October 8, 2008: New Sweaters for Winter!


Otter, do I look fat in this sweater?



No Annie, but your ear looks wrong side out.


Today in the garden: I went to Wal*Mart to buy ten bags of composted steer manure to spread over the garden beds. They only had twelve bags left, three of which were broken open, so Mr. H and I loaded the nine good bags onto the wagon. When we got to check out, I asked if they'd give me their last three bags at a discount, and I got them for 60 cents apiece! I also bought a bale of sphagnum peat moss for the blueberries and rhododendrons. I like to put a mixture of peat and manure on them in the fall, something I hadn't done for a few years, and they are looking a bit sickly. I normally get about a gallon of blueberries from my two small bushes. This year I got a cup. The manure and peat got stacked in the garage by Mr. H, but it will be up to me to get it to the back yard and into the gardens. I really wanted to get some chopped leaves over the tops of the beds before I add the manure, but the trees are still green, no leaves are falling. I've asked my neighbor to save their bagged leaves for me and just toss them over the fence so I can use them next year.

I picked the last of the green peppers and pulled that plant. The peppers are small, but I doubt they'd grow any more in this cool weather. The spinach and lettuce are loving the cold, though. I picked a good sized container of each.



I was extra diligent about washing the spinach after finding this guy on the underside of one of the leaves.



8 comments:

  1. Your dogs are so cute. We used to bundle our little dog up in sweaters and then almost a coat in the middle of winter. She would walk up to the door, lift up her paw and turn around when it was really cold.

    Nice lettuce harvest, after seeing everyone's lettuce I wish the slugs didn't eat mine.

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  2. We had to laugh at Otter. He kept backing up, like he could back right out of that sweater! We'll let him wear it for a few minutes a day, until he gets used to it. Annie didn't mind hers at all.

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  3. That's a good deal on that composted manure. Those little doggies look cute in those sweaters. What's that thing on the leaf? A cocoon of some kind?

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  4. EG, it was a pupae of some kind, about 3/4" long. That would have been a nasty thing to bite into!

    Otter looked cute in his sweater, but Annie looked like a little stuffed sausage. She's overweight and having some joint problems, so the vet put her on meds and a diet. If she doesn't improve in 3 months she has to have her thyroid checked. She's only 9 months old, I hope she isn't facing a lifetime of health problems. she's such a precious, sweet little dog...Miss Personality.

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  5. Aww! Did you knit the sweaters??

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  6. Me? Knit? HA-HA-HA-HA....oh, excuse me! No, I'm not that talented. For only $5 each, I let Wal*Mart knit them for me. I probably couldn't buy the yarn for that, not to mention knitting could be compared to my one try at piano lessons when I was about nine years old. The teacher's exact words were "Go home and tell your mother to save her money, because you will never be a piano player". I took one knitting lesson and got basically the same response. My hand-eye coordination just sux!

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  7. Granny, just saw your post over on EG's blog. You don't have leaf miners on your fall spinach? Mine are getting eaten alive just like spring. I was thinking it must be in the compost I got.

    When I harvest spinach, I just rip away the bad parts and eat the rest. If I got rid of the whole leaf I wouldn't eat spinach. So annoying, and nothing works on them, they're INSIDE the stupid leaf. Grrr.

    Ok, I'm better now.

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  8. Not a leaf miner in sight on my spinach, but in the next bed there was some damage to the beet leaves. My only problem with the spinach were the little birds feeding on it each morning, so I had to put some netting over it. The spinach was planted in the half top soil, half composted dairy manure that I bought by the pickup load. The beets were planted in bagged steer manure/peat moss/native soil mix. My earlier beets (planted in July) in the dairy/topsoil mix didn't show any leaf miner damage, either. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not...maybe the miners are in my native soil?

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