Gardening

A busy day today. I took the girls to English Gardens to see what I could get for vegetables for my garden. I ended up with a flat of pansies, a basil, oregano and sage along with 3 kinds of lettuce. We also got some carrot seeds (Valerie's suggestion: "I like carrots, they're good for you"), cucumber seeds, green onion seeds, a wildflower seed mix, some purple flower that I don't remember the name of at the moment and zinnia, perhaps. Also a bag of onion bulbs. We came home because my Father-in-law was coming over to look at our garage door opener that had stopped working last weekend and I knew my girls would want to see him. He determined that the opener wasn't fixable, switched out our old dishwasher for a new-to-us dishwasher given to us from my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and hung a new swing (?) for the girls in addition to taking the girls for a bike ride to the park. I'm still not sure where he gets all his energy.

The new swing. Someone came to get some of the lava rock that we don't want. It's surrounding the house and I don't like it. We are also planning to change the grading around the house, so it is unnecessary. I plan to bury the rest. I think it would be more work than I really care to put in it to pull it up. They did find a couple pieces of petrified wood in amongst the rock. I may go digging around in it a bit to see if I can find more. After they all left, we went to Lowe's to see what else we could find for plants. I also needed a window cover for the basement windows for when we do the grading. I also got landscape fabric for the grading and rabbit fencing for the garden beds. We have a healthy population of rabbits around here. For plants we ended up with 2 regular tomatoes, 2 cherry tomatoes and a stripy tomato plant. A second rhubarb plant followed me home. I couldn't help it. I also ended up with a yellow and an orange pepper plant and lettuce seeds. When my parents were here, we drastically cut back some shrubs along one side of my backyard. It left a bare patch of ground under where the branches were. I bought grass seed to put there. Now I need to get it dug up so I can put the seed in. I'm not sure that I'll get to that this weekend.

We planted most of what we bought (except for the flowers) today. We ended up planting more of the onions than I had originally planned because the girls were enjoying planting them. The herbs went into pots. The rhubarb was planted next to the one I've had for a few years and planted next to the garden bed. The tomatoes received cages.

They are forecasting a low of 34 tonight, so I covered the beds with sheets, just in case. I need to get some cheap sheets from the thrift shop to use, but for tonight they got our sheets. Surely it won't permanently hurt them. I still need to put in the rabbit fencing. I'd prefer to be able to remove it to access the beds easily (and the girls too) so I'll need to figure that out.