Update from the last few weeks.

Two weekends ago, Genny's Dad came up to help us out with some work we're doing in the kitchen. What a big help. We got all of the electrical work done and got the counters cut and in place and the sink and stovetop are in. Still no drywall up, but it's nice to have counters again! I did manage to give myself a little bit of heat exhaustion working in the attic because there was a freak heatwave and it was in the 90s that day. The attic must have been at least 100.

Sunday of that weekend after Gen's Dad left I got to try out my new roto-tiller that Genny got me for Easter. I only tilled a couple rows of the garden. Just enough space to put my asparagus in the ground. People keep saying be careful it tends to take over but I say yum. Either I'll eat more asparagus or I'll cut it back, big deal. The weekend before I got a bunch of free horse manure and added it to my compost pile and gave it a good mix. It was up to 130 degrees!

So Genny ordered the tiller online and went to pick it up at the store. They gave her the wrong model but it turned out to be the $300 one not the $200 one she ordered. She tried to tell the person that she thought it was the wrong one but they insisted that it was the right one so Genny brought it home. Yeah, there's no way I'm going to go fix that error...

Ok, on to this past weekend. Last fall I was in the habit of buying half dead plants from the home centers at huge discounts and nursing them back to health. It seems to have worked out very well. I bought 3 big black eyed susan plants and divided them into about 16 plants and put them in my vegetable garden which by that time of year was done with veggies. Some russian sage, salvia, and a couple varieties of echinacea. Well they all came back this spring so I dug them up and planted them in the various beds around the house. They are all deer resistant varieties so hopefully the ones I put in the un-fenced rock garden will make it. We fenced in the garden by the driveway with the daylillys, spiderwort and hosta because the deer broke through the netting last year. Hopefully this will keep them at bay this year. The rock garden we built out back though we want to keep unfenced. So far they only thing they never eat are daffodils but at least we like daffodils. I stuck some of our divided plants in there so we'll see how that goes. Also, I mulch both of those beds with compost. It looks good, it's good for the gardens and it was free (aside from my labor in turning it a few times) Speaking of which my compost was down to about 80 degrees so I gave it another good turn and it's back up to over 100 again. Nice.

So the neighbors are great but one of them has a big winnabego in their backyard which is kind of an eyesore. So we've been planting along the property line there in hopes that it will be hidden eventually. We've got mostly forsythia along there up until this past weekend. I bought Genny a little lucky bamboo plant last year because she liked the pot it was in (an elephant). Since it was starting to look a bit sickly, I took all the individual bamboo pieces and planted them along the yard too. Hopefully the will grow fast and take over. If it gets out of hand, I'll just have to import some pandas. I'm ok with that. Ok, time for some pictures...

Oh yeah, you know those raspberry bushes they sell at the home center that look like a couple twigs sticking out of a box? This is one of those things after only 1 year. I never thought it would be this enormous. Awesome!