May showers bring May flowers???

The weather this week seems to think that it is April--rain and partly cloudy. I am not complaining about the moisture that it is going to bring I am sad that I can't get in the garden and get it prepped for my seedlings on Mother's Day. I am going to keep a stiff upper lip and try to get out there in between the showers. I have lots of double digging and compost mixing to do.

Tepee Dilemma

Quick Background: One of our favorite holidays is Halloween. The kids get excited to decorate the house and I love handing out candy and treats to all the kids in the neighborhood. Carving pumpkins is a really epic event and we go crazy over designs.

One year I got real artsy and made some of my favorite characters.  It took me a little longer than I thought but I had a great time doing it. Because we love carving I have over the last few years grown a large pumpkin patch so that we have enough for everyone to express their creativity.

Dilemma: I have come to terms that I just don't have enough land to grow as many pumpkins as I want, so I decided to try going vertical this year and provide a little shade in the backyard for kids and pets. I looked up tepees and trellises, but I can't figure out what to put on them to cover the entire space rather than just have the beans covering the three poles. I have looked on Pinterest and other sites and Google but have not found a sturdy but open material to weave around the poles. Here are some of the thoughts I had.

1. Netting-the kind to keep birds off of fruit trees.
2. Vinyl fencing
3. Building an actual wooden structure

These are my inspirations. I'd like to figure out a way to combine the two and not have the pumpkins crash down on someones head.

Retaining wall is up!

Before with snow

After and 65 deg.

 My "honey"and I have wanted to tear down the front facade of the house ever since we moved in almost five years ago. The plan was to take out the existing rocks that had sunk down into the grass and build a concrete retaining wall. I am not great at pouring concrete so I borrowed the idea from another Pinterest "Pinner" and decided to stack  about 54 60lb bags of concrete mix on top of each other and let nature and the garden hose do it's thing. Over time with rain and help from the garden hose. The wall will set and the paper will wear away and we can rip it off. I like the way it turned out (even with the paper still attached). The plan is to put a second path in the middle to let me walk in and out without compacting the soil too much when I am planting and pruning. There were some scary moments while building that included me almost fainting from horror as my husband almost crushed my peonies in the back. I assumed since they were away from the old and soon to be new wall they'd be safe from someones size 14's. 

Marriage still intact and wall up I just look now and think of all the possibilities of what is in store and happy that our backs survived.

May planting is finally here!

May 1st, 2013 Colorado

I have been waiting to thaw out here in Colorado over the last month. When I was expecting April showers and all, we got April storms and a couple of feet of snow. Little to say that put a crunch on my garden plans. During the thaw I have been meticulously planning out my square foot gardens in the front and back of the house. Luckily for me, growveg.com has a garden design planner that actually has the square foot gardening method programmed into the site.

 You just select the SFG button and it gives you Bartholomew's designated spacing and colors the vegetables/herbs by plant families so you can see if you are providing enough variety and not messing up companion planting.

I still need an excel chart to keep track of all the items that I want to grow and how many I need. I also put on there a really scary column for how much it would cost to put in all of the plants that I want (I omitted it here for the sake of preserving my dignity, nobody needs to now how crazy I am about gardening and you definitely don't need to know the true extent of my fabric and yarn stash). I  just keep trying not to look down the sheet and see what the damage will be this year. I'm telling myself that I am saving money on therapy and grocery bills. It also gives the kids something to do in the summer time when they get bored. The words "how about weeding?" make them run away so quickly it was like boredom was never even a subject of conversation.

Things are coming together finally and snow doesn't appear in the forecast for the next ten days. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed.

Blog reboot

Bloggin has taken a backseat lately. I think that I am going to give this a try again. Lately I have been doing a lot of crochet and knitting, but my repetitive stress injury has been giving me a problem. I made these over the last few weeks. I opened an Etsy shop and have them up for sale. If you want to take a look, it is The Knitting Cheetara.