Year 2 of gardening is underway! My gardening efforts actually began in February with a technique I learned 2 years ago called "winter sewing". Cut open a milk jug, fill it with dirt, plant your seeds, tape the jug shut, water well, leave the cap off, toss it out in the snow, and don't bother with it until May! The first 2 pictures below are our February gardening efforts. The next is the result in May: beets, onions/carrots, peppers, squash. Here's what I learned about winter sewing this year: 1) don't start until St. Patricks day - all my plants out grew their containers a month before planting time. 2) plant peppers indoors and start them in January - they just don't grow in the cold and they grow slow. 3) plant only one type of seed per jug - when they get big they're hard to separate. 4) for big items, like squash, only plant 1 or 2 per jug so they have plenty of room to grow. Winter sewing is a blast though. It's like having your own nursery starts for super cheap and very little effort.
The last photo (above) is the zucchini plant Austin started from a seed in preschool. When it got big enough, he planted it himself in our backyard. Today, it's got a few little zucchini's starting to grow (picture 4 below).
Here's how our garden looks today: Our new honey crisp apple tree, our new garden plot, our new lemon Elberta peach tree, Austin's zucchini, last year's expanding raspberries. This year our garden contains: watermelon, zucchini, rosemary, raspberries, winter squash, summer squash, cucumbers, cantaloupe, carrots, onions, beets, tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. We've harvested all 10 of our miserable strawberry crop already (here's hoping I can do better next year). Everything else is just starting to bloom and I can't wait to start eating it!
The kids have more fun playing in our oscillating sprinkler than in their kiddie pool. They even manage to get me to join in the fun!
Saturday morning (the "official" holiday in Utah) we took the kids swimming in the morning. In the afternoon we dropped Ruthie off at Lisa's (she had a great time) and met up with the rest of the fam to see Toy Story 3. As you can see, Austin was so excited, he wore his Buzz Lightyear costume for 2 straight days. Take on the movie? I loved it. Pixar is great. Toy Story 2 is still my favorite of the trilogy. Poor little Austin was deeply disturbed. At one point the bad guys capture Buzz and tie him to a chair. This is were it started to get hard for Austin. He leaned over to me and asked, "Why does Buzz have to go to time out?" Then the bad guys flipped Buzz's reset switch and turned him into a "bad" guy. Austin crawled into my lap crying and asking, "Why is Buzz being mean?" I kept reassuring him that his friends would save him and to keep watching. He did, ducking his head into my arm several times and at one point telling me, "I just want to see Toy Story 4." He made it through the movie and was happy with the ending, but confessed to everyone after, "That movie was just a little bit scary for me."
