Garden Update

It's raining tonight. A good, hard rain. Lightning, thunder, huge drops of water splashing onto my whole life and garden. It's been a long time since we had rain. This one will soak in deep. Sigh of relief.

Two friends this week have independently marveled at how much I have done with the backyard in such a short time. I feel like it's been an eternity...each step in the process has been a baby step. Do something, wait a couple weeks, do something else with it, wait a while more, do something else, and then BOOM five months later it adds up to this:

See? It's still mostly dirt. The potential is there, though. Friends and neighbors have helped with key projects, propelling the work forward when I just couldn't do it on my own.

What have I planted? A little bit of everything. The key term here is "a little bit." I have no plans to can tomatoes in the thick of the August heat when I'm 7 months pregnant. No thanks. Here's the planting list:

Annuals
shelling peas
butter crunch leaf lettuce
carrots
broccoli
Chinese cabbage
cylindrical beets
green beans
lima beans
dwarf sweet corn
Cinderella pumpkins
white onions
green onions
butternut squash
green peppers
giant cantaloupe
cucumbers
sunflowers
colossal tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
grape tomatoes
eggplant
basil
marigolds
cosmos
zinnia

Perennials
strawberries
blueberries
peaches
apples
pears
grapes

You'll note the distinct lack of summer squash this time around. I need a break from that watery goo. And except for a few fall strawberries, and a small harvest of grapes, we won't be seeing any of that perennial fruit for a couple years, yet.

I'm finally to the point where the biggest worries (i.e. the infrastructure projects) are almost completely finished. The garden beds and orchard and special soil requirements have been established. I'm just planting/transplanting annuals and maintaining now, mostly. In fact, I've had a little extra time to move other non-food-related projects onto the priority list. Revamping a shady flower bed, for one. A friend helped me remove layers of old landscaping rocks from the shady garden bed right under the kids' bedroom windows. I'm still in the process of tilling it all up and amending the soil, but Alice has already claimed it as her "own" garden. Our awesome neighbors have gifted her with oodles of colorful shade-tolerant flowers and hostas. She's also picked 'flowering plants' out of the mulch at her preschool playground and brought them home to put into her garden (they're actually a weedy clover, but she likes the itty bitty yellow flowers, and I love her enthusiasm for the work, so I'm happy to let her keep them). Hopefully I'll finish prepping the soil bed tomorrow so we can plant and arrange and fuss over her plant babies the rest of the week :) Sweet, sweet bonding time that will also significantly reduce piles of compost and mulch still sitting on our driveway :D

Buddy is also a fan of gardening. He loves the kid-sized shovel. He did a great job digging up the corner of my newly-transplanted carrot bed (ARGH!), and he's a huge fan of "Alice's garden" ("Mommy! Robert's messing everything up!"), but his favorite activity by far is the watering wand. He's strong enough to maneuver the handle and turn the spray on and off. He doesn't care for watering plants or grass, however, and spends most of his "turn" creating puddles on the back patio to stomp in...or leisurely pointing the wand in Alice's general direction so she'll run away screaming for Mama (Alice's buttons are easy to push, can you tell?). I do admire his passion for worms. I thought I liked worms, but this boy caresses and talks to "muhr-mees", cuddling them like pets.

Lawn care has been a bit tricky. I've tried to mow the grass according to all of the "ideal conditions," but it's never ideal. I'm lucky to have such a healthy lawn to start with...in the backyard, anyway. Maybe grass is more forgiving than I've been led to believe :)