So I took the Springtime off......

I can't believe how little happened in my garden while I wasn't there to lovingly care and tend for it, (when I was working all day in an office, away from my family, my home, the soil and the sun and the plants).  Now that I've resigned from my job, I'm going gangbusters on the yard and on the garden.  While I was working, I decided to scale back how much I planted to compensate for my lack of time, so this Spring I had some lettuce, a couple of radishes (the others just didn't get picked) and some broccoli this Spring.  And, we just recently harvested a ton of carrots!  Love those things!  So easy to grow from seed, homegrown carrots taste completely different from store-bought carrots, and tomatoes love them (supposedly)!  Now, the garden's growing tomatoes (trying fewer plants on trellises this year without espadrilling them.....I laid them down in the dirt because I read that roots will grow all along the hairy stem and you get more fruiting branches that way), yellow squash, nasturtiums, zucchini, zinnias, a sweet pepper and some purple crowder peas that I saved from last year's crop.  I've also planted a couple of containers of lettuces and radishes (supposed to keep the lettuce from tasting bitter from the heat), and a muscadine grapevine.  She likes the wild boy muscadine that's growing in the brush behind our yard, and we've got a nice little crop of baby grapes coming along!  My zucchini blossoms keep dropping--I vaguely recall having this problem before, and I think I need a second zucchini plant to fix this problem.  Still waiting for my first squash to get big enough to be more than two bites before I pick them, but the four of them are happily taking over an entire bed.  I let my first blue lake beans dry on the vine while I was in DC, and last week I popped the beans inside into the ground, and this week I've got new plants starting to poke through the dirt.  I also have a red onion growing that had sprouted in the cabinet....who needs a seed packet when you can grow what's in your kitchen?

As for the yard, we had some landscapers come in and clear out all that old monkeygrass, which has left me a blank slate to work with (in the backyard--Craig wants to get a landscape design done for the front yard).  So, while Meghan and Michael are at camp this week, Matthew's attending Mommy's Art Camp--the medium is plants.  What's the cheapest way to buy plants?  In a hanging basket!  You can get them basically at "buy two get one free" this way.  What you can't find in a basket, go find at Hillbilly Produce.  They're having a buy one get one free sale.  I save my plant containers, and I spent the afternoon planting new containers for the deck and the yard using combinations of all these plants.  What fun!  I hope this Miracle-Gro Moisture Control potting soil is all they say it is.  Time will tell.