And a month later...

Well it seems like I've ignored blogland for a good month now. I guess the summer has been so busy with school, work, and other uninteresting things that I haven't had a good picture or amusing anecdote to share in a while. We've got some exciting things on the horizon for the next part of the summer, but for now I thought I'd refresh the old blog and leave you with some pictures of the garden. (Boring I know, but that's the best I've got right now ;)

Our little strawberry plants are truckin' along. And when I say little - I mean little. See below for a picture of the BIGGEST strawberries we've seen... 

(Not so big strawberries) Guess that means I'm not a perfected strawberry-farmer yet ;)

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are coming out our ears!! Good thing we love all things yummy made from tomatoes - the picture above is about 1/8 of our weekly tomato crop!

Like other things in the garden, our pole beans are struggling with this 100 degree weather with no rain. 

This doesn't seem to stop them from completely taking over the other side of our fence, though!

The big bed - all that height in the back is tomatoes ;)

Baby cucumbers are quite cute

I guess this picture is in memorial - the heat killed this squash plant this week. So sad.

My favorite to harvest - potatoes! When digging these babies out I ended up with dirt all the way to my shoulders - messy but fun!

Sorry so boring. Promise next time I post it'll be MUCH more interesting. (Promise ;)

Love-

K

Garden Update

It's now officially May and the garden is beginning to flourish. All the tender loving care I put into those little seedlings has (for the most part) paid off - and I've learned what plants do great from seeds (squash, beans, peas, carrots, etc.) and what you're better off just buying from seedlings (tomatoes and strawberries). 

Our little row of beans and peas are shooting up so fast!

First pea pod of the season...

Bean fingers. One of my favorite things ever. Who knows if that's what they're really called, but that's what I call them. If you tether the little "finger" shooter to the pole with a plant tie, it's wrapped itself around the pole this much in a day or two. Incredible!

The tops of our potatoes - they're mounded up about 6 inches, it's just hard to tell because the greenery has exploded so much!

The beginning of our first tomato - my favorite produce from the garden ;) We've got about 6 or 7 tomato vines this year, so hopefully I'll have plenty to spare!

We're going greener (and cheaper!) this year. This is our first rain barrel. Denise and I went to a "Build Your Own Rain Barrel" workshop in Frisco (Thanks Melody!) and Denise let me take our first labor of love to our house. The Powers will have one for their brand new house soon!

So far it's rained once since we installed the barrel and I've watered the garden for nearly two weeks with the water in the barrel. Hello lower water bill!!

A bit ghetto-rigged, but I'll fix that soon and try my hand at painting it to make it a little less "blue" - so consider this the before picture. After pics to follow. 

My pretty little Dragon Wing Begonia - brightens my day when I'm stuck inside grading papers.

Happy spring everyone! Enjoy it while it lasts... Before we bake all summer in a 95 degree oven...

Love-

K

Spring Break Chronicles - Kelley vs. The Pickaxe

For those of you who know my husband, he is a construction-working, Mr. Fix-It, tougher-than-nails, man's man. Last week we were in his car driving to church and I noticed a pickaxe and a sledgehammer in his back seat. I asked him if having these things in his car made him extra manly. He replied, "You know it, babe." (Upon reading this part of the blog, he admitted that the sledgehammer actually belongs to our friend Nels Jacobson. I asked if we needed to give Nels some credit for manliness, and Jer replied, "Yes - I get my manliness from my friends.")


The weather was so pretty yesterday that we decided to do some garden work. I had one raised-bed veggie garden last year, but we were planning to put in two more for this season. After the trip to Lowes for lumber and to Gene Gohlke's for some compost, we were starting to run out of time to build the garden. I decided the most efficient way to *ahem* get 'er done was to double-team it. Jeremy was already sawing the boards and constructing the boxes, so I reached for the pickaxe to break up the ground.


I have to admit that I'm pretty proud of myself - I hacked up 17 square feet of our yard in record time. I think that was my official initiation into the Irwin family, because everyone knows an Irwin can use a pickaxe like nobody's business.


Here are the pictures of our lovely finished, empty beds. Empty because there's a winter storm warning for today, so I didn't want to risk it. Just use your imagination and think of them like blank canvases ;)

And for good measure, since the above pictures are semi-boring, here's a picture of the amazing blooms showing up on our peach tree: (please please PLEASE winter weather - don't kill my peach tree flowers...)

So after my initiation into Irwin-ism, I did what any tough hoss of a woman would do.....

I went and got a massage.

Love ,

K

Updates

Thanks to everyone who was praying for my grandpa's recovery - he is now with my parents back home in Midland recovering :) He's eating sans feeding tube, walking with a walker, and showering. Woo hoo! We are VERY thankful that his recovery has gone this well.




In other news (and very MINOR news compared to the praise above), my knees are feeling great and I've been able to SLOWLY bump my barefoot-esque running up to 2 miles. Yay Vibrams - I sure do love you.

Now that the weather is finally starting to resemble spring, I've started daydreaming about our vegetable garden again. After having learned from my mistakes last year (don't plant watermelon or pumpkin, they will take over your tiny yard and you will get approximately 1 watermelon and 1 pumpkin...), I planned out our crops. 

Yesterday was so beautiful outside that I set to work uprooting remnants of dead tomato vines and dried up bean stalks and chopping it up for compost. I also dug up some compost from the bottom of our bin (which smelled lovely for sure) and mixed it in with our existing beds. I have a whole new respect for my husband now. He built the bed for me last summer by hacking up the ground with a pick-ax. I stir a little dirt up and I have a VERY sore back this morning. My hubby is a hoss. 

I now have my little seeds germinating in preparation for planting outside in a few weeks. I can't wait. Watching plants grow definitely stirs my affections for the Lord.

Love you-

K