We had a couple of days of wonderful spring weather last week. And then, of course, it tried to go to crap this weekend! We didn’t let the wind on Thursday or the storms on Saturday evening ruin our spring plans though!
Last year is the first year that I’d say we had a successful vegetable garden. My goal this year is to expand just a little bit in all directions. I’m planning on several more tomato and pepper plants this year. We’ll still have just a couple squash, green beans, and a watermelon plant or two. The addition of lettuce, cabbage, and onions should round out the vegetable garden. Pumpkins and sunflowers for the chickens. A new strawberry patch and blackberry bushes along the driveway. I even bought a loofah plant! HAHA! This year is our first year attempting anything from seed. I should have stuck with the original plan of starting those seeds the first weekend of March. It was sooo cold though that weekend and it’s hard to get into the seed-planting mood when it’s dreary and cold outside, ugh…Now I’m not sure our seedlings will be big enough to plant in the ground when outside temps are ready. That’s probably part of the reason I went overboard the other day at a couple of local plant sales! My trip to the local Career and Technology Center’s greenhouse sale to pick up a Carolina Reaper and a loofah plant led to cilantro, snap peas, spaghetti squash, and more tomatoes. A gift certificate to the greenhouse at SEMO University (not far from home of the CTC greenhouse) was burning a hole in my pocket- I left there with spinach, lettuce, basil, more jalepenos, and some citronella plants. No wonder my husband just shakes his head and walks away sometimes!
I’m not big on flowers, shrubs, and such. The previous owner of our house was. This year we’re ripping it all out (or planning to at least). The west side of the house seems like a much better place for a strawberry patch than for the Rose of Sharon, burning bushes, and whatever those other tall green bushy things are. So Lando and I set to work on Saturday to cut them all out. I’m reluctant to just pull them out and be done with them. They seem to be planted a little too close to the side of the house to not cause some type of damage if we were to yank them out. So instead, we went through and cut them off semi-close to the base and painted them with stump killer. (Eventually we’ll get to be less dependent on chemicals but that’s going to be a slow and well-researched process. Right now I have other priorities.)
Even Cali helped tear out shrubs
While we worked on that, Ed was busy in shop working on the tractor and his “old” riding lawnmower. I suspect that the mower deck is not the one that goes with the rest of mower. It goes through mower belts like nobody’s business! It is now being modified to be more of a lawn “towing” type tractor- perfect for an 8 year old who needs a little extra motivation sometimes to help with outside chores! It took no convincing at all to get him to move two small wagon loads of lava rock to the pond overflow on the other side of the driveway! Win win for everyone on that one dad!
