Thief! thief I say !

                                        We caught her in the act she can't deny it now.

I've gone and lost my hoe ??!!

So yesterday Mike and me decided we needed to clean like there was no tomorrow and after a sunburn for me and some "itching" with a "b" from him we kinda sorta have the yard presentable.although the big pile in the middle of the yard is still there we can't help that.

Both the green bins got filled up , now before I get flamed for not composting I must add that dog poop is never going in my veggie garden and as I've heard it isn't good to compost it anyways cause of germies. 

 Rosie and mommy playing

We tried to use that contraption on the yard to make it even for building the beds but it's about 50 years old and I think it's given up the ghost. I decided I was gonna make it even nomatter what so I took the hoe to it and did a little bit of it this morning I went looking for it to finish the job and couldn't find it, hopefully Mike know where it's at.

Updates:

We have three baby artichoke on the plant instread of just one.

 I have no idea how to cook an artichoke any suggestions on how to cook one?

 

The dwarf grapefruit is flowering but I found that there were no bees on it

 go figure but I hope it gives fruit this year.

A little info about us

I moved in with Mike my boyfriend into his grandfathers house one year and three months ago. Along with the house came years and years of stuff mostly stuff that was of no use to us and a very overgrown yard that had been neglected for a number of years lots of things needed to be replaced, redone, cleaned and/or  thrown out.We had a cat and two dogs and then a couple of days later a stray cat joined us just out of the blue. Fast forward a couple of months and we saw a poor little dog dodging traffic on a busy street I convinced Mike we could not let this happen poor little thing we went back to see if it was still there, it was and it did not run away when I tried to pick it up (so we took it home). Now here we were two cats three dogs that dog we picked up we put up flyers for her to see if anyone would claim her after all she was adorable, alas  no one claimed her (sad) the dog was pudgy suspiciously round we figured she was just a piggy thing as it turns out about 4 weeks after we had her she went into labor. Dawg gave us five adorable little puppies, so here was the count ... 5+3+2= 10 animals plus one bird something had to be done ... we have since found homes for the puppies we kept one our little Rosie pie and her mother Dawg the name just stuck. Around the same time that we were finding homes for our little ones and the bird a cat gave birth somewhere around here and had four kittens, they were adorable little balls of fluff but very wild, after a while they went away except for one who has adopted us (darnit) never could say no to a pretty face.This is our family Mike, me, Dawg, Baby, Lyka, Rosie pie, Keekers (Kiki), Garfield and B.K.       

 I love our home  it's so big and beautiful and lately it's been getting more and more manageable, soon the yard will be the pride and joy both Mike and me want it to be and (hopefully) i'll grow pounds and pounds of vegetables.We've inherited lots of furniture and problems and trash but I love it, this is our home.

By golly we've solved the mystery!

Remember the weird scraggly plant in our front yard that i had no idea what it was ...well it turned out to be this

It's a Peony almost in full bloom .

These are all the plants that are in bloom right now :

and it seems our orange tree is going to do great this year as there were alot of blooms and alot of bees pollinating it, last year we had a total of two, yes I said TWO oranges on that tree it was sad but hooray for bees !!!

All the little cement creatures living in our garden

All inherited and all need to be repainted which I am in the process of doing we also have a couple of penguins and  a sleeping sonbrero guy , we had some donkeys but they went to the great cement heaven in the sky

So I havn't written anything in about a month ...

this is only because there was nothing to write about i believe it was dreary and rainy and awful it was depressing to say the least. Now it seems that the sunny days are here to stay.

Update on my seedlings : Rememember how I had like 16 tomato plants, well hardening them off  about half of the plants died (very tragic) so did the asparagus beansand the lettuce. I'll try the asparagus beans again once the raised beds are in hopefully they'll do much better there.
The corn I planted is doing great  I'll have to get  some bigger pots and transplant them soon they've outgrown their starter home and the raised beds aren't up yet :( . The little marigolds I planted the second time around in a  ice cube tray of all places are doing extremely well that I had to transplant them into bigger containers they don't have flowers yet but they're about 2 inches tall  and have lots of foliage.Lastly the peas I planted got way too big for their containers as well and I transplanted them into the succulents raised bed since there was space for them there and I ran out of big pots to put things in.

The rain has been preventing us from building raised beds for many weeks. Mike and me can't work the soil because it's been so muddy, hopefully now we'll get a chance to do it.I've started to move the old border rocks that were in place where the raised beds will go, those things have been there so long I need a crowbar to pry them from the soil it's a good thing my mama didn't raise a weakling.Mike will work the soil after all the rocks are removed and even it out after which we'll add weed cloth and place our raised beds there.Ta Ta  for now 

Nature walk

The geese look just like statues

...til they took flight

So today we just needed to get out of the house and we decided we'd grab a little take out and head on down to the river trails and see what we could see

A couple of little wild mushrooms we saw 

Some wildflowersSome really cute grass,

  and ofcourse last but not least the river