Salad Days Garden

John built a raised bed! With mole blocker! That's what the chicken wire is supposed to do...

Very exciting, but then we had to fill it. Lots of options. We decided just to buy a yard of potting mix and a couple of bags of "chicken poop dirt."

Here's the dirt arriving:

The boys helping us wheelbarrow the dirt:

The boys helping stomp the dirt:

 

It's all fun and games until someone steals your shovel:

I decided on a sort of salad bar garden. I wanted tomatoes and bell peppers and herbs and stuff. We also chose vegetables that the boys would enjoy watching grow like corn and artichokes. And John wanted hot peppers. Three kinds of hot peppers.

While we wait to decide on what kind of tree to put in the ring, we planted for artichokes. They should grow pretty tall and kind of take over the space. Acting all tree like.

I also bought some seeds and am waiting for them to sprout before I plant them. Sunflowers, basil, radishes, carrots...more stuff for the kids to maybe like if they grow and harvest them. 

This would be a lot easier if sushi and cupcakes grew on trees.

Afternoon in the Garden of Color and Insanity

 

This weekend, John built us a raised garden bed for us to plant vegetables. I've selected a sort of salad bar concept for the vegetables, i.e. tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, bell peppers, onions, etc...

But before we could buy the plants, John hopped out of town and there is no way I'm planting anything without a second party present. 

1. Too hot. I need time to see where the sun is over the bed during the day.

2. I have no idea if things should go together or be faaaaar apaaaaart...

3. That's a lot of money to spend without coming out of it with new shoes.

So I ended up buying some thyme (that works on two levels), and some other cool succulents I found. 

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that my garden and backyard are a work in progress and most likely this will always be so. But in vignettes, it's pretty.  So here are a few I noticed today:

 

This last one is a plant that Beckett selected at the nursery. He just sort of grabbed something and said, "Here, Mom!" But it turns out it's the perfect foil for all the green and bright colors everywhere else.

Crazy Boy Day

So hard to organize a photoshoot for these knuckleheads. Which is why these are the most recent photos of the boys. Crazy Hair day.