Effing Ameren

*Mom, you're welcome, and you're right, "effing" instead of "fucking" does make me seem classier.*

A couple weeks ago, I received a little post card in the mail from Ameren notifying me they would be trimming the trees in my neighborhood, and I was entitled to free woodchips if I was interested.

Obviously I was interested.  While my little veggie garden booming, the rest of the landscaping is kind of lacking.  Free mulch could only help.

Now, we have two giant trees in our front yard that shade our humble abode.  These beautiful, nay magnificent, trees even survived the inland tornado of May 8, 2009 (also known as my 25th Birthday Storm).

But they didn't survive Ameren.  My poor trees are now just giant trunks.  It looks like the sad tree from The Giving Tree, only without a little boy to love.  Not only are the trees sad, but my plants in my front flowerbed, which have always been full shade plants, are now wilted as they are in direct sunlight.

But, as if that wasn't enough, this was sitting in my driveway.

Why yes, that is a 5 ton pile of mulch in my driveway.  What am I supposed to do with all of this?!?!?!

I HATE AMEREN!

Future Schemes

I have way too many effing tomatoes, especially considering the Hubby doesn't like them.  But, he does like them cooked into things, and I spend a fortune on diced tomatoes from Krogers year round.  

These lead to the logical solution that I need to learn to can this shit.  I have high hopes of canning home made salsa, diced tomatoes, dill pickles, and sweet pickles.

It looks like there are a couple canning methods, and surely it can't be that hard, right?  I mean, people used to do this kind of stuff back before the power of Google and YouTube, which means I can definitely conquer this.

Wordless Wednesday

Blackberry Success!

Despite my futile attempts earlier in the year to tame the wild blackberries growing next to my house, I have found a little path to enable me to have a blackberry snack whenever I want.  My first berry picking mission started out with high hopes.  I took a little Tupperware bowl turned basket, and envisioned myself quite quaint as I strolled off to pick blackberries.

Problem.  It was fucking hot and they have crazy-long thorns.  What I thought would be a quick stroll through the country side picking blackberries ended up being a battle to get out without tearing a hole in my shirt or lose an eye.  Imagine when Maleficent cursed Princess Aurora's castle in Disney's Sleeping Beauty.  

Didn't see a Disney reference coming, did ya?

So after my battle with the thorns, I did make it out alive with about 2 cups of blackberries.  Because I was anxious for my hard work to pay off, I immediately went to Allrecipes.com and made the the first blackberry cobbler recipe I could find for the Hubby and I to enjoy.  

Sadly, the cobbler came out kind of mediocre, to put it nicely.  It was more like a blackberry muffin in an 8x8 square pan.  Next time I'll just shove the blackberries in the freezer and do my homework to find a recipe worth cooking.  If any one knows of a good cobbler recipe, let me know.  I'm talking to you, CaseyRhea.

Blaming the Dogs Again

As many of you, I was drunk or out of town most of the holiday weekend.  [Except for a quick trip to the ER for the stupid hives.  Sigh.]  Which means I was unable to check my garden until today after work. 

Sadly, it appears one of my zucchini plants suffered some unknown illness in my absence.  

The other plants are fine, this one is just really, really wilted.  To solve the issue, I googled my little heart out, and found some possible answers.  This site seemed to sum up what every other site was saying.  You know it's a good sign when "causes of wilted zucchini" appears in the URL.

BUT - this didn't really seem to actually answer my problem.  There were no visible signs of disease, or nasty looking beetles.  (Which is a good thing because the chances of me actually hand picking beetles off of my plants is highly unlikely.  Ick.)  And while it was ridiculously hot this weekend, none of the other plants were wilted.

So after some more amazing CSI sleuth work, I came to a startling conclusion.  Rocky fucking pissed on my plant.  

I guess I get it.  In my dogs' eyes, I've been spending too much time in my little garden.  Besides sitting on the other side of the chicken wire and whining any time I'm in my garden, Rocky constantly needs to remind the world that the garden is "his".  No matter how much I yell and scream, as soon as I let him outside, he now runs to the garden and hikes his leg.  

Gross.  I need to make a sign to warn people to never eat any thing straight off the vine from my garden.  

Once the sun sets tonight, I'm going to try to go out and rejuvenate the poor piss plant with some water and possibly Miracle Grow.