Friday, September 23, 2011

In the garden

We've been enjoying the gardens and greenhouse that are on this new property. We planted some tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, leeks, onions, garlic, courgette, lettuce, cabbage, beans, radishes, and egg plant.


Loving all the fresh salads for dinner! Yum Yum!

Sadly, we were struck with blight!

I'm sure you've heard of the Great Irish Potato Famine, where around 1 million people died--a terrible time in Irish history. Well, we had the "privilege" of experiencing potato blight first hand this summer on a far smaller scale, of course. Nobody died. Just my dreams of a freezer full of leek and potato soup.
Poor puny little things!
They had to be dug up and discarded so that it wouldn't affect the rest of the garden. Such a bummer.

The tomatoes got enormous, but they also developed a case of something (do tomatoes get blight? Hmm...). Anyway, they sort of didn't do as well as their gigantic stalks were promising. So, my tomato saga continues. Someday, I'll get a beautiful ripe red tomato off the vine...someday.

We are now in the season of pears and apples from the orchard. I'll see if I can get some pictures of that one of these days. Here is Mariah in our sunken garden, where she LOVES to play. Enchanting, isn't it?

Saturday, September 03, 2011

4th of July

We had a great day out on the 4th. Since it isn't celebrated here, of course, nobody else was celebrating so it was sort of strange to me. No fireworks, parades, or picnics. But we made a day out of it anyway and took a family drive to see some sights.

We took a walk across the new Peace Bridge in Derry and enjoyed this nice new piece of architecture. There it is behind me...

And we took a snack stop with a view...

And I couldn't resist some photos of this little sweetie...


So that was our day, quiet but lovely.
Happy Independence Day!

My sweet lil' helper

Demonstrating how to do the laundry...