Trevor @ TheYoungPages.com

has been a failure.  What the lack of rain didn’t kill, the shade from the tree killed.  What the shade from the tree didn’t kill, the rabbit ate, and so on and so forth.  My harvest this year so far has been one radish.  I would have had more, but the rabbit took them.  I just hope he enjoyed them.  My tomato plants haven’t done well at all either.  I currently have two which are about half the size of all my neighbours’.  I blame that on the tree they are under and on the dryness of their soil.  I think that the tree sucks all the moisture out of the soil.  And blocks the sun.  A lose-lose situation.  And of the two which look good one is all withered and looks as though it doesn’t have long left.  I gave it a good drenching today, so we’ll see if that was all it needed, but I doubt it.  At least there are some flowers and even some small tomatoes on the half-decent looking plant.

I tried to grow beans, which were so successful for me last year, but it appears that rabbits have been introduced locally and they apparently like beans.  A lot.  The beans were looking great until the (just one!)  rabbit removed all their leaves.  They made a valiant effort to grow back, but the rabbit just did the same thing again.  And then the plants decided it wasn’t worth the effort and gave up.  I sowed some more beans in pots a couple of weeks ago and just transplanted them outside today.  I don’t think that beans transplant well, so we’ll see how they go.  I also surrounded the entire area in chicken wire, so it doesn’t look too great, but that’s the price of beans.  If the beans don’t take, then I’ll remove it, and if they do and grow taller than Potter (our rabbit) can reach, then I’ll take it away anyway, so hopefully it won’t be a permanent feature.

I also have some zucchini and pumpkins planted which look fairly good.  Lots of flowers, although I can’t see any young fruit, which isn’t good.  But this year it is the best I have.

It’s the first weekend of May, and my tradition has been to plant out my tomato plants this weekend.  I think that it is recommended for this area to wait for next weekend (Mother’s Day), but I am impatient.  We’ve had tomato seedlings growing (or not) since February, and it is time for them to move outside.  The ground has been prepared for the past few weeks by digging in the township’s compost and last week I covered it with some black paper to warm it up.  I have been preparing my tomatoes for the great outdoors for the past couple of weeks as well by leaving them outside for increasing lengths of time.

So today they went out.  A nice 90F day.  Rather too warm for tomato seedlings actually, so I waited until late afternoon to put them in.  But in they went.  Hopefully they will do well.  Last year planting them outside provided the boost they need and they shot up after that.  At the moment I have them covered with plastic bottles (cut-off Coke bottles), to act as cloches or greenhouses which will protect them from wind and the cold (a little).  I’ll have to harden them out of those as well.

I planted six beef tomato plants, six cherry tomato plants, and three others, which are some combination of yellow pear and “normal” tomatoes.  I also have some spares, in case any of the originals do not make it.  Unfortunately I didn’t have enough empty bottles, so two of them have to rough it.

In case anyone is wondering, I still don’t have a proper raised flower bed set up.  Which is fine.  I’m still hoping to get one eventually.  It’s just not a priority.  Also, in my crop rotation, tomatoes are on the bottom this year.  Beans are in the middle (which I sowed today), and the top is basically everything else (zucchini (courgettes), radishes, carrots, peas, beet).  Oh, I’ll also stick some pumpkins next to the beans, as there’s not much room left in the top section.

We’ve expanded HSSSS to include two new blogs from my brothers, for this week at least.  This week’s topic is personality test.  All four of us took the personality test at 41q.com, and are reporting the results and any other thoughts on the subject.  The quiz was fun to take, and very easy and quick.  The biggest problem is just choosing which answer is the more truthful and “true to self”.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, I came out as an ISTJ.  Whenever I have done similar surveys in the past, I have been an ISTP, so this was a bit of a change for me – a personality change, I suppose – is that ok?  I think that I was always rather borderline and fell onto the J side this time.  We have suspected for a while that I have been losing some of my “go-with-the-flow” nature, which is how we tend to think of the P-J continuum.  41q.com calls me a “Reliable Realist”, and the description matches me rather well.  Here it is:

“T’s personality type: “Reliable Realist”
Serious and quiet, interested in security and peaceful living. Extremely thorough, responsible and dependable. Well-developed powers of concentration. Usually interested in supporting and promoting traditions and establishments. Well-organized and hard working, they work steadily towards identified goals. They can usually accomplish any task once they have set their mind to it.”

And my chart: (see how close I am to being a P?)

?? And now you know what ISTP (sorry – I can’t think of myself as a J yet) actually stands for, even if not what they mean.  So I am an introverted, sensing, thinking, judging (perceiving) person.  Read the above description to know what that all looks like in a person.  The position of the marker along each line shows the strength of that characteristic in my personality –  my strongest features (not necessarily in a good (or bad) way) are definitely my introvertedness and my thinking nature (I assume my analytical, cold-heartedness).

I hope that Jodi is going to write about how it all fits together – she is now the exact opposite of me (we used to have P in common, before I became a J).  But it does work.  As we said earlier, our personality type is how we think and not what we think – Jodi and I think in very different ways, but we tend to come to the same conclusion, and it doesn’t matter how we got there.

You can read Jodi’s thoughts on her blog here, Adrian’s here and Nathan’s here, on their two new blogs.  Enjoy!

Firstly, some of my seeds have germinated.  Mostly tomato seeds, which started to sprout about five days after I sowed them.  They are still coming up.  They seem to be doing fairly well so far.  A couple of aubergine seeds also started to grow (no peppers yet).  I’ve been putting the seeds under a lamp during the day, which I hope will provide enough light for them (it has been rather gloomy here the last couple of days), and back into the slightly warmer boiler cupboard overnight.

Also, my gardening preparation activities moved outside over the weekend.  Probably a mistake, as the ground was completely sodden and I must have completely ruined any soil structure that I had.  But I wanted to make a start, and avoided walking on any flower beds, so I just destroyed the lawn, which is a disaster anyway.  So, what I did was put ‘compost’ from my compost heap onto the ‘raised vegetable beds’ and cover it with a layer of proper compost from the township’s pile.  My main gardening belief is that the crucial element in gardening is the quality of the soil.  Unfortunately another of my main philosophies is to not spend any money, so I have to improve my soil without spending any money at all.  Having a huge maple tree in my backyard helps considerably – the fallen leaves I collected and shredded in the autumn formed the basis of my compost.  The ‘compost’ was basically still just these leaves, although when I dug into the pile, it was warm, so some decomposition was occurring.  I had also added other household materials, such as grapefruit skins and banana peels (together these seem to be the entirety of our kitchen waste) over the winter, and these had started to break down nicely.

Anyway, it is a start, and I’m hoping that by the time I come to plant anything in the soil (I’m aiming for the first weekend in May), the leaf mulch will have broken down further and the soil will be just right.  Before then, I’ll continue to add more compost on top, and dig it in a bit too. Fun times!

You might think that having had four “major snow-storms” this winter, that I would have had my fill of snow for a while. But I haven’t. The winter of 2009/10 had by far the most snow I have ever seen, and I believe the most snow in one winter for this area. And now it is over. Will I ever see that much snow again? Silly as it seems, I do wish that every winter could have that much snow. I really enjoyed it, and don’t feel that I really got to make as much of it as I could have. Now we’re into March, and although there have been very significant snowfalls in Marchs past, the temperature this week is expected to reach the high 60s. So no snow. And we just had about four inches of rain over the past four days, which was just not fun at all, especially as many other Marchs it could have been another foot of snow.
Anyway, here are a few pictures to remember it by:

Hurry up Winter 2010/11!

Does this thing still work?

Anyway, I started my gardening for the year.  There is still snow on the ground, which has put me off starting my seeds for a couple of weeks (I meant to start around Valentine’s Day), but I realised today that I was running out of time to get my tomato and pepper plants growing.  So I sowed 24 tomato seeds, a couple of aubergine seeds and some peppers (Hungarian wax and pimento).  The tomato seeds that I sowed were mostly plum tomatoes (Roma), cherry (Black Cherry) and Yellow Pear, with a few “normal” Golden Jubilees thrown in for good measure.

We’ll see how they do.  I seem to remember our house being too cold for quick germination last year, and we’re certainly no warmer this year, but I’ve put the seeds next to our water heater which helped before.  Well, there’s nothing I can do to make them grow.

Just in case I ever want to know when the first frost was in 2009 – it was today, October 19th.

I guess I could stop wearing shorts to cycle…

As things have really slowed down in the garden over the past month, I thought that it is a good time to summarize how our garden fared this year.

The big success story of the year was definitely the green beans.  We had about a dozen plants growing up bamboo canes and they have been giving us reliable crops all summer long.  I just harvested the final stragglers yesterday.  We didn’t get hundreds of beans, but they provided the vegetable for many meals.

Then, the tomato plants.  They were interesting this year.  For the first part of the year, people were complaining that they were slow to start, but then it seems that the tomato season picked up for the second half, and it turned out to be a good (or at least average) year in the end.  At least that is what other people found.  Our cherry tomatoes (Sweet Baby Girls) did very well in the first part of the year – until we left for Scotland pretty much.  They never really got back up to full production afterwards, but seemed rather burnt-out.  But even so, we have had  a good number in September and even October.  I also grew Yellow Pear tomatoes.  They did surprisingly well, although only until our Scotland trip.  The plant reached five feet or so, but was then badly damaged by some winds fairly early in the season, but still fruited well.  I’ll definitely do these again next year.  And of course the girls *love* both cherry tomatoes and the yellow pear ones.  They will eat them in preference to just about anything.

I also grew a couple of other varieties of tomato – plum tomatoes and a normal variety, called Golden Jubilee.  Neither did spectacularly.  We didn’t get a single Golden Jubilee (there were a few fruits, but I missed their optimal time and they went funny).  We had quite a few plum tomatoes, but not enough to make a whole meal of (i.e. we always had to supplement with a tin, or store-bought fresh tomatoes).  For some reason, many of the plum tomatoes dropped from the plant before they were ripe.  There are still quite a few green plum tomatoes out there now.  I will have to gather them all to ripen inside before the weather gets really cold (I think that the coldest it has reached so far is about 45F).

Oh, I forgot all about our zucchini / courgettes.  They did well for a while too.  They seem to crop well and then they just die.  Which I’ve heard from other people too.  Anyway, they did well, and the girls enjoyed fried zucchini very much – it was Pippa’s favourite vegetable for a while (maybe still is).  Jodi was pretty impressed with my zucchini until I brought home some that someone else had grown.  Oh well.  Mine tasted better.

I also grew some cucumbers this year.  They did ok.  I got three or four small cucumbers from them.  They might have done better if I hadn’t waited so long to harvest the ones that grew – I was expecting long cucumbers and instead they stuck at something that resembled a tennis ball.  They were still tasty though (actually I think that I was the only person who enjoyed them).

Radishes did ok.  As always.  Not great.  I think that they were too shaded by the tomato plants and rose plants.  The beet-roots which were next to them did nothing.  But the carrots which were next to them grew eventually.  I need to pull them soon.  I chose a variety which looks like a radish (our soil isn’t great for long carrots).  The melon plants were extremely disappointing.  They did absolutely nothing.  The peas which I planted didn’t even germinate.  Although the sugar-snap peas which I sowed did do well.  They gave us a handful of sugar-snap peas.  Never enough to actually cook with, but enough for a nice snack.

And finally, raspberries.  Jodi and the girls (two, at the time) gave me some raspberry canes when we first moved here.  I foolishly planted them under the huge tree in our back-yard.  I moved some of them when I saw that it wasn’t a bright idea.  But this year they all seemed to do well.  The ones I transplanted and the ones under the big tree.  Most times when we go into the garden now there are a few raspberries to share around.  Again, not enough to do anything with, but enough to enjoy.  Nothing from our fruit trees (plum and quince).  Hopefully I just need to be patient.

And that is the sum-up.  It was a rather wet summer without much heat (we didn’t put our window A/C in until mid-August and only used it a couple of times), so the plants didn’t know what to do.  But it was definitely still worth it.  Now if only someone would help me with this raised bed for next year, things would be looking great…

When we moved to America three years ago, we were given a crock-pot as a gift.  For a while it sat unused in a kitchen cupboard, being used only to heat meatballs at a birthday party.  But then I became frugal and read somewhere the benefits of using a crock-pot.  I don’t remember when we started using the crock-pot regularly, but we have used it almost every week for a while.  By the way, crock-pots are frugal because they use less energy than heating a large oven (which also, in the summer, avoids heating up the whole kitchen).  They also allow several meals worth of food to be prepared at once.  I am hopeless at guessing the price of a meal, but I estimate that our typical crock-pot is $10 and feeds five of us twice.  So basically a dollar per person per meal.

We typically prepare our crock-pot on Saturday evening after the girls are in bed, so that the food is ready for us for Sunday lunch.  Before we started using the crock-pot after church, we got into a routine of macaroni-cheese or similar, because they were fast to get ready for the hungry girls.  The crock-pot allows us to be rather more flexible in what we prepare.  By the way, Jodi (correctly, I am sure) says that it takes us far longer to prepare one crock-pot meal than it takes her to prepare a normal meal (or even the two / three that the crock-pot replaces).  That is basically because we have to prepare all of the meat and vegetables before we can use them (e.g. brown the beef, dice the vegetables).  We would rather spend an hour preparing Sunday lunch on Saturday evening than after church on a Sunday.  I think that we tend to have more vegetables in crock-pot meals than in others, but I have read that there isn’t a whole lot of goodness left in them after they have been cooking for 8 hours.  Better than not having any at all though, I’m sure.

So, what do we do?  Our main crock-pot meal is basically ground (minced) beef and tomatoes, with a starch (typically pasta) and then flavoured with whatever culture we want that weekend (e.g. Mexican, Italian, even Indian).  They look rather like a lasagne.  We have done many other crock-pots as well, of course, including chicken based ones, eggplant based ones, etc.  A favourite of mine is roast chicken.  We roast (or more like boil) the chicken with potatoes, carrots and onions all in the pot.  The vegetables and half the chicken are for Sunday lunch.  Then we have more chicken (with fresh vegetables) on Monday.  And there is still more chicken left for the basis of another meal later in the week.  Then we boil the bones (in the crock-pot) and get some chicken stock.  And I take the non-bone remnants and give them to Gulliver.

Jodi’s favourite ‘meal’ is baked beans.  Which doesn’t sound like much, but is very good.  Hopefully she will mention it in her HSSSS, where you can read some of her thoughts about crock-pots.

I realised this morning that around now is the 3rd anniversary of our move to America. I thought to myself, ‘that would be a great topic to blog about.’ Then I remembered that I wrote about the same event last year, after two years in America. Oh well.

I re-read what I wrote, and it is mostly still true. Except now we don’t have cable tv any more. And we aren’t locking into any cell phone plans, but “pay-as-we-go”. And we’ve not really moved away from any of our ‘goals’. So we are better than before. It was nice to go back to our old church in Scotland a couple of weeks ago and for a couple of people to comment on how we haven’t been too Americanized – meaning that we haven’t gained a lot of weight since we left.

Anyway, the three year anniversary is significant because it means that I am now able to apply for citizenship, if I so desire. We’ll see. I certainly don’t have the forms yet.

It is great to look back over the past three years and see all the great stuff that has happened. We only had two daughters when we came over for one. We’ve doubled that in three years.  I think that means that by 2018 we’ll be at 32 kids! Or something. Maybe my maths is wrong.

It’s nice to remember arriving with nothing but the clothes on our backs and now look where we are! For how smoothly everything has gone for us, it is amazing that we didn’t have much of a plan for when we got here. I’m just glad that Someone knew what He was doing.