Gardening Makes Me Hungry

I am fairly pleased with us as a family. We actually managed to uncover, till and prep the garden beds on time! We even planted a few things. The rest of the seeds will be planted soon, and we have a few seedlings coming from a junior high fundraiser.

If you care about this sort of thing, we covered the beds with hay a few weeks ago (after clearing them of leaves, acorns and the largest of the weeds). We could have (should have?) done this after clearing them from the last planting season, but a few weeks of weed suppression is better than none. In order to finish prepping them, we uncovered each bed (moving the hay to the weed covered areas around the beds) and tilled (using a tiller rented from Home Depot) a bag of Ladybug Revitalizer Compost Blend into each bed. Then we just had to rake the soil relatively flat and water the beds really well and we were ready to plant. We planted corn (step one of the Three Sisters garden), red runner beans for the tee-pee and my much loved Baby Mesclun Lettuce Mix. By the by - most of my seeds come from Renee's Garden Seeds, and they produce beautifully.

Oh, and as step one of my personal campaign to make our wonderful little house a place that is not so visually disappointing, we cleared out a completely overgrown and hideous bed in the front of the house to use for flowers and herbs. Very exciting (for me). Don seems invigorated by my plans and helps as much as he can on the weekends. If only I weren't overtaken by compulsions to make huge and sweeping changes in the middle of the week! With some weekend help, I managed to get rosemary, lavender, sage, lemongrass, and a few snapdragons planted. On the "*huh* didn't quite expect that" end of it, clearing the groundcover and weeds from the bed has liberated the grass. New, tender shoots of grass are poking up happily every half inch or so. Um, I guess we should have tilled that bed when we tilled the garden because the roots for the grass are obviously deeper than the raking that we did and new soil that we put down. Oi. Live and learn.

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Both kids LOVE to be outside. Lily Ruth could play for hours in the garden, in her fort or running with her dog. Alec is crazy excited about the outdoors. He stands at our windows and stares out with fingers gripping the sill and eyebrows raised almost into his hairline in anticipation of going out there and putting everything he can see into his mouth.

All of this time thinking about and working in the garden means that I think about food even more than usual. Um, that's a LOT.

I've been doing my menu plans, but I've lost interest in sharing them. My recent lack of energy means that I can make good food, or talk about said food, but not both :-/

We've tried some new recipes, and have even loved some of them. I have started moving recipes that I like to my google drive. Maybe I'll just start sharing those instead :-)