Easiest makeover yet

For me at least! Last week I went to Dallas for a few days for work and when I got back my dad (who was down with my mom to take care of G in the evenings) had painted out outside table. It looks great!

New front door!

Okay, it is the same door, but it looks new!

Fall Veggies

Our fall garden is in! We have carrots (from seed so there are no pictures because it would just be dirt right now), tomatoes, broccoli, cilantro and peppers. We also have a strawberry plant still hanging on from the summer.

An attempt at fall tomatoes. This one hasn't grown very much, so I'm not too hopeful:

 

This tomato is doing much better. It even has some blossoms. Hopefully it will fruit soon!

This is the pepper area. There is a jalapeno and an anaheim plant in here, and they are too close together because I didn't realize the anaheim actually sprouted. However, they are doing pretty well:

Strawberries. The plant is doing awesome, but we've gotten exactly 1 strawberry out of it. The birds have gotten to all the rest first:

Cilantro again now that it is cooler:

Broccoli (if you know me, you know this was an Andrew request):

Grayson's play area

I'm working on making the area to the side of our patio a play area for Grayson. We moved the sandbox over there, and today I added a toy car road. It is just pavers but I added some yellow lane strips.

The tunnel was surprisingly hard to make steep enough to actually have a car easily go through:

The parking lot. I'm thinking about adding a "garage" or something to this also.

I would like to get a few more squares a make a little area for his picnic table. Hopefully Grayson enjoys it!

Only 800 trips from the front to the back later...

Long day ahead of us

All this is going around back!

SmartGardener.com

I'm trying out a new website: smartgardener.com I think it has potential, but I don't think I'm using it correctly yet. Hopefully by next spring I will figure it out.

To use it, you first set up your garden by setting your zip code, telling them how many people are in your house, putting in the dimensions, and then marking "North." After that you are supposed to add what you want to grow (or it will recommend plants for your season and location) and it will tell you where to put everything based on where the sun will be.

The first catch is that you can only do veggies, so if you want to add berries (we have strawberries growing right now) or herbs it is $2 to add each of those.

Once you get it all set up it sends you a weekly checklist of things you should be doing (when to start indoors, transplant, etc). I have trouble figuring out how to check things off the list and say I did them. This may be because Smart Gardener doesn't think I should be growing anything right now...

It has options for setting up a container garden on a patio, so I thought this might be fun for Andrew's Grandma Towle to use next year. I will have to figure out if it can work!

Mosquito plan

Last summer was a really bad one- record breaking heat, no rain. It was terrible for the lawn and the plants, but on the bright side we had no mosquitoes! This year has been normal levels of heat and lots of rain, which has lead to terrible mosquitoes in both the front yard and the back. Austin isn't planning any aerial spraying yet, but we've had a few cases of West Nile in Austin.

(In crazy Mom news, I had to confess to Andrew this weekend that I was a little worried G had West Nile because he had a fever on Saturday. We agreed that I was probably nuts but that I would call the doctor if he still had a fever on Monday. Of course, G was fine by Monday)

If you are on our front porch the mosquitoes swarm you. I counted seven hovering around me the other day. I don't really like spraying bug spray on G even though we have some all natural baby spray, but I make him wear one of these:

He actually kind of likes it because it looks a little like his Dad's Livestrong bracelet. Lucky for him I am a total mosquito magnet, so if we are out together they are all coming after me anyway.

I decided we needed to do some research, since I basically cannot go outside without getting a bite. I read about what attracts the mosquitoes and what we can do to discourage them, and we've been making some changes:

1. 1. Andrew cleaned the gutters in the back. I'm hoping this is where they were coming from on our porch. Apparently they like clogged gutters and it makes sense- wet decaying material. 
2. We had some plants growing in our front side garden. They weren't exactly weeds, but they were not purposely planted. They all had leaves that were just like what was described as something that a mosquito would like. I took them all out (and suffered a few mosquito bites in the process)
3. We can water twice a week now, so I check every Thursday and Sunday morning for standing water. Can't help them out at all!
4. Lemongrass = citronella. I never made this connection. I was thinking about adding some decorative grasses to the yard, and I now I know which one I will pick. They require full sun. I will probably do marigolds as well, since they don't like that smell either.

Hopefully next summer will be mild again but with fewer biting bugs!

G pics

I can't resist. Here are some pics of our cutie

Eating hummus- yum! It still takes him a lot of concentration to use the spoon, but he's a lot better than even a few weeks ago.

Playing with his legos and stickers in a cardboard box. And drooling. I don't have a good answer for why he's only in a diaper.

Raised eyebrow- I love it!

And this isn't of G, but it's for him. My parents got him a picnic table. I just finished painting it red. The good part is I really like the color. The bad part is now I think I should do our table as well. I think it is safe to assume that I could paint for weeks and still not paint everything I think needs paint around here.

Rain

I forgot to post these earlier, but here are some pics from the rain a few weeks ago..

It was WET!

Surviving the Summer

We've been lucky enough to get a pretty solid amount of rain in the past few weeks, so even though it's been hot, things are still doing pretty well.

Exhibit A: Hydrangea is still alive!

These guys just got new soil (far right one is a gift from my mom's garden) and are on an "outside" rotation. The back porch faces east and really only gets morning sun this close to the house. It's not a bad spot for houseplants to be for a while.

All the rain means these guys (zinnias) I think are looking pretty good. I pulled out all the sunflowers against the fence. They were looking more like sticks with dead leaves on them. Not sure I was supposed to do that- I will probably plant them again because they were really pretty in bloom, but will need to do some more research about what I'm supposed to do with them.

I went to our local gardening center today and Grayson helped me pick out some tomatoes for our fall crop. He was a very good helper- sometimes too good. The store uses metal Radio Flyers wagons as carts and he loves to push them around the store while I pull and steer. I stopped a few times and he didn't so I got a wagon to the calf once or twice. He was very cute after we checked out and took his job of carrying one of the tomato plants to the car VERY seriously. 

We're going to try full size tomatoes this fall. We got a Roma plant and a Celebrity. Right now it's too hot for them to be in the full sun all the time so they are on the back porch also. 

We love fresh ginger and it is pretty cheap at our grocery store so we usually keep some on hand. I guess we hadn't used it in a while because I noticed a sprout on it, a lot like a potato would get. I read online you can plant them and grow your own ginger so I decided to stick it in a pot and see what happens. You can just barely see two little sprouts sticking out of dirt here.

In anticipation of the tomatoes, we extended the veggie garden. 

In the meantime though our two basil plants are still doing well. We've made pesto a few times with them and it's yummy! We will definitely continue to plant these.

We also cut down the tree that was nearby. It was pretty small, but would drape over the gate and make it really hard to get out and was shading the veggies. With all the rain and then the shade from the tree the garden was pretty wet for a while and one of the squash plants seem to rot at the base so I pulled it out. The jalepeno must have been grateful because it has since given us our first pepper of the year.

Here's the other squash. It doesn't look good either- very white at the base. We'll see if it recovers in full sun. Or maybe that is how it should look...I'm still learning!

A trip to Home Depot

I went to Home Depot on Friday because Grayson's closet handle kept falling off. It was coming unscrewed because it had the wrong type of screw in it so I went to get a correct one.

Grayson's daycare was closed, so he was with me. For whatever reason, he was really enjoying being in the cart that day, so we ended up walking around more. He's really into pointing at things right now and having me tell him the name of what he's pointed at. We were playing that game and walking around Home Depot and ended up in the plant section. We passed some Crotons (which I always pronounce as croutons in my head). They are one of Andrew's favorite plants- he really likes colored leaves. So we got two....and that lead to a lot of digging this weekend!

I didn't really have any plan of where to put them. When I got home I realized that we didn't really have a good place...currently. However there were several plants we had talked about taking out for a long time. We had even cut off a few but never dug them out. When G went down for his nap I dug out the two we had cut off. They were in front of our chairs and we never liked him. They did smell really nice when we cut them down, so I think they might have been a type of sage.

After I pulled those out, I lamented that our front corner had gotten crowded. I dug around a little to look at it and realized I could rotate one of our perennials so that it was not so close to the edge without pulling out the tap root. So I did!

Cleared out front section: 

But I still didn't really have a good place for my two new plants. So on Saturday I just started digging. And I dug out the three remaining burning bushes. Then Andrew helped me pull out the last two sage type bush/trees. And then we had a nice space for my new crotons that need part sun!

The only plants that are in the garden now that were there when we moved in are the trees and the giant Mexican sage.

You can see them- the colored leaves in the back. The tag says they will get up to 3 feet wide and 6 feet tall. We'll see. I also moved some flowers that the Mexican sage was overtaken. 

An older pic, for comparison. Just a bunch of randomness. Hopefully we'll look more coherent now.

 And from when we moved in:

And a bonus. My mom gave me the plant on the left when I was in Dallas this week, so on my trip to Home Depot I got a pot and I have a new addition to my yellow collection!

Ack

With a forecast like this: 

All I can do is water and hope things survive!

Embarrassing

Because we made it to 101 on Monday, it was time to pull out the tomatoes. We harvested all the remaining tomatoes and have a plan to make some green tomato chutney. While pulling them up I saw my plant labels. 

For the first time since I planted I realized I bought some yellow cherry tomatoes. This explains why some of our tomatoes never seem to ripen, but now I've got a ton of tomatoes and I can't tell if they are unripe red ones or ripe yellow. The vines got so intertwined by the end I can't even guess based on where I'm pulling tomatoes from.

Lesson learned. Next time if I buy yellow tomatoes, I will make sure they are cherries and my red ones are grape. Or just pay better attention to what I buy in general.

But the garden is still going! We've got some squash blossoms. I can't wait to see if they are yellow or green squash. I planted both, but I don't know what grew.

The basil is thrilled to have some more room- the tomatoes were taking more then their fair share of the garden.

And now that the tomatoes are gone, maybe my pepper plants can get enough sun to grow!

101, but still flowering..

We had our first 100+ day on Monday. So far, everything we planted is still alive and we're getting some flowers...

Even my hydrangea