Garden Salad

I took it easy yesterday and didn't do any projects, but I wanted to show you a salad. Yep a salad...from my garden! I'm so happy that it not only survived that crazy hail storm, but it's really flourishing.

Yum!

That's all for today. I hope you have a great Thursday (it's almost Friday!).

The Garden Is Alive!!!

Some of you may remember me writing about a little hail storm. I thought my garden was gone for sure, and it wasn't looking good at all.


I'm happy to say, though, that it came back and it's looking great! I hope you'll enjoy some pictures:

Lettuce (good thing mud washes off!)

A little pea pod. These are the plants I was most worried about.

Carrots. They're looking good!

Spinach. Is it supposed to look like this? Looks a little weird to me, but I've never had much success at spinach.

Spaghetti squash (winter squash). I really, really hope I get a harvest from this. I 'm so excited about it!

Corn. Saving the best for last. It's gotten so big!

Close up of the corn.

Thanks for taking a little tour of my garden!

I'm linking at these great parties:

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Blooming and Growing{Garden Sprouts!}

This weekend sprouts started popping out of the ground in the garden!! I'm soooo excited to see all my hard work paying off. :-)


Here's one type of squash that has sprouted. I planted three different kinds. One still hasn't sprouted, so I'm crossing my fingers on that one.

Next we have some lettuce sprouting.

It's just getting started as you can see when compared to my thumb (and I have fairly small hands).

I think the carrots and spinach may be coming up too, but I'll wait until they get bigger to share pictures of those. It's a little hard to distinguish them from other things growing around them (grass, etc). 

I'm the most excited about this next one. Corn! We've never tried corn, so I'm excited to see how it will turn out. I picked seeds with the shortest growth until harvest since our growing season here in Colorado is so short. We'll see!

They're looking pretty good so far! 

While I was out looking at the garden, I also noticed that some roses have bloomed. Beautiful!

We had some birds build a nest in one of our patio lights, so I thought I'd try to get a picture of the eggs. Aren't they cute?

They're parents scare us half to death every time we walk by the light. They come flying out so quickly that it feels like they're almost attacking us! They're really just flying away from us, but it's pretty hard to get used to it. It's ok though. I don't mind dealing with it for the little baby birds that will hatch at some point. :-)

I love this time of year! It's so nice to get out in the yard. :-)

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties. 

Stretch Your Garden Dollar: Spray Painted Pots

You know those pots that plants usually come in from the store? Sometimes they're just a thin plastic and sometimes they're pretty sturdy. Over the years, I've collected several of these that I couldn't manage to part with even though I wasn't going to use them to display any flowers (not sure why I was saving them). Then I had a thought: spray paint!

That's how these lovelies were born. They were originally a combination of blacks, greens, and that earthly, sort of orange color that we typically see in pots. I wasn't sure how it would turn out, so I bought the cheapest spray paint I could find and sprayed away.

They aren't perfect...

But that was largely in part to operator error/impatience. Yeah, I can be impatient...working on that though. :-) Even with my impatience, they mostly turned out great! The spots you can see in some of the pictures are water spots from the sprinklers. :-)

I think they have the effect I was going for though, and who can beat $5.00 for this many colored pots (I even painted a larger one that's not pictured here)? Not bad if I do say so myself.

They add even more color to the flower bed than just the flowers would. Love, love it! At some point I may have to spray paint my nicer pots that are that terracotta color (there! I remembered what's it's called...not just earthy, sort of orange). I think it adds some extra "umph"...a punch of color.

And the colors of the pots are a great compliment to the flowers...

Loving them!

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties. 

Stretch Your Garden Dollar: Garden Fence and Row Markers

This morning I saw that I now have 30 followers (not including email subscriptions!)!! Thank you all! I can't tell you how exciting it is that over 30 people are interested in what I have to share. :-)

The big project I worked on last week was getting my veggie garden finished. It's been a lot of work, but I'm so happy with how it turned out and can't wait for things to start growing!


Here's what we started with a little while ago. We've been working on it on and off for what seems like months (in between cold weekends :-)).

We have to put a fence around it for a couple of reasons. I don't really want the dog in there, and a certain little boy likes to ride his bike all the time and would no doubt trample any plants. They'd have no chance! :-) Last year, we just threw one together with stuff we had.


It worked but it wasn't super pretty and definitely wasn't the look we were going for in our backyard. This year we decided to spend a little money and build a nicer looking fence, but my hubby had an idea to save us a little. We bought the most inexpensive fence pickets at Home Depot and cut them in half. Then, since they were shaped at the top, we put any shaped ends upside down, so all the tops would match.

You have to look very carefully to see the upside down ones. If you decide to try this, make sure you measure well when cutting them in half. It was a little difficult to get them lined up evenly at first.

Now the garden is all cleaned up and seeds are planted.

Since we used wood we already had for the posts and "beams" of the fence, it only cost us about $40.00! 

The fence works great to keep out certain little bicyclists (yes, he's missing a shoe...boys:-)).

But it opens easily to let them in too...on foot that is. :-)

Oh, and here's one other money saving trick. While I was planting the seeds, I wanted to mark the rows, but didn't really have wooden steaks or string.What to do? Improvise that's what! See those rows?

I used wooden skewers (like for kabobs) and ribbon you would use for balloons. I've been keeping an eye on them to make sure the birds aren't messing with them (I didn't want them to get caught in it or something), but they are holding up just fine! I'm not sure if this would be less expensive than buying string but certainly saves money if you already have this type of ribbon and skewers.

I can't wait to show you sprouts when they start coming up. It should be soon for some of the plants!

I'm sorry to say the most of the seeds I started inside didn't make it. I just started them too soon and they ran out of room before it was warm enough to plant them in the ground. :-( This is my 3rd year planting a garden and only my 2nd trying to start my seeds inside, so I'm learning! This year was better than last year, though, because I still have one plant alive! Last year was a total bust. 

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties. 

Garden Sprouts {Spring Has Sprung!}

I mentioned here that I would share some pictures of my vegetable garden sprouts. Well, that was over a week ago! Here's the picture I was talking about sharing. I took it on March 26th.

Here's where it's gets crazy and is super cool! A week and a half after the above picture was taken, I took this picture:

Crazy! I'm super excited about how well they're doing, and I think I better thin them out here pretty soon.

Are you planting a garden this year? I'd love to hear about it!

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties. 

Paper Punch Storage Tip {And What We Did This Weekend}

Here's a quick little tip for storing all those paper punches. 

I don't know about you, but I'm a bit of a paper addict! Yes, yes it does sound a little weird, but I just LOVE paper! When you've got a lot of paper, a collection of paper punches will soon follow. My collection was getting a bit out of control and was just piled in a drawer, but then I remembered a tip I had seen (and actually used in an old house) years ago.

Use one of those small curtain rods to "hang" your paper punches. You may have some of these just laying around, and even if you don't, they're really not that expensive. I happened to have one just waiting to be used, so I dug it out, hung it on the wall, and voila! I've got a nice place to store my paper punches. Check it out:

Perfect!

And, now, if you're interested, here's a little of what we did this weekend. My husband took the day off on Friday to enjoy the wonderful weather we'd been having, so we went on a little hike.

About a month or so ago we sat down and made a list of places we wanted to check out near where we live. We got to check one of those places off our list!

Then on Saturday, we did a little yard work...ok A LOT of yard work. We were tired at the end of the day!

I guess we figured we hadn't worn ourselves out enough, so after church and going to breakfast on Sunday, we started doing a little more work on the yard. Luckily for our sore muscles, the wind kicked up,  so we retreated inside. 

We didn't want to waste the day, though, so we got our seeds started for our garden. I'm so excited for the garden this year! We started out small in 2010, expanded it in 2011, but this year we're putting more thought not only into growing the garden but in the design of it. It's going to be so beautiful! I can't wait to get it going, so I can share it with you.

What did you do this weekend? Do yo have Spring fever yet? I'm so ready to get things growing here!

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties.