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Cyndi's Comments

January 6, 2008: Happy New Year everyone! As you may notice, I still haven't done any of the good things I thought I'd do with the website. If there were a cure for procrastination, I'd be thinking about whether I should be in line. However I'm still working on it sporadically, and I have good intentions...what can I say.
Last year was incredibly dry here in southern California, and we're now looking at water issues. I am going to have to scale back my vegetable garden by about half this year, and I am not too sure what's going to happen to the cottage garden in my front yard. We must cut back on the watering so I guess I'll just see what survives. I've already lost a nice rhododendron because we had to cut off all watering in October when the water company did maintenance. Oh well - I am consoling myself with the thought that I shouldn't be growing rhodos in the desert anyway. I used to take pride in all the odd things I nursed through our harsh climate, but I'm changing my ways to be more in tune with the environment. I hope so anyway.
Hope you have a good gardening year, and I'll try to get more updates done - lots of good garden catalogs out there!
August 5 2007: First off I want to mention a couple companies I've had dealings with lately. First is Garrett-Wade tools. I lost the tip off a very nice copper garden sprayer, and when we called them to see if we could buy a new one, they said they didn't sell replacements but they did mail us a new tip free, from a damaged unit in their warehouse. That's customer service!
Second is Tomato Growers Supply Company, you can find their link in the Vegetables section. I bought a hybrid pepper called Ancho Ranchero from them this year, but when the peppers started to show up it was obvious they were not ancho peppers. They're probably pimentos, as they look exactly like the picture in the catalog. TGSC gave me my money back for the seed, but I'm out six months of growing time, water, replacement costs for buying peppers I need for other recipes. So I'm not too happy with them, although I did get my money back.
I haven't managed updates once a week, but it's certainly better than it was. I am in the middle of my harvest season right now so I've been pretty busy. Green beans and tomatoes are being ladled into jars at an astounding rate each weekend, I'm quite pleased so far. My friends and co-workers are still happy to accept extra zucchini, aren't they nice people?
Rabbits and ground squirrels did their best to chomp my vegetable garden to the ground in spring, but after several failed methods I foiled them with a "hot-wire", basically an electric fence. Ants ate through the stems on almost all my bell peppers, ruining that crop, and of course there was the ancho chile pepper mixup. My tomatoes have been truly outstanding after last year's utter disaster, the green beans are still bearing, the soybeans were loaded, my onions are beautiful...can't say the same about the okra or the eggplant, and the corn could have done better but all in all it's good.
Time for you all to be thinking about fall bulbs and perhaps that fall vegetable garden. I'm going to take a breather on the veggies, but I may not be able to resist buying more bulbs.
April 1 2007: It may be April Fool's Day but it's no joke, I really am updating the site again. I never got around to changing ISPs and I haven't gotten any new software, but two weeks ago I made a schedule for myself to try and get some structure to the chaos. It's like a diet - if I stick with it, it'll work and you'll see changes - if not, well you know. If you sent me email more than a couple months ago, I have kept everything and am working my way through it but I probably won't reply to you. If it's recent enough that I won't be terribly embarrassed by how long it's been, then you'll hear from me!
It's been the driest year in recorded history in my area. The back yard looks like the dead of summer, there is not a green sprout to be seen. We had an incredible cold spell in January, set records for this area, and I lost an awful lot of plants - much of my xeriscaping died. I was a little surprised because they should have made it through but perhaps an entire week of nighttime single-digit temperatures plus no water was too much. Well, so it goes.

December 31: It's been SIX months since I put anything out on the website. I just don't know where the time goes anymore! Oh wait, yes I do. We have two new additions to our family - see the pictures - and they are taking up all our free time and then some. I don't know why now that we're in middle age we decided to take up horses but so we have. Riding isn't new to me but horse ownership is so it's definitely a learning experience. Before too long we hope to be spending some time out on the trails and doing some horse camping.
But what you care about is the website, I expect. I'd like to find a new ISP that will give me some more space, and I'd also like to use some more advanced techniques so we can have such basic things as a search engine. I've been typing all this in by hand for years now and it just isn't very efficient. I don't know how I'm going to find the time to do this, but I don't want to give up this particular hobby just yet. Anyway, I will be updating as often as I can, although I doubt I'll ever manage to get weekly updates as I used to do.

A little bit about my garden last summer: I cut way back on the veggie garden, being tired of spending every weekend in the kitchen preserving. Just as well I didn't have high expectations; an incredible heat wave (I bet most of you remember it, the whole country got it eventually) at the worst possible time ruined my one row of green beans, prevented the tomatoes from setting, prevented the corn from pollinating, and even slowed down the zucchini and the cucumbers. Then normal summer heat settled in. Out of 15 tomato plants we got enough for about 2 good bowls of salsa - how pathetic can you get? Only the peppers did well. My roses bloomed and withered instantly during the heat wave in May and then, poor things, the same thing happened in the second bloom. Oh well...there's always next year.

Garden pictures and more at my Yahoo photo site. Enjoy.

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