Garden Update & French/American Baby Shower!

Here are some new garden photos, up for your viewing pleasure. We've been collecting tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, cabbage, egg plant, and now, pumpkins like crazy! I've been trying my hand at some more cooking...still having a hard time with cabbage, just can't get my psych up on that veggie. But I'm learning more and more about cooking...which is good! (Sidenote: the first photo is a trip to deliver tomatoes to the neighbor, one of the rare shots of reclusive Camerony Balony!)

Next are some photos of a wonderful baby shower some friends in France threw for Cam and I. It's not a normal French tradition, so they went out of their way to research about it and prepare it just for us. It was a really special day, they spoiled us for sure. :)

Early 3rd Trimester

Here are some recently taken 3rd trimester photos. It's hard to know how to pose for these kind of photos, what often happens is I find myself awkwardly standing in front of the camera, asking Cam, "What should I do?" "I feel weird posing."  And he says, "I don't know, ya, do that." So I've included some other models in these pictures to take the pressure off of myself. The models include Kindle (our little French black kitty) and Lion (big U.S. kitty), this way they can share in the 3rd trimester photo shoot as well. By the way, the cats are handling pregnancy pretty well. Although they do have a fascination with climbing up on my belly that I tend to get rather frustrated with. We have heavy cats, so I've made a "no belly rule" they sometimes decide to follow. Most of the time it goes like this: Lion or Che jump on what's rest of my lap, then they try to sneak up on my belly, I say no and push them down...30 seconds later they try again. Repeating this pattern until I get so frustrated Cam has to come over and take them off my lap (while laughing of course, b/c I'm not able to get them off myself due to lack of ab muscles and sitting up power...I'm sure I look like a turtle lying on her back just getting more and more pissed off). 

Copulating Snails at our own Kitchen Door!!!

So recently I've been doing some research on snails and slugs. Why, you ask? Well, because they are super friggin' interesting, that's why! I've been finding these green jelly sacks all over the flower garden and was thinking maybe it was a snail egg sack. I'm still not sure on that one b/c I haven't been able to find any info on the green sacks online, but in the meantime I've learned a bit about snails copulation techniques (some people might call it snail sex...and yes, it's a process that happens at a snail's pace for sure.) It turns out that snails and slugs are hermapherdites. They just need to mate with another snail in order to fertalize eachother's eggs with the other's stuff (I'm not exactly sure if you still call it sperm when they are snails...I'm not a scientist, just a snail nerd). So these long white things come out of the sides of their heads and insert into the other snail's head. I came upon these snails when they were alreaady connected, but even still the process lasted over an hour...no quickies for snails! Here are some more pictures of them too. Patricia (a friend of ours) told us about a snail farm that's not too far from us...I had no idea! So now my new mission is to visit this farm and learn all I can about snails. Why? Because snails are cool!

Overgrown Jungle

With all the rain we've been having lately, the garden has been left to it's own devices somewhat. This is what happens when you don't check on your garden everyday....

Garden July 2011

This year our garden has grown (both vegetation-wise and size-wise). Back in February Cam and our farmer neighbor (Christian) got motivated to enlarge our garden. Now, when I say "enlarge", I mean enlarge Cam-style. This means there was no moderation in the enlargement process. We went from having a big garden to having an enormous garden! After that Cam went ahead and planted about 200 potato plants right away. Following the potatoes were a TON of onions (red, white, yellow), shallots, garlic. Little by little as the months wore on, the plants we sowed were transfered from our living room to the garden.

Included here are some recent photos of our garden. As a sidenote, the weather here has been rainy and cool for the past month or so...a perfect environment for weeds to prosper, which they have! As fast as we can pick them, they grow. We tried an experiment with the onions, just let the weeds take over...maybe their growing power would transfer to the onions through osmosis or something. Well, the result of the plan was: weeds don't help your garden after all. As a consequence of our anti-weeding spell, Cam and I basically spent an entire 3 days hand-weeding very sharp and thorny weeds from the onions. Gardening gloves are no match for the ferocious weeds at Le Taux!

Here's a pic of some of our "leftover" tomato plants on the left and our eggplants on the right. To the far left is the green house shack we are currently building for the pepper plants, more to see on this later.
This is an artichoke that's way past ready to eat. Quite beautiful...
Pumpkin plants growing along nicely.Our cheasnut pumpkin patch, which I'm super psyched about. Can't wait to see what it tastes like!Ruby, the delicious rhubarb. Bettey and Diane contributed this little beauty to the garden this Spring!
Some cabbage and green beans (keep ignoring the weeds, they are only a figment of your imagination...)

Due to the cool temps, the tomato plants have been taking a really long time to ripen. We have a bunch of green tomatoes, but just a few that have changed so far.

The pepper greenhouse that's still being built. Tomato plants on the left and right of the pepper house.

A red pepper in the pepper house!

Hmmm, can you guess what this is? It's a medly of beans, cabbage, flowers, weeds, seeding spinach and lettuce. Somehow we have random flowers that have popped up all over the garden. It's kind of pretty.

Some of our beets, got lots of those too...


This is where I sit when my baby belly gets to heavy for me to continue gardening. I take a break and look out over Cam working in the garden. I'm not the best gardener...but I'm a great encourager! This bench and table were made possible through the efforts of Cam and Ben-jammin'. Once a dead tree threatening to fall on those below, now a pleasant garden attraction inviting butts from above.



Some basil in the little green house. We have lots of basil all over the garden also.

With the shallots and onions we started braiding them...

But then we realized we have enough onions to feed an army, so we had to get more creative. So we spent an entire afternoon creating a net to hang the onions so they could dry. Now I know how to build a net if I'm ever lost in the wild with rope and I need to make a net (a useful skill I'm told...) These are the onions in the net in the woodshed by the house.

A close up of the onions in the beautiful net...

Lion enjoying gardening time. Our cats have never been so happy, this is cat paradise!

Stam & Ceph's Newest Adventure

So, looking at our last blog entry I see it has been almost an ENTIRE YEAR since we wrote! Somehow time has passed quickly in the slow moving region of Ariège. A lot has happened in our lives since this time last year, so here we go...

I (Steph) am still working in the towns of Muret and St. Gaudens (France), teaching adults English. It's an enjoyable profession. I have had the opportunity to meet many quality people that are excited about learning, which is a refreshing break from teaching Public Speaking where I had to convince my students that learning was important! ;) I recently went to Helsinki, Finland for a work conference/project with the European Union. It was an incredible opportunity to be a part of the progressive development of intercultural communication within the EU. The project consisted of creating a resource website in which teachers and trainers could find teaching tools to further intercultural communication training in the classroom. Exactly my kind of project. :)

Cam's work life has changed quite a bit since last year. He is now an official computer programmer! He's been super busy working away on several projects, and amazing me with his incredible knack for learning anything he sets his mind to! He's having a ball, and it's really been fun to see his progression in his new career path.

Here's a few pics of Helsinki...

The veggie garden is back, bigger than ever, for the summer! Cam decided to enlarge are already very large garden to accomodate for...us two. Whatever the reasoning, we have a VERY big veggie garden this summer. We planted approximately 200 potato plants, a plethora of tomatoes, beets, carrots, spinach, onions, garlic, shallots, cabbage, peppers, pumpkins, cucumbers, artichokes, rhubarb (thanks to Bettye and Diane), rasberries, strawberries, blueberries, zucchini and a couple types of lettuce. Whew! We should be set for a summer filled of weeding and eating delights!

Garden pics:


As you can probably tell from this last photo...my physique has changed quite a bit since last year too. Hmmm, what's the news...

We're having a baby! Cam and I are expecting a little baby (girl) around October 2nd. Preparing for parenthood has been an adventure in and of itself, we can only imagine what the real deal will be like. We are super excited about this new adventure, it makes moving to France seem like nothing. :) So far a challenge has been figuring out how to work our new (used) super stroller that transforms into 3 different things. Talk about confusing. But we've also been trying to enjoy the down time we have by climbing, traveling just a bit, and playing with our super funny kitties. They're going to be in for a big shock when the little one joins the family! :)

More Pregger Photos:
To finish off this blog post, I'm posting a picture of our last construction project. After having finally finished the hardwood floors in the house (great job Camicito), our next project was building a systems board (wooden climbing wall) in the garage. It's a very nice addition to the garage that Cam is super psyched on. I can't use it during pregnancy, but I'm all about it when the little one arrives. She'll have something to train on too! :)