The difference one day makes

We spent the last couple days prepping for an unexpected change to the front yard.  At the spur of the moment, Adam decided yo take a bobcat to the front yard so that I could have the garden I wanted instead of in the awkward place I was trying to put it in.  

That morning, before going to work, this was the view from the inside stair case window.  

When I got home from work, this is what I found.  I really didn't know what to think.  I was kind of in shock.  It was only day 1 of 2 though with the bobcat and  I couldn't see how it would come together.

This was the yard from the front porch.  Wow, not pretty.

 But that's not all.  The driveway needed to be expanded as well since we were sorely lacking parking space.

Adam's been hard at work improving the yard and building raised garden beds.  I have three 7' x 14' beds so far and they are all planted...but that's another post.  I wish I had more time but it's already too late...just wanted to finally show one of our projects.

Green smoothies and my weekend

This weekend seemed busier than it was, I'm sure. Adam had his birthday party on Saturday. So I spent Friday evening vacuuming and doing general clean up. Mostly, I didn't do much since I was distracted by watching America's Funniest Home Videos.

Adam came home from the PO box with a package for me from a friend in France. A Christmas card (we don't check the PO box very often) and a bag of organic, French spices. There was a recipe on the box to use them in but since I don't read French, I don't know what it is yet. She said she'd translate it for me. So a nice surprise to start the weekend. :o)


The world was still wet on Saturday morning. I love the look of wet wood.


To start off my weekend right, I had a green smoothie for breakfast. It's a great way to get your greens in. Plus it was so good! This one was lots of kale (my first kale smoothie in my new blender...worked much better than my last blender), peaches, grapes, strawberries, mango, pineapple and orange juice. It made two large glasses full. I drank every last drop.

I first started drinking these when I was doing the raw diet. I can't reccomend these enough. They pack vitamins, minerals, fiber and yummy goodness.

After I finished cleaning, I went for a bike ride. Get this, it's in the middle of January and I was wearing shorts and a short sleeved jersey! It was around 68 degrees!! I am loving the warm winter. But I had to pass the garden on my way out the driveway and found all these water bubbles. I really liked the looks of them.


Action shot.


Back in the subdivision at the end of the ride, the sun was shining down a side road. I had to turn around to get a shot of it...I couldn't go by without one.

To prepare for guests, the dogs had to be loacked out. They weren't too happy about it. I wasn't thrilled with it either since the ground was still wet, but the deck was fairly dry and it was plenty warm out so they were fine. But they still tried to convince me they would be happier inside.

Even my nephews came out. I didn't get any pictures of them on the phone camera (I used it to take all the pics on this post, except the top one) so I don't have access to them right now. I watched Samuel a while and also played Mario Kart with Isaac. That's his favorite part of coming to our house. He LOVES Mario Kart and we are the only people he knows who has it.

After they left, the dogs got to come back in and hang out while the rest of Adam and his friends and I played games. We had pizza and cake.

We played a game called Iron Dragon. It was fun but long. I think we played for 4 hours. Adam was on the verge of winning. He deilvered a commodity to me so I payed him just enough to make him win so we could quit. See him without his glasses?

Bear was creating trouble. He kept laying under the table and people would accidentally graze him and he'd let out a growl. He finally settled in behind me, out of the way.

The dogs said it was a long, tiring day.

Yard crashers

While I was on vacation, Adam did a tow for friends of ours, didn't charge them and lent them my car so he could get to work before he had a chance to work on his car. He is a horticulturist at a local college. They just had a plant sale that the students had planted. As a thank you, they brought enough plants for a 20 square foot area and planted them for us...the brought fertilizer, amendment and mulch. We got our very own mini yard crashers. The area they worked on has never looked so good...and the pansies and cabbage will continue to grow all winter providing us with color. So cool! I like that kind of thank you. I tried to help but she kept telling me to just let them do the work. They brought yellow pansies, red pansies, ornamental cabbage and snapdragons.

They brought all four of their kids and they made fast work of it.

They even watered everything and swept up.

We have great friends. And we are still planning on doing an overnight backpacking trip next month. Hopefully it's not too cold.

shriveled

My poor garden did not do so well. We just planted too late and all the plants have shriveled. The carrots still seem to be doing fine. I picked the smallest one to see how it was doing. It was a pathetic little thing but still growing. I think they still have a couple months to grow. See the little orange stick below, connected to the green, lacey leaves? Yeah, that's my carrot. It tasted really good! Also, the greeb nean plants are mostly still hanging in there. All the squash cines have shriveled and disappeared so I took the two butternut squash and 1 acorn squash that hadn't yet rotted. There are 4 tiny watermelon. I took them because their vines had compltely dried out as well. I'm going to give them a try. I have nothing to lose. We got three little sugar snap peas...YUM! We'll definitely have to plant those next year. And the pile of greens is actually a weed called lamb's quarter's. I let them grow in the garden once I identified them. They're edible and a good replacement for spinach. We never even got a single tomato. Aside from the carrots and some of the green beans, everything else is done...shriveled. A sad end to my first garden but I will prevail and plant again. I am planning what/when to plant my fall garden now. I hope to have it in the ground before I go out to visit.

The black thing is a camra lens cover for size reference.

Bike ride to the garden

I am trying to fit everything into my schedule. It's tough. If I drive to the garden, it's a 40 or so minute round trip. If I bike there, it's a 1 hour 45 minute or so round trip. That doesn't count the time spent weeding or watering. I do drive there sometimes but sometimes, I just have to hop on my bike...to save on gas money as well as to fit in some much needed exercise time. So I do spend an extra hour commuting when I take my bike but it's time well spent to me.

When I take my bike, I put my rear panniers on to carry some clothes to protect me from the thick misquitos, a pair of shoes and sometimes a container if I think I may have some produce to bring home.



The ride to the garden is mostly more rural roads...at least compared to the roads around my house. The closer I get to the garden, the less traffic there is, except for one road I have to take for a few minutes. Then it's back to rural roads.







We had our first picking of green beans and got enough for a very hearty amount for each of us. There are a few more beans on the vine now...but they're still growing. We finally have pea blossoms and the bush beans look like they might produce something soon.


And of course the squash are trying to produce something as well.


On the ride back, I take a different route. This route has 4-5 fig trees lining the road at one point. Each time I ride past them, I stop and grab a handful to snack on for the next couple of days.


Here's the green beans after I got home and washed them. There's some kind of caterpillar eating holes in them so I have to do research to find out how to get rid of them.


Dinner that night was homegrown green beans, foraged figs, homemade sauerkraut, homemade wheat bread with honey and butter and a small bowl of lentil slaw (which is sprouted lentils, shaved carrots & diced tomatoes, with a apple cider vinigarette).

It's growing!

We finally have veggies growing! It's very exciting for me. Adam discovered the green beans. I hadn't noticed any even though I weeded them on Saturday. He only picked 4 of them and brought them home.

We ate one each right away. Yummy! Aren't they beautiful! ;o)


Aside from the green beans, we also have:

a few spaghetti squash

a few butternut squash

several watermelon

and lots of bush bean blooms, carrots, an acorn squash and the tomatoes got their first bloom. The peas are growing but I don't think they'll give us anything this year.


I doubt it willbe a bumper crop year but since I wasn't going to have a garden this year and we got it planted so late, I am grateful for anything I get from it, and for the experience.

A visit cut short

Adam told me he was going to be out for a while on a tow so I took the opportunity to go visit a couple people I had been meaning to visit. One is a neighbor that wasn't doing too well the last time I saw her and the other was Grandma Sutton. I took them some banana chocolate chip bread. The one neighbor wasn't home so I left the bread with her husband and Grandma Sutton wasn't feeling very well and wasn't really feeling up to visiting so I didn't stay long. Since I had more time than I anticipated after my visits, I decided to take some pictures before I went and did some grocery shopping.

Her garden is producing all kinds of yummy looking stuff.

And her lowers are amazing!

Her house is on the back side of the stables and in front of her garden is the pasture the arena they use for the horses. This is the view from her porch.

Walking around the other side of the stables, there is the original office building. It looks like it hasn't been used in years but the flowers were gorgeous there...I think it must be Grandma Sutton's doing.

I had never been inside the stables before. The stable probably has about 30-40 stalls but it is dying and only has about 5 horses being boarded there now. This beauty was scared by me.

At one point, this stables was bustling with activity. I remember when I first moved down here, we always had people riding their horses through the neighborhood since the stables is right outside the entrance. The ribbons, silver plates and flowers were from the 80's, as far as I could read, but even some of them were faded into white.

Grandma Sutton sent me away with 4 more cucumbers. Another neighbor gave me some cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes and peaches from her garden on Sunday. We truly are blessed with sharing friends.

To celebrate my day in the "country", I made a country dinner. Country fried pork, mashed potatoes, country gravy and some of our fresh produce. Good dinner...and one of Adam's favorites.

garden progress

Last night, we went to the garden again to do another few rows of weeding. By the time we finish with the weeding, it will be time to start again. Lots of work. I have about 50 misquito bites on my arms from gardening and building the dog barn. I am getting sick of misquitos but I have to put up with it...there's no choice. Maybe I'll get smart enough to remember my long sleeved shirt next time.

We actually have blooms on some of the beans and the canteloupe plants. So exciting!

Here's the part we have to come back and weed.


This is the section we weeded last night.


This is the section we weeded last Thursday. I was happy to see that the weeds haven't completly taken over already.

It's like a real garden and I can't tell you how cool that is to me!!

peas get to climb

Saturday will be a "dog condo" building party (we'll be building some kind of shelter for the dogs to get in out of the rain when we leave them out and a storm pops up before we can get home...there will be at least two different structures) at our house so I told Adam I would be going over to the garden to weed last night instead. He told me he'd come with me. We stopped at Ace to buy some poles and twine to string up some lines for the peas to climb. I throught the green beans would need it to but they don't have any tendrils so we didn't put any up for them...seems weird to me.

While Adam and James were pounding the poles into the ground and tieing up the twine, I got busy with the "claw" a weeding implement. It is circular with twisted blades. You punch it in to the ground and twist it. It loosens the dirt and makes it much easier to pull the weeds out since the roots are already loosened.

At one point, Adam was walking around holding his hand funny. He hit his finger with the mallet while putting a pole in. A couple minutes later, he was back to work...but James was now doing the pounding while Adam was the one handing him the poles. When they were done pounding, James started tying off the twine and propping the peas up on the lowest tier. Adam took the claw from me and I got to work pulling the weeds while he clawed the dirt.

The misquitos were everywhere! I was down there with them and they were loving it! A picture of an elephant covering itself in dirt came to mind...from a nature show I watched once. They do that to keep the bugs at bay. So I took my gloves off and started rubbing dirt all over my arms. It worked pretty well too.

Adam only did a certain amount of rows since we were running out of time before the storm was moving in. He finished clawing and took some pictures before we completely lost our light.



The garden in the foreground is the smaller of the two. That one got completely weeded and it looks great! The garden I'm kneeling in is about twice the size of the front one and the furrows are run different directions from each other. You can see all the grass and weeds popping up between the furrows. We'll have to go back on Moday after work to finish up.




Because Adam was so calm and continued working, I had no idea that he had really hurt himself with the mallet. This is what he did. OUCH!! He kept his hand out of the dirt so it didn't get dirty. When we got home, he soaked it in peroxide and cleaned it up. It still hurts my stomach thinking about it. I hope he heals up fast, poor guy!