OK! So you see the smaller of the 2 cucumbers?? Check out its size. So, imagine a little bit smaller than that. That is the size that the 2 of them were when I went home around the bay for 4 days…Carmanville-Noggin Cove-Fredericton Come Home Year…had a blast! So anyways, we came back to this!!!!! Its friggin huge! We got our friends to check on our place while we were gone. I asked what in the world did they do to it 🙂

And the shape….is this what happens when they are grown vertically? I have no idea. This is our first time with cucumbers. I read you can grow them this way…but we did it in pots…and not outside in the ground. So, I’m not sure how much more they will grow. But they seem to be doing fantastic right now.

Tomato plants are doing great as well. Especially considering when they were just tiny little seedlings resting on this shelf and one day one of my cats, Wally, decides to jump up on the shelf. He totally tips the whole tray over!! Took me about an hour to get it back in order. Well, I did lose a few…sad moment.

Here’s an update to this post to August 14….we cut down the cucumber. The skin of it was a little tough, the inside is delicious!!! Its HUUUUGGGEEE!

Last fall/early winter we managed to complete one side of the greenhouse with Lexan glass before the snow came. When it did snow, it filled up inside the greenhouse….our hearts broke. We HAD to do something. However, the installation of the glass was VERY time consuming. Once you measured your next piece, it had to be put in place to pre drill all the holes. Then very gingerly take it down, vacuum out all the holes, seal/tape the edges. Then caulk the areas on the lumber where the glass would be laid, put the glass back in place, attach with the screws and seal/tape those seams. So, we decided to close it in with some poly for the winter. Boy are we glad we did that. Seem to work out great. And it helped with our early start to our crops in that spring.

If you look at the picture on the left, you can see the side with the half moon window is completely finished with the Lexan (plus underneath the long window to the left of that patio door with the grills). The other 3 sides and roof had to be finished with the plastic…IT WORKED!!!

So, about 3 weeks ago, our weather went into total hot sunny weather! It was fabulous! Inside, temps reached about 40C on some days if we didn’t open all the windows. Anyways, we decided to work on the roof first. Again, very time consuming. Kristian’s dad helped us out a lot. Funny thing, not one of us remembered to seal the seams when as we were doing it. It rained a little later the last day that Kris and his dad were just finishing up. The next day it was pouring – so was the inside of the greenhouse – YIKES! Well, it wasn’t cold and our plants were getting watered! Within a couple of days when it was a dry warm day again, they got back up and sealed it all up. Great job boys! 🙂

Hey! Thanks for following my stories so far. I should be up to date with these blogs now. Diving into my real estate career lately has left me little time to write…but I love this. Its kind of meditating, therapeutic perhaps 🙂  So, I may go back in time…from time to time to reflect on some things that I didn’t get a chance to write about before. I hope I don’t confuse anyone. Think of it as one of those movies that goes back and forth in time.

If you’re new at reading this, my first blog is at the bottom of this page, titled “First blog post” 😉

What I hope to gain from this page is to communicate with anyone around the world to get their take, advise or experience on gardening. And who knows, maybe I can offer some help to others as well.

So, this year we planted seeds for the following: Asparagus, pea, green bean, mustard, cucumber, zucchini, dill, parsley, cauliflower, broccoli, tomato, peppers, chilli pepper, pumpkin, potato, yellow onion, red onion, romain lettuce, carrots, kale, chard, and spinach. Plus a boat load of flowers; from morning glories to forget me knots. (We also picked up some strawberry plants at Lester’s Farm later in the spring and planted them in our yard).

We did most of this inside the garage again. Although we got the greenhouse closed in last fall, its still way too cold for them. Except we were getting some bright sunny days in a row! So, we carried each tray of seedlings and some pots to the greenhouse from the garage. We started to notice a big difference in the run of one day. It was great. Kept checking weather seeing that nice days were turning into colder not so nice days….we would then bring everything back to the garage again. We did this about 4 or 5 times until I was tired of it. I decided to close off the “attic” part of the greenhouse with some poly to try and keep heat down where the plants were. I ran a cord out to it and plugged in our infrared heater for a few hours in the night time. I remember automatically waking up at 2am, 4am, etc to run out to the greenhouse in my house coat – could be snow on the ground – just to check to make sure the temp was ok and that the heater was running properly. Tough few weeks with it, but we managed.

Winter stared early this year. Temps dropped well before christmas and froze our ponds. Here’s some family and friends clearing off the pond to go ice skating. This was New Years Eve. It was so much fun. I think we ice skated 3 times in 4 days.

On another pond, a man who lived on that pond cleared a skating trail with his quad and a plough. A couple of bumpy spots but overall was very good.

After Christmas in the new year, temperatures started to warm up and we would get a good bit of rain. Then it would freeze and more snow would fall. In between these highs and lows, we did manage to get out for a couple of runs on the snowmobiles. Had some cook ups in the woods. Some nice!!!

Now, growing up around the bay years ago, made ya tough! If you were to go ice fishing, you did just that…out on the middle of the pond fishing away despite what weather was happening. But like I said, here on the Avalon is a lot windier, it seems. Ice fishing is not so nice with 80km/h winds in your face. I got Kristian an ice fishing shack for Christmas. I tell ya, nothing like ice fishing in a blizzard! It was great!!

Potatoes were the first thing to grow in the garden. Carrots and romain lettuce took a little bit longer. Green onion went crazy as did the peas. The peas and pumpkins were put in the garden as seedlings the day before we went on summer holidays…around July 11 I think. The pumpkins produced a flower or 2 but no pumpkins. So sad. Another year failed at the pumpkins…we won’t give up though.

Several times in the summer/fall we got to enjoy fresh veggies from the garden and share with our family and friends. So awesome!!!

Oh, and I forgot about the gladiolus me and mom planted in the spring. For anyone out there that has experience with this beauties, maybe you could help me. The instructions were to only plant the bulb in the ground about an inch or less, but my goodness…they grew over 3 feet tall and most fell over. Was I doing something wrong? And do they come back again the following year? Just wondering…they are so beautiful, but most were doing so laying on the ground or standing at a 30 degree angle!

It was hand work building this thing. The hardest I think was constructing most of the roof trusses and hand bombing them up…ugh, my forearms were some sore!! The greenhouse was really starting to take shape…but the old left over weathered lumber we had from building our house along with a few new pieces we bought, it looked a little ‘drab’. One day Kristian comes homes with this black paint (char smoke was the name I think….close enough to black) and thought we should paint it all one colour.

Great idea!! I thought it was starting to look real sharp! We even got my mom to help out when she was in visiting us from around the bay. God love her!!

Once the white windows and doors went it, everything started to pop!

Since we now have 2 green houses on the go, we had to distinguish them…so we have the small green greenhouse and this one….we called it the black green house. The name just stuck! 😉

While all of this was going on, we still maintained our garden….despite being one of the coldest damn summers we had in a very long time. The week we picked for our summer vacation to go camping at Terra Nova National Park, the warmest day was 11C!!! But there is absolutely nothing you can do about weather only move away….so if that is not an option or you don’t want to move away, suck it up and appreciate the great things you have in this life. And one of those great things is doing stuff outside without being eaten by flies!!!! And with the temps only reaching a balmy 11C, the flies were too damn cold to come out. So it was great weather for fly fishing which is one of our favourite things to do in the summer.

I still to this day haven’t caught a salmon!! But, lucky horseshoe up his butt, Kristian got one!!! We brought along our smoker this camping trip and so glad we did. That sucker went in there right away….oh my what flavour!! Life is good.

And in goes the seeds again…our little garden set up in the garage. Constantly back and forth with boiling water in the kettle for the plants. Pain in the arse, but like I’ve said…we love it, we don’t care. We started with pumpkins again this year. Thought we would give it another try to see if we could get more than 1 to grow this time. We also planted tomatoes and of course – PEAS! We didn’t start as many seeds this year. I was studying Office Management and Brokerage….trying to become a Real Estate Broker (passed my exam in June! woohoo). Working full time, trying to study and have somewhat of a life is tough….reminded me of university days.

Once the weather warmed a little, construction commenced on the greenhouse. We had all the window and door sizes wrote down everywhere and tried every which way to maximize the fixtures in the wall so that we didn’t have to use much material to fill it it. And that material is Lexan. We got it at a really good price. We didn’t need it yet so we just stored it in our garage-along with everything else we practically own-anyone else have a garage that has never had vehicle parked in it??

Kristian had the vision with it and I just helped out anyway I could. I knew the jest of what was happening but he was the brains of the operation.

So the winter season is upon us again. Only for all the love I get out of gardening, winter would be my favourite season. But here on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, the snow isn’t consistent, it doesn’t usually stay very long. Could be a blizzard with 50+cms then it normally turns off to rain because temperatures rise. All that snow starts to melt a little and with the rain makes it very slushy. Then, as it usually happens, the temperatures fall and all that slush turns to ice!!! It turns out for a very big MESS! No wonder a lot of people hate the winters here. I don’t remember these type of winters growing up around the bay in Central Newfoundland. Then again, that was 20 something years ago…our global climates are changing. Not sure about warming….I saw somewhere that on average NL was one of the coldest places on earth last year. Don’t quote me on that 😉

This year, we upgraded our ’91 and ’82 machines to a couple in the 2000’s. We got a good deal of the Grand Touring, a Vmax and an enclosed trailer for $3000!!! We did this at night. The next day we realized the Vmax didn’t have reverse. Now I didn’t have reverse on the Phazer either but if you needed to turn around, you could just pick up the arse of her and flick it around in the trail. This thing weighs a tonne (…or is it ton?). Ha anyways, we had to sell it. So, we sold it and bought a Polaris 550 Classic Touring. I think its a 2003. Don’t matter, it works AND has reverse. I never had a snowmobile with reverse before, I felt rich! We also fixed up and sold the trailer too for a super price. We already had an enclosed trailer from a couple of years ago. It was all good.

We had a decent winter that year. Got to try out our “new” machines a few times. This one evening I was noticing that my machine was a little “boggy” when we were going slower in the trails…almost shutting off. But when we got to the open fields, I’d give her the gas and she flew. I am a careful driver and when we would get to the open fields, I would carefully drive around it first to see what the lay of the land was like. Making sure there weren’t any big rocks or anything like that. When I seen what it was like, I would drive around it fairly fast, making sharp turns, stuff like that…just having fun. Well back to this particular evening when my machine was acting weird when driving slow, it was really getting on my nerves! Sometimes it WOULD shut off. Anyways when I did get out into the open field (one that I hadn’t checked out yet) I gave her the gas and passed everyone I was with! I came upon a spot that looked like a couple of small trees and a rock under the snow so I kept to the right of it a bit. Within seconds I was airborne!!! I didn’t see the big gaping hole about 12′ wide and about 8-10′ deep until I was upon it. I didn’t try to steer away I knew I would flip. I didn’t try to break, I knew I would end up in the hole so I just kept going. I almost made it too….Dukes of Hazard style, but I guess the weight of the machine and gravity brought me down a bit before clearing to the other side. The machine hit the other edge of the hole and tossed me like a rag doll. The machine kept going another 30′ or 40′. Everyone came over quickly as they all seen what happened. I knew I was hurt but nothing too serious. My right knee hurt a bit as did my left middle finger. I realized why….my knee hit the reverse handle and cracked it right off (I now use my reverse with a thick string to get it to work) and my hand went through the windshield. I took off my glove and seen I had the top nearly torn off! But with lots of Polysporin and good bandaging it healed up perfectly! I tried to continue the ride that night but I was a bit shaken so we headed back home. It did not stop me from going again though. I just love it so much!!

We did get to experience snowmobiling on the west coast of NL this particular winter. We rented proper machines for this place. You do a lot of mountain riding and there is a lot of powder. You need the right machine to get through it and handle the climbs. Real fancy schmancy machines. I used to make fun of them as I thought they looked funny. But once I tried it, I totally took back everything I said about them. THEY ARE AMAZING! Going through the powder is like riding a seadoo in the water. If you ever get an opportunity to snowmobile on the west coast of Newfoundland, you really should do it!!! You won’t be disappointed. But get someone who’s been there before to show you where to go. You could get lost!!