Sunday, May 18, 2008

A Hillbilly Weekend

It's Sunday! Time for a new photo of the week. This weeks photo was taken early last month while Pa and I were working on the garden area.

Speaking of the garden, we're getting closer to finishing up with the planting. We stopped by Bi-Mart on Thursday and found tomato plants at 99¢ a piece so scooped up on 9 of them. Most of them are now planted in our newest raised bed, along with carrots, green onions, and lettuce. The acorn squash seeds have been sown, along with the cantelope seeds. Today we're planting the zucchini seeds, and finishing up the weeding of the last two narrow beds, which we'll probably fill with more spinach, carrots, and green onions.

The last 3 tomato plants (including 2 cherry tomato plants) will be planted in homemade grow bags today. We decided, rather than spending the money on premade grow bags, why not make our own from the plastic grocery bags just waiting for a creative form of recycling? We're also choosing not to pay for potted soil for the bags. Rather, we are using "surplus" soil from the garden area, which we amended ourselves by composting. What once was nearly barren soil, useless for growing much of anything other than ivy, is now beautiful, rich soil, and home to many happy worms.

We hope to finish up the last of the family garden today, as well as the container plantings, then it's on to the kid's garden, which they've been working on, so it shouldn't take much. Just a matter of fencing it in, and cutting them loose with the seeds of their choosing. They've adopted the "sand dune" as their garden area, and have been busy composting in there for a few years as well, so it's becoming less of a "dune", and more of a productive garden space all the time.

Knitting
I needed to come up with some inexpensive "just because" gifts, and wanted to keep them frugal, yet meaningful. I ended up deciding to work on my intarsia skills, while using up smaller amounts of yarn left over from previous projects. It's slow going, but a fun challenge for me.

Saturday Night at the Movies
Last night the kids enjoyed their Saturday night movie. It was one I had seen at the Library many times, but for some reason thought it was a horror flick. I couldn't have been more wrong! It was a delightful animated movie, "The Iron Giant", which we enjoyed almost as much as the kids.

I'm off to play in the garden!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like you've been busy. I need to learn the finer skills of composting!

Boondock Ma (Kim's Mom) said...

Due to the bear population around here, as well as the raccons, we do all our composting in the garden itself, behind the fence, and in the ground. We just leave a small section unplanted for composting, burying the compost as we take it outside, keep it moist, and turn it on occasion. When we harvest another section we start composting there. That way we can keep rotating the crops as well as the compost areas so everything benefits ;)

Linda said...

bought some seed potatoes this last weekend and am going to try and grow them in the garbage bags. Hope it works. Also will check out the Iron Giant for my grandson. Always looking for things to entertain him. Linda