Cleaning Up the Garden: Cleaning up the House

The gardening season is coming to and end. I still have tomatoes, kales and radishes. However, it is time to pick the last of my crops and begin cleaning up the garden. Cleaning the garden does several things. It removes debris that can hold insects and disease and it gives you a start on next years plantings. A clean slate or bed so to speak. There are other things you can do to clean up your home and that includes looking at the summer's potential water damage to the house. Flood damage or leaking walls? There are many services available to help with water damage and flooding like fixing water damage austin.

Turning the ground now will often turn over insect eggs and disease and bury them, to naturally kill them. If your garden is 10 years old like mine, you might find the trees have blocked out hours of sun. Or you might want more sunlight and less trees.  Time changes your garden and it changes your house. Maintaining your house is important. Did you track in dirt and mud over the summer? Floor cleaning tips austin can offer you some ideas to clean up your floors or services available to help remove a growing season's worth of dirt off your ceramic floors.

 The garden brings great rewards to the home but it does require working in dirt. Carpets can become a victim of feet from the garden, especially in the entry ways. There are many services and products available to help clean up your home. You don't always need a service but you might want to use green products. A company based in Austin may have some products you want green carpet cleaning products austin.

Riding Around

Guest post written by Darren Hill

One of my favorite things to do on Sunday afternoons is just to ride around in my car and see all the sites. Now we have a convertible and it's getting almost too cold to get to ride around in it and enjoy it so I'm really taking as much advantage of it right now as I can.

The past couple of weekends I've been driving it around a bunch of mountain roads and looking at all the leaves and the trees that are changing. I also like to stop and take pictures of all the breathtaking views at the overlooks on teh side of the mountain roads. Some of them just make for such great pictures that I decided to enter them in a contest for one of our local TV news channels.

I had found http://www.cleartvbundle.com/ not that long ago and decided to switch over our internet service to it. So I used that to email a bunch of my different high-resolution pictures to the station.


I haven't seen my picture on there yet, but I think that I have a good chance of it ending up on there.

Designed to Sell - Favorite Real Estate Themed Television Show

Post contributed by Noah Schmidt

Out of all the home improvement shows on HGTV, my favorite is by far "Designed to Sell." Rather than give home improvement efforts unlimited funds and wherewithal to create the custom home of their dreams, Designed to Sell limits the cash flow to $2,000, forcing designers to be creative and think outside of the box in order to maximize the look of a ramshackle home.


See, any blind fool can take a pot of cash and buy large marble columns and fountains covered in gold leaf. Real design can be done on the cheap, with nothing more than trinkets found in a convenient store. Often times it is this freedom of choice that liberates the designer's clogged mind. Suddenly real estate is like an art canvas, and the designer has accessed the secret power of the avant garde which allows them to turn ordinary trash and garbage items into million dollar house decorations.


This is the great part about Designed to Sell. I feel their creative energies transferring to me like some kind of magic transfer. I suddenly have tons of ideas to use in my own home design, which I employ every week much to the dismay of my family. They say that I am borderline schizophrenic, but really I just love how home design can speak to the impermanence of life. Watch Designed to Sell on HGTV on satellite TV from www.tvbydirect.com/directv-deal/TEXAS-TX-direct-tv.html.

Construction Worker On Halloween

Guest post written by Peggy Garrison

Our son is always wanting to help my husband with all of his construction work and thinks that it's so cool that he builds things at work. My husband does some little woodworking projects at home and he helps him out with some of those, or at least my husband lets him think that he does. So for Halloween this year my son wants to be a construction worker.

We actually already have a lot of the things around our house already for him to wear but there are a few pieces that he will definitely need. So I've been looking on my clear wireless internet for those pieces, like a construction worker hat and vest.

It wasn't as hard as I thought to find a cheap plastic construction worker hat. I also found an orange vest like the kind that people wear so that people will see them working for far away. Then I'm just going to dirty up a pair of old jeans and a white tshirt and let him wear that with one of my husbandÕs old tool belts.

Asparagus in Fall

Every wonder what asparagus looks like 5 months after its was edible? Asparagus is a perennial plant. We eat the shoots in the beginning of the season. If you let some shoots mature, the plant grows larger and stronger and you reap the rewards the following year. This is what asparagus grows into. Notice the red seeds.

Behind the asparagus are my Pablano peppers. Still kicking October 6th.

Galapagos Tomatoes: Too Many to Eat

Well, too many to eat is a good thing. The rest are hanging to become seed. I liked the picture. It is a good close to the summer.

And The Before

October Garden: Peppers and Eggplant Survive!

The pepper plants are hanging in there. And so are the two varieties of Eggplant I planted. In the picture below is my tabasco plant. I will pick them all and make dried peppers. The eggplants I will eat over the next week.

I am excited to have vegetables into October. I didn't do much to the eggplants but kept them dusted. Flea beetles will devastate them in my garden.

October Green Pole Beans!

Now I did get lucky and this grew from a seed that survived from last year. It grew up the black cherry tomato plant and stake. I left it there to do as it wished. It started coming up in early August.

The Black Cherry tomato plant produced very well but burned out in August. If you look closely it is producing fruit again. Around September 1st new green shoots started coming out. I figured I'd let it grow as the beans grew. 

The October Garden: What's Producing... Tomatoes

Well, as I said, I tire out toward the end of the season. But I did manage to get in my third wave of tomatoes, radishes, and kales. I was also lucky enough to have a string bean grow from some lost seed.

Here are some of my tomatoes. Waves 1, 2 and 3. I don't think wave 3 will make it. I will try and build and wire cage hot-house.

This is one of my 1st wave of tomatoes, planted back in May. It is loaded with large healthy green tomatoes. It did well. I will have fried green tomatoes when frost time hits. The variety is Whopper. I will save the seeds and grow these next year.

This is one of my 2nd wave of tomatoes. I planted it in Julyish. It is the standard cherry Super Sweet 100's. It started producing in early September. I will be using this as my standard 2nd wave.

These are my 3rd wave of tomatoes in the cages. In order front to back are Silvery Fir, Glacier and Sub Artic Max. I don't think they will mature. Some have set fruit. I plant to get these in the ground next year on April 1st. I'll put them in a hot-house cage.