I’ve been out of touch for a while. I have been really busy though!

My chair redo is almost done, thank goodness! It turned out to be a pretty large undertaking but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

My garden is coming along very nicely. I have a ton of tomatoes. Now I’m just waiting for them to ripen and turn red. I have a few peppers. The onions and garlic are still surviving. My herbs are still doing really well. The cantaloupes are awesome! I have been eating tons of lettuce too! My lettuce actually started to “bolt” (apparently that’s a technical term) so I had to harvest all of it. When your lettuce starts to bolt the lettuce turns bitter, so they say. Luckily I got to it in time and there is no bitter lettuce here!

Hopefully I’ll have more of an update soon.

A few weeks ago my husband and I spent a couple hours in the morning building a raised garden bed. We followed these simple instructions from The Pioneer Woman. It was certainly a lot of work (on his part mostly), but it turned out great!

Later that day I filled the bed with a mix of garden soil, manure, compost (my own!), and top soil. I used the top soil in moderation. It’s cheap, so it’s great filler, but it drys out quickly and has little nutritional value for the plants.

Compost on the other hand, is chock full of the good stuff! In fact I’ve apparently been growing cantaloupe and didn’t even know it. Evidently I put some seeds in my compost, and by some I mean all the seeds from the innards of a cantaloupe. I have seedlings sprouting up all over the place! I’ve been keeping an eye out for them, and when I see one or in most cases ten, I pull them and replant them in a corner of the garden. I’m going to wait until they grow some and then pull out all of the small ones.

Speaking of plants. I think this was a classic case of my eyes being bigger than my stomach, or I guess in this instance my garden. I got three different types of tomatoes, two types of lettuce, four types of peppers, garlic, onions, and lots of fresh herbs. I also purchased some seeds, but I didn’t have any room after I put in all the live plants. I guess I’ll just have to keep the seeds until next year, and hope they germinate then.

Now I just have to worry about keeping them alive and hope all the plants produce something edible.  And hope that I get to it before my dog does.

I have some great plans for this chair. I acquired it from a friend and can’t wait to recover it. Once it is finished it will live in the corner of our living room that has been rather vacant since moving into our house almost a year ago.

Spring is finally making its appearance here in the valley.  The days have been mostly sunny and warm.  I’ve been trying to get outside and enjoy this lovely weather.  Soon it will be unbearably hot and these gorgeous early days of spring will be gone.  While I was strolling around my backyard yesterday, thinking about all the things I want to get done this spring, I noticed something poking out of the ground.  Three of the five Hostas I planted last year are coming back!  I was so excited that I immediately called my green thumb wielding mother.  It’s always nice when she shares in my enthusiasm for the simple things in life.

Here comes my resident garden stomping, hole digging, mole hunter.  Hopefully the little guys will survive her massive clodhoppers.

For Valentine’s Day my husband and I have a formed a tradition over the years of cooking a nice meal together. We always choose something that we’ve never made before and spend the evening making it together. This year we decided on a menu of chicken cordon bleu, broccoli cheese casserole, spinach salad (to keep it healthy), and mini molten chocolate cakes for desert. Everything was amazing, especially the molten chocolate cakes. I used this recipe and they turned out perfect.  And is there any better combination than raspberries and chocolate?  I don’t think so.