Gardening

Our garden/landscaping progress continues. I spent about 4 hours this morning rototilling all of the flower beds we had made and the whole farm behind the garage. I've got about half of the compost pile spread out. Katelyn dug out at least 100 daffodil bulbs the other day and probably just as many grape hyacinth bulbs. It looked like someone had dug a hole and buried a bucket full of them. We have no idea if they even bloomed this year or not. We know most of the irises that are here didn't. The odd looks have already started from the neighbors. One stopped over the other day when I was working and made mention that that was a pretty big area for a vegetable garden. I jokingly said that it would be more of a small farm. He not jokingly agreed.

In all of my life I can only recall seeing a handful of praying manti in the wild. Here we see one at least every day we go outside. They're all over the place. I also found a cicada that was freshly hatched on the compost pile yesterday.






When all is said and done the farm will be packed with vegetables and a few fruits, chickens, and eventually bees. I've discovered a few things which I didn't know existed/were possible. Like growing potatoes in towers. They just keep growing up and then you dump more dirt on them, and it hardly takes any space. What's way cooler is people are breeding mini cows!? You can get a full grown jersey dairy cow which stands 36" tall! I already checked, we can't have one. Our current garden is exploding, our tomatoes are finally ripening, I imagine in a week or so we'll be overrun with them.

Next Saturday we leave for Tybee Island for a week with all of the former roommates. We're renting a house just south of the pier. It shall be wonderful. Except there was a news story about how they're having record jelly fish stings, just like in 2007, when we were there last time and both got stung. Apparently we bring the jelly fish.

Got Compost?

Yes, yes we do.

That's 10 cubic yards getting dumped on the driveway. We've been digging out and creating actual flower beds for the yard. There was no definition to anything here before, it was all just plants surrounded by grass. Which makes the yard a huge pain to mow and looked kinda crappy too. We're also going to create our vegetable garden (more of a small farm really) behind the garage. Thankfully it's been really unseasonable cool the past few days, highs in the low-mid 70s.

In the meantime our mini vegetable garden is exploding. Katelyn planted 4 tomato plants and 4 bell pepper plants by our patio this year. Katelyn took a bunch of green tomatoes into work today because her co-workers all like to make fried green tomatoes. We picked some green bell peppers and stuffed them with ground chicken, salsa, pepper jack cheese, and some jalapenos. They were delicious.

Back to shoveling.