Raised beds

I've been dreaming of raised vegetable beds for years.

Or precisely, since I was 11 and discovered that I liked gardening. That spring, mom had declared that there was not going to be a vegetable garden - you know, something due to her being pregnant - and I realized that my goal in life that summer was to have a vegetable garden. And that I would miss pulling weeds. Well, not really. But I realized that there was more to gardening then pulling weeds. Since then we had various incarnations of mounded beds, or at the least, nothing but weed cloth laid on the ground with holes poked in.

But this year, unbeknownst to me, was destined to be different. God had heard my prayers.

In April we realized that our shed needed to be resided. The siding (batten wood) was failing to keep out mice and all sorts of nasty critters and had to come off. Well, if you're familiar with batten wood siding, you know that it consists of wide planks (about a foot wide) battened down with narrow strips. Well, the narrow strips weren't much good for anything but the wide planks, usually sized one foot bye eight feet, were/are perfect for raised boxes.

So... Tah Dah! We now have eight beautiful raised beds in the vegetable garden, and four flower boxes near the shed.



Today, Hannah came over and we got the pea trellises up, did some weeding and planted some squash and cukes. You can't really tell in the picture below, but we are using a bent over stock panel as a trellis for the cucumbers and squash. Hopefully, it should work!




I'm also being particularly ambitious by weed clothing everything. :) Should pay off in a month!

So I posted this and then realized I should give credit to those who deserve it. First off, I think Jacob and Daniel helped with almost every single box. They're pretty awesome! Andy certainly helped with at least half of them, and Scott, I think, built the first two, plus he did the majority of work tearing them off in the first place. Also, all the younger men helped with pulling out the original nails, which was rather tedious. I wasn't able to do a lot until yesterday but since my neck is doing so much better now I actually got contribute by doing the chop sawing. I now have a lovely sunburn, thanks to our last push to get them finished. I think we made five of them in an hour and a half!

Eight not-so-little ramblings

So, most days I don't feel like writing much, thanks to point four of this post but today was one of those special days (I don't have to do it on Sunday) so here's a couple of weeks worth of thoughts* in one post.

1) Most importantly, I'm going to be a bridesmaid this August. Yay! Little happy dance for Jason and Ellen. :) This will be the third time I've been in a wedding in August and once again, I'll have to pay attention to tan lines. Nothing worse then a farmers tan with a bridesmaids dress. I think it would be so much easier for them to get married in June at Family Camp. :) And this will be, drumroll please, be my sixth time being a bridesmaid. I watched 27 Dresses recently, and yeah, I could actually relate somewhat. :-P When I get married, I'm just going to avoid the whole issue and elope.

27 dresses

2) And talking about chickflicks, I finally finished My Girlfriend's Boyfriend yesterday and with watching that and the royal wedding hubbub of last week, I had the perfect chick flick dream last night. You know, the kind where at the last minute you realize the guy who wants to marry you is actually, ooooh, a Prince! It was a little weird. I don't think I've ever had a dream like that.

Inspired by Pinterest, a felt flower.

3) I love Pinterest. If you, like me, have millions of bookmarks/favorites, you should seriously check it out. It's basically a visual bookmarking service. So instead of your link being a line of text that you may or may not remember what website it goes too, Pinterest allows you to "pin" a photo from the website onto a catagorized board. It's awesome for saving recipe, book, crafty, house, photo and really anything besides just plain text website links. There's also a main page (which is currently my home page) which feeds everyone's "pinnings" onto one giant board. It will be interesting to see how it grows. Based on the giant board, you can definitely tell that the majority of "pinners" are female, you know, with lots of decor, recipe, and clothing pictures.

One of my torture eye therapy charts. :)

4) Vision therapy. I go in for an evaluation next week. I'm very interested to hear what he's going to say. My neurologist told me that the eyes are the last to heal, and it might take up to a year. Bummer. And my concussion isn't healed until the eyes are healed. So no sports for me this summer. Unless a miracle occurs, which I'm all in favor of! Oh, well, I guess it's not all about me. The one advantage, and I'm not sure how much of an advantage it is, is that I loose my appetite thanks to it. I get full with half to a third of what I used to need, and I could probably eat vegetarian if I wanted too. It's nice not to be hypoglycemic anymore!

5) Posture exercises. I get to start doing them for my neck. My x-ray results came back and I have some degeneration in disk C5/6 and my neck doesn't want to arc forward correctly. I've always admired people who have perfect posture, and now I'm on my way! Of course right now I'm totally slouching, but you can't tell...

6) Ceiling fans. They are the bane of my Sundays... I'm seriously contemplating my sitting options at church.

7) It's spring. Well kind of. I have a million plants sitting on the porch waiting for me to plant. Or more accurately, direct my ever lovin' brothers to help me plant.

8) Music. I'm trying to listen to music more to give my eyes a break during the day. I have a list of about 25 bands, and a couple of times a week, I type one into Grooveshark and listen to some selection. I think I find the music world overwhelming. Plus, how many girl/guy songs can one listen too? There's just not much more to be sang that hasn't been sung. Feel free to leave me suggestions. :)

*And these are just the thoughts I can actually remember. My memory still ain't what it used to be. Good thing I can't remember everything, else this post would be a mile long.