We spent the weekend in true Reintjes style working in the yard on ramshackle projects using bits and pieces of things lying about.* The boys are hard at work on a new fort that Chris cleverly designed by sinking sticks in the ground and telling the kids that they needed to gather up all the sticks in the yard they can find to build up the walls by making a kind of wattle fence. It's a win-win. The children get a fort and the grown ups get the sticks cleared away.
It will take a lot of sticks to finish off those walls.
We also worked a bit on shoring up the garden. It's September and the tomatoes are finally tomato-ing. That might tell you something about our gardening skills.
We should probably not be allowed to make gardens. This particular one was designed before we actually knew what the sun situation would be in the new backyard during the summer. Spoiler, there's significantly less sun there than there was in the winter when the trees were bare. Really, we mostly positioned the garden to disguise a very ugly cement wall. If this were our forever house I would have put in hydrangeas there, but we didn't have time to grow up bushes large enough to cover that amount of ugly wall so a garden it was.
Really I like to think of all of our gardening endeavors as practice gardens until we actually have a home of our very own to put in a real professional garden.
So far we've learned that:
- We shouldn't plant tall things in tall planters or we won't be able to reach the vegetables to harvest them.
- We should always check where the sun will shine before we plan our garden.
- Also, we should put the garden somewhere we'll actually remember to look after it. This might not work if you are like me and like the idea of gardening better than the reality of actually tending gardens.
- On a related note, we probably should check our garden more than once a week.
- Don't overplant the garden. The plants will grow larger than we think they will. Really.
- It's silly not to harvest the lettuce. Just make a salad for goodness sake. But lettuce plants can turn into pretty amazing flowers if you let them just go to seed so maybe they weren't a complete waste.
- Maybe next time we should just stick with herbs. My chives are doing very well. You might even say I'm a master chive grower.
There are probably other lessons in there as well, mostly revolving around not planting overly ambitious gardens when you have babies in the house. I doubt we'll ever really learn that particular lesson though, hope does spring eternal.
*When I say "we" I mostly mean "Chris." I mean it was raining most of the time and someone had to stay dry inside listening to the end of their audio book and tending the baby, right?