Garden Week 3

I guess since we don't have children (yet!) I'll just have to blog about my garden - haha!

So slowly but surely we are recovering from the garden disaster on Monday. I've kinda gotten over it...that which will grow...will grow! :)

I bought 3 different types of basil seeds from Territorial Seed and started them today in egg cartons and black trays. I planted lime basil, siam queen (thai) basil and the classic sweet basil. Basil likes warm weather, so I am going to start these in my classroom because I have grow lights in my room. Hopefully, we'll have a warm summer (yeah right!) and I can get a good enough harvest to make/freeze my own pesto.

I also planted some cilantro in some transplant trays that I'll also take to my classroom lights. Can't wait for fresh salsa!

A clump of arugula and lettuce mix. Things are kind of clumpy and messy thanks to our " evil visitor."

So far, the radishes are doing okay. I'm a little worried they will have trouble forming an edible root, but we'll see! They are definitely behind schedule...

The spinach finally came up! YAY!

Walla walla onions are getting bigger too! These will take ALL SUMMER to grow.

Sugar Ann snap peas are starting to climb up the trellis. 

My second planting of radishes are in much neater rows. Thankfully, the evil creature didn't really disturb them.

My cauliflower (top) and cabbage still aren't looking so great. They lost a lot of support from the upheaval. Quite a few plants were found buried under soil in a completely different spot! I'm nervous about these guys!

Strawberry plant that overwintered...wondering if I'll get strawberries???

Lettuce transplants - not doing as well as I thought. They ended up with a lot of dirt on them from the evil creature's digging. Almost want to just start eating this now and plant something new...

Box number 2. There is random arugula everywhere, from the evil creature's digging - but at least it's growing! :)

I think I'm going to try and get some fertilizer this week and see if that will revive some of the older plants. It is supposed to be sunny this week too! We had nothing but pounding rain last week and I think the beds are getting a little soggy. 

Also...still no carrots. It's been 3 weeks. I might have seen beets today. So just in case, I am trying to germinate carrot and beet seeds in a wet paper towel in the warm house. Once the roots emerge, I'll place them outside and wish for the best. 

My potatoes also arrived from Territorial Seeds. We bought fancy french fingerlings (kind of like small red potatoes), because those are often more expensive to buy from the market and they are so tasty! Still haven't figured out where I want to grow them...but I've got some time, as it needs to warm up a little bit.

And last, I just found this funny article that talks about human urine as fertilizer! The study specifically cites urine as being beneficial to cabbage due to excess nitrogen. Hmmm...I think Dan would go for this!?! :)

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Garden Nightmare

Today I came home to total destruction of my gardening beds. I can't believe it, but some filthy lowly creature decided to entirely dig up my two veggie beds today. It was so devastating, that I literally had tears. I felt pathetic for crying. But I've invested a lot of time into working outside and hoping that our little garden will sprout up....See, I told you I was going to be really let down if something didn't work out!

Everything is in chaos. I spent 1+ hour hunched over when I got home at 7pm trying to find hundreds of little 1-2in plants.

Two full weeks my garden made it. :(

I think most of the transplants will survive. The cabbage and cauliflower that I put in last weekend, is looking questionable. They are all wilty and leaning over now. Good thing Dan doesn't really like either of those veggies. :)

So I did my best to find all the little plants and stick them back in the ground...but I'm really worried. It's been the longest 16 days waiting for those little baby plants to finally get green and start to grow leaves! Tomorrow is going to be a sunny day too - that's lots of growing that could've been happening. Now they are all uprooted, stressed out and hidden under the soil...

Yesterday, I planted another few sqft of seeds too so that I could have a continual harvest through the early summer. Ugh - I have absolutely no idea where those seeds are now. Hopefully they are on the top of the soil!

I saw that some of my carrots put down roots the past few days...now I'm pretty sure I won't have a carrot harvest  this year as I could not find them tonight. The next chance I'll get to plant more seeds might be thursday, so I'm really going to have to get more carrots going because they've taken a really long time to germinate. Same thing with my beets. Bummer...

Now it's too dark and too late to get up a protective barrier over my beds to prevent this from happening again. We think it was a neighbor cat. I'll be so pissed if this happens again!!! Thankfully it wasn't Lily, she's so cute it's hard to punish her! :)

Off to bed to sulk a little bit more and then time to try and stop thinking about it...

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Garden Week 1

Thankfully the weather wasn't too bad this weekend, so I was able to get out and work in the garden beds. I'm so excited to have a project that I can work on all spring/summer/fall!

Germinating radish

Walla Walla onions - might possibly become green onions?

Romaine lettuce (from transplant)

Today, I filled up the second bed. This time I actually marked off my square feet with yarn and a staple gun. I wish I would have had 5 hands to hold everything, but I managed to measure out the spaces fairly fast. This bed also holds cool weather veggies.

Today I planted:

4 older Buttercrunch lettuce transplants

3 sq.ft. Beet seeds (I presoaked them a little, because they take forever to germinate)

1 sq ft Carrot seeds (Larger)

1 sq ft Carrot seeds (Little finger baby's)

2 sq ft Arugula seeds

4 sg ft Cauliflower transplants

2 sq ft Red Cabbage transplants

5 sq ft Golden Acre Cabbage transplants

1 sq ft of 3 puny-sad-looking cabbage transplants (we'll see what happens...)

Cabbage + Cauliflower

We bought a trellis this weekend for the growing peas.

I also planted some Little Marvel peas seeds behind some lettuce and added a few spinach seeds to the spinach plot. Not too many of the spinach seeds have germinated yet, so I thought I'd throw in a few extras just in case. The arugula and lettuce mix is also coming up, but I'll take a picture in a few days when it looks a bit more substantial. :) I've yet to see a whole lot from the carrots...but they take a bit longer to germinate so hopefully they will start to sprout soon!

I've also got a sweet potato in water and I'm trying to grow some splits. We don't really eat sweet potatoes, but I think it would be really fun to try and grow them. They are such a healthy vegetable, so I think I would be encouraged to eat them more if I grew my own. I think I'll grow them in containers to save space in the beds for other veggies we eat a lot of (tomatoes, peppers, etc)...we'll see!

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Garden Dreams

Despite all the car craziness this spring break, I did manage to accomplish my one big goal: 

THE BACKYARD. 

While it's still cloudy and rainy outside, I knew that if we didn't get the sod in now or start the garden beds, it likely wouldn't happen.

I knew putting in sod ourselves would be a lot of work...but I just didn't realize how heavy and obnoxious a roll of soggy wet sod would be! It didn't help that it was cold and rainy either.Thankfully, halfway through I was sent to get the rental car and Dan managed to put in the rest while I was gone. (He's amazing!)

I think Lily loves the grass the most. Unfortunately, she's loves it a little too much and has been caught digging holes. She's in big trouble if she gets caught again...

I've become slightly obsessed with gardening lately. I knew that I wanted to garden, but I've really gotten into it. So I researched  a little (okay...a lot!), then Dan and I went to home depot and we got lumber to build raised gardening beds. Of course, Dan did all the hard work (like I said...really amazing!). :) Eddie and Leila helped a little (okay...not at all.)

Romaine up front, buttercrunch and red leaf in the back.

Saturday after we bought our Jeep (<3) I rushed to Home Depot to pick up soil, compost, manure, etc, and filled up one of the beds. Somewhere along the way, I had already managed to buy a couple of veggie transplants and seeds too.

Walla walla onions in the front, sugar snap peas in the back.

In the back middle, the lettuce mixes, arugula and spinach are  planted. Front right: radishes and carrots.

It's looking a little sad and pathetic now...it was drizzling rain the whole time I was out there and I stayed out until about 8pm, when it got too dark to see what I was doing. Although the conditions were not that great, I knew that if I didn't get this stuff in, I would likely not have time for a long while. So it was worth it! :)

So far, I have planted:

• 3-4 Buttercrunch lettuce starts
• 4 Red Leaf lettuce starts
• 8 Romaine lettuce starts
• a sprinkling of arugula lettuce seeds
• a sprinkling of lettuce salad mix seeds
• a sprinkling of spinach seeds
• 4-8 Sugar Snap Peas starts
• 4 walla walla onion transplants
• 10-15 walla walla onion sets (+ nearly 35-40 others in a pot)
• sprinkling of radish seeds
• sprinkling of carrot seeds

I just can't wait! I think I might be too eager. It's gonna be rough if all this doesn't work out...the weather is looking pretty nasty the next few week too. :(

I'm a little nervous about the lettuce transplants...they aren't looking so great because I was sort of rough with them in the cold, rainy dark. Ooops...we'll see. 

In a week or two, when the lettuce starts to sprout up (hopefully!!!), I'll plant some more seeds so that I have lettuce throughout most of the early summer. I plan to sprinkle seeds a week or two after that as well. Then I'll thin them out and we'll have some baby salad greens to enjoy! I'm planning on trying to do this with the carrots too - baby carrots! Can't wait.

I've got a lot more planned for early spring: cauliflower, beets, more carrots, prob. more lettuce, maybe sweet potatoes, maybe regular potatoes (if I have room and can figure out how to grow them!), beans, and green onions.

Late spring/summer we want to grow: tomatoes (roma, cheery), squash (like zucchinni!), peppers, lots of basil, a few other herbs, maybe cucumbers, maybe some melon...I've got a little while to figure it out.

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Great car, smashed car, NEW CAR!

In one second, we went from our great 2004 Saturn Ion to this:

 First off, thankfully, Dan and Jeff are okay! I'm pretty tired of thinking of the details, but Dan and Jeff were coming back from the movies and they got rear-ended on the freeway. Dan had a little whiplash, but he is okay now. Everyone else is fine.

Our poor Saturn didn't fare so well...she's totaled. I tried to find pictures of her "before," :) but realized we don't have any....so I found a few of our road trips across the country.

Sad.

But now, we have this BEAUTY:

 Yesterday, we bought a 2011 Jeep Patriot. :)

Thankfully, we had been saving for a new car anyway. The bad news is that we were saving so that we could have 2 cars...now we are still stuck with 1. But hopefully, we can now find a decent used car to buy.

I never thought I was the type to write a whole blog about our car...but it's kind of consumed our spring break. Also, the Saturn was basically my first car, our only car for most of Dan and I's relationship and she traveled the span of the country with us (twice!)...so we were kind of attached. :)

On to bigger and more beautiful things...

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Rants on an empty stomach

All I've eaten today:
 a few crackers, a banana, two oatmeal banana cookies (delish!) and 1 pickle. It's 4:40pm. Weekends are weird.

Wait...

...add another pickle. :)

January and February have happily flown by. I owe this mainly to my purposefully planned mini(big) vacations. Previous years, I have always hated January/February, mainly due to freezing temperatures, the lack of sunshine and the absence of breaks/vacation time after a long Christmas break. My life revolves around a public school schedule. So this year a trip to NYC with Chey at the end of January and a little weekend break in the middle of February for a conference in Seattle and a visit with Natalie really made my winter not so awful.

Now for spring - PUH-LEEZE! The winter blues have not completely escaped me. It's March and March should equate to sunshine and flowers. But it doesn't. Instead, I get rain and wind. Thankfully I have coaching track to keep me busy until the sunshine arrives.

Not sure why I'm talking about the weather...but I guess it's because I've got A LOT of crazy stuff on my mind and talking about the weather is easy.

Things on my mind:

• UGH - lesson planning. I really love lesson planning (KEYWORD: planning). Actually getting all  my materials together is really annoying. Why can't their be two of me?
• Grading. Seriously - worst thing ever.
• House improvement/decorating crafts - i've taken a sharp decline in this department, after a rapid acceleration (hey...ignore my vocabulary...i'm teaching about motion and forces right now...)
• my procrastination with advising the prom committee. i have tons of ordering to do.
• spring break plans with friends - Canada??
• why does Lily (the pup) still insist on submissively peeing? Gr!
• Dan is amazing (he's had some impressive offers (=$$$) for a piece that he got into a juried show at school).
• my sunday school lesson (yes, i teach 6 days a week)
• my NYC trip (can I go back?...right now?)
• planning my life + dan +children (constantly on my mind)
• my school district budget cuts for next year. (seriously America? can we please value education a little bit  more. I'm disgusted.)
• my teensy tiny track team. (the kids we have are extremely dedicated, but it's a rebuilding year for sure. one or two girl hurdlers & not even one boy hurdler. hrmph!)
• summer vacation plans. 
• The Bachelor - was Reality Steve really wrong all this time. GRRR?! (Stupid, I know!)
• i should really go make something to eat for myself...before I waste away and die of starvation...

So that's that.

PS - check out my new label.

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S'mores

Whoa...look what I just stumbled upon. Peanut butter puff pastry s'mores. These need to be made. Sometime soon. Found the recipe here.

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Terrifying!

So this evening I was casually thinking about what I should blog about today, tomorrow or sometime soon. When randomly (i have no clue why...) I remembered that the most terrifying thing happened last night and I totally forgot until JUST now. Don't you love how our brains do that? Looking back now...it's completely hysterical.

I've been sleeping a lot lately. For example, Sunday evening I slept from about 5:30pm until 8am-9am the next morning! Also, at night I've been quickly falling into a deep sleep, which is a bit unusual for me. As such, last night I quickly fell asleep while reading in bed with the light on around 9:30pm.

Well, at around 11:00pm or so (if i remember right...) I literally skyrocketed out of bed! I have never gone from such a peaceful, deep sleep to utter and completely chaos.

Now, I love our new house, but something seriously needs to be done about our smoke alarms. Some genius engineer had the bright idea to connect all the smoke alarms in our house, so that when one alarm goes off - ALL OF THE FREAKING ALARMS IN OUR TINY 1200 SQFT HOUSE BELT OUT THE HIGHEST PITCHED SCREAMING NOISE IN THE UNIVERSE!! I'm pretty sure we have enough blasted alarms to cover the square footage of our whole block!

So as I was happily dreaming away, Dan decided to do a little late night cooking and set off our extremely sensitive smoke alarm system.The alarm in our room is right over my head. I'm pretty sure that as it went off, I felt the earth shake. I was so startled from sleep that I literally thought the world was ending. I can't even describe how fast my heart was racing because I was so disoriented! I stumbled down the stairs to make sure there wasn't a real fire. And of course not....Dan was just cooking (fake smile). For a good minute I was shaking because I was so scared out of sleep and then....within a few minutes I made it back upstairs and I fell back asleep! HAHA! Looking back now, I have no idea how I slept after having so much adrenaline going through me because I was so terrified.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Around Thanksgiving, Dan set the alarm off while I was in the shower (like 3 times in a row!) and I thought I was going to have to run out of my brand new burning house in my just my towel. When we have friends over and cook, it goes off with just the faintest amount of smoke. It wouldn't be so bad if only ONE ALARM went off....but instead we have 20 SCREECHING ALARMS. UGH!

Something has to be done about this....

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