My how things have grown

This is totally unrelated to this post, but I thought I'd buy a cheapo temperature reader at Home Depot today because it's always nice to look out the window at any time of day and see what the temp is.  I just hope it doesn't blow any in any wind.

First pick of the season!  Cherry tomatoes.  There should be about 5 more ready to pick in the next few days.

My one cucumber plant was getting out of control and I had been meaning to make a trellis for it for  quite some time so the plant could learn to grow up the trellis instead of just spreading everywhere.  Well, so I finally made one today!  I did have to loosely "twisty tie" the plant to the trellis though.  I'm hoping that doesn't hurt it in the long run.  Once it actually attaches itself to the trellis, I'll be able to take the ties off.  Think of it like training wheels for plants!

And now with a trellis, our garden looks like a serious garden!

Here's an updated look of our corn.  It's about 18" tall. 

All of the tomato plants!!!!!  And I found like 8 roma tomato and 1 regular tomato starting to grow already!!!! 

Whiz Kids Spring Fling 2012

Last Saturday we attended the annual Spring Fling with our whiz kids Jesus and Nataly. 

There was a bungee jump thing...

Rock Climbing...

 

Even I wanted to try...but this is as far as I made it before freaking out.

Nataly (left) and her friend being silly.

We were all exhausted after the long day being outside but we had a lot of fun.  Our kids graduate from the program this year and we hope that we've taught them a few things, made them better readers and helped them feel worthy and proud of their accomplishments.  

Thank you pest control

I have a serious aversion to moths and june bugs.  I turn into an instant ninja master when I see one anywhere outside or in my house.  Ninja master meaning I just start freaking out and fail my arms and scream like a scaredy cat and demand that Stephen take care of the problem before I will enter the room where I saw the moth.

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my front door the other day to find this.  I almost stepped on them BAREFOOT!!!!  I flipped out and gasped in disgust.  I carefully went outside and got the broom.  I started to sweep them and quickly found out that they were not dead.  Just stunned I guess by the spray the pest control people had done about a week ago.

 So, i guess that meant the pest control people did their job well!  But it was still a weird thing to randomly have like 30 toppled over june bugs in my entry way. I tried to sweep them up, but their gross legs started getting stuck in my broom and I just couldn't do it anymore.  Naturally, I called stephen and said that he HAD to sweep them out of here and throw them away.

 There were two one legged crickets in the mix, too.  Gives me the heebee jeebees.

THUNDER!!!

Thanks APMEX!!!! Stephen's employer gave away two pairs of cour-tside tickets to the second game of the playoffs for last Monday  night.  You had to be the 35th caller to the HR department to win.  The only stipulation was if you won the courtside seats, you had to take another employee.  

They dined like kings in the buffet area.  Prime rib and cheesecake!

Arts Festival

Last Thursday we headed down to the OKC Art Festival for some good ole festival food and walking around.  We walked there via "The Underground".  

The whole secret Underground connects a bunch of buildings downtown and has some shops and restaurants in it.  It's pretty neat, so now I can say I've been in there.

Festival tents.

Really creepy lifesize metal art.

Cool, 10 foot, wind spinny lawn sculpture thing made out of metal and glass.

Aslo VERY expensive...

Some pretty slick looking painted city scenes.  I also didn't take a picture of this one piece art but it was incredible.  It was about as big as these here, but it was a painting of a rowboat in the water and from like 10' away it literally looked like a photograph.  How he painted the water and the light reflecting off of it was superb.

Devon Tower.

Shoe art...okay..sure why not!

Cute and super creative metal art.  This other tent had the same thing, but way more diverse and intricate.  Did I think to take a picture of his stuff...of course not, why would I do something that smart.

Anyway, we had a great time and ate too much!

Bathroom Update...again

We're finally to a point in our bathroom project that it's all up to us now.  No more contractors.

Over the past few weeks we had a tile guy come out at his leisure, in between his other jobs, to prep  our shower for tiling.  That meant we demoed everything, he pre-sloped the floor, hung the cement board, put in the shower pan, cemented the floor and put in our curb.

We met one last time to finalize the placement of our niches and exactly how the tile is going to be laid out.  We are going to be doing the tiling because 1) we know how and 2) we'll save tons of money.

Here is the pre-sloped floor...

And some of the cement floor and the heavy duty shower lining (pan)

Sloped floor and curb...

 The approximately 22"x12"x4" niche for shampoo and body wash.

The 5"x5" niche for the soap.

 The whole finshed thing...all prepped and ready for tile.

Next on the list is to fix all the drywall in the bathroom, texture and paint.  THEN....we can tile.  And we're really busy this month so as much as we both want to just get it done and over with, it may not happen as soon as we want. But I did give myself a deadline to have this all done by the end of June so......here's hoping we can pull it off!!!!!!

The 3rd annual veggie garden

So...it's that time of year again to start growing veggies.  We didn't start our veggies from seed this year indoors, we just bought plants from Home Depot (on sale!) and Davidson's Nursery here in town.  We planted a lot of tomatoes.  Mostly roma, because those are my favorite, and a few small round tomatoes.  I'm really hoping we get a lot and I can make salsa and spaghetti sauce!  This bed here has corn, tomatoes, and peppers.

This other bed has basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, onions, green beans, and a cucumber plant.  My question is "how do you know when onions are ready to be picked?"  The stems on ours are getting quite long and I'm afraid to dig them out yet!  I guess I'll have to google it soon and find out.

Here we've got red, yellow and green bell peppers and one jalepeno pepper.  I'm itching to be able to make my own salsa with stuff from my garden this year.  Please Oklahoma summer heat, do not kill my plants this year!

I like cucumbers and I kind of wanted to buy a viney plant and see if it's going to take over my garden or not.  I'm hoping it doesn't, but I'm thinking I'm going to buy a little trellis or something to teach the vines to grow up and not crowd the beans I planted next to it.

Speaking of beans, here they are!  We planted two rows of green beans to get started with this year.  That way, if they grown and produce, we can plant a second harvest.  Or if they just grow but don't produce anything, I haven't wasted a bunch of seeds for nothing.  Beans really do grow fast, as I just took these pictures last week and the beans are seriously like 3 inches taller.  Now I understand why in science class growing up, you always planted beans to study the parts of a plant.

This should be fun.  When we bought this cherry tomato plant, it already had a bunch of green tomatoes on it.  Now it has a lot more, but none of them are ripe yet.  It's a small plant, but heavily one sided and it fell over the other day.  Luckily, the stem didn't break, but this baby is already staked and reinforced.

We also did plant some tomatoes by seed so we could have a second harvest later this summer. We planted in three spots, so after we weed out the puny ones, we should have three hearty looking roma tomato plants.  We also just put sprinkle out a bunch of seeds and weed them down to just one as they grow.  Although, I think I've finally learned this year that we could get away with just putting down like 4 seeds in each little spot and weed from that.  Almost always, all the seeds end up sprouting so there's not really a reason to put down 20 seeds in one area.  Anyway.

Woo hoo! And corn!  Now, if you remember last year.....our corn was awesome looking and super fun to watch grow.  Unfortunately, we didn't get to enjoy any of it and ended up digging out and throwing away all four plants because ants started making their homes in the husks and stems and completely destroyed them. It was super gross and disgusting and was not worth fighting for.

This year, we planted 8 corn.  And again, probably needed to only put 1 corn seed down in each spot because obviously each and every one sprouted and I've had to go out there twice and weed it down to just one and dig out the seeds.  Silly me!

And finally our basil plants!  Yeah I know we had a huge bush of one basil plant last year and now I've planted three and will probably (hopefully) have three huge basil plants this year!  Basil is awesome. It's the perfect garnish to any italian dish.  Fresh basil with mozzarella on tomato slices is the perfect summertime snack, appetizer,  or light dinner.  And the pesto I made last year is still in my freezer waiting to be used and the basil and dried is used often as well.  So, what do I plan on doing with this bounty of basil this year!  Well, share it with my friends and neighbors of course!

All in all, I'm really excited about the prospects of the garden this year.  We've had good rain so far and everything is growing great as of now.  I hope that we have a mild, only sorta hot, summer and get some rain every now and then and things will really start to grow!