Tis the Season

Amidst the holiday rushing and pushing, all I could think about yesterday is the fact that I have been lazy in one area of my life…..prepping my soil for next season!!!!!  So I found the perfect holiday shopping spot yesterday, Alameda Greenhouse.  No crowds. No lines.  Just a wonderful woman, whose name I should have gotten, so I could send her a Christmas card.  She coached me through a few things I need to do differently with my two fruit trees and also walked me through the wonderful winter wonderland that is my dirt filled beds.  It has been interesting this year how i have been more excited to think about which vegetables are going where and which beautiful flowers I swear I won’t kill this year.  While everyone is looking at electronics and toys, I have been researching garden windows for my kitchen.  I guess I inherited more from my Grandma B. than originally suspected.

So while the kids dream of santa and reindeer, I’ll be dreaming of compost and seeds.  Strange.  Well, time to bake cookies and through Luke’s reindeer food out in the front yard.  Maybe they’ll stomp on some of those awful xeriscape plants that are there.

creeping…

So, it has been slowly creeping up….my excitement to garden again. Last year was my “half” season of trial and error, but this year I hope to define my garden a little more. One thing I learned…i’m not good with flowers; i am better with veggies. I have decided to start drawing up a diagram and getting some things in order early this year. Another thing i think i’ve decided in the winter months is the tree i think i want. I think i’m going to go with another fig tree. i miss my figs. i’m going to try my luck with some flowers in pots instead of letting them die in the view of my window.

i am turning thirty in a few days and rather than dreading it, i am very excited!! my twenties were very rough, but i learned a lot of lessons and i’m ready with “what not to do” now. i plan on growing a lot of plants and painting a lot of walls, and maybe trying some….i totally forgot what i was going to say because i left to do something…maybe thirty is going to be more interesting than i thought.

the fruits of our labor!

I think it happened over night! I woke up this morning and wandered outside to check, as I always do, and TA DA!! We had a baby watermelon! We’ve also been patiently watching our little green tomatoes grow. We also have what I thought was supposed to be a bell pepper, but is apparently just a pepper, which is exciting. Next year I can’t wait to be a bit more advantageous in what and how much I plant. It will also be nice to plant things on time, so that we can enjoy these things much earlier in the season.

I have also began to enjoy the wonderful sky we have from our back porch….next on the list: flowers, a TREE, and how to make pesto.

the thumb is getting greener!!

I haven’t posted about the garden in quite some time! Once the actual porch structure was done, it took us a few weeks to get motivated enough to finish the planters. We wanted to make sure once those were started, we could finish them quickly. We ended up finishing them completely within two days. It was extremely exhausting and i found muscles i didn’t know existed, but it was worth it.

Now that I have somewhere to put things, i am experimenting with some different vegetables. The “flower side” of the planter looks really pathetic at the moment, and I’m thinking i might start over. The veggies I have NOT killed are bell peppers, heatwave tomatoes, artichoke, cucumber, bunching onions and watermelon. I luckily have my uncle to thank because he helped me choose things that would encourage me this year. I also have peppermint, orange mint and lavender growing…and of course, my apple tree.

I am chalking this year up to gaining a bit of basic gardening knowledge. My friend’s mother just moved back and bought an acre of farm land in Los Ranchos, and she said I could come learn there, too, which i am totally excited for. I am interested in researching some different flowers that do well in new mexico that don’t look like they belong in new mexico, but after some successful vegetable growing, am tempted to make the whole thing a vegetable garden. I am excited to learn alot this year before the next growing season. After talking to a gardener at Los Poblanos, I think I am going to try my hand at garlic in November.

Steve hung the stars in the backyard yesterday, making it complete. Well, making that half of the yard complete. The other half we just ignore and try to pretend it looks pretty. We’ll get to that next, as soon as Steve and I decide on what we want to do.

we have progress people!!!!

we have the beginnings of what will soon be concrete!!!! i never knew a grown person could get so stupidly excited about 2×4′s in dirt. There are even big holes where my beautiful porch will soon be!! All of my little herbs are still growing away; my apple tree looks great. All is well in the green front. Now just a few more hours until the concrete begins to flow!! Oh, joyous disappearance of dirt.

woweeds

For some reason, I do not remember my yard being so utterly hideous. Well, it’s not hideous, the beauty is just buried under piles of weeds and dirt, as is much of New Mexico. I think it’s kind of romantic that we’ll be uncovering the potential in our yard (my husband will not be reading this or he will laugh endlessly at this observation).

I had the intentions of getting rid of the weeds last year, honestly. There is even a wheel barrow to prove it! As you can see in the pictures, I slowly began to realize that coming up with a free and easy idea of getting rid of weeds either involves a secret-op burn at 2:30 in the morning, so as to not alert the fire department of my fire; or cramming all of the weeds into black garbage bags, about 100 of them, and shoving them into the trunk of my volvo. hahaha that would have been worth it if we could have taken video footage.

Anyway, they are still there and the guy that is building the porch promised me that he would remove the unsightly wanderers. Well hopefully we’ll make some progress soon. We’ve been in this house since January of 07, so it’s about time we have somewhere to hang out! This yard will probably take more than one summer, but that’s the beauty of container gardening, or so i hear.

After an afternoon of staring at my bleak yard, I realized the only cute thing in the yard was my four year old son.

my progress

Okay, so I know it might be a little much to have more than one blog, but I felt I needed a separate one to track my gardening progress. As my backyard is developed from a weed haven to my favorite spot at the house, I’ll share it with everyone! I’m going to be adding pictures and drawings soon. I am very excited to learn and grow as I garden and plant!!

Hopefully these thumbs will be green by the end of the summer!!!