2012 Backyard Garden

A few weeks before Levi was born, I was looking out the back window of the house at the garden boxes Sam had put in the fall before, and I worried that with a newborn on the way, they would remain bare this growing season. I had a bag of seeds, and all kinds of little starter planters I had hoped to do, but hadn't had the time or energy.  But I decided I should at least try - so I skipped the starter kits, and just took my bag of seeds right to the boxes.  I planted peas, carrots, beets, kale, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, and radishes, and tried to keep it wet for a few weeks, even though the irrigation water and sprinklers weren't on yet.  Part of me thought it wasn't really going to grow at all.  I had been spending all my time and energy on growing Levi, and it seemed like the seeds were taking forever to germinate. Box by box, little tiny green plants began to emerge.  It's been a few years since we had a garden, and I had forgotten how much I love watching the little plants emerge and grow.

 By the time Levi was born, the radishes were ready for harvesting. And the peas were starting to need a trellis to grow on.  A few weeks later, the spinach and kale were big enough for harvesting baby greens for my smoothies.  And the past few weeks we've been enjoying more peas than we can possibly eat.

Our peas got even taller than this  - I think they were close to 6 feet tall.  

 Spending summer evenings out in the backyard eating straight out of the garden is one of my favorite family activities.  I love watching the kids pick and eat as they play.

The other night Noah again complained of being starving right before bed, but proclaimed kale would quell his hunger.  So, out to the garden he went, where he picked and ate several kale leaves, and said he was satisfied.  I welcome a kale snack at bedtime any day!  The pea plants, spinach, and broccoli all got pulled today (it's getting too hot for them) and we've since added onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, and we're trying to get watermelon to grow (our plants keep dying for some reason?) When we went to the farmers market last week, I didn't feel the need to buy any of their produce, because we were either growing it ourselves, or we could go pick it ourselves for much cheaper.

Cherry Picking

This past Saturday, Mollie and I and the kids went to a local U-pick orchard.  It was their last weekend for the cherry harvest. At work a lot of people have been talking up a local variety of cherry called the "rainier cherry" presumably named after Mount Rainier. So when Mollie said she found a farm with this variety, I was really excited.  Cherries fit well with the U-pick philosophy. They are pretty expensive at the store, and most of that is probably because they are difficult to harvest and bruise easily.  Wikipedia (which cannot tell a lie) says these prize cherries go for $5 per pound.  Our U-pick price was a modest $1.50.  And they were worth every penny.  So amazing.  I am extra appreciative of the flavor and quality because a week ago I purchased some cherries at Walmart.  Half the bag was past ripe and rotting.  The other half just did not taste very good.  So after struggling to find half a dozen good ones, I just threw the rest of the bag away.  I was totally sour on cherries.

The rainier variety does not get the deep red color that bing cherries do when they are ripe. They are more like a Fuji apple color. So I was not sure how to judge what was ripe, but given that it was the last weekend of the harvest, I guessed that everything would be ripe, and well... I was right.  Out in the orchard, we found plentiful supply of delicious ripe cherries.  We picked a 5 gallon container in about 15 minutes.

 Since it was the end of the season, many of the trees were picked clean up to about 6 feet high.  So I put the kids on my shoulders to reach up and get the rest.

It was a great, fun quick summer outing.

 I plan to do a lot of U-pick this summer, we had great luck today, and in the past with both blackberries and peaches.  On a related note, I hope that they have good side-of-the-road corn stands; those are awesome.

Springtime Saturday

We had a really great Saturday yesterday.  It was the perfect combination of fun and work, almost all out doors, and the weather couldn't have been more perfect.  Well, maybe a little less wind would have been more perfect, but we are coming to expect wind is pretty  much the norm here.

We started off the day doing some outdoor clean up at our church building.  The kids really had a great time scouting out trash and weeds, and getting them all in trash bags.  Then we were off to Kid's Fishing Day at Columbia Park Fishing Pond.  Every year they set up a day where you can pay a nominal fee, and the provide you will a reel, rod and bait (and a cool t-shirt to wear) and stock the pond.  You then have about an hour to try and catch some fish.  Harrison really enjoyed this, and learned to cast a fishing line.

Noah reeled his line in a few times, but mostly watched Sam and I attempt to fish.

And Olivia was a happy observer the whole time, kept occupied with a few snacks.

It felt good to be part of a real community building activity.  There were TONS of people out, and we even ran into some friends while we were there. We didn't catch anything, but part of me was glad - dealing with the hook out of the fish, cleaning the fish and eating the fish are my least favorite parts of fishing.  I do have great childhood memories of fishing (probably has something to do with the fact that my dad took care of all of my least favorite parts) so I was glad we could go do this with the kids.  And now the boys each have their own reel and rod, and we can take those to Utah this summer to do some more fishing with grandpa. Where he can take care of all those parts if we do catch anything :)

Next we headed off to Harrison's soccer thing.  It's not really a team.  They just learn some skills, and then do some scrimmaging.  I am afraid I'm not much of a soccer mom.  I'm glad to have my kids participate if they want to, but part of me just doesn't get the soccer mom thing.  And having both the boys involved in soccer this spring has really gobbled up some family time. I guess we'll see where we go with it.

Next we came home do do some of our own yard work.  We have been removing all the rock they put in when they did the landscaping (before we bought our home) and replacing it with bark.  I want to have flowers in my yard - which don't really grow well in rock, so we took the leap to replace it all.  I guess we'll find out if it does in fact all blow away in the winter, as a few of our neighbors have warned us.  But I think I'd rather have my flowers in the spring and summer, and replace the bark each year, than have planting beds full of rock.  With the help of  a faithful home-teacher's truck, we got a load of bark from a local nursery, and did some planting, and filled it all in.  I love how it's looking.  I just need to plant some more annuals.  We've got some perennials that are done, and some new ones just breaking through.  We also planted some water melon in the square patch in front of our porch, so we'll see how that goes.  We put some strawberries in the lowest area of the terracing, and think we'll add some tomato plants there.  Eventually we'll want to put a garden area in the back, but with so much great full sun in the front yard (we have a south facing house) we're doing some planing out there this year.  We almost splurged and got a dogwood tree to plant in the front yard, but after a little research, we were worried it wouldn't thrive in the heat of the front yard, where we would want to put it.  But we did put a couple lilacs in the terracing nearest to the house. And that's a weeping flowering cherry we added about a month ago, up in the top area next to the porch. Here's what it looks like now: 

And here's some before and after's of the front yard.  I don't know how much you can see from these pictures - the before was taken when we did our first showing of the house - before we even knew we'd be buying it someday!

Before - taken Sept. 21st, 2010

After - taken today about 7:30.  I don't know if you can see the difference in the landscaping - rock vs. bark, but we like it so much better with the bark. 

After that was all done, Noah decided it was time for him to learn how to ride his bike without training wheels.  He had a friend over earlier in the week, who had requested the training wheels be taken off (he was already riding a 2-wheeler at home) and so I took them off.  Noah was very anxious to catch up to his friend, and so we just went for it.  We decided it was time for Harrison to learn too, and after seeing Noah ride a couple of time without training wheels, he decided he was ready to try to.  Here's some videos of both of them riding their bikes:

Olivia also wanted us to take a video of her riding:

Spring Celebrations

This year, taking the lead from my friend Kim, we decided to do our commercial "Easter" celebrations (you know, the bunny, egg hunts, candy stuff) on the first day of spring. This year it worked out rather nicely since March 20th was on a Saturday, and I knew we were going to be recovering from our San Diego trip on Easter weekend.  I think it worked out pretty well, although it seemed strange to try and explain to people wy we did "Easter" a couple weeks early. And the boys have eagerly tried to explain to their friends, "The Spring bunny came to our house.  It's the same bunny as the Easter Bunny, but you can ask him to come for spring instead.  Then you can focus on the Resurrection for Easter."  Their friends just look at them very confused.  I think I might just stick to the Saturday before in the future, but this year it was perfect.

I found some great things in the dollar spot at Target.  I really don't like giving too much candy on holidays - I end up eating too much of it, and my kids get hyper and crazy.  But at Target they had some cute Beatrix Potter themed sticker sets and little board books, which the boys loved.  They also got some egg shaped sidewalk chalk, and a few other toys (playdough and slinkies).  The only candy was hidden in eggs around the house.

They loved hunting for the eggs.  Here's Harrison finding an egg in the kids dishes.

Olivia got a little purse (also from the dollar spot at Target). She likes to put it on her arm, wave and say "bye-bye" and then leave the room. 

I really did like celebrating spring - I was so ready for spring to come, and it was really here on March 20th. After having our little egg hunt, we headed off to Mount Vernon.

Spring at Mount Vernon

We spent the first day of spring at one of our favorite spots here in DC, Mount Vernon. It was a beautiful spring day, and we were lucky enough to meet up with our good friends, the Gathrights.

The flower gardens were just starting to get green - we plan on going back again soon to see everything in bloom.  This winter felt especially long, and I'm so excited that spring has sprung!

Olivia was not happy about posing for this picture - since the nice weather has hit she loves to go outside and run around, and Mount Vernon was no exception.  She often climbs all the way down stairs, finds her shoes and cries at the door until we let her out. 

I love this funny picture. There were a whole bunch of baby lambs in the paddock, and the kids loved watching them. I was trying to get a picture of Olivia and a lamb, and I caught this funny little expression.

And here's a picture with the 2 Gathright girls. Our boys just love playing with these girls. They were good friends at UCSD, and now they live in the DC area, so we've enjoyed keeping up with them and getting together from time to time.

Our year passes expire in July, so I think were going to try to make it out at least a few more times before then.  It's such a great place full of places to explore.

Day off

We had our spring break last week. This really has little meaning to us, since we don't have kids in school yet, but Harrison did have the week off from preschool (again), and Sam didn't have Seminary all week. On one particularly nice afternoon, we convinced Sam to take the rest of the day off from work and go down town.

The cherry blossoms were a few days past their peek, which made them look almost brown (pink blossoms mixed with green sprouting leaves), but the day was gorgeous none the less. We headed away from the tidal basin crowds, and over to the Washington Monument.

The monument is on a hill, and often has pretty good wind, and we happened to have a kite in the car, so we spent most of our time flying the kite there.

Harrison would run around under the kite, and managed to catch it several times on it's way down. It was a bit crowded down town (with spring break and the cherry blossom festival) and so there were some close calls with erratic winds, but we managed to have no injuries. We ended the day with ice cream sandwiches overlooking the paddle boat dock. Now it's cold and rainy, and I can't wait for another warm sunny day to spend outside again!

Spring Snow

We had a fun spring break last week - no big trips, but lots of fun. On Tuesday the boys were waiting outside for Sam to get home when we got a surprise:



It's hard to tell from the video, but it was snowing. Pretty hard. At first I thought the wind was just blowing the cherry blossoms from the front yard to the back, but soon realized it really was snow! It lasted only a couple minutes, but the boys thought it was pretty fun. They ran around yelling "Snow! Snow!" And Harrison added, "Snow in spring? Rare!" His new favorite saying.