While our Fourth of July celebrations may have been less than impressive, our weekend was not a total disaster.
A week or so ago Chris started making me a raised bed so we could have a bit of a kitchen garden in the back yard, but then he ran out of free wood and stopped. Later, when he and the boys went scavenging for more supplies, well, long story short, David ended up in the emergency room with an old rusty screw in his foot, which obviously put a damper on any near-future wood gathering excursions. Being the resourceful housewife that I am, I solved this problem while daddy was at work, dragging the children out on a Craigslist adventure in which we picked up a van load of free wood from someone's deck replacement project. Chris was very surprised when he got home and so excited to get back to work on my garden over the long weekend, I'm sure.
We put the garden in the only sunny patch we have in our back yard, known affectionately as "the weed patch." Chris leveled the whole area and dug out all of the random plants that were growing there, as well as the ever present grass weeds that kept popping up no matter how often I attempted to pull them out. A proper blogger would have given you before pictures but all I have is the after--just imagine a smallish bush/tree, a scraggly rose bush minus the roses, and a whole lot of ground cover with a smattering of weeds and vines throughout--one of which had thorns sharp enough to pierce leather gloves--which I discovered the hard way. There were also some pretty blue wildflowers that we learned were dayflowers. The boys had been checking them daily since we read that they only bloom for one day and then the flower dies, which is apparently very exciting. The kids were upset that we had to dig them out so I tried transplanting them nearby and I think they'll probably make it, seeing that, besides being interesting, they're also a fairly hardy weed.
Anyway, in the garden we put in a tomato plant, a zucchini plant, and a pepper plant and then the other third of the bed was planted with carrot seeds because Henry desperately wants to grow carrots. We didn't have much luck with them on our last attempt, but we also didn't have such an amazing, deep garden for them to grow in, so perhaps this is our year.
After he finished the bed for me, Chris was on a very manly sawing roll so he went ahead and cut the wood for a flower press template I've been working on for our homeschool co-op this year out of a sheet of plywood we had in the basement. And then after all that, my darling husband went to work "mowing" the yard with our weed wacker--which is what you do when the free lawn mower you just inherited won't start and you send it to the lawnmower repair man who informs you they're running about six weeks behind. Great.
Here's to productive weekends, and (hopefully) gardens......and a quicker turnaround on that lawnmower repair......