The Great Outdoors

We've been spending a lot of time outside the past couple of weekends. My husband finished building me a raised bed out of cedar and did a great job keeping the box level while matching the slope of our backyard. Thank Heaven I married an engineer! This weekend I put our vegetable starts in it.

I have two varieties of tomato (Early Girl and Roma), lettuce, red bell peppers, strawberries, and cucumber starts. I also planted carrot seeds and lettuce seeds. I also have a couple of pumpkin starts that I need to plant somewhere else in the yard. Next year I'm hoping we can add another raised box--then I'll probably let half of this one become a strawberry bed. Cedar is so expensive though, this is all we could afford to build this year! After taking these pictures, I started adding cedar pickets around the bed to keep the bunnies and neighborhood cats out of my veggies. I still need to finish that project.

We also weeded out the bed under our front window and transplanted some of the so-called carpet roses from that bed (um, they were about two feet tall...that is WAY taller than what I was expecting when I planted them!) into the backyard. The bed has a few new plants now and is freshly mulched. It looks a million times better than it did at this time last week, that's for sure!

I also planted some pots for our front porch and our back deck. Now I'm ready for summer to come! We've had a few fleeting glimpses of warm weather, but in general we've had an unseasonably cool and wet spring. I must say, our house is looking mighty cute right now. We had it painted blue with white trim last spring (previously it was beige with green trim) and it just looks bright and festive, especially with a bright red rhodie blooming in the front yard.