Sheesh, been a while... but we've been tirelessly (and tired-ly) working toward the goal of having the house ready to list end of August/September. I'll save all my emotionally conflicted ramblings about this for some other time and instead catalog all the new stuff.
Anyway, off topic to start with, my brother David and SIL Kendra visited in the beginning of May for a week. By the numbers: at least 8 hours of The Office and 3 Bourne movies watched, 3 trips to Buttercloud, 2 In N Out, 2 beers and 2 desserts at Schoolhaus Brewhaus, 1 enormous breakfast at Morning Glory, 1 Bella pizza, 1 trip to Crater Lake (pretty snowy, which made us happy, though the lake is not as blue on cloudy days) and 1 exceptional bottle of Gnarlyhead ancient vine zinfandel paired with steaks.
It was a fun time. Then Memorial Day Weekend, I gardened. I haven't really stopped gardening, actually. The back 40 was tilled, weeded and landscape-fabric-ed.
And now looks like this, with things more grown in. We need to lay just a bit more pea gravel (in the foreground) to meet the driveway on the right, and then this will be pretty much finished. This year, I'm growing:
- pumpkins
- cateloupe
- cucumbers
- tomatoes (obviously)
- dahlias
- 5 kinds of squash
- onions
- potatoes (the organic ones sprout super fast in the pantry)
I just picked my first yellow squash today and have eaten a few yellow cherry tomatoes already.
Sorry about the funky lighting on this, but this is how the back looks now (minus canoe, which we sold and replaced with kayaks). Few rough edges still, but looks really good mostly.
Finally, I got to fill these giant pots for either side of the garage. I bought them three years ago and they've been shuffled around the garage ever since. They're 23 inches wide, for scale. I made little carts for them to wheel around on and strung up sprinklers around the garage door so they're watered automatically. Insert heart eyes here. Sprinkler drip lines and whatnot were a SERIOUS PAIN to install but I'm looking forward to sipping my beer and watching all my plants get watered.
Not bad, huh?
We need to mulch most of the beds next to the pool still. I planted blackeyed susans of various types to fill in where it's still blank. Hopefully the bed in the background finishes filling in. It's a bit spotty still, but eventually the plants will entirely fill the whole bed.
The best flower in the garden right now is this hot pink dahlia. When the sun hits the petals, they almost glitter.
And out front, we have two trees full of peaches and (super excitingly) my Macintosh apple finally has apples. I have been waiting for six years to enjoy fruit off that tree. Two of the peach branches broke from all the fruit and an unfortunate miscommunication about pruning this spring, but we'll still have way more than we can eat.
And lastly, here's a before (over eight years ago, when we were just looking at the house)...
And an after, now that we have our shutters up and Todd finished the brick walkway, which turned into a much bigger project than he expected. It makes me smile every time I drive past the house because it looks so dang cute. We're going to put window boxes up under the two big windows and fill them with begonias or something. It's going to be unbelievably charming.
Oh, wait...one more. I just loved how the kitchen looked one morning a few weeks ago with a kind of crazy bouquet of flowers and the filtered light. Hard to believe it was so dreadful three years ago.
