Xiaoniu 小妞

I love a weekend where I get some actual work done around the house. I don’t get time to do much other than live for the house and the children anymore. 200+ unread email messages and 500+ unread blog posts (and this is after going through and weeding out posts from the most active feeds). I spent nearly this whole weekend out in the yard doing things.

Saturday I finally got a chance to finish the enlargement of our garden. It’s now three times the size it was last year. It is almost full too. About two thirds already has plants and the remaining third is waiting for some early summer seeds that Sue bought. Once those are down it’ll be very full. I think it came out well. I pulled up a lot of nasty grass and weeds, yanked up and cut roots from the tree we had taken out and laid down some of the good stuff for the plants. Topsoil, moo doo and Plantone was mixed in to make the bed fertile and ready for plants.

I think I under counted the number of plants we have down this year. 10-12 eggplant plants, 10 or so peppers, 10 basil plants and 16 tomato plants make up the bulk of the garden. The rest is full of various other things. Not to mention we have other plants in pots. We’ve already been able to harvest some of our strawberries and lots of chives. The bok choy we grew from the seeds I collected last year is ready to eat as well. Yum.

Today Sue got out and fill her pots with new liners, new potting soil and lots of flowers. Things should really look pretty again this year. I planted a tree in the front yard. It is unofficially planted in honor or Caitlin, but I’m holding off on the ceremony until I’m sure it’ll survive in our yard. I’m hoping to plant some other things around the house to spruce it up a bit. It’s very plain in certain areas, especially since we had to remove a few trees.

The grass is coming in well and some of it can be mowed like regular lawn now. I still water these areas well each day. As times goes on I may switch from twice daily watering to daily, but thorough waterings or every other day drownings. I guess time will tell which works out best. I have to fix up the hose bib in the back so that I can put the garden and back yard (currently a desert) on a sprinkler system. The pipes make an amazing sound at certain times. I think the spring mechanism in the hose bib is causing it. I’ll know better once I disassemble the thing for the twentieth time.

Oddly enough the roof is going to be done on Monday. We got a call on Saturday saying that they would be here first thing Monday to start. I’m nervous about having the house worked on, but I know the guys does nice work. We plan to have him come back to do some other work like basement windows and maybe a couple of exterior doors. Very nice guy and his crew does nice work.

Time to hit the sheets.