Green Thumb Anyone?

Well, after a week of late nights at work, some rain, and a couple of irritable girls, the garden is now complete. The other big adventure for our family this week was the purchase of a fence. With so much to talk about, I better begin.

Last weekend Jaynee decided that we needed a fence for the girls. They need a boundary to keep them safe, as well as to provide protection and structure. Jaynee made a couple of calls on Monday and by the end of the day she had a contractor lined up. Wednesday work began, but due to the lead worker being a little ill, work was not completed until Thursday afternoon. The girls just loved it. They can now run from one end of the yard to the other without being yelled at, picked up, or even headed off. It sort of reminds me of what a cattle herder does all day except that these beast are on two legs and know how to work together to make it that much harder for the herded.



Due to my late work schedule this week I was not able to get home with enough time to work on the garden before it was dark. We had time, but about 1 hour before sunset is the girl’s bed, so that factored into our schedule. I was able to take half of Friday off, and I plan on doing the same for Monday. It is nice to take time off when the boss is away. Monday night there was some rain, but not enough to turn our dig site into the canals of Venice. I was hoping there would be enough water to warrant the purchase of a remote control boat to play in my newly formed canals. Maybe luck will be on my side when I am tasked to create a strawberry patch later this year.

Friday Jaynee and I were able to complete the frame and clean up the dirt. Most of the dirt went back into the garden as part of the foundation for the step stones, but there were about three loads that I needed to dump out back behind the fence. The only thing left to do was to put the stones in their place, and then mix the dirt (after purchasing it of course). So after a late night Friday, Jaynee dragged the entire family to Home Depot at 6:45 in the morning. The ratio of employees to the number of people in our family was staggering. I think we lost time because we had to politely decline the help of every employee working at that time at least twice. After a couple of other stops, we returned home to continue working on our garden. After playing with the girls and getting them nice and tired, we put them down and worked on putting the paving stones in. Just as we finished that, the girls got up, so we decided we would stop until their afternoon nap. All we had left to do was mix Jaynee's soil mixture. The soil mixture contained 3 parts of peat moss, 1 part cow manure, 1 part mushroom manure, 1 part manure toasts, and 3 parts vermiculite. Don't ask me why the weird stuff and mixtures. I just figured out how much we needed and then perform all the muscle related tasks to manure. The mixing was a little fun with a strong wind, manure, and trying to mix each of the ingredients with the use of a twin size sheet. We were finally complete and with only a bag or two that I will need to return for a refund.


After cleaning up from playing in poop that I just so loved to play in (Jaynee was lucky that we didn't have a manure fight, or I would be writing this post from a hotel room somewhere in Augusta.) we decided to treat ourselves to a nice afternoon out. We have learned that our daughters do so much better when we eat an early dinner. After our night out, we put the girls to bed and then the planting began. This will be a learning experience for sure. Minutes before we began to plant our garden, Jaynee realized that some of the vegetables were for fall and winter planting. I guess we will be ready for our fall planting. Until then every open space was filled with radishes. So in the next 4-5 weeks we will see if anything edible will grow, because that is when the first harvest should be ready.



Not a lot of pictures of the girls this week (just got Sofi for some reason), but it was defiantly a learning experience on how manage home projects and the girls at the same time. There was several times when they were outside trying to help us with all the work that needed to be done, but after a while we had to pause to keep them out of harm’s way. Besides a couple of soar backs and a mild sunburn on my arms, no other injuries to report.