Mom's Visit

Week three of the garden! Things are looking wonderful! I even have some little tiny green tomatoes on my early girl plant. I am so excited and cannot wait to start eating my very own veggies.

So the big news this week is that Mom came to visit and along with all her wonderful ideas and joyful presence she brought me a lawnmower!!! This made for a HUGE improvement to both the back and front yard. Hopefully future mowing will not be as much work as it was today. But I simply could not be more pleased with the result. It makes everything look so much cleaner and healthier to have the weeds that were getting to be a couple feet tall all gone and all in all it felt really good to mow down those nasty weeds! Now I just need to hit them with a dose of organic weed killer and hope they never return.

Before-

After-

In addition to the lawnmowing, I added a few little shared things from Mom's garden including, yarrow, oxalis, and some varigated thing (this what Mom kept calling it, so I don't remember it's name). She also bought me a beautiful stargazer lilly and some lovely petunias to hang by the front door. Everything is growing and I am so happy with my the way my space is turning out.

PS- I also decided that if it hails in the next 2 months (distinct possibility in Texas) I am going to cry.

The Garden!

So in the last few weeks, I took advantage of some of the wonderful space and preplanned areas I have in my yard. The house came with a raised bed garden and a very cute stone walled garden in the front that was full of weeds. I also love cooking with herbs so I planted a wide variety of potted herbs. I planted the vegetable garden two weeks ago with black beauty squash, banana peppers and leaf lettuce. Then, this last weekend, I added 3 different kinds of tomatoes and red and yellow bell peppers. I also went ahead and used some organic fertilizer on it to try to get things perked up. I will say, I wish things looked prettier but I will keep trying. The fertilizer really seemed to help but I have not yet figured out the best watering schedule. Also, this weekend, I spent several hours breaking my back weeding and hoeing (oh yeah I'm not afraid to say it) the front garden, it was so much hard work but the clean fresh dirt that now conceals my little seeds looks so nice. I added my rosemary and bay leaf plants and seeded the bed with colias, columbine, four o'clocks, inpatients and some other mixed flowers. Hopefully some of them come up but I don't think I should expect to see anything for about 10 days. In addition to all the gardening I also bought so fabulous deck chairs and stained and polyurethaned them and then assembled them. They look wonderful and really help the yard look more like a "living space."