Update, anyone?

It's been awhile since I've done an update, so here's what's been going on (in bullet points, of course!):

• Work has been going pretty good. I'm doing well according to my 45-day review and am improving daily. I'm no longer the newbie since they have hired someone else in my department. Hooray! The constant changing of my schedule is harder than I remember and I frequently get tired. When I close and then open the following day, I don't get 8 hours of sleep. My poor body needs 8 hours (no less!) to function well. I've taken two 2-hour naps so far in my quest to catch up on much-needed sleep.
• Somehow, even though I have a crazy schedule, I have managed to stay in the gym. I'm still attending Body Attack, Body Pump, Body Combat and Step. It's been hard to fit them in, but I'm able to go several times a week. I'm getting better at each class and I'm able to follow the motions with much more ease. I did fall in Step class this week, but I didn't hurt myself. It was toward the end of class and I was exhausted. I was jumping over the step quickly when one foot touched the other. It was just enough to set me off balance. Then, it was like I fell in slow motion. I landed on my butt fairly softly and laughed. The best part? No one noticed because I was in the back!
• Still no job prospects for Jason. He's been looking, but there's not much out there. His mood has been very up and down and some days it's hard to deal with. As long as he keeps himself busy, he's okay. I've been trying to keep him motivated to get things done to make himself feel productive. So far, so good.
• Luckily, with my paycheck we can live the exact way we are living currently (the horror!) for another 18 months. My paycheck doesn't cover all the bills currently, but's fairly close. At least that means we can stay in our house for now. Thank goodness.
• Our garden isn't looking good. The soil that we brought in last year has mixed too much with our original soil. It's now a compacted, thick soil that is making it hard for the plants to establish roots. Also, something is eating a few of the plants. I have no idea what they are, but it's not the pill bugs that we had last year. This time, it's eating the leaves, not the stem. The squash is the only plant that actually looks pretty good. I think we'll have a good harvest from it.

I think that's all there is to talk about. If you made it through my jumbled train of thought, I applaud you! And now my friends, I must get dressed to go to work. On a Saturday. :(

Read more...

Winter garden update

I've forgotten to take pictures because there wasn't much to see, but we lost most of our winter garden after a hard freeze we had a few months back. Jason & I had taken care to cover the plants every time, but it just got to cold. All that was left was broccoli and carrots. We knew the carrots had done okay since we had pulled a few. The broccoli, on the other hand, was stuck in some sort of time warp. It hadn't grown (or died) in a long time. After we had some warmer weather a few weeks ago, I peeked out the window and was surprised to see there was little broccoli heads growing! Here's a picture of it:

 

This was taken as Jason cut some off for our dinner! The carrot plants still look good as well, but they are definitely ready for picking:

  

And then we had some funny-looking carrots that actually looked a little naughty!

We'll be enjoying carrots and broccoli for some time!

Read more...

Our first harvest!

The garden has come along nicely and we finally were able to pick a couple of the zucchini.

They look nice, don't they? But let's see them in comparison with my arm!

They're longer than my forearm! And just let me say that this was a really hard picture to take by myself. Here's a look at our garden today:

The squash and zucchini have taken over the whole thing! Since before, we've braced the tomatoes and the sugar snap peas. Out of two red bell pepper plants, we have one pepper growing so far:

Both pepper plants look kind of sad, but when Jason went back to the store, he said that their plants look the same. I thought something was wrong, but apparently not. Here's the spinach:

It's about the size of the baby spinach that you can buy in stores, but I'm going to let it get bigger. The squash plants are coming along nicely:


The squash plants are a little smaller than I expected, but they bloomed very quickly. They are devoting more of their energy towards growing their fruit, so they haven't grown in size recently. The real stars of the show are the zucchini plants:

Looks a lot like the squash plants until you see the size of those leaves compared to my hand:

They're huge, too! And here's a couple pics of some zucchini that isn't quite ready to be picked yet.


Our green beans are growing quickly and finally have little blooms on them. No beans yet, but when they start, we will have tons of them.

The sugar snap peas are a mystery to us. We don't know what to expect from them and they haven't seemed to grow any bigger recently. Jason put some stakes in so that they wouldn't grow out of control, but.....they haven't.

And finally, we have one tomato growing on a vine.

Hopefully, we'll have more coming soon!

Read more...

How Does Our Garden Grow?

Quite nicely, actually! Here's a picture breakdown of our veggie's growth so far:

Cherry Tomatoes (regular tomatoes not pictured)

Sugar Snap Peas

Red Bell Peppers

Spinach

Zucchini or Yellow Squash - I have no idea which is which

Green Beans

Want to know why our beans and squash are surrounded by styrofoam cups? It's easy. Pill bugs, or Roly Polys, as some people call them. The very first night after the plants had grown out of the soil, those little bugs attacked them. We went outside at midnight and found them feeding on them, at least 5 or so per plant. They just eat into the fleshy part of the stem and munch away. They normally don't feed on plants unless they are in very large numbers and there's not much food. Our garden fit the bill. We wanted to try to grow our garden without pesticides, so Jason found that he could buy diatemaceous (sp?) soil which is harmless to us. Unfortunately, you can only buy it in nurseries which are only open until 5. So, for night number two, we tried to block the bugs physically with these cups so that we could save the plants. Since it's worked, we didn't even bother buy the soil after all. Once the plants are larger, the pill bugs won't be able to bite into them, so we can remove the cups.

The last thing in our garden is this chili pequin plant:

Yeah, I know it looks like a stick. It was a larger plant that was growing underneath this plant:

We took out this plant because it was in the way of the garden and it was a little out of control. It's now planted at my in-law's house where it can grow all it wants!

Back to the plant - er - stick. I tried to plant the entire plant we uprooted at first. It was about a foot and a half long and had lots of leaves. I watered it, but it just didn't look very good. The leaves dried out and died. So Jason gave it a mayjuh haircut and chopped it to the stick it it. I thought there was no hope, but as you can see below, there's some growth!

I took these photos yesterday and today, there's actually 3 spots of growth on it! We may have little chili pequins one day after all!

Read more...

Weekend Project Revealed!

Did you guess what Jason did with the pick-ax and the wood? If you guessed "build a garden" then you were right! Sorry, but there are no prizes. This blog just isn't big enough and I have no sponsors! (Sponsors and their samples will be much appreciated, however.) Moving on.

This is what our side yard looked like before the garden. The wood you see was some old wood that came off of some picnic tables. We try to save the planet once board at a time here at our casa.

The labor actually started over a week ago. Jason thought he would start by digging out the hole, build a frame, then fill it in with some good dirt. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a much more daunting task than it would seem.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but the pile of dirt you see is almost all rock. Lots and lots of rock. Not too much dirt here. Poor Jason got his workout when he took on this project. He put that pick-ax to work and even bent it a little.

We had a potentially scary thing happen while Jason was pick-axing out the pit. He almost broke a water main! It was placed about 8 inches off the side of the house. When we moved in, we couldn't figure out why there were double faucets outside in a few places. We just accepted it and used which ever one was easier to get to. In reality, one was connected to the water softener (the original pipes) and the other was connected to the city water. Apparently the previous owners didn't want to waste their water-softening salt on the yard, so they T-ed off the original water main from the street and put in new faucets. Jason almost broke the "new" water main...the one connected to the city water. We plan on capping it off and taking it out later on. The water was plenty soft without the extra salt so we had disconnected the softener a long time ago. But do you know what the worst part was? We didn't know where the shut-off valve was. It's on the street and we would have to have a wrench (which we do somewhere) and then be without water until Monday morning! Aaahhh!!!!

After we learned something new about our home, he dug a little more carefully. Here's the pit he dug out, complete with a giant pile of rock on either side. It's roughly 20 feet long and about 8 feet wide.

Every time I would go outside to check on Jason, Cassius would jump in the window to see where I went. He hates to be left out!

After digging out the dirt/rock, he planned to frame it in to contain the garden. I was sent to buy him some nails. Big mistake on his part. There are too many to choose from! Finally, I found the right ones and came home. He started sawing and nailing the old picnic table wood to make the frame. Sadly, the wood was just too old and too hard to nail. It constantly split and the nails didn't want to dig into the wood. He then decided to just start over and buy new wood. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise!

It turns out that old treated wood contains CCA (chromated copper arsenate) which is used as a preservative to keep out microbes, termites and other insects. CCA was outlawed for consumer use in December 2003 because of the levels of arsenic leaching off the wood were too high. You can read it directly from the EPA here. Our old picnic wood was definitely treated before 2003, so we chunked it. The new wood treatments are just that.....new. Rather than find out in 10 years that the new treatment is also toxic, we opted to use untreated lumber. Sure, we may have to replace it in a few years, but it's better than finding arsenic in your tomatoes!

Here's the untreated lumber frame that Jason built. That's his dad in the background helping to fill in the holes and level it off.

As they worked, two cats would jump into the next door neighbor's window. They would reach out to us, as if we could pet them! The one on the left is trying to lay down in what looks to be about 2 inches of space. The one on the left is harder to see since it's mostly black, but he just wanted to jump over to us and let us love on him!

After ensuring that the frame was level, Jason & his dad started to fill it in with some nice manure-filled dirt. That part took the least amount of time! So, without further ado, here's the finished product:

I am planning on buying some seeds and tomato plants this week. Jason is in Washington, DC until Thursday, so I won't have any help until Friday! I'll update as soon as we get it all planted! I can't wait to get some nice, home grown veggies!

Read more...