Lookin’ like a Fool with your Plants in the Ground

Why yes, that is a reference to this video:

I don’t watch American Idol regularly.  In fact, I don’t really watch it at all, but “Pants on the Ground” happens to be one of my littlest brother-in-law’s favorite songs.  So we sing it a lot at our house.

But anywho.  I’m happy to report that we are in business.  We’ve got our garden planted!

YAY!  It doesn’t look like much (yet) but we have high hopes of it feeding us well this year.  My uncle who lives down the street was gracious enough to bring the tractor and plow us up a nice huge garden in our back yard.  We have a really nice area for a garden because our yard has two tiers.  The top tier is where the house sits.  It’s fairly flat and a nice big area to play with Harley in or have a party.  Then there is a weird little dip and a second relatively flat section of yard that we put the garden on.  It hardly ever got used anyway and it makes that much less ground for us to have to mow!  We were very fortunate in that, although the house sits directly on red clay, this section of the yard has AMAZING soil.  My uncle called it “loamy”…?  It feels amazing on your toes!  At first we, being the novice gardeners that we are, were worried about how huge the garden was.  I’ve always heard that too much garden means too many weeds, but once we started planting/spacing, we realized that we didn’t have too much space after all because so ground vines take up so. much. room!

Here’s a rundown of what we planted:

1) 3 tomato plants.  These are roma tomatoes or sauce tomatoes.  Not the best for just plain eating, but Josh and I don’t eat tomatoes, we eat salsa, so these should make amazing salsa!

2) 8 jalapeno pepper plants.  We make hot salsa…

3) an unknown number of green pepper seeds.  Not sure how many of these plants will make it, but we planted quite a few.

4) Okra.  Not as much as I would have liked, but if it comes up nice and thick then it should be perfect for us to get a mess (that’s the technical term) for supper every now and then.  Fried okra is one of the highlights of my summer.

5) Cucumbers.  we planted 4 plants because it came in a pack of four, but we really only want 1-2 max.

6) Squash.  I love baby squash covered in cheese, and apparently lizards like squash.  So a squash we planted.  Same as the cucumbers, if more than 1 plant makes it, we will have to thin them out… or give away LOTS of squash.

7) Watermelons.  We bought these because we thought, “Hey, we have way too much garden space, let’s plant watermelons and see if they grow.”  Josh nor I either one have ever grown watermelons so these are an experiment.

8) Dahlias.  These aren’t edible, but a very successful gardening couple that I know (who have been gardening for about 75 years) swear that if you plant flowers in your garden, the bees come, and they make everything grow better.  Once again, no idea if they will grow, but here’s to hoping.

Unfortunately, that’s all we have room for.  I was a little sad… and shocked.  When we first looked at our garden we thought for sure we’d never fill up the whole thing.  I wish we were growing onions, spinach, and lettuce, but we aren’t going to for a multitude of reasons a) they are hard to grow.  Onions not so much, but lettuce and spinach take a LOT of effort to get them to grow nicely.  b) They are cheap.  I can buy onions and lettuce cheaply at the store.  c) I got connections.  I have family who are always looking to give away lettuce from their garden… we’ll just snag a head from them every now and again.  We also plan to grow a little herb garden with cilantro, mint, and a maybe garlic.  Our attempt is to grow all the major ingredients for my homemade salsa.

Our neighbors, aka my cousins, came over and kept us company while Josh planted and I got the worst of the old grass clumps out of the soil.  The entire evening was amazingly relaxing.  Makes my heart full.

So I’ll keep y’all posted.  Now Josh says we’ll have to fight off the rabbits and birds, both of which we have in abundance in the woods behind our house, so hopefully we’ll be able to keep them at bay.  We aren’t going to try to grow this stuff organically, but we will be sparing on the chemicals (sevin dust is a miracle worker on pests!) For now, I’m just excited at the prospect of growing our first garden!

And here’s one more, because I’m in love with this little picture!

Hosta Takeover

Sorry about all the plant-related posts here lately, but… it’s spring and Josh and I have been spending every non-raining moment outside here lately.  And because we are super excited to finally have a yard at our disposal, we have been doing our best to cheaply spruce up the exterior of the house.  Thankfully, between Josh working at a landscape store and my aunt donating to the cause, we’ve been able to get some cute little plants started without spending much money.

So far we have:

1) Added day lilies around the mailbox.  They are still alive, but just barely.  Any thoughts on how to make them not die would be appreciated.

2) Bought a trellis at Lowe’s (with our cashback rewards) to try to corral this cute little flowering vine to grow up the side of the house.  I’ve been determined to do everything in my power to break up the monotony of our grey home… so far, meh… I’m not doing so hot, but I am making some not-too-expensive-or-time-consuming improvements.

3) Took some of that vine and some of the day lilies and planted them in front of the awful black railing at the front of the house.  As you can see from the picture above, I have plenty of vine to spare.  I had great and amazing aspirations of sanding/priming/painting that railing.  But Josh, in his infinite wisdom, convinced me not to.  And he’s right.  It’s not my house, it’s not my house, it’s not my house.  One day, I will have a house with some su-weeeet curb appeal, thanks to my hubby’s love of plants/landscaping, but until then, I’m at least hoping for some “hey, nice people live there” appeal.

As you may can tell from the picture, once again… the day lilies are nothing to write home about, but the vine is at least not dying.  I’m hoping that the warmer weather ahead (finally!) will give this vine the kick in the pants it needs to start hiding all the ugly spots.

Here is a closer picture of the vine.  I think it might be morning glory, but I’m not sure.

And please don’t judge the astro-turf.  Again, I was all for tearing it up, but Josh says no.  Not my house, not my house, not my house…   But still, you can see why I’m doing my darnedest to hide all that icky stuff!

4) Planted canna lilies, another gift from my aunt, in the corner by the back patio stairs.  This is what it looks like now

And this is what I have hopes of it looking like by summer’s end…

4) hung ferns from the back patio roof.  Here’s a picture of one, but we have them on either side of the stairs.  I love ferns.  They add polish to any exterior in my opinion… even ours…

6) Admired the cool tree in the back yard.  We didn’t have to do anything to it, and it took us both forever to figure out what it was.

The flowers gave it away…

Yep.  It’s honeysuckle.  I didn’t know honeysuckles made a tree.  From what we can gather, there was a pole in the center (probably to an old clothesline post) that the honeysuckle grew up, and then it was allowed to grow and grow and grow, and now it’s the size of a tree.  I love it… Josh says it’s a weed… all in the perspective.

7) Planted hostas along the edge of the back patio.  These are the one plants that are really thriving so far.  Josh, in his infinite plant-wisdom, knew that hostas like water.  So he planted them where the rain water pools at the edge of the patio.  They are growing like weeds!

8) Collected cast-off plants from Josh’s job and coax them back to life.  Often times, before they can put in new landscaping, Josh and his crew rip out all the old landscaping.  Most of the plants go in a reject/burn pile.  Because he’s sweet, Josh goes through and picks out the plants he thinks we’d like and brings them home to nurture them back to life.  Sometimes they have to start out in this little plant-hospital until they are big enough to transplant

But the other day he brought me a full-sized rhododendron that we are going to get to plant!  Woot!

So our yard is a work in progress.  And if I know my hubby, it always will be.  We have been l-o-v-i-n-g our yard here recently (when it’s not raining that is) and it’s been so much fun to get to see it take shape.  It’ll never be perfect, not at this house, (we aren’t willing to buy the plants/mulch to really finesse the landscaping… not our house, not our house, not. our. house.) but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.  With this poor yard, anything is a step in the right direction.

So what about you?  Have you been up to any spring-time sprucing lately?  We are so pleased with the way ours is taking shape.  The yard is where we’ll be spending most of our summer hours, so it’s nice that it’s becoming a place where we can relax and enjoy God’s beautiful creation…

Hiding in Plain Sight

Once upon a time, there was a young man and a young woman and they were very much in love.  They were very excited to married and start their lives together.  This woman, as I said, loved this man very much, however, there was a problem.  For, you see, three months before the day they wed, that man, in a moment of insanity, bought a big ugly chair at Goodwill for $5 which he refused to ever part with.  The woman begged and begged, but everywhere they lived, that chair lived, in some corner of a room that no one ever saw until one day, the woman and the chair became friends and lived happily ever after.

The end.

If you didn’t notice… I hate Josh’s chair.  I was so excited before we got married (almost 2 years ago! AAAHH!) that Josh didn’t have one of those “bachelor chair” that you hear horror stories about.  No worries, he fixed that.  3 months before the wedding.  It was the most hideous chair I’ve ever seen.  BURNT ORANGE VELVET!!! So old and threadbare.  But… it is insanely comfortable.  Like, “pass me a book and my coffee I’m not moving today” comfortable.  Still, it was too ugly to have out where people might see it and leave blinded by its awfulness.

But unfortunately, the alternative wasn’t much better.  If you’ll remember WAAAY back, a whopping 8 months ago now, when we moved, the first thing I set up was a little “me space” a cute little nook where I could just go and sit and try not to think about all I had to do.  Just a refresher, it looked like this:

That checkered mauve arm you see in the bottom right corner of the picture?  That was the alternative.  My Dad’s cast-off 90s recliner.  Awesome.  I’m not sure why I kept it around so long, I guess because I hadn’t found anything I like better, and Josh’s chair was slightly worse..  I tried slip covering it before I ever even started blogging; that was a FAIL!  So it just sat, forlorn and unused in it’s cute little corner of the room.

But it’s gone now.  To another place, away from me… FOREVER!  Becaaaauusee… I was able to salvage Josh’s man chair into something not so hard on the eyes.

It’s not perfect, but it’s still a HUGE improvement.  The slip cover is way too big for the little chair, but I like to think it’s shabby chic.  Not sure it it works, but we’ll go with it.  Thankfully it has these cute little side ties that help gather the fabric and make the baggy cover hang a little better.

It also helps lighten up the room!  We have very poor lighting in this house.  Couple that with dark floors, a dark couch, a dark desk, dark tables, and a dark book shelf, and our house definitely comes off looking a little Eyore-ish, so anything like slip covers or curtains that can lighten up the room are awesome!  Josh fusses that he can’t sit in it when he’s dirty (which is about 99% of the time) but I don’t care.  Hopefully it will be an incentive to get clean once he gets home!

So anywho, we went from this (notice the lovely worn orange-y brown velvet)

To this:

Sigh… Happy Mandi!

Here is the link to the slip cover.  From good ole’ tar-jay!  And I still have wedding gift cards to Target, so I actually paid $0000 out of pocket.  Woot!

The one last thing I forsee needing to do to this slip cover is hemming it.  See how much extra fabric is crumpled at the bottom?  Yea… dirt MAGNET!

But considering I don’t even OWN a needle and thread… seriously, I don’t… That’s gonna have to wait until someone either takes pity on me and does it, or I learn to sew.  The former is more likely…

So what about you?  Been snazzing up any old furniture lately?  One day, I’d love to have a (couple) new armchairs like this one:

but, right now they aren’t in our budget (that particular one is probably NEVER in my budget).  Plus, Josh has warned me, if I bring home a chair without arms, he’s burning it.  And he’s right!  Chairs are meant to be sat in, and ARMchairs… kinda supposed to have a place to put your arms.  Like I’ve said a gazillion and five times, I want our house to be functional and usable primarily, and pretty second.  For us, that means a Craigslist couch, a little dirt on the floor, and big ugly chair hiding secretly in the corner of the room.  We’re no better homes and gardens, but it’s OUR home and garden and we like being comfy. 🙂