kinderGardens Update & Random Avoidance of Work!

Here we are, week 6, and we've got nothin'! Below is a pic of the green roof to be's planter box, growing but not onto the trellis yet! I don't even have any pics of the kids in the garden this week! For good reason though, as they had a life changing event that most of you know about already, I figured that excuse is at least better than "my dog ate it"! Check out The Inadvertent Farmer's blog to see updates from other kinderGardens participants.

In other news I am happy to report that I am back in business - or at least back to housework and gardening, sort of! Today started off with the best intentions of getting ALOT of weed pulling and garden maintenance done... things derailed fairly quickly though, and I only got about an hour's worth of work done pulling weeds with the help of child labor before they started begging to do something "more funner, MOM!" But first, let's see what I did get done...

3 loads of laundry washed and hung out! It would appear that we all wear a uniform of sorts around here from the multiples of the same t-shirts we all have!

Sprocket's harvest of onions! She helped dig...

Onions were hung to cure

Found the first of the Heirlooms on Tomato Alley...the winner: Brandywine!

About lunchtime, I could hold off the kids' pleas no longer and I just said "oh, $%&!, let's go do something more funner"! After the week the kids had, how could I say no to an uncrowded beach with temps in the 70's and a slight breeze? Exactly! So I took them out to the secret spot, without being blindfolded! No tourists here, ever!

Finnegan doing some kind of ritual to celebrate the end of mommy's crabbiness!

Mommy with her baby... he's getting so big, he carried his own bag o'junk out to the beach today, hooray!

my guys

Tonight, all I can think of is a huge list of things I must get done! No diversions tomorrow, no excuses! My first sowing of carrots is almost ready and I never sowed more, so I need to do some carrot and parsnip t.p. strips, more weeding, pull out the greens that look like a rabbit's Christmas tree farm now, wash and put away all my seedling trays and plastic pots. My front yard needs attention too very soon, it looks like hell, and my blog and computer desktop is a mess! I still have up last year's harvest counter, slideshows that never worked right, I feel so overwhelmed that I think I'll have a glass of wine and knit. As Scarlett said, "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow..."

As soon as I thought about it, I could hear Rhett saying "I'm very drunk and I intend on getting still drunker before this evening's over!"

But no, that won't do at all, headaches are lame-o without another parent around to wake up with the kids at zero-six-thirty on a Sunday! Have a great weekend y'all!

The Government Interrupted my Gardening!

Well, it has happened again!  My husband returned from 2 weeks in Arizona for his sister's wedding and was greeted with a message that he needed to be on the ship no later than midnight that same day!  Gotta love it when we are so harshly reminded that he belongs to the Navy and is just ours to borrow for a few months at a time.  He wasn't even here long enough to take a shower or see how hard the kids and I have been working on the ol' homestead!  Just enough time to pack his bag and get in the car so we could take him to the base.  So all the projects he intended to finish are in limbo for the next month or so.  I am left with half of a fence, trailer loads of compost that I have to get myself, and hoping the vines I have to cover the non-existent fence will survive in their pots until he gets back.

Those of you familiar with the deployment thing know that as soon as our beloved leaves, things break...BIG things!  Last deployment it was a water heater and a well pump, this time is no different.  We were preparing for a SCHEDULED deployment later this year by replacing our aging HVAC system, decrepit fencing that falls down every time the wind blows, and purchasing a generator for hurricane season, but NOOOOOO... last night I awoke to the sound of my well pump kicking on/off every 25 seconds.  At 3 a.m. I knew no one was up showering or anything, I checked for leaks inside and there was none, so I just laid there contemplating how bad this could really be.  As soon as it was light out, I stuck my head under the crawlspace (yuck!).  I heard it before I saw it...waterfall noise...seemed to be gushing out of a pipe and hundreds of gallons of H2O pooling up on the "vapor barrier"!  After taking a shower (what's another few gallons?) and crying, I finally shutoff the well pump and called in Joe the Plumber.  Thankfully for our finances, it was fixed in an hour with a new pipe, but Joe gives us the bad news that our pipes are really old and need to be upgraded (no surprise).  All this has transpired and been fixed and the sailor-pirate chaser-farmer doesn't even know about it yet!  Joe the Plumber was a real character, too...not much for words (or teeth for that matter) until he saw my garden and that my primary water source was a well in the suburbs...then he was all "don't get city water, the man will stick it to you" and "you should build a bunker to store your veggies".  Really?  A BUNKER???  LOL, this was kind of amusing seeing that he makes his money from those water pipes fed by "the Man".  I think he needs to move somewhere the moonshine flows and the militias are on the move!  Anyway, here is the offending pipe, all the damage came from the little pinhole on the upper right. I have no idea what the patch job is on that pic, that was before we got this place, lol.

So now that I am done venting about the above, we just started hardening off the seedlngs the other day, but have been plagued by severe weather the past couple of days, so haven't planted anything yet. 

 I finally got around to organizing my gardening papers & seeds, etc., something I have been planning to do for a couple of months.  Being so OCD, I am surprised I lasted this long with all my garden stuff strewn all over my desk!  I mulled over the idea of a bin, or file folder of sorts, but decided on a binder system.  The result rocks...I have laminated planting info, divider tabs for everything from seed types to monthly garden chores, and seed packets fit perfectly into photo sleeves.  It is the PINNACLE of my OCD/Type A Projects and here she is...

Next up... the the booby-trap for dogs...

No, it's not where all the good little stakes go when they die...!  It's to train the garden dogs to stay out of the beds!  It dawned on me the other day that my other raised bed garden is fenced in, which is why I have never had the dogs playing "agility competition" until now.  So before the plants go into these new beds, the kids gathered every unfriendly object we had laying around and stuck them in...working so far...we will see when the plants go in!

Aha!  I see I have just received an email...no doubt from the sailor-farmer who just found out about the water pipe carnage...better get that!