A garden to grow on

You may think that this post is mis-titled, and that for the sake of wit I should have titled it "A garden to grow IN" but, no, that isn't a typo, and I will tell you why.  Today we planted our first ever vegetable garden, and when I say that I use the term "garden" rather loosely.  We have friends who actually plant gardens, and to avoid any laughter at our meager setup, we just want to point out that we know the difference, but that doesn't mean that we, Calvin especially, aren't exceedingly proud of our own (miniature, 3'x5') backyard food bearing plot.  This is something that we've wanted to do for a long time, and with a little push from my encouraging mother we finally took the plunge.  Of course, any plunging that occurred was on the part of our hands, which first ripped into and removed more sod, then broke up the sandy clay ground we have, before finally plunging into the beautiful, dark, composted manure we added to our box.  Calvin not only helped pick out the plants in an afternoon shopping trip with Gram, but actually helped plant them, carefully taking them from the packages and setting them into the waiting holes.  We planted five tomato plants and four zucchinis, and we plan on expanding the area this weekend so we can give them more room, and perhaps add some different vegetables, as well.  Next year we see an entire bank of gardens that will home to many different foods for us to enjoy, and that is why I call this is our garden to grow on.

A touch of irony.

Sooooo.... raise your hand if you need a long week to recover from your long weekend.  And now, if you're raising your hand, you can put it down because you look silly - we can't see you.  But if we could, we'd be all for commiserating.  We fully understand that the long Memorial Day weekend is a time to commemorate and remember, and we spent Monday morning doing just that while sitting at the side of the local parade route and watching young children maul each other over thrown pieces of candy, but the rest of the weekend we used to get started on the plans we have for our new yard.  We started this task at ten in the morning on Saturday, armed with a couple of shovels, and finished our work just before dinner on Monday after putting away the pick ax and sledge hammer that we'd added to our selection of handy tools.  If we've learned one thing this weekend it's that clay, especially bone dry clay, is not a digging friendly medium.  But even taking into account such breaks as the pizza party with Jon's family on Saturday, the BBQ ribs party with my family for Sunday dinner, the bonfire with the neighbors on Sunday night (have we mentioned how much we love our new neighborhood?), and the parade on Monday morning, we have a long list of accomplishments to tack on our refrigerator door before bed tonight.  We ripped out two to three feet of sod all the way around the house, and improved the grading where needed;  we extended our sump pump pipe by five feet, dug a trench, hauled in a trunk full of free rocks from a local farm, and installed a dry creek to disperse the flow of water; we removed a large area of sod from the SE corner of our backyard, added a property defining garden, then transplanted two bushes and one tree from our overcrowded front garden to populate it and hauled in ten 40lb bags of topsoil to mix into it; and we removed two rather large and rather dead bushes from by the front walk way.  It may not sound like much, but ask our muscles and I'm guessing they'll disagree.

And what about the above mentioned irony?  We spent hours upon aching hours chopping at the sod with such inefficient tools as shovels, trowels, and even the aforementioned pick ax.  Then the very last thing we did on Monday night was ask our neighbor if we could borrow his lawn mower again (since ours is still at the old house that we are still mowing), only to have him ask if we might also want to borrow his sod ripper.  Say what?  At least the parade was fun.

Garden pictures in the Yard Transformation album. 

Parade and other new pictures in the May 2008 album. 

Everything is fascinating...

...to a two year old.  Especially worms.  We have a wonderfully landscaped garden plot in front of our new house, but since the home was vacant for nearly a year it had fallen into some manner of disrepair.  With the beautiful weather about to come to an end we decided we needed to get a handle on the encroaching grasses and weeds before the coming rains gave them a power boost, so the three of us spent the evening in the garden:  Cortney weeded, Jon cleaned up after her, and Calvin pointed out as many bugs as he could find ("worm, more worms, more worms," "spider, more spiders, more spiders," "tato bug, more bugs, more tatoes").  He also talked a lot about how prickly the rose and fir bushes are ("ouch," "picky," "no no no don't touch picky ouch").  And in case you were wondering, no he's never quiet at home.  Never.  Unless he's in trouble.

Three cheers for summer weather

We went out for one jog, two walks, and one bike ride today, worked in the garden, met two sets of new neighbors, played in the neighborhood park, grilled and ate on the deck, and went out to say goodnight to the spring peepers before story time.  We love it.

Pictures, pictures as always:  April Album.