the best thing a garden can grow and it is not the carrot!

 

 welcome to my new wonderful grandson!

more bounty from my gardens!

it is so fun to reap rewards from your own garden! so i have some lovely sunflowers for my dining room table and some delicious tomatoes to accompany my new arthritis diet although i think i read somewhere that you should avoid tomatoes but who in their right mind can resist a fresh picked sliced tomato! the bottom 2 pictures are my artichoke that turned into a flower. this is the tale of the artichoke. first the ants could not resist it so it was sprayed with an organic cinnamon smelling spray, and then i sprayed out the ants everyday, and then the slugs came so it was sprinkled with sluggo so that my little poodle dog would be safe, and then the outer leaves fell off, and then this artichoke appeared miraculously, and then it grew and grew and looked just like an artichoke you see in the store and never buy, and then poof it turned into a flower! so i will leave it and watch it and then trim it down and supposedly it should come back next year and maybe it might produce!

trying to learn how to blog!

i am trying to learn how to do this blog and my 25 year old daughter is trying to help me without taking my head off. i actually want to use this blog instead of eating since i am now going to try ( a little bit ) ( because this is so hard!) to blog instead of eating so that i can get some weight off my knees! and then maybe the arthritis will not be so bad!

more pictures of the "grave"

here are some more pictures of my "grave garden." i do not think that my husband is going to let me have this garden next year. i think that he wants his yard back! but i do enjoy the flowers! now i have tuber roses that planted from bulbs so maybe i will get at least 4 out of the 25 i planted! the chocolate gardener is still a novice!

what spring brought!

after the cold winter this is what came up! all the bulbs worked! woo hoo!

well the chocolate gardener has just found out that she (i) has arthritis in her knees. yes knees. both of them. i was walking to the farmer's market on saturday and i felt a pop in the back of my left knee. i was supposed to meet my darling daughter there but i called her up and told her that i could barely walk and that it was better if she did not come. i forced myself to hobble through the market and managed to buy fresh corn and melon and my favorite bread and then i limped my way back to the car. i came home and my sweet husband gave me a bag of ice and told me to rest and ice it. i told him that i was sorry that he was now married to an invalid. i could hardly bend my knee because it felt like i had a sausage behind it. so i knew i had to see a doctor but how degrading that i could not say that i sustained a sports injury, i just had to admit that i was walking to get food. more food. that is my real problem. so i went to the doctor and had some x rays and he maneuvered my knee all around which killed. then he showed me the x rays where i am missing all this cartilage and told me that i have had the dreaded word arthritis for quite some time in both knees and the left is the worse. wonderful! but at least i do not have to have surgery. so the best thing i can do he said was manage my weight. he did not say i was fat but he did not have to use those specific words because the truth was blatantly out there. so the chocolate gardener is fat. she is fifty- fat- arthritic- and owns a poodle! more to come later!

what will spring bring to this little garden?

so my sweet husband cut the sod away and added some wonderful dirt and made a little garden in the middle of our front lawn so that i could plant some bulbs!  i planted some daffodils and some tulips.  the next door neighbor dogs thought that they had a fine place to poo so it was suggested that i plant pansies to keep them away and it worked!  now this little garden is covered with snow and bordered all around by a little wire fence that now looks like a grave.  (i will show a picture of what it looks like now, after i take the picture!) now i can only look at my "grave" and hope that something beautiful and living will emerge after our cold winter.