My garden is exploding!

Here are the tomatoes.


See the green pepper in there?


My cucumbers are climbing right out of the garden! I had to dig out the chives and transfer them to the area under my living room window because the cucumber vines were strangling them. They have lots of flowers, too!



My single pumpkin plant has a flower! A few more are forming, but they aren't open yet.


The tomatoes are getting big!


Here is a side-view. I'm so glad we decided to do this this year! I'm excited about it!


I even decided to put in a flower bed next to our shitty old garage. We bought some perennial ivy plants because we want to have ivy climb up and cover the wall. (We have siding on the rest of the house and garage, just not this side wall.) After getting the ivy, I had to put in a bed because it's all cement there. Once I built the bed and added the dirt and the ivy, it needed more. Petunias are so pretty, so I bought a flat, and I LOVE IT!! (If you click on the picture, it will enlarge and you can see the ivy better.)


Benny got a new chair for outside, but decided to bring it inside and sit in it ALL the time.


And Todd got...
an EARRING!!!

My tomatoes!!



I've been working on this. I put patio blocks around the garden, and I planted the bean sprouts and banana peppers and a pumpkin.

Luc lost his first tooth!

Todd caught a fish.


Luc caught his first fish.

Todd enjoyed fishing so much, that he kept at it when everyone else was ready to go.

My tomatoes!!

So here is one of the cute little green tomatoes! I took a pic of the other one, but it was too close and blurry.


Here is my pepper plant that has the first flower.


Here are the cucumber plants in front of the peppers and tomatoes.


And this is a big stinky bush that I HATE, but Todd insists we keep. It is so big! I drive a Suburban. You can barely see it behind this monster.

So, I gave my speech. I am not a public speaker. I get so nervous, I feel like my heart is going to explode. So, I got through it (just barely) and got a 90%. Not great, but not bad.
I came home, and guess what I found? Two of my tomato plants each have one little perfect green tomato! Those little tomatoes made me so happy! I take a walk over to my garden whenever I come home; just to take a look. Today and last night, we've had a lot of rain, and I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. I noticed the flowers were on the tomato plants even before I planted them. Today, I looked closer, and saw two shiny green tomatoes!!! My pepper plants are getting tall and looking so healthy. The cucumbers are low and getting kind of spiky. The chive onions look good, too. So, I'm happy.

I need a topic

I have to give a speech on Wednesday. I have to introduce a (hypothetical) speaker. I can choose anyone; real, dead, fictional. Any thoughts on who I should pick? I hate having to narrow things down like this. It would be so much easier just to be assigned someone to introduce.

It's... Planting Day!!!

And we're done. Mostly. I've decided that I want to add some beans, so I bought the seeds, but I'm going to start them in small pots inside and plant them in a week or two. I have 1 Burpless Cucumber (just to see if they really are better), 5 Marketmore 76 cucumbers, 3 Health Kick tomatoes, 3 Cherry tomatoes, 4 onion chives, and 5 California Wonder Sweet Peppers.
It's amazing how much soil I needed! I used 8 40 lb. bags of topsoil, 3 40 lb. bags of Miracle Gro potting soil, and 1 40 lb. bag of Scott's garden soil. That's a lot of dirt! And the garden is pretty full, so by the time I'm ready to transplant the beans I'm getting ready to sprout, I'll need to dig another section to add next to the garden which will need garden soil, too!
Wanna see what we did? Sure you do...
I have two different angles, and one from far away because it looks small up close. (You can see larger pics if you click on the pic.)

Outside a lot!

I have been outside so much in the past few days! Benny is loving it! I have my garden dug, but I think I will be making it bigger either tonight or tomorrow. I have Miracle Gro soil to add with the regular soil. I'll mix it in together in the plot I dug out and then tomorrow is the big "Planting Day"!
We used to have two garages. We have an attached garage and when we bought the house there was a second one car garage about 2.5 feet away from the attached garage. It was a mess and the roof was falling in. Years ago, maybe 7? Todd and some friends tore it down. It had a cement floor, so we have a nice sized cement slab next to the garage where the boys can ride their scooters or skateboards. I decided to dig up the dirt between the garage and the cement slab and I wanted to plant some sunflower seeds in that strip. I went out with my shovel to pull out the weeds and the small rocks and just turn over the dirt. It's all cement! It had about 2-3 inches of dirt on top of cement! Crazy! We've lived here for 11 years and I didn't know that!
So, now I'm considering putting in a little garden box on top of the cement and still growing sunflowers in it with some mulch and a nice little wooden border. We'll see. I dug all of the dirt and weeds off the cement earlier.
Benny will be 2 in a little less than two weeks. Today I plan on starting the birthday shopping. I'm thinking outside toys like a little wheelbarrow.
The boys' school year is almost ending! June 8th is their last day. Todd is almost done with 4th grade and Luc is finishing Kindergarten. I feel old, and these white hairs aren't helping.
You know what I hate! I hate how Luc's name is always underlined in red when I type it as though it is spelled wrong!! It is SO ANNOYING!!