Seed Giveaway!

Hi everyone! So my birthday is coming up in a week! Only July 27, I will be 26 years old! And to celebrate, I would like to give away some free seeds. I have many many seeds, some flower seeds and many vegetable seeds, some from my garden and others from various stores and WOULD LOVE to share them with 5 U.S. readers. This is going to be a simple giveaway. Simple comment on my blog and tweet or facebook a link to this page. You can tweet/fb this page as many times as you want, but for each day that you tweet or facebook the link, you can comment an additional time. Shortly after my 26th birthday I will be picking 5 readers through random.org and will mail out at least 3 different types of seeds for each reader. I will also give away a seed package to the reader who tweets or shares a link on facebook the most. So there will be a total of 6 United States READERS!

Hope ya'll have fun! I know I will!

Happy Gardening everyone!

Easy Mango Lassi (Mango Smoothie)

I'm pretty blessed when it comes to free fruit. Just a couple of days ago, my best friend brought me a box of mangoes. The box had about 10-12 ripe mangoes, some of which were almost overly ripe. I had a few of the mangoes for dessert the past couple of days but I was sure that I wouldn't be able to finish it all so today, I made Mango Lassi to cool everyone down. I also sliced some of the mangoes and froze them. Prior to today, I hadn't had Lassi (yogurt drink) before and wasn't sure if I would like it, but decided to give it a shot anyway. Its a great way to get your daily dairy and fruit intake. Here is the recipe I used. I did freeze some mango slices the last time I had them in abundance so I used some frozen mangoes in place of ice.

Ingredients:

2 whole mangoes, peeled and sliced
2 mango sliced and frozen
1 container low fat vanilla yogurt (6oz)
1/2 cup plain yogurt 
2 cups milk
*1 cup crushed ice
*if your mangoes aren't sweet, then you can add some sugar or honey* (mine were plenty sweet)

Directions (super simple)

Add all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. This makes 4-5 servings. I actually didn't add the ice until the lassi was totally blended. I added the lassi over ice to keep it cool and the ice melted, it become more liquid and it was super easy to slurp it up! I will be making fruit lassi a lot more now! Delicious and healthy drink. Very refreshing for a hot day.

Tomatoes!

My tomatoes are all doing really well! Even my volunteer husky is doing really good. It is looking quite strong and the stalk is thick. The Early Girls are producing quite well already and the others aren't far behind. The Roma has one beautiful tomato on it and many flowers. I do have a few plants in the front yard that I haven't included in this.

Pepper Update

All of my peppers are doing really well. It is amazing to see the peppers that you start from seed bear fruit. Last year all my peppers were starters, but this year, I was determined to start them all from seeds. Although I did have a booboo and ended up loosing all the labels for the seeds, but just knowing that they were some sort of hot pepper was enough. All except of type of pepper did well and producing now. The only one that didn't make it was the Black Ornamental Pepper (sadly) but I will just have to wait until next year for those. I plan on overwintering all my peppers that are in containers so next year I have a head start with them. So here are a few pictures of my pepper plants.

The Bhut Jolokia doesn't look like a its a Bhut Jolokia. :(

All the Peppers are looking luscious and green. 

The Fish fertilizer must be working. Everything is looking good!

Not sure what type of pepper this is but it looks HOT

I think these the small cherry like peppers but they are hot!

I think this one is Cherry Pepper.

Lots of flowers in the middle. A few peppers hidden too.

No peppers on this one yet, but it is growing quite tall! :)

Bell Peppers! Overwintered plant from 2010

Another one from last year. At 5 peppers on each plant!

The stalks on these are quite thick. I am glad they overwintered on their own!

Bee Hive

While I was outside today taking beautiful pictures of my wonderful garden, I noticed that I had quite a lot of bees in the backyard. I do have veggies and fruits trees back there but was shocked to see that the bees were just flying around as if they live there. Well, after some walking around the backyard, I noticed that they do. There is a small bee hive in my backyard right on the covered shed we have. It is quite small but there are a lot of bees on and around it. My mom suggested we get rid of it, but since they aren't in the way of anything and actually help pollinate my vegetables, I am going to leave them alone. What would you do though? Would you get rid of the beehive or just leave it?

 

Pretty small and high up... Will they make the hive bigger eventually? Or will they leave it at this size? If you have any similiar stories or suggestions, please comment. First time dealing with bees. :)