Last night I picked some lettuce for a salad for dinner and harvested the radishes. Turns out that either I don’t like radishes or they weren’t ready to pick… yuck. But the lettuce was delicious (Seattle friends, if you need lettuce, come and get it! We have tons!).

Potatoes with a bean plant in the middle.

Carrots.

I’m hoping to get some time in the garden tomorrow to cover the potato plants, do a little weeding, and thin out the carrots so they have room to grow. Anyone else digging in the dirt this weekend? How are your gardens growing?

This year we chose a few starts at the store – garlic and onions, which you would do from bulbs in the fall… we had actually considered moving over the winter so we didn’t plant in the fall when we should have.  But for lettuce, radishes, carrots, and green beans, we decided to try planting from seed. In the bed with onions, garlic, and our lavender from last year we planted radishes and carrots. In the other bed we’ve planted beans and lettuce, and left some space to stagger our plantings throughout the summer. Yes, everything needs thinning.

We can’t wait to tackle the garden this year (actually, we can…. we’re planning to hit the ground running NEXT weekend!). Since the large expense of the beds, dirt, and amendments was covered last year, this year we have a little budget left for patio furniture.

This is what we’re working with:

Obviously this was taken last summer!

That big white/gray square is actually the roof of the garage that is on our lot (the street is just to the right of the frame). It’s painted cement and gets VERY hot in the sun. Only one time last year did we bring out a folding table to use for a party (along with the grill, of course). The rest of the summer we used a picnic blanket. So this year I’m planning to get a little fancier.

First of all, I’d LOVE to replace the “death fence” as we call it (rickety wire fencing) with lattice, and grow some climbing flowers on it from cement planters. Would be beautiful and practical (hello, privacy – we’re seriously right above the street like we’re on stage!).  Next up, a few more planters by the existing ones for tomatoes and maybe peppers. Then a beautiful outdoor rug, probably an 8×10 or 9×12, a table and chairs, and a big umbrella. It would also be ideal to have a nice pair of lounge chairs.

So we’ll see where we end up this year! At the very least, I’d like a welcoming place for summer outdoor entertaining, and what better place to start than with outdoor furniture! (At least that’s what I keep telling Ryan).

Any big outdoor plans for you this spring/summer? I’d love to hear about them!

This post contains sponsored links, but all opinions belong to Maggie Rose.

In the meantime, I’m re-reading a few of my favorite garden-themed books to get in the spirit, and adding new favorites. Here are some of my stand-bys:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The Secret Garden

Second Nature; A Gardener’s Education

What’s your favorite way to get ready for spring? Are you hoping to have a garden this year? Read our garden adventures from last year!

It’s been a while since a garden update! After a bountiful summer, it was finally time to turn down the beds for fall.

Now, Washington has a mild enough fall that we could have replanted for a fall harvest, but we decided not to this year.  Instead, we tore out all the dying plants (some came out as early as August) and we took down the poles from the snap pea trellis. Those two little bushes you see in the second bed are my lavender bushes.  Then yesterday Ryan pulled out all the weeds that grew up since we cleared the beds a few weeks ago. Then he laid down a layer of mulch over the dirt, and around the bases of the lavender plants. The mulch will keep weeds at bay over the winter until we’re ready to plant again in spring. The lavender should be protected from all but the harshest freeze with their roots covered and toasty. The mulch should slowly breakdown and will be incorporated into the soil in spring when we bring in some compost.

Thanks for sticking out this gardening adventure with us! I had so much fun raising our first garden and eating from our own yard. We had a bumper crop of lettuces, lots of potatoes, more peas than we could eat, and will continue to use the herbs through the winter. If you’re considering starting a garden next spring, I’d highly encourage it!

I get my love of bouquets and flower arranging from my dad and his sisters – they all have a wonderful knack for it that I hope is hereditary!

I loved reading about the  new “loose” technique of arrangements – the author likened these modern displays as the perfect undone-bun with a few wispy strands of hair. Here are two of the arrangements made in the class featured in the article:

I love how textural these arrangements are. The article has some good tips on how they are layered, but doesn’t go into specific detail. Clearly from these two bouquets, color contrast plays a major role as well. It sounds like a lot of the magic comes from a great vessel and a wide variety of flowers, herbs, and leaves to choose from and be inspired by! I can’t wait to try something like this at home.

Our sugar snap peas have been producing a ton, so we’ve had a few nights with just regular steamed peas. But the other night I came home to this: pork chops and sugar snap peas with a mint julep glaze. I love having a man who cooks.

It smelled so good when I walked in the house, and it was very tasty too. Fresh and summery and just slightly sweet.

So I snapped pictures, then coerced Ryan into sharing his source: epicurious. This is the recipe he used. Of course, I think the magic ingredient is the peas and mint that came from our own garden.

What about our plants that are still in the ground, you ask? The green lettuce is done (we couldn’t pick it fast enough and it went to seed), the carrots are ALMOST ready to come out, and we’re about to put in our tomato plant (which has a few green tomatoes on it already!). I’ll take new pictures when it’s all in the ground. For now, we’re enjoying eating dinner from our own backyard!

I know some of you were putting in gardens too (or at least some little planter pots). How are your efforts coming along?

Shortly after Maggie and I built the garden beds in our back yard, we knew we needed to do something about the space in-between the beds, a patch of dirt that was about 2 feet by 3 feet.  Our first thought was the lay a little brick path, but between the springtime rain and other household projects to distract us, it wasn’t until recently that I got around to starting on the project.  In this older picture, you can see where the mud and weeds had free reign between the beds:

Armed with measurements and a rough idea of what we wanted, I was off to Home Depot. The first thing to pick up was sand.  There were two types of sand that I purchased, a rougher gravel-sand mixture that would work well for leveling the ground surface, and a fine grain sand to fill in the cracks after the bricks were in the ground.  When it came to paving stones, I managed to find some smaller bricks (3×6″ instead of the usual 4×8″) that would allow for a bit more creativity when coming up with a pattern to lay them in our small space.

But we didn’t have recipes burning a hole in our pocket, waiting to be copied down letter by letter onto the little cards. Oh no, we were more drawn to the cute little pea/radish/onion motif for a more, er, organic reason…

Seed storage!

We had a few random packets still hanging around that didn’t get planted this spring. Using the included tabbed cards, we sectioned them off into F(lowers), V(egetables) and H(erbs). For only $8 I can finally move these slippery seed packets off my desk (and table and inbox where they’ve been floating to and from) and into a cool, dark place for storing. And thanks to the cute design on the box, we won’t have to wonder “what is in THAT random shoebox/tupperware/milk jug” next spring. (Yes, we use old (clean) milk jugs for some storage – with a handle!).

You can find cute recipe boxes for a dollar at Michael’s craft stores, or for just a few cents more at Goodwill or other thrift stores. Or you can pay quite a bit more if you’re so inclined. But for $8 we felt the price and the pattern was right.

How do you store your seeds? Or if you don’t have a green thumb, how have you adapted a storage item to fit your needs over the supposed use of the product?

That’s our lavender peeking up at the bottom, followed by lettuce, red lettuce, mixed greens (yowza, they really took off!), spinich, and nasturtiums (which you can’t see very well because they were our seed starts and are still pretty little).

In fact, tonight we had our first leafy salad from the garden! Here are the greens waiting to be washed:

I can’t wait for the farmer’s market in our neighborhood to start on Thursday. Soon we’ll be adding fresh berries and cheese to those crunchy leaves.

And here’s a little comparison of where we were last month…

To this month…

Some tips we’ve picked up:

1. Have a great resource handy. We love the Sunset Western Garden Book of Edibles for our region. In a pinch, we call my dad.

2. Follow the spacing directions that come with your seeds or seedlings. They looked far apart when they were tiny, but now they’re running into each other!

3. Watch for anything suspicious. The bottom of our pea plants have been looking a little yellow. Turns out we may have been watering them the wrong way (from up top instead of direct to the roots and soil) which can cause mildew. We’re hoping to save them. I’ll keep ya posted.

4. Weed roots can be DEEP. Be sure it get the whole thing or it’ll keep popping up.

How have your gardens been growing? Did you start with seeds or seedlings from a nursery? Send pics too, if you want!