1st harvest of the year

this year has been a struggle with the garden. the first time i planted most of my seeds they either didn't work or after they sprouted a creature pulled them up. i have planted peas three times, corn/radishes/carrots twice. the flowers that i tried to plant didn't come up at all. if they did come up then they looked just like the million elm tree sprouts and i might have pulled them thinking it was a weed. the plants that i bought are doing well. most of the leeks had been cut down by a bird, but they have all grown back. i am trying peanuts this year as well, i hope it works.

with all the rain and cool weather the lettuce has gone crazy. i put in a generic head lettuce and romaine this year. it will be interesting to see how this all plays out since i have a total of 15 lettuce plants. anybody want some? after doing some weeding yesterday i noticed that the radishes needed to have some dirt pushed up so that the roots aren't exposed. as i was doing this i saw that i had a really good sized radish ready to pick!! i have tried radishes before, but never really gotten anything to write home about. in the past they have been small and rather woody tasting. maybe the cool weather helped, or maybe it was the fact that it has rained for 15 days this month. whatever the reason i am hoping that the rest of the veggies look as nice as my first radish of the year.

ice waiting

two weekends ago i had the opportunity to go ice fishing with "the guys". there was originally going to be six of us going, but it got trimmed down to three. we had a great time. there were no clocks, no alarms to wake us, and best of all no kids to demand attention. (i must thank gianna, my wife, for this mini vay-cay.) the fishing was awful, and the hike across the lake was grueling, but it didn't really matter too much. the weather was perfect and it was really nice to get out. we really lucked out with being able to drive down to the lake. gianna's uncle had used his bobcat to plow the drive down to the lake. if he had not done that, who knows if we would have gone fishing for very long. a 1/2 mile hike in two feet of snow was out of the question. but the icing on the cake was being able to land a very nice northern. granted it really was the only fish of size that we caught, but who cares.