Relief

Week of July 5 through 11


Two and a half inches of rain fell on Tuesday, accompanied by thunder and lightening. It was the first rain we've had in more than six weeks. We were free from the oppressive heat, at least for the day. Now, the air is thick and it is sticky, steamy hot again. Ah, Texas.

All Around Our House Next Week: Wedding Bells in Dallas

Forgotten Foliage

Week of May 10 through 16

We have been so excited with the recent development of our tomatoes and beans, that some of the other fruits and flowers in our landscape have gone unmentioned for weeks. I begging foliage-forgiveness here as I post about our left out leafage.

My Dad planted blackberry bushes for us back in April. At first, they looked like dead sticks poking up from the ground. Recently, the canes have sprouted leaves, and now they look more like fruit-bearing shrubs, and less like something out of The Blair Witch Project.


The flower bed in our front yard has burst forth with color. We built and planted this bed more than eight weeks ago, and I have been remiss in not posting about how absolutely beautiful is has become.



Also beautiful is the small bed by the sidewalk to our front door that The Husband planted, in the rain, by himself, the same weekend we built our garden. The ornamental peppers in that bed have grown into gorgeous textural treats for my eyes, and I smile every time I pull into our driveway and see them and our bright red geraniums.

8 weeks ago

Now

Fruits and Flowers

Week of April 26 through May 2

Our yard and our garden are bursting with life and color. Our plants have been spoiled by the rain and the 80 degree weather of the last week. I don't know how I'm going to explain to them that last week was a fluke. Generally, it is dryer and hotter. Much hotter.

Our garden continues to amaze me. It is such a joy to witness the new developments. In the last week our tomato plants have shot up and entire foot, the tiny purple blooms on our bean plants have produced tiny green beans, and our bell pepper plant set fruit from one of its little white flowers.


The fruit on our tomato plants has continued to grow larger, as has our one lone squash. We've had a bit of trouble getting the squash blossoms fertilized. I think our squash may be gay. We've had two male flowers open, then whither, just one day before two female blossoms opened. So far, we haven't had the right combination of male and female blossoms open at the same time. As soon as we can get the boys and girls mingling though, we'll be out in the yard lighting mood candles and blasting Barry White music.


Quite a few nights this week, The Husband and I have sat out on the patio after work, sipping wine and enjoying the beauty of our yard. The colorful blooms on our celosia, gardenia, geraniums and hydrangeas are intoxicating. This is the payoff for the hours of work we've put into our yard, and we couldn't be happier.

Creepy Crawlies

Week of April 26 through May 2

In one day, 11 inches of rain fell in our area. Things were very gushy. Now, after the puddles have dried and the plants have soaked up all the moisture from the ground, our yard and our garden are bursting forth with life. And not just plants. In the last week I have seen more creatures in our yard than I ever have before.

The day after the Big Rain, I was inspecting our yard and garden for any storm damage when I noticed that Gidget was particularly enthralled with something on our patio. Gidget is a very prudent pouncer, prefering not to waste her precious energies on anything as pedestrian as a grasshopper or house fly, so to see her so mesmerized by something meant it had to be good. When I reached the concrete pad, I saw her gently pat-pat-patting a frog. She would reach out her paw and gingerly touch the frog's bottom, then immediately withdraw her paw and watch the frog take one quick jump forward. Then ever-so-gently she would reach out and pat the frog again. The unlikely playmates circled the patio at least twice, pat-hop-pat-hop, and Gidget never got rough with the frog and the frog never took more than one small jump forward. If I could speak Cat, I know Gidget would have told me that this, this, was the best toy she'd ever had.


Where Gidget is positively bored, Gizmo finds all things that flutter, flap or twitch to be facinating. She is constantly streaking across the yard to attack the wind. Every movement in the grass and every rustle in the trees deserves her full and uninterrupted attention. It is exhasuting to watch her in action. She was recently captivated by a dragonfly when she noticed that I was interested in taking its picture, but got a little disoriented when it flew from our garden to the boxwood shrubs along the fence.

The Husband noticed that something had been chewing on the bell pepper plants and on our lemon tree. We assumed it was slugs, but he couldn't find any to prove our theory. Finally, after much investigation, and many overturned leaves, he found a centipede. Apparently, centipedes are very rare in our neck of the woods, at least according to the expert at our local garden center.


In case you were wondering, that centipede is sitting on a leaf on my kitchen table. Mere millimeters away from insect-ifying the place where we eat. The Husband staged and took this horrifying photo (without my knowledge), and will be hearing from my lawyers when he returns from his latest trip to the Middle East. Bugs placed purposefully on the table. Barf.

Aside from trying to induce insect related vomiting in his wife, The Husband did manage to solve the centipede issue by sprinkling powdery insecticide in the garden. I refused to go anywhere near the backyard while he was sprinkling for centipedes because, according to The Husband, "there were millions of them crawling out from in-between the rocks." Now imagine that phrase uttered with as much excitement as if hundred dollar bills were raining from the sky. Boys. According to the garden expert, this sprinkling had to be done at night, and while he was outside in the dark The Husband found two more garden-munching culprits.


Snails are cute and slugs look like snot. I don't know why I differentiate between tiny, slimy, antennaed, night-crawlers, but I find one adorable and one disgusting.

All creatures great and small, the Good Lord made them all.

Around Our House Next Week: Painting and Sewing while The Husband is away on business (again!)

Eggs-ellent Progress

Week of March 29 through April 4

After four weeks of nail-bitingly slow, almost imperceptible growth, my tiny egg plants have finally bloomed! I doubted that the little sprouts would ever grow into the flowering plants that the egg packaging promised. (My issues with plant patience aside, that packaging has been known to lie.) But then, in the last few days of March, the eggs exploded with growth, almost if they knew about their Easter deadline.


April Fools!

The thread-like sprouts in the eggs were growing nowhere fast. I hadn't seen any further development in the last two weeks so I gave up on them, cute as they were. Instead of waiting for a flower that may never have come, I planted each egg with a nicely established, grown-by-someone-with-patience, flowering plant, and left the discarded seeds and filler to their own devices in a small pot in the backyard. I will be happy to claim my "Seedling Nurturer of the Year" award as soon as the trophy cup is ready. As long as I'm not required to grow anything in it.

The eggs could not be persuaded into blooming, no matter how much I babied them. The tomato plants, on the other hand, have literally blossomed in the last week, without much coaxing from us. The age old argument of Nature vs. Nurture wages on.


Our garden continues to flourish, and recently we've noticed quite a few bees buzzing around our little plot. All of the plants have added new leaves, and I noticed what looked like the beginnings of buds on the bell peppers.


When we transplanted our herbs from their peat pellets to the larger soil squares I wasn't sure which tiny sprout was which because they all looked the same. In the last week, I have watched as the baby leaves have grown into more recognizable herb leaf shapes. Now, by process of elimination, I can definitively say that the few tiny chive and rosemary sprouts that we transplanted were fatalities of The Freak Hailstorm of 2009. Our parsley and basil have bounced back from their hail beating, and seem to be thriving despite the adversity of losing their closest friends.


This week we added a new plant to our growing botanical repertoire. The Husband is a total sucker for coupons (and commercials on the radio, for that matter... and gardening) so when we received a 20% off coupon to our local garden center it was nearly impossible to keep him from leaving a trail of drool from our front door to the nursery. We decided on a hot red camellia because it is the only flowering plant that will thrive in the shade of our front porch, and we're running out of places to put new plants. It should bloom red in the fall, to match our front door.


Around Our House Next Week: Dressmaking and Easter dinner

Tiny Sprouts and Transplants

Week of March 15 through 21

Oh how our garden grows! Warmer days and good soil (and plant food) have caused our tomato plants to double in size over the last week. The squash and peppers haven't grown as much, but they have put on new leaves since we planted them.


The most exciting development in our garden has been the emergence of our bean sprouts. We have been (im)patiently waiting for our beans to come up since we planted the seeds. My dad told us that we would see sprouts in about a week, but being the constant worrier that I am, I assumed they were desiccated and hopeless about four days after we planted them. I really need to learn to be more patient. One week to the day of being planted, we saw the first sprout poke its little green bud from the ground. I will not doubt the green thumbed king of gardening again. At least not today. The next day it was bean-o-palooza! Every single one of our seeds had sprouted a plant with two flourishing leaves. Every grade school child in America has participated in the bean-in-a-styrofoam-cup experiment, and has been rewarded with a verdant green plant for their patience. How these six year olds stand the waiting, I may never know.


I had also given up hope on my living Easter eggs. For the last two weeks I have been optimistically adding water to their colored shells, hoping for any indication that the little flowers were actually growing. Just as I had decided that the eggs were rotten and would never germinate the way their (paradoxical) packaging promised, The Husband noticed tiny sprouts poking through the dirt. I'm not sure if we will have flowers by Easter, but the eggs sure are cute!


We also transplanted all of our herb sprigs into larger starter squares. I peeled off the tiny net surrounding each peat pellet, and gave each seedling its own little home. It has been four weeks since I started the seeds in the windowsill greenhouse, and in the last week, since moving them into full sun, the plants have burst forth, growing taller and reaching for more light. We moved the plants outside onto our patio after transplanting them, with the hopes that the sunshine and warm air would encourage them to grow even more. With better soil, and more room to take root, I think these little sprouts will flourish.



Realizing how decidedly impatient I am with growing plants from seeds, it is no surprise that growing up, my least favorite parent-ism to hear was "give it time." You aren't quite tall enough to ride the roller coaster? Give it time. You aren't old enough to get your ears pierced? Give it time. You aren't an expert flautist the first time you pick up the instrument? GIVE IT TIME! It was right up there with "don't wish your life away." As I've gotten older, I've realized what my parents were really saying - with time, everything has a way of working itself out. Finding a job, working through tough situations, determining your place in the world; these things all take patience. I've learned that when things aren't going quite the way I'd hoped or planned, I need to give it time. So, why am I so impatient with these seeds!?! It must be the crazy.

Around Our House Next Week: Closet Shelf Installation, Dressmaking, Decorating for Easter and A Birthday Celebration

Constructive Demolition

Week of March 15 through 21

Our house came with a grizzled old basketball hoop anchored next to our driveway. It was one of our least favorite amenities, and disuse had made it an eyesore. Our front yard is shaded for most of the morning and, combined with the typical humidity in our area, is an excellent hosting ground for all varieties of lichens and moss. Generally, I approve of these fluffy-looking additions to our landscape because they add so much color and variety, but it just isn't prudent to allow vegetation to grow on one's basketball hoop. It not only causes the neighbors concern over their property values, it also advertises one's lack of skillz with the rock.

Not long after we moved in, The Husband and I took down the lichen encrusted backboard and hoop, and stored it in the garage thinking that we would post it on craigslist. You never know what hipster might need a green basketball goal for their art school final project illustrating the political ramifications of tourism in Holland - ironically. Yeah, I don't really get art. Said basketball goal is still in our garage, next to a working washer and dryer we also intend(ed) to list.

Removing the goal left a lonesome square steel post jutting eight feet skywards from our yard. And thus it has been for the last year. Until now.



The torrential rain of the previous weekend softened the clay mud around the concrete piling enough for The Husband to dig out most of the post. Then the testosterone kicked in. Testosterone+Pickup Truck = Great Idea! Using his brand-new, self-retracting tie-down strap, The Husband hooked the steel post to the back of the truck and used some hemi-power to pull it out of the earth. As the clay relinquished its hold on the concrete piling it released a big sloppy wet slurp of resignation. Sadly, we can now no longer have Maypole dances in our yard.

We filled in the gaping hole with sand and topsoil and the large chunks of grass uprooted by the testosterone and hemi-power rippling so closely nearby. Then we realized that we couldn't lift the post to move it out of sight. Not even a budge. The basketball goal lives on! Toppled, and humiliated by the brazen display of its concrete nether-regions, it is still in our yard. I don't know which offends the neighbors more, our willful determination that a moss covered basketball hoop is art, or our willful defiance of social mores by allowing our basketball post to lay outside, naked, for all the world to see.

A Gardening Hootenanny and a Flower Bed

Week of March 8 through 14

The Parents came into town for a visit this weekend and we had so much fun! We originally planned for their visit knowing that my mom would be coming to town for a bridal shower. But, when we realized that our parents could be coerced into manual labor, we knew that this weekend would also be the perfect time to build our garden.

My dad has the greenest thumb. He inherited it from my grandparents, who have the biggest garden plot I've ever seen. Sadly, I think the emerald-phalange genetics skipped me, though I did inherit the crazy. Having a backyard garden was inspired by my dad's natural ability to coax vegetation from the earth. Growing up, we always had squash and tomatoes and blackberries from the backyard plot that my dad lovingly tended. It seemed only natural to me that when The Husband and I finally had a yard of our own, we would plant our own garden.

For the last month we have been in the final, serious, planning and preparation stages for the installation of our garden in our backyard. We've done our research: picking out the best location, the best plant varieties and the best soil for our area. We also spent a day driving around our neighborhood to determine what kind of retaining walls we liked, and what kind we didn't (ahem...the lip on those concrete landscaping bricks is supposed to go down). After determining that we liked the rock wall look (and why wouldn't we, since it was the most expensive option) we chose a pallet of moss rock at our local landscaping supplier and arranged to have it delivered. We were all set for our Gardening Hootenanny (with free labor!)... then it started raining.

Since the beginning of the year our area had gotten a total of 2 inches of rain, over 8 inches behind the average for this time of year. As the weekend approached, the skies darkened, the temperature dropped and the meteorologists began predicting drizzle and rain for the entire weekend. And over the weekend we had carefully and thoughtfully set aside for our garden, no less! Still, we were not going to allow this to deter the hootenanny-ness of our hootenanny.

The 1.5 tons of stone we ordered was delivered via bobcat to our driveway on Saturday morning. I asked the delivery driver if he wouldn't mind just driving it on back into our backyard for us and he just grinned. I think maybe he had heard that a few times before. Meanwhile, The Husband drove off into the rain with a trailer to pick up 2 cubic yards of some kind of special soil.

Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle...

The Parents and I ventured into the backyard, and after much deliberation, staked out the plot for our garden. It so happens that the spot in our yard posing the least grass resistance was also located between the two sad, lonely and haphazardly positioned plants that existed in our yard when we moved in. While my dad tried to rescue the few lone patches of grass that would soon be covered by our garden (to fill in the bare patches in our poor, sad lawn), my mom and I loaded up the wheelbarrow with stones and started shuttling them from the front to the back of the house.


Sprinkle, drizzle, sprinkle...

My dad, expert stone stacker that he is, had the front wall built three courses high by the time I loosened my mom's shackles and allowed her to stop toiling long enough to get ready for her shower. I continued to move stone, and Dad kept stacking, and occasionally breaking, stone (think: chain gang in a old prison movie). I think he enjoyed breaking the stone with the sledgehammer a little bit too much. In his defense, though, some of the stones did need to be broken in order to make a stable stack, but the determination of which stones those were was a bit willy-nilly. Soon, The Husband's Parents arrived to lend a hand (and some tools) and shortly after that, we had all four walls of the garden built.


Sprinkle, rain, rain...

The Husband returned with the soil just as we were finishing the walls in the backyard. Thanks to The Husband's Parents, we had an extra shovel, an extra wheelbarrow and two extra people to help us haul the stinky, compost rich soil to the garden. Little by little, The Husband, my MIL, FIL and I filled the wheelbarrows and then the menfolk hauled them into the backyard and dumped them into the garden.


Rain, rain, pour...

When the garden was full, we still had about a quarter of a trailer full of soil. We also had some left over stones. Even though we were all wet and tired, and the rain had really started coming down, we decided to take on the front flower bed. (Bonus project! Order now and we'll include some rain absolutely free!) We laid out a garden hose to mark the shape of the bed, and then my dad and MIL dug out a shallow trench while The Husband and I followed behind, filling it in with stones.

One would think this would be a much easier task, since it was certainly smaller. But, I'm an organized, anal retentive, methodical planner, who needs to think things out before making a decision, and since I hadn't even considered the possibility of tackling the flower bed, my crazy started showing. As the project progressed, all of our lovely assistants were thoughtfully asking me if I liked how it was looking. I think this might have been because at one point during the construction of the garden, when my dad asked The Husband if he was happy with the progress thus far, I said, "He doesn't care what it looks like, as long as it grows tomatoes, I'm the one who approves aesthetics around here." Thus, my approval was needed on the front flower bed, quickly, before everyone gave up and went inside where it was dry. And my head nearly exploded from the power/unplanned disorder of it all.

No sooner had we placed the last rock, than it started raining in sheets. Thankfully, we were finished, sadly, everyone would later die of pneumonia.


The next morning, we visited our local nursery to pick out vegetables for our garden and plants for our front bed. We still needed expert advice on plant selection, though, so we requested that the king of all things agricultural help us. Of course, it was still raining, and the nursery is not covered. In true royal style, my dad stood under the only dry overhang at the nursery, while we ran out into the rain and grabbed flats of different plant varieties for his perusal. The king then decreed which plants were the best specimens, all the while staying perfectly dry.

Drizzle, rain, drizzle...

We spent the afternoon ducking in and out of the house, avoiding the downpours, and planting our garden and flower bed in the drizzle. We planted tomatoes, bell peppers, yellow squash and beans in the back. Then we designed our front flower bed with shrubs, begonias and impatiens. We got dirty, and wet, and we got some invaluable garden advice from my dad. And we finally got our garden finished. Over the weekend of our Gardening Hootenanny, our area received 2.5 inches of rain. We got more rain while we were outside working in the yard than we had previously gotten all year!


We are so excited about how everything turned out. It is more than what we were even hoping for. We can see our garden when we wake up every morning, and we love it. We can't wait for our first harvest!


We truly could not have accomplished what we did without the help of our families. We are so grateful that they live close by, and that they were willing to give up their weekend to stand in the rain and deliberate over each and every stone placement with us. Everyone worked so hard, and we are so appreciative of the effort and energy they put in to help turn our dreams of a garden into a reality.

When we were looking for a house, we knew that we wanted something with a lot of space and an open kitchen so that there would always be room for company. We really enjoy having all of our family together at our house, and we wanted to have a comfortable gathering place for everyone. This weekend was one of those times when we felt so grateful for what have. Our family, all together, cozy in front of the fire, spending peaceful time together in our happy home. Perfect.

All Around Our House Next Week: Transplanting our Herb Garden and Bikes