New Blog!

Our new blog: Ramble Bramble.

Adam came up with this blog name and it will include all the adventures of our small family including: babies, gardening, trips, cooking, family, friends, jobs, etc. etc.

Hope you enjoy!

Once I figure out how to do it, I will import all of our 25x50 blog posts and incorporate them into the new blog. I have also turned off the comment field on 25x50 because we will no longer be checking it.

Sweet Potato Harvest

Adam and I harvested roughly 25 sweet potatoes from our garden today. I have plans for these potatoes: ranging from a savory sweet potato bread to sweet potato soup. For tonight, we made a two potato gratin that I got from a Moosewood Restaurant cookbook.

First, let me just say that I love the Moosewood and all of their cookbooks. If I could take Ithaca and subtract the 100 ft of snow they get every year, add in some southern accents and food and shake it until it ended up closer to my parents in Arkansas I would totally live there.

This gratin was the perfect recipe for Adam and I because it combined one of his favorite foods (potatoes) with one of mine (sweet potatoes) and topped it with a mutual favorite (cheese). I have to say, though, I think I'd add less cheese than what the recipe required. What you see here is 4 oz of grated Havarti but it kind of overwhelmed the sweet potato flavor. All in all, however, the gratin was spectacular. So spectacular, in fact, that I forgot to take a picture before we dug in.

Relish Your Garden

In the height of the summer, Adam and I ventured out to the garden in the early morning hours to pick all of our green tomatoes, peppers and onions. We then spent the next two days in my parents' kitchen making my Gram's relish.

This particular relish is a family recipe and, therefore, a big secret. I can tell you there is a lot of chopping involved and several cups of vinegar and sugar but a better accompaniment to black-eyed peas I've never found. Luckily, we had some red peppers in the mix so the relish looks Christmas-y and will make great gifts when that time rolls around.

The huge benefit to making this relish is that we put so many tomatoes to good use. Not being much of a fresh tomato eater myself, Adam and I were often lost as to what to do with the vast amounts of tomatoes we had on hand. Luckily, this relish pretty much wiped us out.

The best part of making this relish is that Adam and I got the very first quart all to ourselves.

I think I did it again

Maybe it is unrealistic to think I can blog and garden (and attend classes and work two jobs) over the busy summer months. I don't know. But, needless to say, I continued our blog tradition of being completely absent during the summer months.

But it is almost October now so let the blogging begin (again)! There are still some forthcoming summer-y blog entries detailing our relish-making adventures but that should about conclude the summer.

In totally unrelated-to-gardening-news, Adam and I are expecting a baby although I'm sure most of you reading this have already heard the good news. For that reason, I am considering creating a new blog (to detail all of our adventures including baby and gardening) but have yet to think of a good name.

Give me your suggestions - I need them! (Says the girl who actually named a blog 25 x 50).

Vacation: All I ever wanted

We should have done a little post about how we were going to be absent from the blog-o-sphere for a while. But we didn't. Sorry if you were wondering.

We have been on vacation - not the entire time we've been absent from the blog - and now we are back to the real world.

At least, I am. Since Adam is a lucky ducky teacher, he has the summer off. Since I am a poor pathetic grad student, I have two classes and two jobs for the summer. Fun.

Our garden is going bananas. While we were out of town my parents watered and harvested. Here is what has been harvested so far:

zucchini
bell peppers (!)
herbs
lettuce (but it was bitter-y so we yanked it out)
one okra pod

Everything else is doing really well. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, onions, beans, watermelons, tomatoes and flowers.

Our only failure so far has been our cucumbers. They got the evil cucumber beetle and never recovered.

Pictures soon to come, I promise. Adam may be doing most of the posts for the next two months because of my aforementioned dreary summer plans.

Oh hail!

Around 4 this morning we had some major hail. And I just kept picturing our little plants being ripped to shreds. Honestly, our garden has endured just about all of the possible weather events for this section of the country. Early frost, strong winds (although, thankfully, no tornadoes), heavy rain and large hail.

I can't believe I'm going to say this but I'm actually looking forward to the summer when every day is just hot and humid and mosquito-filled.

May showers bring slugs

Our garden is growing very quickly now. Our onions are thick and dark green, the potatoes have shot up


we've got our first tomato



and our first little zucchini



BUT, we also have our first pest of the season. Slugs.

It has been so wet this season and the slugs seem to really like the nice, moist mulch we have provided. We first noticed them when we harvested lettuce for the first time and had to pick several slugs off the inner leaves.

Then, yesterday, we went to the garden to discover they had severely munched on our zucchini and cucumber leaves.


We're not real worried because the zucchini, cucumbers and lettuce all have a lot of new growth so they are far from dead.

But we need to get rid of these slugs.

Our plan of action: get the slugs drunk. That's right, apparently, slugs LOVE beer. They love it so much that if you leave a bowl of beer out they will crawl right in and drown. We are also going to spray the leaves of the plant with a soapy water mixture to make them distasteful.

We'll see how it works!

Shout Out

This post is for you, babies Mason!

Last night I saw this pretty little red strawberry with a not-quite-ready berry growing right next to it.

Adam and I are currently blessed with two nieces, one nephew and one mystery niece/nephew on the way.

But this picture reminds me of my little red-headed niece Dorothy and her still-growing baby brother or sister. So this little post is dedicated to them.

Uncle Adam and Aunt Erin wish y'all lived closer to us so we could make you some fresh strawberry shortcake! In the meantime, we'll make do with blog shout-outs.

(And I will continue to look forward to the day when all my nieces and nephews hit the 2 year mark so that I can start referring to them in years instead of months. The month-age thing just confuses me.)