stuff

I have had time on my hands now that school has been done for a while, so I have been able to do a few things around the garden.
The first major thing that I have tackled is preparing the vegetable garden for this season, which entailed compost. We have two compost containers, one was not used because we werent sure if we wanted to keep the containers where they were. We decided we do like to have them in the same area, but move them forward from the cedar hedge. This meant I had to get rid of a pile of brush we had collected last year. I just broke the branches etc in small pieces and piled them into garden waste bags. Then I moved the empty bin where we wanted it and then took all the new compost from the used bin and put all the new/not yet digested stuff in there. The nice dirt left in the used bin was mainly used to put in the vegetable garden containers. I put about 3.5, 4 small bucket fulls of compost to each container and alan helped work the dirt into the containers. Once that was all done the now empty container was moved to its new spot and the containers are once again good to go. I noticed big stems of brocolli, big pieces of egg shell, avocado peel and some of the orange peels had a harder time decomposing. I also found tons of peach pits so perhaps we should just toss those in the garbage of the yard waste bags. Note to self, make sure that what ever goes into the compost goes in smaller pieces so it has an easier time being processed. I think it is a good thing we have been putting in our fireplace ashes, it seems to get absorbed in the whole really well.
Alan made an arbor for our beans and one afternoon I helped him put it in it looks great! I put our first two hatched beans from the seedlings we started in the ground and they seem to be surviving well. that is about all though, the rest of our seedlings are pretty much all dead. There are a couple of tiny plants of parsely, a couple of thymes, one gangly green onion and that is about it. Oh well, better luck next year. At this point I am just going to wait to by some plants at the nursery. Next year I'll be better prepared.
Alan has also been working on the irrigation system for our vegetable boxes. It looks amazing and once they are hooked up to the rain barrels it will be perfect. Organic veggies water by nature. Pretty perfect! Pictures to follow hopefully!
I am trying to design a garden for the front and more or less think about what to do with the back. I havent really gotten very far. I want to learn more about the plants we already have also. I picked up a couple of books from the library and I already recognized a few, so that is definitely exciting! Now I get to learn how to take care of what we have. I think Alan and I did a good job last year intuitively, because it seems that the few garden beds we did tend to are doing pretty well this year. We have far more tulips this year than we did last year and they look healthy. Whether they reproduced or the chipmunks planted some more for us I dont know, but I absolutely love all the colours.
Today I rake part of our 'lawn' also known as the dirt patch underneath our tree. We tried to sow grass seed there last year which turned out a complete disaster. Today was time for take two. I put Scott's heat and drought resistant grass seed on that patch as it gets really dry and hot in the summer, and last years seedlings just scorched away. So, hopefully this stuff will do the trick. Hopefully the seeldings will take and be established before the actual summer starts. It is supposed to be nice spring weather for the next few days, seedlings take about a week to start showing, so we will see what happens. Hopefully it will go well. I love a nice green lawn, so hopefully we can work to improve at least our front lawn. That is about it for today. more updates later.