Food on the brain

I have been planting flowers in the front yard for the past two summers that we've been in the house, but this year, we are trying something different: SEEDING.

Some are seeds that I ordered, others are seeds we took from the plants in the fall. My goal is to keep it under a hundred bucks this year, instead of the few hundred I have spent on the past summers. And it has been keeping us busy!

There is one flower bed in the front that I have never planted... in the fall we ripped out the yucky plants and transplanted the good ones. We now have an 18x11 foot bed to plant veggies in this year! We are doing beans, tomatoes, cukes, peppers, Brussels sprouts, watermelon, pumpkin. Not all of it is going into the bed, but we are anticipating a lot of potted veggies and some failures, so it will be a fine summer regardless. We have done a lot of planning for planting.

We finished edging the bed tonight, and in the next few weeks we will build a wall out of all the river rock we dredged from the dirt. There's a lot of it, so much that I need to build the wall soon to get the pile of rocks out the garden-to-be.

The garden bled into the yard a little, so we had to pull up some grass, which was happily transplanted to bald spots in the back yard. Here, Zoe helps with the effort:

While Zoe's new thing is gardening, that should last only a few more weeks until all the neighbor kids are out again on a regular basis. Jacob's new thing is cooking with Mom. He loves to help, watch, eat, make a mess. Here's a shot of him on my laptop, which wouldn't happen under circumstances where I didn't have three burners and an oven on all at once:


I can't wait until summer. CAN'T WAIT. But I'm glad spring is here, and I'll take what I can get!