Category Archives: gardening

Our little piece of quiet

I’d say our back deck is finally complete – we have a table and chairs that is big enough for two and still leaves ample room for my experimental container garden, our grill, and sunning space for the cats.

Granted, it’s been so hot the past few days we haven’t really used it yet. Let’s hope for good weekend weather so we can actually break it in! I’m looking forward to drinking my morning coffee out there this weekend while watching the corn field.

Things I’ve learned about container gardening: I need bigger containers!  I am thrilled at the first sighting of peas, though, and our carrots are getting bigger by the day it seems, as well as the tomatoes and onions.

Now, I just have to wait patiently for the jalapenos and straweberries. We had one berry, but nothing since, though the strawberry plants are growing like crazy. We also discovered that if you let brocolli flower it’s really quite pretty, which was a nice surprise and lessened the blow that we missed harvesting time.

I also didn’t realize that spinach would flower… I thought it would be a bit more like lettuce, so for next year I’m going to do more research and actually learn a bit more about everything we’re growing. It’s been a lot of fun eating our own lettuce, though, and all of my flowers are really taking off, so I’d say our garden so far has been a success and next year it shall be even more glorious!

Return of the Road Warriors

Returning from vacation is always so bittersweet. It’s good to sleep in our own bed and the affection we’ve received from the cats shows we were greatly missed, plus our deck garden has greatly perked up while we were away! The peas are beginning to really take off (or are those actually morning glories… guess I forgot which, so it’ll be a surprise!), we have broccoli starting, the first little strawberry is forming, the tomato plant is blossoming, the pepper plants smell like jalepenos, and as you can see the the lettuce has gone nuts.

     

It’s still very hard to jump back into reality, though. Granted, at least it’s summertime so we have plenty of good weather to enjoy, but what now? We spent months and months planning this trip and it was so nice to have something to look forward to. It looks like we’ll just have to start planning another adventure, and we have a few in mind. Time will tell, and in the meantime, we have plenty of time left this summer to go on drives, camping, and whatever else we decide to pass the time.

In the meantime, we’ve started recapping our trip on our Random Trippers blog.

Springtime!

Hooray for warmer weather and gardening! I got as early of a start as I could in the garage, a weekend or two ago.  The wind was just too cold for me to sit in, and try to put plants and seeds in pots.

Once it started warming up, though, it was much easier to continue, and now we’ve got quite a little garden started with a ton of lettuce that I’ll need to thin out – those and the Morning Glories are the only seeds to have sprouted so far – We’re waiting on carrots and spinach and… something else. :p

Otherwise we have a tomato plant, some peppers, broccoli, strawberries, and some grass for the cats to munch on when they’re outside with us. I’m so excited for everything to start really growing, and only hope they make it through any upcoming storms.  We’re supposed to get a big one tomorrow night, so I’ll be moving them against the house under the overhang… hopefully that will be enough.

Yard Work

Finally I am posting pictures of the yard work I did a few weeks ago. :p It’s so easy to go outside and take a few pictures, and yet, it’s even more easy to procrastinate and not do so. So, I give you… the yard.

These first pictures I replaced everything in these two bottom tiers (including the soil) they were all hostas, and those are boring, so eventually these will all be blooming and gorgeous.

These are my potted plants
Look! Sunflowers! I need to transplant these babies to give them more room.
These are the hostas I moved from the tiers to the other side of the garage with some other plants that I don’t remember what they are…
This was probably the biggest undertaking and is still a work in progress. I wanted to turn this hill of dirt into something a little more attractive, so I built the walls and planted some hostas and some other various groundcovers that in time will get much larger and have pretty little purple flowers. 🙂

Hello Ziggy!