Happy New Year!

We are only hours away from celebrating a New Year - 2018. It's been a great 2017, mostly a year of travel for us! We didn't get a lot of house projects done this year, but we are hoping that next year we will get to some bigger projects that we've been wanting to do for a while.

This New Year's, we have several inches of snow outside, and temperatures in the negative digits. But we're ready to ring in the new year with Trent's family here in town!

I hope you all have a Happy New Year, wherever you are. Stay warm everyone!

Tomato Update

It's Saturday, and I'm hanging at home this weekend! Trent went up to Milwaukee with a couple of friends and will be going to the Cubs/Brewers games tonight and tomorrow. So I'm home with the pup, watching Netflix and cleaning!

And I took a couple of new pics of the garden yesterday, well of the tomato plants anyway. It looks like we'll have lots of tomatoes pretty soon.

I think those are cherry tomatoes above. 

And the below look like the Romas. We have a few more turning red...

We have some big ones growing, too. These things are going to be bigger than my hand pretty soon!

Pretty sure we'll have a much bigger harvest than last year! I'm ready to add some tomatoes to my sandwiches. :)

First Garden Harvest of 2017

It's been a couple of weeks since I blogged all about our recent Michigan trip, but I'm finally popping in for another post, less about traveling and more back to the domestic life! Don't worry though, there will be another travel related post in the near future, as we went back to Chicago for a Cubs game over the weekend. Trent and I are pretty sure Chicago is our second home now, since we have visited the city multiple times this summer!

Today though, I thought I'd share our very first harvest of this year. It's not very big, but we're excited that our tomatoes are finally turning red, and we have been able to enjoy our first veggies from the garden:

Yes, so far we have a lone ear of corn and a couple of tomatoes! So I got to add a couple of slices of fresh tomatoes to my salad the other day that we grew right here in the garden.

We have plenty more veggies that will be ripe soon, too. I actually need to go out to the garden and see what else is ripe, plus take more recent pictures!

The below photos are all from a few weeks ago, but you can see all of the tomatoes that have been growing. Here are the Romas: 

I'd imagine we have many more turning red now. And here was the corn a few weeks ago:

We also have some garlic that grows back every year. We're not really garlic experts though, so we're not sure when garlic is ripe and ready to pick...this looks close though, right??

It definitely smells like garlic, that's for sure.

Well, that's it for now...I'm sure I'll be back with some new posts this weekend!

Trent's Outdoor Bar Progress

Trent has been continuing to work on the outdoor bar he started building back in April. Little by little, he's putting together his own bar space in the backyard out of reclaimed wood and some metal sheets he picked up recently at Lowe's.

He got a little more finished over the weekend, including the metal in the front of the bar, and one of the sides started.

He still doesn't have a plan on paper. He always says it's in his head. :)

He did get ideas from looking at different outdoor bars online, though. There are a few out there that are similar, like these:

From here

From here

From here

Trent's is going to be a little larger than those, though. The frame of it is the doorframe he made for our wedding ceremony, and he's attaching posts to the back and going to make sides and a roof for it, too. It's really starting to take shape!

I'm glad he's making something that he really wants, even if it is just a side project and not the big projects we really need to get done. We're hoping that after we get back from vacation, we can focus on the "big stuff" we don't want to do, but really need to!

Container Vegetables

Second post today. Couldn't help myself! Since planting our garden this summer, we've gotten a few other vegetable plants from Trent's family: An eggplant from Mark and Sandy, and a few peppers from his dad.

They've been sitting in the kitchen window for a week or two, so we figured it was about time we planted them. :) Since our garden is pretty full right now, and we had some spare pots in the garage we didn't use, we decided to plant them in the pots instead.

We've never really planted vegetables in containers before, so this is kind of a first. We'll see what happens! It's a little late for planting, but maybe we'll have some veggies by the end of summer or early September.

Here's what we have in the pots:

We have some extra wire caging, so may put some around them just to help keep the pests and any animals away.

We'll see how this container gardening thing goes!

The Garden Is Growing!

It's a beautiful Sunday morning, and we finally have a day to spend at home around the house after a couple of busy weekends in a row. 

Today I'm sharing a few pics of some of our growing plants outside. We haven't gotten too much rain so far this summer, but we've had enough I guess, for some pretty good growth with our flowers and garden vegetables. 

Just look at some of my flower pots in the backyard: 

I've got lots of pretty pink petunias taking off in my pots right now!

The garden has also been growing, much better than last year's. These pictures were actually from a week ago, and since then, I think they've even grown more.

This first row is all tomatoes, and they've pretty much outgrown their cages at this point!

We also have a row of corn growing, as well as some butternut squash and cucumbers. I think it will probably be another month or so at least before we actually get to harvest some vegetables, though.

Last weekend was pretty hot (which is kind of my jam), so I was able to hang out in the yard a little and watch the garden grow. :)

This weekend feels more spring-like, only lower 70s for a high, so we're spending time around the house with the windows open and a nice breeze flowing through the house.

Cheers to a nice Sunday all!

Back Patio Life

It feels like summer finally! It was hot this weekend, but so nice! We hung out at home, cleaned up the patio, and Trent worked on his outdoor bar.

The flowers in my pots are still looking good, though we haven't really had much rain lately. That reminds me..I should probably water the flowers again soon. :)

Trent's outdoor bar is finally starting to look like a bar. He's using the door frame he built for our wedding, and adding wood pieces to it that he and his dad had laying around. 

Here's the bar top in progress -

He got the bar table put together, but it will need sanded and sealed. The wood in the table is all from old pallets we got from our neighbors. 

I think it looks pretty good so far. And he's super excited about it. It's kind of a break from all of the boring house stuff that we have to do, but at least he's having fun doing it. Today we went to Lowe's and he got some corrugated steel roofing that he will be adding to the front of the bar, and he's also making a roof out of it. 

We made a fire last night and hung out on the back patio. It was such a nice summer night. We also dreamed about a full-length fence enclosing the yard...that would be nice, and would create a little more privacy. Someday!

The back patio is officially ready for summer. The tables and chairs are all cleaned off and the lights are strung on the umbrella.

I think we have a pretty nice and relaxed ambience going on back here. Can't wait to hang out here for the rest of the summer.

 

Our Pretty Peonies

I love our peonies that come up every year in May! I have to share them each spring! It's been pretty rainy lately, but although the weather can't decide what to do right now, one thing's for sure: the peonies are really doing well!

We have 2 peony bushes now - one in front near the road that's been there for years, and another on the side of the house by the driveway, which we planted maybe 5 years ago or so.

These photos are of the newer peony bush by the driveway. It has really taken off this year! 

This is a photo of the same bush just a couple of years ago when it was first starting to come up in the spring:

It was so little! When I first got this peony bush, I think it was really only one lone peony bloom. At first it would get mowed over, and never really bloomed much. Now we have more pretty blooms like this one in the yard:

It's really similar in color to the one out front. When they first bloom they look like a pretty blush pink. As they open up though, they get white and start to lose most of the pink color.

I think they're prettiest right now, when they're starting to open up. 

It rained today, so they're even sporting tiny raindrops on those petals. They are so nice to come home to everyday! 

Planting This Year's Garden

Hey guys, what a week! Through the crazy busy-ness that was this past week, we managed to make time to get the garden planted! Trent had to take his truck in to get repaired, so I had to pick him up from work at the end of the week. Then we saw Luke Bryan Friday night, and went to a birthday party yesterday! Today we're finally home again getting things done around the house.

We had gotten the veggies to plant last weekend, but didn't have time to plant them all until Tuesday night. We got it all done just before dark though, and so far it's looking much better than last year's garden at this stage.

We even got some rain this week which helped to get those plants going once they were in the ground. And we're trying a new rabbit-proofing system this year, but I'll get to that a little later. :)

So, on to what we planted. Last year, we went all certified organic and started mostly from seeds. This year, we have a mix of organic and conventional, and are starting mostly from plants.

We have a few different types of tomatoes: organic Red Beefsteak and Husky Cherry Red tomatoes..

Cherokee Purple and Romas..

As well as organic Better Bush tomatoes. We'll see how all of those tomatoes do this year. I think they'll do a little better, since these plants are a bit more mature than those we planted last year.

We have another watermelon plant this year...

Butternut squash, Cucumber...

Red Bell Peppers, and Sweet Potatoes! We're kind of excited about these sweet potato plants. This might be the first time we've done them, though I can't remember for sure.

And finally, we did get a couple of seed packets. Sweet corn and these interesting Kaleidoscope carrots that Trent picked out...I'm not sure about these, but we will see how they are I guess!

Trent did the majority of the digging and planting, while I got the plants out of their containers and prepared them to be put into the ground. Many of the containers we got were actually the decomposable kind that you have to soak first, remove the wrappers, and cut the bottoms off before planting. Then you leave the decomposable paper containers around the plants when you put them into the ground. This is supposedly to help the plant with transplant shock.

We had old tomato cages from previous years that we put around the plants.

The garden space we have out back is pretty large, so we were able to space out the plants pretty far apart this year, which is especially nice for the cucumbers that tend to spread out quite a bit.

The tomatoes are on the far left end, followed by the cucumber plant, peppers, and butternut squash. Then there's the row of sweet potatoes, and a couple of rows of corn and carrots, then a mound for the watermelon.

We also finally got to plant my wildflower seeds at the end of the garden. I'm excited to see if these will grow into beautiful flowers this summer!

Now, here is the rabbit-proofing method we decided on for this year's garden: We got a roll of chicken coop wire, about $10 at Lowe's. Then cut sections of it and wrapped them around each of the plants we put into the ground. 

We are hoping this will prevent little critters from getting in there and eating our veggie plants, which happened quite a bit last year!

We'll probably take these barriers off once the plants get larger and established, to make room for them to grow. I think we had about 15 total plants to wrap the wire caging around.

It was getting dark by the time we finished all of our cages, but they're all done!

We ran the hose out back after finishing up, and started the sprinkler on them for a little while, just to make sure the soil got nice and wet.

Then Saleen wanted to check out the garden, too. I think she approved, though her face said she wasn't quite sure...

I'm glad the planting stage is all over! Now our next step is just to put down a little weed preventer, pull the inevitable weeds this summer, and wait for our tiny plants to grow into some yummy veggies! Should be a better crop than last year's!