Starting Pooka's dragon

The time had come. Pooka wanted to start growing her dragon from Aunt B. It was a simple enough kit. Pooka opened the cardboard part on her way to bring it to me. Pooka said she hopes it grows a live dragon and I told hit wasn't very likely. But I suppose if we believe in fairies, one must believe in dragons. I just looked at the "pot" and thought it looked like a take out container from a restaurant. Pooka has since been calling it her "takeout container dragon"

The purple dragon 

I will say I had a bit of a time finding the directions, but once I actually looked at the inside of the package I felt dumb.

Directions

The kit came with this little card and sticker. The card gave some fun facts about the "dragon" and how tall to expect it. I let Pooka put the sticker on her sticker shelf in her room. It is an old bookcase we don't care much about, so I don't care if she covers it in stickers.

extra bits

The kit was fairly straight forward. They were the standard water the pellet then plant the seeds. The seeds themselves have gone on the top of the dirt and are under our grow light to help it germinate. We had to wiggle a few things, but it fits fairly well for now. Pooka asked as she put it under the light "what happens if it grows a real dragon? Can I keep it? What if my dragon shoots plants instead of fire or ice? Will Daddy still let me keep it?" I told her we would cross that bridge when we come to it. I fear the day she finds a "real" dragon. Daddy says it must shoot fire or ice and fly. If anyone could find one, it would be Pooka.

Now we wait.

Paging Dr. Pooka

I mentioned recently in our monthly pictures that Pooka seems to have developed her own tomato. I don't remember planting a Roma on that said of the deck, and I know I didn't plant anything beyond a standard Roma, so where our purple/black Roma came from, I have no idea. I guess I have a little geneticist as well as botanist in Pooka.

This is a Pooka tomato

 I don't know if you can tell from the picture above how dark the Pooka tomatoes seem to be. These tomatoes are completely ripe and are very tasty, but they are certaintly different looking. I will also say the vine they came off of is very prolific, so we are getting quite a few of them.

Traditional Romas and Pooka

The Pooka roma is a much smaller tomato, but I am wondering if that is due to being on the shadier side of the deck. I will say I do see more Pooka tomatoes on the vine then the regular romas. I will admit I made a point to grab some great examples of the tomatoes to work with.

Traditional Roma Vs Pooka Roma

 You can definitely see the difference in color between a Pooka tomato and a regular roma as well as the size difference. They are both very meaty little tomatoes, which is great for canning. The Pooka plant also seems rather sturdy since it has decided to grow THROUGH our patio table.

Let's see if we can do it again

I will say that I wondered how viable the seeds are. In fact, I am wondering if we can get a tomato that really likes our yard and does well everywhere. Pooka likes the fun colors of them, so Daddy, Pooka and I talked and then I did some research. We decided to try saving the seeds from it and see if we can reproduce our "oops." I will admit we have never saved tomato seeds because frankly the idea of doing it is a bit daunting. You have to put the seeds in water until they ferment and get nasty, then you rinse them and then you dry them and frankly, I didn't know if we could do it, but I can't go buy more Pooka seeds, so we are going to try it. I have 2 different sets of seeds (From 2 different harvests) to see if these work. Now to get to the nasty part then wash them. Only time will tell I guess. Wish Pooka luck on her "Pooka tomato." Who knows, maybe in the future Pooka will be giving away "Pooka Tomato" seeds to family and friends.

Oh hello Mantises

On Sunday, the entire family was in a rush to get out and run some errands. I had walked outside first to make sure we had what we needed in the car when I glanced over at the praying mantis container and realized it was full of little mantises. Lots of them. I called Pooka and Brother to come out and see. Pooka was amazed over how many there were. 

Surprise

They were so tiny but yet even Brother found them amazing. We didn't have a ton of time at that moment to look at them. Again, timing this year is not our friend. However, since I still hadn't found the bottom to the container, I didn't want a garage to be full of mantises. We already had one escapee we had to usher out on a frisbee. The plan was for them to go in the garden.

Look at all the new friends

Daddy had the brilliant idea to put the container in a shady spot of the garlic bed until we could empty it. That night we went through and shook some of  the mantises out into all the garden beds, and then the ones we couldn't get out, we left with the zippered part open and down in the garden beds in back and let them either leave on their own or die.

They are so tiny

I will say its nice knowing we put a ton of mantises in the garden. I made sure each bed had a good shaking of them and hopefully this will help keep down the pest issues in the garden. Pooka in true Pooka fashion tried naming them all, but in the end just saying goodbye and do a good job to each bed as we shook out her good bugs.

Now get to work

Purple peas

I honestly did not plan to have two pea posts back to back, but we have peas. The purple peas have come in and they are rather prolific. I will say we have not be disappointed with them since their flowers give a nice pop of color in the garden. Pooka loves having lots of colors in her life and this gives the added bonus of not being what you expect.

Peas on the plant with flowers

 I will say that sometimes the different color makes it much easier to find the peas than sugar peas. These peas are very much "Here I am" being in such contrast with their plant. . However, sometimes the dark color also hides it when it is buried in the plant.Here is a better picture of them with the plant.

Purple Peas on the plant

I have noticed these to be rather prolific. The very random cooler spell we are having seems to be helping them quite a bit. This is just today's harvest. We are harvesting the peas when they are still rather "snow pea" thin. Supposedly, if you let these peas get too big they get rather tough since they are more like soup peas. 

The harvest today

The color is very purple, which surprised me just a bit since they were suppose to be blue podded peas. I am curious that if I leave a few on the plant for more then a day or so to fill out if they will get blue or if they will stay this neat purple color. The kids have taken to eating them raw as a snack or as a side at lunch. I am glad this experiment has gone well and Pooka is already asking if she can plant some to take to school in the fall for her lunch. Although I will say Brother is not as much of a fan and is watching the sugar peas to come in.

Purple peas

A huge difference

This year we are planting two very different types of peas. The normal sugar snap peas that have yellow flowers. These are the flowers we expect to see, a yellow white flower that is cute but more a sign of food on the way. Pooka told me the other day that she observed the difference between these peas and the blue podded peas.

Picture from last year, See the white/yellow flowers

Imagine our surprise when the purple podded peas started to flower. The plants all have multiple flower colors and they are give a great pop of color. There were pink flowers on some of the plants. Sorry, Pooka just corrected me and told me the flowers are fuchsia. I guess I live in an 8 bit color world.

Pink and purple flowers

There are blueish purple flowers mixed in as well. The bluish flowers seem to be a bit more rare right now. I had a friend over recently and she said asked what pretty flower I had in the pots. She was shocked to learn it was actually a pea plant and said if I hadn't told her better, she would of thought I was just growing flowers. Of course, this friend is starting her own journey into growing food and knew I wouldn't grow flowers unless there was a good reason.

More pea flowers.

There are also some pretty purple flowers of their own. I will say it is nice to have a pop of color out there that will still bring us food in the long run. Here is to having peas in the near future.

Another shot of the pea flowers. Gotta admit they look great

Dino Plant

A while back, I took Pooka and Brother to Toys R Us to get some toys with christmas money. Well, low and behold, Pooka found a plant in there. That girl can sniff out a plant at 200 yards. The weirder thing was it was NOT in the clearance rack I took her to. 

The Dino plant.

Needless to say, Pooka finally asked to open that box a few days ago. Its a really interesting set up and it had a nice little blurb on the back about the plant and how it survives and that it can handle Mom forgetting to water it (They know me so well). It even talked about it use to grow GIANT size for the dinos, but after the ice age, it tended to be smaller. 

Story on the back for Pooka

 Pooka opened her box with a few more directions, this is what she found, two bags and a bowl. I will  be honest when I say I had to tell Pooka to back off for a moment so I could get a picture.

Contents of the box

 The rocks form a circle in the middle of the bowl for the plant to rest on. Pooka was very interested when the directions said these were volcanic rocks, so I explained how that meant they were rocks out of a volcano.

A circle by Pooka

 Then you add the plant which is this weird little root ball and some water and wait. Now, I will say the directions did not say how much water, so we kinda guessed.

Now we wait

 I think I spent an hour trying to keep Pooka from checking it every 30 seconds. I finally convinced her that in 3 hours like the box said, it would look great, and it did. Even if that 3 hours was really the next morning. Pooka loves it and is reminding me to water it. Then we will let it dry out eventually and it will shrivel back up. Once that happens, we will give it some time before doing it again. I am sure this will be on of Pooka's favorite winter plants.

A full dino plant. 

Christmas for Pooka

So Santa and our families have been very good to Pooka.

Not only did Pooka get her own gift certificate for the local nursery, but she also got some new seeds from Santa. I swear that was her favorite gift from Santa. Santa brought her more of her Chinese 5 color pepper seeds, some red romaine, a type of blue podded peas, a shiny purple striped eggplant and some tomato blueberries that are suppose to turn a pretty purple color. As we all know when your 6, you can't have food be normal colors. Half the fun of growing it is growing blue peas instead of green.

Seeds from Santa

Her aunt and uncle and grandparents both got her a lady bug habitat. Maybe this will help with the aphid problem we had on the milkweed last year. I suppose I should get to ordering the babies for it.

I think we will be raising lady bugs

Maybe while I am at it, I will reorder her praying mantis egg sacks. Hopefully we will have better luck with them this time. 

New friends

The other day I was sitting on the porch and I noticed some odd looking little black shapes on the dill. You can almost make them out, there were caterpillars on the dill plant. They were little black ones with a white stripe. I wanted to save our dill plant, but I also wanted to save the caterpillars. I had Pooka run and get her bug house. There were 3 in all, and we placed them and some dill in the bug house. Pooka wants to raise them. I figure since we already have the habitat, why not.

 

We have since found a green one on a sage plant (I am pretty sure its a cabbage moth, but she wants to save it since that sage leaf was about to be blanched for dehydrating). Looks like Pooka will be raising more caterpillars this summer. Anything to have pollinators. Too bad at this stage they are more trouble in the garden. But if they are contained, I can feed them only what I want them to eat, which is a good thing.

"We all need more bugs"

Or at least that is what Pooka told me at the end of May. You see she had a return to take back and asked, begged, and bargained with me to let her get this. Now since it was her own money, I had a lot less bargaining power and she had money left to spare. I did convince her to only get one bug kit at a time (she was trying to get this and some lady bugs). On the upside if this works, we can up the number of predator insects in the garden pretty quickly.

Oh look, more bugs

So she bought her own praying mantis kit. She was ecstatic.  We brought it home and realized if we didn't send off for the little eggs soon we wouldn't get them. The package said they only ship from January to June. Good to know. On May 30th I did the online order for the eggs and waited.

About 2 weeks later (due to a shipping oops), Pooka opened a small box that container 3 vials. One of praying mantis eggs (which can have 200 mantids in them), a vial of wingless flies to feed the mantids and a vial of food for the flies.

The bits of the bugs

 Now I don't remember signing on for flies, but apparently we need them to stay alive to feed to the mantids so they don't eat each other. I really don't feel like explaining cannibalism, so I decided to read the directions.

Dinner for the mantids

 It turns out you need to add water to the food and then give it a few minutes. After the minute or so is over, you transfer some of the flies from the vial of flies to the vial of food without letting them run away.

Making dinner

 We did okay, we got the 10-15 flies in the vial of food and hoped for the best. We did have a few escaping flies, but since we did the move outside, I figure they could become something's dinner. They are gross little suckers, so I will save you the up close and personal picture.

Yum....not

Lastly, Pooka had to set up their little house with a few sticks. We broke one of the bamboo sticks in half and placed it inside. Then the 2 egg sacks got placed in the house and Pooka got to "lightly mist" the eggs. Pooka thought this was a great job and it is her job now. Supposedly it can take up to 6-8 weeks for these guys to hatch, so I guess it will be a lot of watering and waiting, just like the rest of the garden.

Watering and waiting.

Potatoes, Peas and onions oh my

I just thought I would give an update of some of the things going on around here.

The blue potatoes are doing really well. I am actually thinking about hilling the first bag already and am waiting just a bit on the second bag because it still has one smaller plant. Brother is so excited that his potatoes are doing well. Daddy even admitted that if this works, we may build a bigger bag/tower to put potatoes in next year.

The smaller of the potatoes

The peas are growing great. They are still rather small, and some are just now sprouting, but with all this rain, I am expecting a bit of an explosion on peas. I did get a stick in the ground yesterday between storms for them to start climing. Then I will tie it to the trellis on the deck so they can grow up it. We also got the ground around them mulched yesterday, so we are getting somewhere finally.

Peas before I gave them a stick

The onions were mulched as well. It looks like something tried to eat one or 2 of them and decided they didn't taste very good. The bit they bit off was laying next to the onion. It also looked a bit like they had been walked on, but the new mulch should help that as well.

Onions freshly mulched

I do have a set of tomatoes that I am trying to harden off correctly. That plus the 3 pans of seedlings I have been carting in and out of the house daily onto the front porch which is a bit more sheltered. So far they seem to be handling it quite well. I sadly still have tomatoes that are in dire need of transplanting. At least the garage is clean now so Pooka and I have a place to do it. Brother's homework assignment exploded out there for a few weeks.

Hardening off tomatoes

At school on Tuesday, Pooka made a raingauge at the local Kids Discovery Museum. She put pebbles at the bottom so it wouldn't fly away into the neighbors yard. Pooka really likes having her own rain gauge. She says "it's really fun, all you have to do is take a bottle, cut the top off, and then put measurments on it and put pebbles in it and scotch or duct tape the top on upside down. And it doesn't matter what kind of tape you use, just really strong tape. It is kinda hard to get the water out without getting the pebbles out." We got our own rain gauge the day before and hers is fairly accurate.

Rain Gauge by Pooka

 Now to hope for good weather so we can get some work done.

Surprises for a Pooka

Our family came into town this weekend and Pooka became a very happy girl. It seems her Aunt B brought her some spinach seeds she had apparently promised a Pooka. I know it meant a ton to Pooka and to me it meant having a kind of seed that we know should work well. If I can grow it. Aunt B has alot more experience then I do, but I am lucky to be able to ask her or any of my other sisters for advice.

The little green package of spinach from Aunt B and others

Daddy got a surprise on Saturday after Aunt S and I went out for a bit. I came back with a second blueberry bush. You see I did some reading last week on the blueberry bush, and all the reading says that you can get blueberries from 1 bush, but it does better with 2, and great with 3. I talked to Daddy about it, but we decided to table it. Well as Aunt S and I were out, I decided to go look. Bad idea. However, we found a nice new bush that would transplant well and brought it home. It got planted while we had all this family here. I am sure they were entertained since I did it solo since I didn't feel like getting all the kids that were here involved. Although sadly it has kinda fallen over a bit since I planted it. I will probably spend part of this evening staking it back up to stand up straight.

The second blueberry bush

Sunday evening, Pooka and I were sitting in the computer room and the butterfly habitat was above my desk. I was zoned out (as I tend to do after having family all weekend and a funeral on top of it). "Mommy, look a butterfly" Pooka exclaimed.

Hello Spot

Sure enough, this little guy was flying around the habitat ready to play. He is the only one that has hatched yet, so at least we got one. Pooka decided to name him Spot and he has spent the last few days being feed by a flower and living on my desk. It should warm up enough to release him in a day or so.

Pooka's picture of runt

However, Runt went for a bit of an express trip due to the cats and hasn't moved much since. Out of the whole group, we got at least 1 butterfly. Possibly due to the cats. We may do this again, but with the wild caterpillars we find the garden. It wouldn't be the first time. Now we at least have the right places for them to live.

Apparently plants have names

Over the weekend, we had a company. Our family came into town and Daddy reached into the fridge for a bulb of garlic and found this. A couple of sprouted bulbs.

I guess we aren't eating these.

Not to be dismayed, the idea to plant it was brought up by a couple of people. This made Daddy roll his eyes, but he left it to me and went in search of better garlic. I think he may of said something about having enough garlic, but I am not so sure since we eat so much of it.

Fast forward to Monday, when I walked into the garage and saw the growing bulbs and the little 4" pots I had bought by mistake recently. It took Pooka and I no time at all to separate the cloves and find 5 cloves that were still in good shape to plant.

Wrong size pots

In goes the dirt and the bulbs and next thing you know, I have 5 more cloves of garlic that are probably in too small a pot, but its an experiment if nothing else.  I am really wondering (aside from the size they have to grow) if the garlic from the nursery is different the the garlic from the grocery store. I have read you can use the garlic from either place.

Ready, set, grow. Oh wait, you already are.

The real kicker is that this time Pooka decides she wants to name the plants instead of writing garlic on the sticks. Instead they are named "Green Thumb, Rosebud, Tia, Lucky and Boss." The last three are off a show she has been watching lately called "Pitbulls and Parolees." I think while the show can be kinda scary, it will help her deal with some of the more unfun parts of life soon. As of right now, she wants to be a garden scientist and then rescue huskies when she grows up.


The garlic family

Who knew plants had names? Goodness only knows what she will come up with for the tomatoes.

Lots and lots of updates

In the last few weeks, we have had alot of projects start, but I think its time to tell you how they are going.

A couple of weeks ago, we had cut the ends off some green onions to see if we could regrow them. While we did have to get rid of some that didn't look so good, we did have a couple of green onion cuttings that are growing like mad. Pooka is so excited that they are doing so well.  So maybe that is one internet rumor that works. I did cut a few more ends off another set, so those got droppped in the cup too. The more the merrier at this point and all are showing signs of growth.

The green onion experiment

In Febuary Pooka and I stumbled across a clearance herb kit. It was a nice kit and grew nicely at first, then the dampening off/gnat problem got to them. They seemed to do okay until I stopped watering them to combat the dampening, and then the rest of the plants really took off, and I kinda forgot about them. This probably would of worked if I had not forgotten about them. Black thumb scored there. However, I am going to retry putting seeds in this container in a few days after I get some of these plants outside of my house.


Oops, they got forgotten

Pooka's Easter bunny egg flowers are doing okay. So far only the two snap dragons and a pansy have sprouted, but we are watching the others closely to see if they do okay. Pooka found a red watering can at Target in the dollar section that we are going to transplant the flowers (or just regular seeds) into once they get a bit bigger. She is so excited to just have flowers, something I don't share. If I am going to do the work, I want to EAT the darn things. However, it makes her happy and it is not going to take up much space.

Pooka's flowers

Finally, the peas, oh the peas. How I am not sure what to tell you. I planted the plants outside, and they didn't keep dying, but they haven't really seemed to come back. Add to it the last couple days of rain and pretty harsh winds, and its just there. Monday, Pooka and I saw our first sprouts from the Pea seeds we put in there. Maybe there is hope for them yet.

Can you play spot the Pea sprouts?