Home Improvement

At what point in life did home improvement projects become fun? Because I love them. Give me a Chick-fil-A lemonade and a trip to Home Depot and you've pretty much made my Saturday.

This weekend we put in our first-ever fall garden, which meant two trips to the garden center! Excitement.

We have a normal yard (the lawn mower broke recently while Andrew was cutting it though, so there is a mowed area about the size of a football field and the rest is kind of overgrown right now) and a stone ridge thing right outside our back door. Above that wall is the rest of the yard, which I like to describe as contained chaos. Andrew really wants to weed eat everything up there, but I like the look of it and we're always seeing a fat orange cat slinking around the great unknown. Also, we don't have a weed eater, so I win for now.

Anyway, we put our garden up in the wild area in a spot that had obviously been a veggie garden in the past. I had visions of raking up our supple earth, sprinkling in the seeds and marveling over our finished handiwork by lunchtime with full confidence that in the next few weeks we'd have fresh beets, lettuce and cabbage to dine on. Not so. When we got out to the area we picked for the garden, we found this:

Does that look like a garden to you? It was lots of weeds, a mix of powdery dirt and clay and just an overgrown garden plot in general. So we called my mom, gardener extraordinaire, and asked her what to do about our less-than-idea soil. She and my stepfather Steve spend a lot of time in the yard and stuff actually grows (in weird shapes, but still), which I consider a success. Here they are in their summer garden:

Sure enough, Mom was on her way to buy a peach tree and had some specific advice for our soil therapy: mix organic garden soil, manure (it comes in bags, who knew?) and later some organic fertilizer into the ground to help beef up the dirt. So off to Home Depot we went, where we picked up all of the above as well as a few broccoli plants and a cabbage (because why not?).

And thus, our quick weekend project turned into a two-day event. Fast forward a couple of hours hoein' it up in the garden.

Even Sawyer's friends wanted to help.

By the end of Saturday, we had a (for the most part) clear garden plot. Much better, right?

On Sunday afternoon we finally planted some of our seeds.

Voila!

Whether or not it will actually produce any veggies is beyond me, but we're trying our best! Check out that awesome cabbage. Will it live? Who knows. Have you ever tried to grow anything? Was in a disaster or a success? I've only ever had success growing jalapenos, which is that random green thing over by the birdbath.

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Don't forget to start your week with Mingle Monday over at Life of Meg! It's such a fun way to find new blogs to read.