Thank Goodness It's Spring, I Mean Fall

Wow, I didn't realize it's been two months since I posted.  I always struggle the last few weeks of summer, but it seemed worse this year.  Summer for us in AZ is like winter everywhere else.  The heat sucks the life out of you and makes you hide inside, running from air conditioned house to air conditioned car to air conditioned school/store/wherever.  The downside of all this inside is that like winter in the north, I get a little stir crazy and very unmotivated until it's finally below about 90.

This week it has cooled down somewhat and in a fit of downright pleasantness the high today is below 80.  Be still my beating heart.  I took this opportunity to crack open our gardening in the desert books and decided to clean out the garden and the sad little rosebush in the back yard.  Here our big vegetable growing season is winter, when the days are cool enough not to burn the plants, so I'm going to try carrots, broccoli, lettuce, and some herbs again.  I don't have any seeds yet, though, so I contented myself with cleaning out the old stuff, breaking up the baked soil, spreading the compost bin over top and watering and raking it all together.  Hopefully some of that compost goodness will leach into the surrounding soil before I get the seeds in a few days.

Here we have the before - with two helpful men adopting their best supervisory pose and a photobombing toddler trying to walk on the gravel without falling.

 

Our super-expensive compost setup.  Actually we wanted it to be pretty incognito since I'm sure it's against HOA bylaws to be composting in your backyard.  This bad boy was pretty much full.

 

The after, all cleaned up, composted, and watered.  It looks like I missed a piece of paper when I was cleaning up the compost - there's always a bit that doesn't get broken down well.

I also pruned, cleaned up, and fertilized my little rose.  I had put it under a tree next to the wall for the hottest part of summer when I saw it was burning badly.  I think the lack of sun made it go a bit dormant, but hopefully a nice feed and some clean-up pruning will perk it up.



{pretty, happy, funny, real} - The Spring Edition

I have a sick big boy at home, so this will be pretty short this week.  I didn't want to completely disappear again, though.

{pretty}

I love these pretty yellow flowers that popped out in my garden a few days ago.

{happy}

Miss Elizabeth has made the developmental jump to walk-first, crawl-when-I-fall.  It makes me happy because, at a year old it's time and means she's growing as she should.  It makes me sad because she looks so darn big doing it - what happened to my baby?!



{funny} 

This is sad-funny.  This is my sewing table right now.  Apparently I thought that if I took my whiteboard and made a list of things I need to finish and mend, and then sat it by my machine, that would shame me into getting to things.  Yeah, it's not really working.

{real}

My pretty yellow flowers in the garden - they're on the broccoli.  I have no idea what happened there.  I planted about 30 broccoli seeds, and this is the only one that came up.  It went from having a tiny head (maybe 5 florets) of broccoli to this in a few days.  Clearly my gardening skills still need a lot of work.  I'm thinking I'll just bring the stalks in and put them in a vase and enjoy them.  I'm sure the broccoli is not edible now that it's shot to flower.

I have a bunch of other things to put up, but I have to go get Patrick from school and then we'll see how everyone's feeling.  Hope everyone has a great weekend!