yard - hooey!critic

I’m a farmer…or so I like to pretend

We spent much of this weekend working on the vegetable garden. Actually, we spent much of this weekend working on the fence around the vegetable garden.

Last year taught us that three kids, one feisty puppy, and one digging wiener dog do not make for the best vegetable bounty. We knew that we had to fix the problem this year.

We started by moving the raised vegetable beds to a higher point in the yard that gets a few hours more sun than our previous spot did. Next, my wonderful husband build me a great little fence to surround the beds.

No dogs shall enter!

The beds are ready to be planted – that is next weekend’s project. But, the soil is beautiful and lovely. All the grass inside the fence will eventually be killed and we will create little walking paths with gravel. Plus, there is room for a small potting station off to the side!

I decided to plant my herbs in containers this year in order to free up space for more vegetables. I only planted parsley, basil, and mint (hello, summer mojitos!). They are mounted on top of the fence and have wonderful drainage in the bottom. My plan is to keep adding container gardens across the top of the fence so that I have more room in the beds for whatever the kids decided they want to plant.

And, the watermelons I planted a couple of weeks ago are starting to root and grow! I can’t wait to watch them vine down the sides of the barrel.

The best part of this whole setup? The kids like to pretend the inside of the new fence is a jail. Sadly (not!) they can’t reach the latch from the outside. So once they go in they can’t come out. Hehe…

Gold rush and sticks

September 17, 2008 by Neena 4 Comments

My children had one of those rare days today were they begged to go outside. Maybe it was because the rain finally stopped. Maybe it was to escape my meatloaf dinner. Whatever. They wanted to run and play. I had a feeling, though, a mommy intuition that my little darlings were up to something. Of course I was right.

They were in the process of tearing down a tree. Yes, a tree! They were attempting to rip to shreds the magnolia tree that was given to us as a wedding present over 6 years ago.

In all honesty there wasn’t much hope for the tree to begin with. It sat in a container at my in-laws’ house for over three years until we got around to planting it at this house. It has never really had any leaves sprout amongst its twigs and has pretty much resembled a stick in the ground since it was planted three years ago. As you can see from the photos we can’t grow much in our yard…including grass. No, not that kind of grass. Geez!

I didn’t yell at them for trying to take down our wedding tree. I was just happy to see them working as a team.

When they did finally see me sneaking around the backyard with the camera, Jake came running to show me this:

It was some weird rock-like foam thing he found outside. He proudly told me that he had found some gold. I cheered and asked him what he was going to buy with his gold. He looked right at me as if calculating something in his head and said: