Friday Foto

Itty-Bitty Amphibian

Was walking through the yard after inspecting my veggie boxes and noticed that there was something (other than the wind) fluttering through the grass.

This little guy was LITTLE! I doubt that he was even and inch long from snout to butt. I tracked him a little before he made his way into the lawn and out of sight.

My Latest Obsession

shishito pepper

Seriously, I have been a little obsessed with this little thing call a Shishito pepper. I follow Gimme Some Oven and last year the author posted about these delectable little dudes by sharing THIS recipe. Since then I thought that if we made it out to Trader Joe's I should look for a package of Shishitos. However, we are almost never in the neighborhood of Trader Joe's which is across town, so it never happened. A few weeks ago I spotted them at Chuck's Produce FRESH! Once I laid eyes on them I decided to get some and finally try that recipe out. Which is great and all, but as soon as we got them home they got "lost" in the fridge and were promptly forgotten. A couple of weeks later I pulled the bag out and they were very sad and very inedible. I hadn't thought about them much since tossing the peppers into the compost.

This past weekend I decided to go and browse around Wilco and Chapman's Nursery. Which were fun and all, but the BEST thing happened after Tom and I went for coffee. I mentioned that I wanted to go and check out the veggie plants at Freddy's - knowing that I wanted to find Shishito pepper plants. I didn't see anything the first time through the peppers, but then BOOM...out of no where they were right in front of me!

I was so excited - so much that I declared that I wanted to buy all of the plants. There were maybe 7 or 8 total - Tom gave me a look. So I settled on three.

As a bonus I got some more peppers at Chuck's yesterday evening. They will not be going bad this time...

(photo credit Gimme Some Oven)

OH. SO. CLOSE.

starting to look like a green/hoop house

We spent most of the morning working on getting the bottom part of the walls done. SUCCESS! Now that the sides are finished I decided to drag some stuff in and organize what I have happening right now. I have allocated the other half of the bench to my garden sista Mary.  The ends need to be "sealed" up, but that should go quicker than the sides.

This afternoon I think I'll head out to visit some places that have garden type stuff and just browse. It's time to get away from the house for a little while.

My dream is getting a little more real...it's time to dream just a little bigger and see what happens!

Friday Foto!

It's finally coming together!

In the last week the Groophouse took a giant step backwards - like all of the panels were taken off. Tom decided that MOST of the hot house should be done with clear panels. Okay fair enough, but it was just so discouraging just looking out there to see the hoops and nothing else. So earlier this week more panels were purchased.

It was starting to become very apparent that a friend of ours would not be available to lend a hand so in an effort to be helpful I gave Tom 20 minutes of my morning time yesterday and we were able to get a couple of the upper panels attached so he could at least work on setting the screws to the rest of it. Then after we returned from a late day appointment in Battle Ground after work yesterday we got dinner going pretty quick and tried to get out before it started raining again. At the end of yesterday I think there was only one more panel attached. By that time my hands were freezing and the rain was more steady. It was time to stop.

Now this morning - 24 hours later and almost professional doing this panel attaching routine I had a few extra minutes to offer up before needing to get on with my day and we were able to get a total of 4 panels installed which made it more "water proof." what's left now would be the bottom of each side.

This project has been in progress since last August. I have crazy ideas a lot of the time and Tom tries his best to indulge the crazy. Well, a lot of the ideas are not toally crazy, but I do think that all of the more recent projects have been my idea which required a lot of work on Tom's part. There have been a few changes in the design, but nothing terribly major. It's nice to see that this might actually be done before we can say we have been working on it for a year!

I am lucky to have a husband who is handy and loves me enough to go with the crazy!