....starring John Hurliman!

A few weeks ago, my beloved scowled, "Why don't you ever write about my stuff?"  It seems that in venturing from child-based blogs to a few blogs about myself, the hubs felt left out.  Sad Trombone.  As any loving wife would, I quipped back, "You were the rhetoric major, write for yourself!"  So without further ado.... 

 

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Recently, Shannon suggested that I do a “guest blog” for the Hurlifam page.  Somehow this has seemed more important than it probably is because I oddly equate it to something like being a guest star on a hit, prime time TV show.  As if, at any moment, I might hear clapping as I walk into a room or see “… and John Hurliman” close the credits of a sitcom.

My segue is to say that often, as a husband (and frankly, a father), I don’t so much make choices in life as much as I’m allowed certain privileges.  Case in point… our house is approximately 1900 square feet and lies on a plot of land about a third of an acre.  Yet somehow I really only have control of a single 20’ x 30’ patch of land in the very northeast corner of our backyard that’s been apportioned to me.  It is a source of great pride, work and frustration.  No, it’s not where I keep my kids… it’s where I keep my garden and bird sanctuary (said with the manliest of scowls on my face).

Welcome to the pumpkin jungle.

My mom had to tell me this was a goldfinch.  Apparently interest and intelligence are mutually exclusive.

Yes, I’ve turned growing vegetables and feeding birds into a legitimate 35-year-old’s hobby as opposed to something that my 90-year-old grandfather used to do to bide his time between meals.  Even as I sit typing right now I wonder how many weeds I could be pulling, if my eggplants need a little water, or if there is some colorful finch on the feeder.

I don't want to make my eggplants mad.  They look like they could hurt me.

This is probably the 4^th year for the Hurliman garden, which once started out (with prompting from my mother-in-law) with one tomato plant, one zucchini plant and one jalapeño plant.  Now I’m to the point where I’m semi-successfully starting seeds indoors early so that I can transplant garden-ready plants come May.  In fact, unlike last year, I even started them a couple months early instead of a couple weeks early, and spent a few weeks “hardening” the sizeable plants instead of sticking model railroad sized vegetables directly into the garden on a 40 degree night.  Grunt, me man… me learn!

Fortunately there are no child labor laws in Colorado.

Now I have a garden that’s filled with a combination of hardy vegetables, vegetables that don’t grow well in Colorado but I’m too stubborn to stop trying, and gimmicky hybrids that attract me like a 3-year-old to candy.  Chocolate peppers anyone?  How about purple carrots?

But perhaps what I should write about today is the vegetable category that ALL my plants fall in: the “vegetables-that-don’t-thrive-having-been-pelted-by-hail,- smothered-by-a-fallen-Aspen-tree,-and-wilted-by-100-degree-weather” category.

At first it was the fairy tale garden I’d always wanted – large leaves, blooming flowers, flourishing plants, etc.

Big bonus for anyone who knows what this is :)

Humulus lupulus or "the wolf of the earth." Yes, these are my beer hops!

Tanner and Ellery are big fans of the apple tree.  Hopefully it's not related to their interest in Snow White.

Then it was like a horror movie.  A vegetable snuff film.

Creamed corn anyone?

Squashed squash.

And then it got worse.  A cheap, B-movie, drive-in monster flick.  Attack of the Aspen!

Nothing officially touched down here, but I sure feel sorry for Kansas.

Do you see the pile of brown leaves to the left of the fallen tree?  That's what's left of the first tree that feel in the garden this year.  We re-rooted the above tree quickly and it feel down again the next day (in the opposite direction).  Currently it is down for the THIRD time and very close to being turned into kindling.

I won’t go into detail about our convection-oven backyard, but suffice it to say that our thermometer was at three digits and plants with holey leaves prefer a less stressful environment in which to recover.

However, we should still conclude with our fairly tale ending.  We just picked and grilled our first zucchini the other day, have witnessed small pumpkins growing on the vines snaking around the garden fence, and even dug up an onion that was ALMOST store-sized!

So despite mother nature’s dark humor, I'm still grateful for my mother-in-law getting me started years ago, my kids not picking vegetables too early, my wife for putting up with my constant watering, fertilizing, tinkering, etc…

…and John Hurliman <applause>.