We spent a quiet evening at home for our anniversary. We needed to relax for a while.
Yesterday I got back into the swing of things. I started by doing a check of everything. There are now pumpkins and sweet corns growing in the corn bed. Some melons popped up. We have good looking hot peppers on very unimpressive hot pepper plants. The peas are almost at the first crossbar of the pea trellis. The green beans are getting blooms.
The vining seeds have sprouted along the fenceline. The bunny has been kept at bay....
Things are good!Aren't these just so gorgeous? Love them! Don't have a clue what to call them, but oh wellsies! If I do find out what they're called, I'll call them that, but otherwise they are going to now be called 'Oh Wellsies'.
They're by the road, right next to these.
Matt says these are a weed, but I always think of weeds being an offensive plant with nothing good to offer. Obviously this plant has interesting purple cones and therefore couldn't possibly be seen as offensive, one would think. Then, I realized that most weeds have pretty flowers and blooms on them. I shall call these 'Coneheads'.
Yesterday I thought it would be a perfect time to weed our swimming pool area, which is just a big ring of deep sand. Things like to grow in it. It took me 4 hours (!!!!) and I sort of got lazy at the end and let some stuff go. Here's a really interesting "weed" that's growing in there.
Isn't that a great flower?! It closed up when the sun got too hot in mid-afternoon. Now this one, I'm truly clueless about. If I don't find the name of it, I'm calling it 'the Neato plant'.Today is the best day to get the tilling finished finally and that's the plan for this evening. I need to get my sunflowers, broccoli, cauliflower, and squash in immediately. Immediately, I say! (By the way, have you seen the Miracle Fruit yet? -See? Anyone can make up names.)
High: 77 Low: 47, sunny; Lunar Phase: Waning Crescent, 34% of full.
Right under Green Man's chin! That's pretty clever. Yesterday I saw sawdust falling from his beard. 
Tomorrow we are going to our first ever Indianapolis 500 race. We got free tickets and we're taking Matt's dad and uncle. None of us have ever been. We've been to the Kentucky Derby, but not to the 500, until now that is. They say there are 300,000 people expected and the race will be televised to more than 375 million homes. This should be fun. Wish us luck!
Sunday, Matt wanted to play more than work, so we went to Lowes and got replacements for the dead ones. They are Bush Goliath, Early Girl, Sweet 100's, and Super Fantastic. Bush Goliath had tomato hornworm eggs on it that we noticed and (hopefully) removed before planting.
I also never had any luck producing good broccoli or cauliflower for long. They all died. The catchflies - well, you've seen them. The hot peppers and the one green pepper are in the same growth stage as the bell peppers but instead of peppers, they are making new leaves. That's good at least.
Oh, it's so close that you can see the light brown of it's eyes. It didn't move until after I shut off the camera and the lens closed. I wonder if it knew that I had been waiting to take a picture of it. I wonder if it reads this blog... 
And this Iris was down by the street right beside an electrical thing.
There's a lot of Irises in the east side bed that I've never noticed. It's just always been a space slated for renovation and nobody ever bothered to pay attention to it. See the weeds and rocks too?
Here's one hamming it up for the camera from the street corner bed.
But most importantly, we borrowed a tiller to do our garden. Matt is doing all that though.
It works great. We got the corn bed tilled and sowed. I put the sweet corn in 4 rows, 6-10 inches apart. Then, I made hills and planted 4 hills of pumpkin, and 4 hills of butternut squash. I also put in 6 nasturtiums. When the corn has grown a foot or two, I'll sow beans around them and dill too. Here's that bed after the first round.
You can see the next row there? That's watermelon. I planted four seedlings there 2 days ago, but the bottom leaves are yellowing on each one. I might dig them up tomorrow and have him till it up real good. More pictures of nicely tilled and sowed rows tomorrow, if it doesn't rain.
I put the rest of the bag of pine bark nuggets along the pathways between the rows of the garden. I like it. 
And the best thing: New lavender blooms!!
There's way more than last year!
They smoothed the ground out a lot, re-seeded, and put down hay. This is a lot better than it was. Thanks guys!
I guess the previous homeowners did have this place landscaped, but the weeds just took everything over so bad that most of everything had to go. As you can see, we still haven't managed to get to the store for mulch. Maybe this weekend.
Considering what this plant looked like out of the package, I'm pretty impressed by the growth it's been able to make for itself. This picture was taken Monday I believe, and there's already more on there today.
Don't you just love finding flowers in the woods? Wild flowers. Just flowering because that's what they were made to do. 
The forest makes a nice seat for hikers.
In retrospect, the May Apples seem to have been trying to give us a heads up about the incoming storm last night. 
Still got a few bloomers. The Crimson King turned from brilliant crimson to a deep, rich red.
It turns out that all the rain we've been getting lately had really invigorated the thistle problem in the south-side bed that housed the peas. I say housed because we had written them off based on the evidence of being a bunny buffet. However, the thistles must have been protecting the little stumps of pea plants and they grew! There's about 6 going pretty good right now and I sowed seeds all the way to the end of the trellis this morning. 
Yesterday was also first mow day for the backyard (and second mow for the front due to a craftily designed dandelion coup d'etat). It needed it. Spring rain is nature's Miracle Gro. Matt, being a manly awesome husband, does the mowing and he saw the bunny high-tail it (pun definitely intended) to behind the compost bin. So I checked it out and indeed there is plenty of room for a bunny bunker between the fence and blocks. 
(Look Ma! No pollution!)
I used Deb's trench method for all but one of the tomatoes, because it was the Large Red Cherry and was just as straight as an arrow. I figured that level of perfection deserved a deep hole. Some of the others were the 2-liter bottle second picks and after the plants were in the ground, I used 2 of the tops of those 2-liters to make small cages to keep them off the ground. A double-recycling. Yahoo!
I still had 5 leftover Tomato plants, so I planted a Yellow Pear in the south-facing pea bed, and the others, along with 2 peppers, are going to Matt's mom in reciprocation of her passalongs.
Are you wondering what we did with all the sod we removed from the garden? Well, a giant pile of grass and dirt is boring, so we made a temporary Sod Fish. This is it's beginning stages. If it stays much longer, I think I'll throw potting soil all over it and give that fish some color.
Pictures can't even capture the spirit of this Sod Fish, so this is the only glimpse of this legendary fish that you'll get to see for a while.
