First Veggies from the garden and a Murder Mystery dinner

Last weekend we hosted another Murder Mystery Dinner. We used the same game as before so this time Tim and I acted as the cook and waitress at Maltie Falcon's diner were the suspects were gathered for dinner. Everyone had a great time and were dress for their parts. I believe this dinner are going to become our new hobby.

We checked our garden this evening and discovered lots of veggies ready for picking.

6 squash, 7 cucumbers, and 4 zucchini including one that is 10 inches long. Guess what we are eating on all weekend?

This is a baby watermelon that is slowly growing.

Compare thes pictures to the ones in our last post and you will see how much bigger everything is compared to less than two weeks ago.

Honey helped out by running in and out of the garden the whole time we were out there. Her little legs are brown now from the dirt.

Garden is Growing including a new Flower

We have been enjoying lettuce and spinach from our garden and it is delicious! Blackbirds were discovered in the garden on Sunday so we strung CDs across it to scare them away. I think it's working. We have also been blessed with a new flower for our flower garden of Shih-tzus. Honeysuckle aka Honey is a gift from Amanda's cousin Julie. She was not able to make friends with Julie's other dog so she asked us to give her a home. We are thrilled to have her. She is a mess, but wonderful!

How new baby, Honey.

Our first night home.

After her first haircut.

Flower Garden Completed

We took on a new project this weekend: the flower bed in the front of the house. At some point on Saturday morning we got the bright idea of building a rock retaining wall around the flower bed instead of the simple landscaping trim we originally purchased for the project. Needless to say after moving 50 rocks around plus pulling out all the grass from the area we are both very sore and tired. We are extremely proud of our work though.

Just in case you don't know what the flower bed looked like when we moved in, here's two pictures.

















Nice, huh?















So under the supervision of Lily and Daisy...















And with Tim in his cool shades and do-rag.....




















We tilled up everything, pulled out the grass, weeds, random pieces of metal and non-dirt items, and built a rock wall.















We layed down a WeedFree mat and then 9 bags of pine nugget mulch, and total of 18 cubic feet.


















We are so happy with the results!











Our bigger apple tree is in full bloom. Absolutely beautiful!
















And the herbs we planted in our newly built gutter flower boxes have begun to sprout. If you zoom in to the picture you can see the little green leaves.

Evidence of Hard Work

Laura came to stay the week with us and did a lot of work both inside and outside of the house. Of course, she also cooked very yummy food. Amanda had a cold for the whole week so she mainly supervised. That is until Saturday. Laura left on Friday morning and Tim mowed the yard for the second time this year. We are going to pay for all that fertilizer we put on it last year. It's filling in really well with pretty grass. We also tilled up our first garden. We have grand plans of planting a little of everything. Fingers crossed and prayers prayed that we grow at least a few things that are edible after putting in all this hard work.

Here's our freshly tilled garden.

While Laura was here she got rid of the built-in box that was on our back porch. It had been built there to deflect the air coming off the old HVAC unit that used to sit under the back porch. Since our new HVAC unit is at the end of the house the box no longer needed. Our grill now fits perfectly in that end.

One of our biggest goals has been to get the fence row cleared off. Below is a picture from last summer. See all that brush, honeysuckle vines, trees, etc? It's like that all the way to behind the larger shed.

Now look at it!

This is from between the two sheds.

We still have more to do, but we ran out of energy and broke two rakes so we had to quit for the day. We moved on to building flower boxes for our front porch using gutters. We have to wait until tomorrow for the adhesive caulk we sealed the ends with to dry then we will be planting herbs in it. Pretty cool, huh?

Our pear tree has begun to bloom this week. Laura pruned the tree while she was here so hopefully the tree will produced bigger pears this year. The ones last year were so small they were not very tasty.

One of the other very cool things Laura did while she was here was help us install shades on our back porch. The evening sun is so bright that it has not been possible to sit on the porch during the evening, but now we can.

Can you believe how long Tim's hair is?!? It has never been that long.

We will update on the progress of our garden and fence clean-up.