What I do instead of clean......

Actually that's a VERY LONG list! Lol! But lately....I've been gardening!!!

If you would have talked to me a year ago, I would have told you that you couldn't pay me enough money to put on a pair of gloves and dig in the dirt. I hated gardening. I didn't like weeding, planting, watering, squatting or kneeling, all of it.

Things have changed. I don't think I've ever been able to make something grow. Never. But since we have this new house, and it has a huge (unkempt) garden and greenhouse (overrun with weeds, and raspberry plants) I figured I'd give it a try.

IT'S SO FUN! Not only have I been able to grow everything from seeds myself, except the tomato plant which I bought yesterday, but I've nurtured and preened them and the little plants have all become like my little babies! I feed and water them, check on them throughout the day and at night (yes really) clean up their areas (weeding), and cheer them on as they start to grow!! See, like babies. :-)

In the interest of getting this post up quickly, I'm not bothering to edit any of these photos, so sorry if the light or colors are off, I have a really old, sucky camera. But the weather is beautiful today and I couldn't have asked for a better day!

Oh, and in case you're wondering or get confused, I do my captions backwards. Above the photos instead of below since you're going to read the words before looking at the photo it seems like it would make more sense. Right? Or maybe I'm just backwards all around. :-)

Here's my garden.

The last row is empty so I don't have a photo with that in it, but my peas are in the second row and they are growing so big!! Some have even reached up to the second string which is about 10-11 inches high!

Next row is my lettuce. They're still really small, but I have high hopes for them! :-)

Then my carrots (below). Which I have labored over for DAYS now, spending at least 3-4 hours a day in the garden with them. Our garden was a crazy mess of weeds and we ended up having no choice but to till it all into the soil, so needless to say I've been picking weeds out of these rows for hours on end and there's still no end in sight. Lol! There was just so many weeds growing under and around them that when it was time to thin the carrots, I decided to save them all and just transplant them to a weed free area. I have 124 carrots planted. Yup! Good thing I love carrots! Ha!

Next two rows are Squash and Zucchini.

Last row is my corn. People have told me that it probably wont grow here, but so far it's done amazing! I'm so proud! I guess we'll see if it continues, but with the kind of wind that we get out here I'm not sure how it will do when it starts getting really tall.

Oops, almost forgot my cucumber, and broccoli!

And I've got some chives that I transplanted to the garden after finding them growing wild alongside the greenhouse in the grass. They have such pretty purple flowers on them (which apparently you're not supposed to let grow, see I know nothing).

I've already had the chance to eat some of my crops! It's so fun saying that! We made a 7-layer dip when my sister came to visit over last weekend and we used fresh chives from the yard! Yummy!

And here's a little view of what kind of crap I'm dealing with. This is just a tiny section of walkway that didn't get covered with weed mat.

We've got wild grass up the wazoo! Haha!


Here's a look at the greenhouse. Don't judge k. It's not our fault it looks like this and we can't afford to fix it this year.

We moved last year's weeds to the side until we could get a burn barrel to dispose of them, and meanwhile... more weeds grew in and took over!!!

The kids have a play area, which has been wonderful, that is also weed ridden, despite our continued efforts to kill them. When we can afford it, we'll just end up ripping all the crap out of there and laying down new weed mat and new gravel.

See that one swing that's an inch lower than the other? They fight over "the lower swing" every time we're out here! Arrgh. Some super complicated boy scout knots prevent me from lowering the left one to match. :-)

Here's a view of the back of the house and a few of the front.

I love this big tree! It's probably the largest/oldest tree on our whole block!

And.... our new truck!

So did you notice that ugly dead tree in front of the house? Turns out we HAD a cherry tree. It apparently died because it decided not to bloom this year and we were talking about ripping it out. UNTIL, one of my new friends out here gave me some advice to try watering it. Actually, purposely, water the tree. Have you ever heard of that? Well, I know NOTHING about anything green so I tried it. It's coming back to life! I can't believe it! And to think we were going to do away with it! I just hope it's not too late in the season for it to bear fruit this year! (We have an unbelievably short season here).

I'm almost done, I promise. Just a few more pictures to show you!!!
The tomato plant I got yesterday already has a tiny tomato growing!! I'm so excited!

I can't wait to try out my home grown parsley too! Um, question.... how do I use fresh parsley? Do you have to dry it first, or do you just chop it up and add it to stuff?

One more question.... Since I was a little overzealous with my seed starts, things got a little mixed up and now I have NO CLUE what these are. Can someone help me out? They don't even look like the things I have planted so it's probably one of the few I tried that didn't make it... *embarrassingly admitted* I tried some watermelon, cantaloupe and pumpkin seeds (among other things) :-) lol! Obviously Alaska isn't the right environment for those. Does anyone know what these are?

Well friends, it's been fun. But I need to go water my garden now, and make lunch for my "real" kids too! :-)