Our Backyard Garden

We have been working hard this early spring to get our backyard going. Here's the latest picture....

OK, OK. You may have guessed that this is someone else's backyard. In fact, this is the Little Homestead in the City and my new inspiration for what we can do with our little patch of ground.

Alex and I built a 4' x 10' raised bed as our start. I have been adding compost material and topped it off with composted cow manure, sphagnum peat moss, and mushroom compost from our local Wallace Farms.

The mulch is a free delivery of wood chips from a local tree service that was cleaning out the woods in our neighborhood. I have mulched a lot of areas and still have a moderate mound of material left on the driveway. And it was just a half-load! Can't imagine what a full load would do to me!

I also made several ollas for improved, consistent irrigation. An olla is a clay pot that you bury to its neck and fill with water. You plant your plants right next to it and the roots reach out to the pot which releases water just as the soil dries. Ashamedly, I will admit that I finally went to Wal-Mart where the 6" pots were $1 each. The lowest price elsewhere I could find was at GardenRidge for $3. Darn those low prices.

My planting approach is based on square foot gardening. The idea is that you divide your planting space into 1' x 1' segments and then you plant a certain number of plants in each segment depending on the type of plant.

Dad came over and pulled out four of our u-g-l-y crepe myrtles and I planted needlepoint hollies in their place. It'll take a few years for them to get a decent size, but they look ok now and they will be great as an evergreen backdrop to our projects in time. Our neighbor has an amazing lawn and I never liked the idea that he had to drive up his driveway and see our life in progress. We may miss the myrtles at first but will be glad when we have some more permanent screening too.

I also removed the climbing rose bush that has engulfed everything nearby. It's a beast. In its place went trellised peas.

My front yard effort has been to remove the honeysuckle that has overgrown everything in our mailbox-side bed. It's so bad, I'm contemplating whacking the shrubs down to nibs so I can fully eradicate the honeysuckle. The abelias are all overgrown anyway; I just might really screw up their natural form if I go for it too hard. Now that it's fully spring, I'll have to wait until February. Not like the honeysuckle could get any worse, right?

Future plans for the back yard include a grape arbor and a second raised bed to be put into action this fall.

My friend Kate gave me the brilliant idea to put blueberry bushes in the front yard. I added five additional plants earlier this spring and the results on my older bush has been tremendous. They are all popping with future berries!

Home Alone

I am convinced that if we left Ricky home alone for a couple of weeks that he would be just fine. He can work the TV, climb to the top of the pantry and open the peanut butter, draw the water and take a bath, etc., etc. Here's a picture of what you get, though, when you leave him alone for just long enough to check your email....



















Bottomless with one - just one - shoe on and doing something bad under my bed. It looks like a dead body in this picture but it was actually a lively scene, whatever was happening under my bed.

Kitchen Update

Wanted to put the before and after pix of our kitchen. As always, it's not 100% but there's a lot that is finished. I have come to love the orange in the kitchen. It's definitely my color.

Kitchen Before:

Kitchen After:

I'm in the market for a chandelier for the eating area and I need to figure out how to fix what's hanging on my walls there too. I relocated some key pieces and it's just not the same.

Nature, Taking Care of Business

I love my bees. They are so awesome and they do not need me. Not to feed them, not to clean up their poop, not to be their friend.

It was in the 60's today and they were flying so I figured it was my chance to whip up a sugar solution and see if I could help them not starve before spring. I got out there, put the sugar syrup in the feeder, and then stepped back to observe. Those little girls were bringing in pollen! On Feb 1!! I had heard a rumor that redbuds were blooming and that this might be a good year for honey but I didn't think my girls had it in them to go find it.

In this video, look for the bees flying around with giant yellow balls on their back legs. You can see it a couple of times. One girl flies in with some and then another one crawls out of the hive and back in.

Cakes

I just finished a birthday cake for our friends Anne Frances and Whitney and thought I'd post it and the others I've done. My mom used to make great cakes for us when we were kids and I guess it has spilled over.

A Swamp stadium cake, for yet another national championship game probably.





















Ricky's second birthday - a Nemo cake.

Gator heads for Ricky's first birthday. The yellow one's eyes wouldn't stay up...

Robbie's 4th birthday - kachow!


























Robbie's first birthday - hey, he's a Leo.
























A nearly finished cake for Anne Frances and Whitney from last year.




















Robbie's second birthday. The cupcakes were the best :) Not many ate the Oscar cupcakes but they were the most authentic.



















A kitty cat cupcake from our "Welcome Home Stripe" party when he returned from a month-long "va-cat-tion"
























Robbie's third birthday.











And my most recent, a field of horses for Anne Frances and Whitney.

Extracurricular Activities

So can I tell you how much I love coaching my Lego team?!?! We are experiencing a true creative process and I'm applying a lot of the development skills I learned at Andersen Consulting, just on a much smaller scale. The boys are really responding to the different challenges and I can see the kinds of professions they will wind up in some day.

One is already an engineer at heart (I know enough of them to tell...), one is never going to engineer anything but will be the sales guy who promises the customer all kinds of cool design features that can never possibly be worked in given the timeline and budget, one is just a really great, curious, talented kid, and one of my first graders is restless, fidgety, chases the other kids around the room, and is constantly goofing around but has the most raw genius and consistently busts out with the best finished product of any of them. And then there's Robbie and Charlie :)

So fun. In the picture above, they had just finished building the first phase of our barge-style solution to this year's challenge. (Long story short, it has to be something in the category of Think Green and their idea was a ship that will clean rivers of litter.) They filled the sink with water to make sure it would float. If there's anything boys like, it's seeing if something floats...

My other new extracurricular is my Scrabble Club. Laurie and I called a couple of other smart moms from PLP and we are beginning to play Scrabble once a month. It came out of a conversation in which Laurie and I were lamenting the brainlessness of bunko and how we needed to get out of the neighborhood a bit. Our first meeting was last weekend and it was so super fun. I memorized all the 2-letter words but Laurie still won by 4 points, playing qis for 50 points... Maybe next time....

December Pix

Seems I have a lot of pix from December to post so here we go.

Good old Stripey had a good Christmas...

We were supposed to meet up with some old friends and reunite but the morning we were to leave, Ricky busted out in an all-over hard core rash. Maybe not the best picture to start things out, but those cheeks sure are cute in his corn starch bath.

Grandfather + Grandchild(ren) + Sofa = Secret Snuggle

With Welo and Nana in town, Alex and I had a great New Year's date!

Rockin' out with the cousins... (Somebody thinks she's big in that chair...)

OK, OK, it's not Ohio snow. We got a half inch and it was melting by noon (during Obama's inauguration speech!) so we had to get out there and make Frosty the Snow Head. Yes, those are Miniwheats for eyes. It was melting! We had to hurry!

Apparently, Ricky's favorite temperature is *not* cold...