to pull out of my hat tomorrow.  It just occurred to me that I don't think I've been truly alone with Finn this long since the first night in the hospital!  It's always "LochandFinn" so this is pretty weird! 

Just as I'm finishing up this post (I'm at Finn's music lessons) I can hear him learning the theme song from Hawaii Five-O on the ukelele in the other room...  no doubt I will have to listen to him play that all the way home in the backseat :)

p.s.  Loch called last night and I wish I could have recorded it to load onto the blog!  He was talking so fast, all about zip lining, rock walls, orienteering, and flying cockroaches in the bunkhouse LOL... I guess he's having a good time, and they DID go tubing, they got caught in that storm the other night so I'm glad I didn't know that at the time or I would have been pretty worried.  He's going on an offshore night fishing trip this evening, I'd like to think that he will be secured to the deck somehow with no chance of man overboard in the dark, yep - I'm going with that scenario :)  Finn kept saying "lemme talk to him" so I passed the phone over and told him to hurry since Loch only had 2 minutes on the phone, and Finn says "I don't miss you, I'm glad you are at camp and I took all your stuff" - ah, brotherly love...

How did those get there?

The pepper girl is back! 

You know where I'll be spending the day!

Canning jalapeños, blanching beans & salvaging some of those massive cukes for refrigerator pickles, every year those first few cukes get away from me!

One day... use it wisely!

A one day break from the high 90's, that is!

I set out to tackle the worst of it today and didn't even make a dent.

First up was to pick beans.

I brought it on myself, with my 50 bean plants per bed, LOL.  Promptly after picking all these I got a little crazy and just ripped all the bush beans out.  That's right, perfectly good bean plants, gone.  They were starting to have that crispy bottom look with little stink bugs setting up outposts so out they went.  Such satisfaction in stuffing plants covered in stinkbugs into a big plastic bag to cook in the sunshine, heeheehee!  Not to worry, I have pole beans that are just starting to really come into production, as you can see from the top left.

Onto the jungle - I really needed a machete for this job but had to settle for hands and pruners.  Take a good look at these photos, they are taken from the same exact spot, you can tell by the PVC hoop in the background LOL - can you believe that I was bushwhacking my way to the garden the past month or so?  That's a path, or is supposed to be!

before...

         

after...

 

We had some wild weather last night.  The temps dropped from the 90's down to about 75 in a matter of minutes, and the wind was gusting to around 60 mph!  The below photo doesn't really do it justice, but over the yard these two sets of clouds were moving in opposite directions towards each other and swirling around, pretty creepy for awhile - we decided to head into our imaginary basement for a while.

But what was bad for us must have been awful for Loch up at Camp Hailstormflashflood -

Check out these radar images for his area, apparently there was quarter size hail too, and they were supposed to go tubing yesterday down the James River, I have a feeling that didn't happen and they spent the afternoon picking ticks off of each other.  Now that's fun times.

Speaking of weather, I was sitting here watching the chaos unfold on tv when I actually started really listening to our meteorologist, and this is what I heard:

"We have some storms here and then they're done."

and this gem...

"Tropical Storm Debby may move south, east or west, but basically will move."

Um, what?!

And.... I picked the first Brandywine of the year!

yeah, can you hear Mother Nature laughing at me?

I snapped this one today at the dentist's office, just thought it was cool the way the morning sun was thrown across the floor and Finn :)

Tomorrow it's back to 90º with 100º forecast for Thursday through the weekend, oh goody.  I think I overdid it today, I just realized I can't get up from the couch...