Vegetable Gardening Part 1

I have lived in Austin 3.5 years, and Michael has lived in Austin for 7.5 years. We have been slowly acclimating ourselves into the "Austin Lifestyle" as I like to call it. You know, being more aware of organic/natural ways of doing things, getting excited about gardening, going local with buying things, etc (the list could go on and on). The culture here is pretty diverse, and we love it. So these past 2 weekends (rain and bad weather prevented it from being just 1 weekend), we have embraced the idea of home vegetable gardening. Pretty fun, I know. I have been doing a bunch of research, and we are both hoping that this works out and that we end up having at least a couple of successful plants. I won't set my hopes too high and expect everything to grow well. But I sure won't complain if it does.
We decided that the best way to do this for our yard was to make raised beds. So off to Lowe's we went to get a couple of 2x8's, cut them, and made a bed that is 2.5 feet by 5 feet, and a smaller one for asparagus next to it.

We went down the road to this gardening place called It's about Thyme (cute name huh?), and talked to a really nice man named Dwight who was very very helpful. They have an area of several raised bed gardens at this place and he showed us how they did theirs, and gave us lots of tips on how to make our garden succesful. He also recommended that we buy our soil and compost from another place in Austin called The Natural Gardener because it only cost $3 a bag there. Thanks Dwight!! Based on some of his recommendations, we decided to make a line of several beds and grow a grouping of things in each one.
This stage is only part one because its just the "starter" bed. Here's what we have accomplished:
1. Finalize our plans and get the beds built
2. Prep half of the beds which included digging up existing soil and mix in good soil and compost
3. Plant the veggies that are ok to plant this early while still cold (carrots, asparagus, broccoli, and lettuce)
4. Figure out a plan for keeping the dogs away from the garden!


So I think we have made a pretty good start, this is how the yard looks right now:

From Left to Right: broccoli, carrots(in the blank space) and 2 types of lettuce

Asparagus bed (this has to be by itself and will take 2 years to grow)

Hopefully this will keep the pups out!

I thought I would add a few bonus pictures of our suuuper awesome dirt from The Natural Gardener. Man that place is so cool. The day we went was very cold and we were going as fast as we could b/c we needed 15 bags of dirt and 5 bags of compost, so we didn't have time to go exploring. As soon as we have some nice weather and a free Saturday though, I want to go back and look at all their fun stuff! (in case you didn't see the link above, here is how to get to their website to see a little of what I am talking about: http://naturalgardeneraustin.com/).

mmm compost

Michael working hard to load up the dirt

Coming soon: part 2!

Friday Five

Yay for Fridays!! This week has been a pretty good week at work, nothing too crazy, but Im still always ready for the weekend :). Especially cold rainy ones that lend themselves perfectly to working on some sewing projects and reading. So here's 5 random things that happend with us this week.

1. We went and bagged up our very own super awesome dirt (that was also only $3 per bag) and if the weather clears up a little bit tomorrow we will be starting our very own backyard vegetable garden! (you know, just so we can call ourselves true "austinites")

2. We heard from our foster-dog coordinator that she may have found a home for Ranger! Its an older retired couple that would be able to be at home a lot with him, and give him lots of attention. Hopefully it works out!

3. I thought up a really fun sewing project to accomplish this weekend. It's of course for my nieces, so even if I have a little trouble and can't finish all of it this weekend without guidance, I still have until March before we go home again. I have kinda been a terrible aunt, and didn't get anything together for the birthdays in January, but hopefully late is better than never!

4. My friend Cassell had her baby over last weekend, and last night I took them dinner and got to squeeze that little one! He is sooo cute! This was her second baby, and she was amazing and did it all without an epidural. She said she was pretty proud of herself but that she would never do it that way again lol.

5. Valentine's day was this week! I already posted a picture of our dinner that night of the heart-shaped pizzas. Since it was a Tuesday, we just stayed at home and watched a movie with our dinner and spent time together. It was pretty nice. I got some beautiful pink roses, a box of chocolates, and a Joann's giftcard. Such a good hubby.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day!!

Parenting?

No this post is not about me having a kid. Don't get your panties in a wad of excitement yet. That is still a ways off (I mean, come on people I am only 25!). This post is about an interesting article that I read the other day. One of the blogs I follow is called nat the fat rat. I don't know her, but one of my good friends, Julie recommended her blog to me. Its a fun blog to read b/c she lives in New York, and is a really good and interesting writer. So she has a little boy that she stays at home with, and posted a link to this article a couple of days ago. I don't have kids, so I have no idea how to parent or what having kids it like, but I thought this article had some interesting ideas. Theoretically, the way the French kids are raised sounds like an ideal way to raise kids to me, but probably is a lot different in practice. Also, I am not really sure how to practically apply all these ideas, since I don't even know if I have that much self-control in my own life ;). Hopefully, I can try to incorporate some of these ideas into the way I parent one of these days because they sound like behaviors I would like my kids to have. But who knows, maybe all this "wisdom" I am finding and reading about right now while I don't have kids will just sound like crazy ideas when I actually have real live children to raise.

Books vs. Movies

I stayed up waaaaay too late last night finishing the last book in the Hunger Games series. Once I get going on a book that I really like, I just can't put it down. I always tell myself that sleep is overrated (which is kinda ironic b/c I do love me some sleep). I have been hearing a lot of people talk about these books, so with one of my  amazon gift cards that I got for christmas, I went ahead and bought the series. It was an interesting read, and pretty full of action. A little gory in places, but that just may be me being sensitive to that stuff. I liked the way the author had me guessing pretty much the whole time, and at the very end, I was surprised at what happened. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. I kinda wished it would have ended a little happier, but I can still be satisfied that it wasn't predictable. One thing I didn't like was that she (the author) seemed to leave out a lot of detail, and in my head I was asking a lot of questions about things. Some of them were explained, and others were not (at least to my satisfaction). Michael made a good point (he is reading them now) that it seemed like the whole story was from the main girl's perspective, so some details may have been left out because of that. Who know, I enjoyed reading all three of the books. Hopefully all that just increased your interest level in the books without it being a spoiler alert :).

The point of all that was that I saw a trailer for the hunger games movie the other day, and was thinking about how I am kind of a snob about movies adapted from books. I really like going to the movies, and also watching movies at home is great, but I just really love reading. And books themselves. There is nothing better than a new book smell to me. So great. I kinda have a little of a book-hoarding problem. Almost every movie that I have seen where I have read the book first, I kinda hate. Or else spend the whole time comparing that movie to the book in my head, pointing out all the things the movie-making people got wrong. Especially if its a book or book series that I really really liked. The only exception that I can think of is the Lord of the Rings movies. They did not get all the details right, but those were some of the best made book-adapted movies that I have seen in my opinion. I think its because I have a pretty active imagination, and none of those movie producers get the characters, setting, etc "right" according to how I saw it happen in my head while I was reading. I blame my mother who made us read all the time when we were younger, and kicked us out of the house to play outside with the neighbors instead of watching tv while we were home-schooled. Sometimes, my mom would take my books away from me as punishment until I did my chores. Yeah, I was am kinda nerdy, I know.
The twilight series (yes I know, but don't even put me in the same category as all those crazies out there) is one of my favorites. I have read all the books 3 times (that's not too abnormal for me, I usually read books that I like a lot at least 2 times). I just think its a fun story and really well written fiction. But I saw the first movie, and almost walked out in the middle of it. It was terrible. So so many things were horrible about it. My comparison is to a super low budget cross between lifetime and MTV movies. Needless to say, I have refused to watch any of the others. I get kinda sad for all the people who think they are great movies b/c I feel like if they had only read the books, they would understand that the story is so much better than it is depicted in the movies. Oh well. Harry Potter is almost the same in my book. I am probably going to offend several people who love those movies, but I thought that they were just OK. I did watch all of them, b/c my husband likes them a lot, but I will hopefully never watch them again. The last 2 movies were probably the best of the bunch, and I didn't think that watching them was a waste of time, but they still don't hold a candle to the books in my opinion.
Well that was a lot of rambling brought on just by one movie trailer (sheesh!) Even after all that, I will probably end up seeing at least the first movie of the hunger games. I am a little curious about how they will try to make that story work in a movie. Plus, I bet Michael will want to see it. But if you are going to see it, read the books first! I think you may just enjoy them more :).

Ranger Update

Well we have had Ranger (see this post for details) for almost 3 weeks now! crazy! He is doing pretty well. Our main goal has been to fatten him up, and he is filling out nicely. Still a cute little miniature version of our dogs, but is looking much healthier than when we first got him. Turns out he is a little escape artist and has gotten out of the park (several times), our backyard, any area of the house that we try to baby-gate him into, and almost out of the crate. The good part is that he doesn't try to run off, but the bad part is that we can't really trust him anywhere. Even in the house-which is a problem. So we are working on it. We just have to be smarter than the dog. That should be easy, right??
Today I did a little photo shoot in the backyard of Ranger, and that dog was sooo not cooperative! I am way past the deadline of when I was supposed to email our coordinator some pictures so that he can be entered into the Springer Spaniel database and hopefully get adopted. You can see the website here. *warning, the dogs on there are stinking cute, and they have stories that just make you want to rip your heart out!* I thought that it would be really easy to get some pictures of him, but the little stinker did not want to sit still, and it felt like almost every time I pushed the button to take a picture, he started moving. I got a lot of pictures of his butt. Here's a couple of the good ones.

When Michael got home, I had him tie the dog down so he would sit still!

Its too bad he's not used to having his picture taken like my dogs. The whole time they were vying for my attention and posing for the camera. Such divas.