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!