Two-Fer Tuesday

Our first zucchini of the season! I didn't even think that any zucchini had started growing, guess I was wrong...

German Queen

Can you guess what at German Queen is?


It's not a Queen that lives in Germany


or


A German drag queen


it's a

Tomato!

That's right, it's a type of tomato plant! I also bought a Celebrity tomato plant, which brings us up to 8 tomato plants. I planted the German Queen and Celebrity about a month after I planted the other plants in the hopes of having a later season tomato crop. We shall see how my experiment goes.

The zucchini plant is growing like a weed.



And I had to stake up my container tomato plants after our storm the other night.



How is your garden doing this summer?

In the garden

I've got the Early Girl & Bush Goliath in planters on the patio. They are both supposed to grow well in planters. We have to maximize our tomato growing ability at our house!

In the garden I've got Better Boy, Pink Brandywine, Rutgers & a Red Beefsteak.

What tomatoes are in your garden this year?

Peas hurry up!

The peas in my garden are sooo close to being ready. I seriously CAN NOT WAIT!  Look at all those pea pods!

Peas

Two-Fer Tuesday

Two-Fer Tuesday

 The peas have broken through!!

Redbuds are blooming, spring is in full swing!

When Grandpa/Dad visits

Whenever my dad visits we always stay busy and keep him busy. Last time he visited he put new brakes on my Jeep. When he visited a few weeks ago he asked if there was anything that we needed to get done around the house. I thought about it for a while and then remembered that I'd been wanting a couple of garden boxes to plant in this year. So we made a trip to Home Depot to get wood to build the boxes. While we were there they had a free kids workshop and they were building race cars. We took Dylan over to see what was going on, but he got freaked out for some reason and didn't want to participate. We walked a few isles over and calmed him down and started getting the wood for the garden boxes. Then the very nice lady who was checking people in for the workshop came over to talk to us. She had seen Dylan looking over at what they were building and then leave. So she came over to bring him a race car that he could build at home!
Unfortunately we had a rainy weekend and the garden boxes didn't get built until Monday, but Grandpa and Dylan had fun building the race car in the meantime.

They were also busy running around the house. Grandpa hid the ball they were playing with under his shirt and Dylan did the same thing.

When I came home from work on Monday, Dave, Dad and Dylan were putting the finishing touches on the gardening boxes and had even gotten enough dirt to fill one of the boxes (which was ALOT and all that would fit in the back of my Jeep).
Dylan and I planted spinach, 2 kinds of lettuce and snap peas. I really hope the snap peas grow, they are one of my favorites!

Are you planting a garden this year? When it warms up a little bit we will be planting tomatoes, zucchini, red peppers and jalapinos!

Step one done

Here is a better close-up before we pulled the bushes out.

We got quite a bit done on Saturday regarding the bushes in front of the porch. Our friend James came over Saturday morning and got to work with Dave on cutting down the bushes so they were more manageable. Then they hooked up the chain to the stumps to pull out the bushes by the roots. The first bush came out pretty easily, surprisingly since it had the largest root system. The other ones took a little more work but were pulled out in the end.

Starting to cut away at the bushes

It's quite a change to see the front of the house now, without the bushes, it really does open it up a lot. And if you look around our neighborhood, all the houses that have porches have bushes in front of them that really hide them. Unfortunately we got quite a bit of rain this afternoon so we were not able to plant new plants out front. We did power wash the driveway. Which took FOREVER. But wow, there is such a huge difference in the driveway now. And yes, I did work for an hour power washing, so Dave can't say I didn't do anything today.

Since Dave has Monday off he is going to get the plants for the front. We are thinking some native grasses, maybe a hardy hibiscus (we had hibiscus in Florida and LOVED them). If anyone has any suggestions on what to plant let me know! We also have some large decorative rocks that we are going to put out front.

Also a BIG thanks to our friend James for helping us out this morning, we couldn't have done it without you!

We also pulled out the RR ties from the hosta bed behind the deck, we need to get new ones and finish that too. Will the work on this house ever end? No is the answer, because we still have to paint the front porch, mulch and plant the rest of our garden. I hope you enjoy home and garden posts because that is what you are going to get for awhile!

Trimming the bushes

It's really more like yanking out the ugly bushes in front of our porch than trimming them, at least that is the plan for this weekend. For months Dave has been talking about how he hates the bushes infront of our porch and we should get rid of them. I've been a little slow in accepting this because while I don't really like the bushes Dylan can play on the front porch with his sand and water table and no one will see him. Not that I think someone is going to come and snatch him, but it is just nice to have the privacy. We are going to replace the bushes with other smaller bushes, maybe azaelas, and then some decorative grasses for ground cover.
Here's a photo of what the front looks like now (ok, not really now, last fall, but it really looks about the same, see the huge bushes infront of the porch, those will be gone). I will post the after photo on Saturday evening or Sunday to let you know how everything goes!

Thanks a lot Home Depot

Dave picked the D-man up from daycare today and I met them at Home Depot so we could get plants for our garden. I was hoping to get a few varities of tomatoes, a red pepper, jalapino, basil, asparagus and seeds for peas, cantaloupe, lettuce and spinich. We had no problem finding the seeds, but there were no jalapino, red (or green for that matter) pepper or asparagus plants. Also, there were only a few varieties of tomato plants. I was pretty disappointed, I would have thought the Depot would have had quite a few different plants. Usually we go to Mayo Garden Center, but they close at 6pm (I know, who closes at 6pm? in a retail business) so we couldn't make it. So if you are planning on still getting plants this year I wouldn't recommend the Depot for your plant buying.

In other news Melea and I are going bridesmaid dress shopping on Wednesday after work, I'm pretty excited about that although I have some work to do if I want to look decent in the dress...