Winter Wonderland

It seems that every time our local weather people call for snow, we don't get anything. And then they don't call for any and we get a lot. This time though, we have to give them some mad credit because they nailed it! The snow started sometime during the wee Friday morning hours and didn't officially stop until Sunday morning. We really only expected a few inches, but ended up with TWELVE!!! Every thing is completely covered up and it's absolutely beautiful! Even now, 4 day later, there's still snow piled up all over everything. My hubby's a bit of a rebel who LOVES to drive in the snow. So, we went out for an evening donut-fest on Friday night, and I'll admit that it was pretty fun...even when we went skidding sideways down our friend's driveway. What was not fun was watching not one, but TWO big trees fall across the road just seconds after we passed by them! YIKES!

I'm sure most of you in the area got some variation of this storm, but I thought I'd share some photos from our neck of the woods.

I promise there's a 12 inch ruler in there!

The view across our yard

More trees across the yard

We lost power for awhile, so we buried our refrigerated items in the snow to keep them cold!

The main road leading to our house

The main road leading to our house

The side road leading to our house...thank goodness for 4WD!!!

The view from the top of our housing development

I doubt we'll have a white Christmas, but this is good enough for me!

Gardening Success!

Several months ago, what started as a venture in growing tomatoes, turned into a full blown gardening experience! Well, now that the summer is winding down (Fall begins tomorrow!!), the days of gardening wind down as well. And it's probably not a bad thing, since harvesting any more vegetables would require us to get a new freezer.

Our tomato project produced less than abundance of ruby red tomatoes. The lettuce has yet to finish growing so that we can pick it. The half of the green onions that actually grew are finally getting ready to pick. And we haven't produced a single head of broccoli or cantaloupe (unless you count the one that grew to the size of a tennis ball and rotted) or green pepper. Pretty big bummer, huh?

Oh, but no! We could open our very own supermarket, selling cucumbers, yellow squash and zucchini. We're gonna be sick of this stuff before we get rid of it all! We were able to eat several fresh squash and zucchini and have given 15 or 20 away to friends and family. But even after all that, we have 3 of these...


That would be Ziploc freezer bags filled with zucchini and yellow squash (I just sliced or chopped or shredded it, put it in the bags and labeled them). Those plastic Sterlite baskets from Wal-Mart fit perfectly into our side-by-side freezer. And in addition to those 3 very full baskets, we have several loose bags stuffed into random corners of our side-by-side and chest freezers. As of this very moment, we have over FORTY FIVE bags!!!

So, all in all, I'd say the Gardening Gilberts Experiement of '09 was hugely seccessful!! Now, I'm excited to make some yummy fall soups and casseroles with this goodness!

Siamese Squash

You may remember this post upon which I was the proud owner of a small garden out back. I fear that the squash plant felt as though it was represented unfairly or not mentioned enough to its liking as less than a week after that post, it produced this:

You rebellious little plant, you!

The Birds

Early one Spring morning Marty and I were awakened, well before our alarms were set to go off I might add, by a persistend pecking sound on our bedroom window. Obviously, we were annoyed by this and after about 30 minutes, we had concluded that it was a bird. This bird would latch onto the screen (which we could hear), scratch it's claws against the glass part of the window (which still causes me to cringe), then release from the screen and fly straight into the upper portion of the window....repeat times a million. The next morning, it started again...and the next morning...and the morning after that.

I finally resorted to the master of all researchers for things of such a bizarre nature-Google. According to all the professionals on the World Wide Web, we were smack dab in the middle of bird mating season. You see, birds are very territorial animals during such a time. Our lovely little wren was seeing his reflection in the window, assuming it was another bird and attacking it. And thus began the trial and error portion of this story. We tried everything we could think of or read about on the internet to get this bird to give it up already!! I printed a picture of a cat to put in the window-that worked for about a minute. I put CDs in the window (the sun would reflect off of them and keep birds away)-that worked a little better during the day, but didn't help at all during the early morning hours. Finally, we ended up with a contraption that I'm sure came straight from the Beverly Hillbillies. I'm kicking myself now becuase I didn't take a picture of it and any description I give can't possibly do it justice. We had the window completely covered on the inside (fabric, blinds and 2 sets of curtains). There were 2 CDs wedged in the top of the window. There was a trash bag taped, with packing tape, to the top part of the window. And there was 2 pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom part of the window between the window and the screen. It was ugly as anything, but let me tell you right now...it worked!! We were finally able to sleep in again and the little wren could finally regain any sanity he lost by beating himself up on our window for 2 weeks straight!

About a month after that, Marty was out of town for a conference, and I had gone to stay with my mom for a night. I was gone for about 24 hours and came home to this on the back stoop...



Yes, that's bird poop and this picture certainly doesn't do the damage justice. What you don't see is that it's also covering our door mat, and the surrounding areas of the carport. YUCK!!!

And if you think this was bad enough, check out the sliding glass door...

No, that's not paint on the door. Those would be marks where a bird was repeatedly flying into the window. Apparently, the bird would sit on the stoop, see it's reflection in the door, fly into the door and literlly beat the poop out of itself. Neat.

Our little wren friend wasn't the culprit this time. We had a different attackee on our hands...a Red-Breasted Robin. So, in an effort to keep the bird from seeing it's reflection in the door and to keep from causing another portion of our house to be blocked off by trash bags and cardboard, I started keeping the curtains closed all day, which caused a darker interior, but much less mess!

And the bird must have really been out to get us, becuase this is what happened next...



The bird would sit on our retaining wall and relieve itself (multiple times) before launching off the wall and flying straight for the driver's side window of my car. It would hit the window, fly away, come back to the car, perch on the side mirror or ledge beside the window, poop and then do it all over again.

So, in order to keep my car from looking like this every day, I had to put a towel over the driver's side window every single morning.

When I started this blog a few years ago, I never thought I'd be posting pictures of bird poop. Nor did I ever think that I would look out the back window to see my husband sitting on the retaining wall with a bebe gun trying to keep birds away. However, I figure that spending this many hours observing birds' activities and researching ways to combat such activity was blog worthy. So, the moral of the story is, birds are persistent...and messy.

The Gardening Gilberts

Several months ago, Marty decided that he'd like to try his hand at growing some tomatoes. I'm sure you've seen the ads for the "Topsy Turvy" Tomato Planter (it hangs from a hook and grows tomatoes upside down). A friend told us about a way he'd figured out to make his own upside down tomato grower out of a 2-liter bottle. Figuring we had nothing to lose, we gathered our supplies, and got started. And this is how it turned out...


It's certainly not the most beautiful contraption of all time, but it seems to be working! It's grown quite a bit since this picture was taken and is finally starting to get some little tomatoes on it! We've got 3 plants like this, so we'll hopefully be making some homemade salsa before long!

Soon after the tomato plants started proving to be a success, Marty decided that we might as well try our hand at gardening as well! So, after several trips to Wal-Mart and Lowe's for soil and supplies and seeds, we set out on this new adventure.

First, Marty made a basic box of out 2x4s. Then, we cut out a patch of landscape fabric and used stakes to secure the box to the ground.


Next, we filled the box with a whole lotta soil...we used Black Kow, which is basically just composted manure, for more organic vegetables.

We had started the germination process for several seeds and decided to plant some sprouts as well as some seeds to see what happened.


We planted Zucchini, Yellow Squash, Cantaloupe, Cucumbers, Cilantro, Green Peppers, Hot Peppers, Broccoli, Green Onions and Lettuce.

And just a few months later, here's what we've got!

The squash and zucchini plants have taken over completely!! We ended up having to uproot several plants of squash, zucchini, cucumbers and cantaloupe because their leaves or vines were keeping other things from growing.

And here is our first little bit of harvested homegrown veggies!!


So far, we've collected plenty of squash, zucchini and cucumbers. The broccoli didn't come up at all. We had one green pepper plant come up, but no peppers produced from it yet. The lettuce is finally starting to come up (after several tries), but probably won't grow enough for us to use. And the green onions seem to be growing, but not fast enough. We tried to do a little container garden with cilantro and some hot peppers, but that bombed as well. Our cantaloupe plant finally has a little melon on it, so we'll hopefully be able to get something there!

It's been so much fun to pick fresh vegetables to cook for dinner. For a little money and just a little time each day, we've been able to stock our freezer to the point where it is overflowing with the crops our little garden has produced!

Snow Day

While the snow came and went and came and went today (we definitely have accumulation, it's just that we would have a lot more had it not blown away and melted all day long), I was thankful for a day at home with next-to-nothing to do...let me re-phrase that...there is ALWAYS something to be done, but on this day, there was nothing really pressing. I got up this morning, sent a few e-mails, put away some laundry, made out my grocery list, cut some coupons, did a little reading, made a yummy orange salad and that was the extent of the "have-to-dos". So, then it was on the fun things-things like embellishing the black kitchen towels I got for Christmas (Thanks, Brooke!) with some fun gingham fabric and polka dotted ribbon or sorting through some old certificates and concert programs for our scrapbooks. Seldom a day goes by when I am able to complete everything on my to-do list. But to have a day where everything is completed AND I get more projects taken care of is extremely rare...and pretty fun too. If the roads are bad in the morning, I'll be home all day again tomorrow...this time with NOTHING on my "to-do" list. I feel some craftiness and some organizing coming on :)