The garden, step 1

Lots of progress towards our 5 minute a day garden yesterday, unless of course we screwed it up and will end up making more work for ourselves. Incidentally, this post could also be titled "Rachel and Chad don't know how to compost." Let's not go into any gory details but leave it to say there were some rather smelly spots in the pile.

Avoiding the worst spots, I do think we got some good compost out of it. And we proceeded to mix it with the soil and make us some beds, following the instructions in our 5 minute garden book as best we could. Planted today: Beans, Zucchini, Cucumber, Radishes, Spinach, Lettuce, Basil, Dill, Parsley, Chives. We also want to do tomatoes, but have to wait until the seedings are ready (probably by the end of the month).


Today was a mission in yard recycling. I want to get the beans to climb up the back wall and up the fence, so I rigged up a crazy makeshift ladder using branches that fell from the tree over the winter.


We also did some general yardwork, digging up GIANT cement things, planted long ago. We think they were probably from a clothesline or something.


The one Chad is rolling in the picture above took both of us forever to get out, and almost broke our shovel. Basically, it was super heavy and dug very very far into the ground. In this big hole.


In digging up the garden we had a ton of extra sod, which we used to fill these giant holes, but there was extra. Which I insisted we recycle by putting out over the grass-less spots on the right side of the tree.


For the record, Chad thought this was a ridiculous idea. I think it is genius. I guess time will tell whether the grass takes or not. But I figure it can't be worse than the dirt that was there before. And how is the tree, you may be wondering?


Still stunning. The petals are starting to fall, but it's hard to be sad about that because even the falling petals are gorgeous. It's a bit weird to rake up piles and piles of flower petals, but really not too bad. And they can only improve the smell of the compost.

First BBQ of the season

It didn't rain yesterday! Which means we got to run a 5k in the sun. Chad and I were 73rd and 80th, out of 435. Which is exciting (we did it in 25 minutes, which is good for me), except a whole bunch of the runners were in the 7 - 12 year old age group. Which makes it hard to really consider it a victory. :)

The other exciting result of the lack of rain is it allowed us to have friends over outside for the first time this year.


Nothing like bocce amongst the gently falling petals to make it really feel like spring! That and shish-kabobs, iced tea, and cake. And laughing hard enough that people can hear us down the street. Perfect!

Dr. Pytel, P.R.

P.R. = Public Relations, of course. I opened the Ambler Enterprise (our newspaper with an average length of 10 pages) to just skim through it for concerts or something interesting to do before I threw it in the recycling, and found this (click on the article to see it large enough to read).


I was totally surprised. Well, shocked to see my name in a headline but really not surprised after I did, since our director of communications asked me a bunch of questions before I went. My immediate reaction was to be really embarrassed, but then I tried to remember Mom's advice about dealing with the fishy-handed reporter at the Free Press: smile and be gracious. Smile and be gracious. And this isn't that embarrassing after all, since half of the article is the R&H standard press blurb. At any rate take a look, I'm famous.

More about tree

Sorry, I just can't help myself. Here we are, getting ready for our first meal outside of the season.


Notice our new patio furniture! :) The tree is really opening up now, so instead of really looking pink, it's looking a lot more whitish.


I would also like to take a moment to give my camera props for great close-ups! At any rate, I am just amazed at how stunning this tree is every time I look at it.

Tree!!!

Look at our tree! It's pretty crazy looking, since it's full of blooms and doesn't have any leaves. I'm not used to giant trees with flowers and no leaves. Can't complain though - look how pretty the flowers are!




So what's a girl to do in order to try to get in some kind of volleyball shape when she's not playing tournaments? Especially when she's got a nice flat patio, a nice back yard, and an afternoon when it's not freezing or raining? Jump rope with my tree!


Oh wait, I suck.

Perhaps with practice, by the time the blooms are replaced with leaves I won't suck as badly. And the jump rope whip marks on my legs will have healed.

Are you paying attention?

Here's your test.



For the future, I will try to refrain from posting random internet garbage. But I have a weakness for dancing bears.

Wepons and furniture

A busy day today. We spent a good portion at Home Depot, waiting for the rental truck to be returned (it only took an hour and a half longer than we expected) so we could bring home our new patio furniture. Hopefully someday it will look like this:


Minus the computer-generated deck and swimming pool. Right now, however, it looks like two giant boxes in our basement. It took long enough to bring it home that we didn't have the energy to start putting it together. Hopefully next weekend.

Also scheduled for next weekend, planting a vegetable garden. We bought a great little book about how to plan and plant a low-maintenance garden. We're going to put it back against the compost (which, according to the book, we have been doing all wrong, but I'm hoping we get away with it anyway) and hopefully in a few months we'll be swimming in our own zucchini.

We attended the second "intro to reconstructionism" class at our Synagogue this morning. I've really been enjoying these classes - lots to think about. But probably for another post.

And the final purchase of the weekend (made while at the grocery store this evening), is intended to get our cats in line. Recently, they've (ok really Entropy is a worse offender) been rather cavalier about prancing about places they are NOT ALLOWED (i.e. the dining room table). We intend to put an end to this behavior.


Pay no attention to the magazine under the squirt gun - I just didn't want it to leak on our coffee table. Though I do like the evil/genius caption. Here is Chad looking to bust some heads (or rather, squirt some heads) after we heard a suspicious noise in the other room.