Plant a Garden, Fly a Kite

Today was a gorgeous spring day and the girls and I took full advantage of the opportunity to be outside. After such a long, cold winter it is pure joy to be able to go barefoot and run in the sun and play in the dirt!

One of the things that I have been most concerned about finding the time to get done before Aubrey and I leave for Seattle is preparing and planting my garden. We were planning to slowly dig up more bushes/small trees along the south fence to expand our garden area but Jason got ambitious and almost got the whole length of the fence cleared out, which I am super excited about. (Thanks, Honey, for spending Sunday afternoon digging out that horrible tree with the proliferate root system – I know you’d rather just forget the whole awful experience but I am so glad you persevered!)

Overnight temperatures for the next 10 days are finally looking good, so today was the chosen day for all the seedlings to move into their more permanent garden homes (except the potatoes that went in about a week ago).  Does anyone else talk to their plants while they transplant them?  Because I have to admit that I did, begging them to root well and grow tall and bear much fruit!  I’ve got 3 different varieties of pepper plants on the east side, 7 varieties of tomatoes on the west, 2 bush cucumber plants, some carrots, and a big patch in the middle called a Three Sister’s Garden that will have corn, beans, and several different kinds of vining squashes (I planted zucchini, summer squash, delicata squash, pie pumpkin, watermelon, and green and yellow scallop squash).  I also have a separate patch by the garage for potatoes and am planting some herbs in my deck boxes.   Most of my gardening ideas and my heirloom seedlings came from my gardening guru friend Stephanie – so here’s a shout out to Steph for helping me succeed!!  I’m so excited to see how well everything grows – it’s always really hard to imagine and trust that something useful can come from a little tiny plant or little tiny seed that is dropped in the ground, but last year’s harvest reminds me that it does indeed happen!

While I was busy planting, the girls were entertaining themselves by running around attempting to fly some kites that they made this morning.  We have been taking a “Creating Together” class through the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre and today they got to paint kites.

Aubrey was SO upset that the whole class didn’t take all their kites outside to play together (they will do that next week but Aubrey will be in Seattle) and it took forever to convince her that we could leave class and go fly the kits on our own.  Of course the girls had a blast running around the backyard with them once we finally got home though!

If you want to check out a couple more pics of  today’s adventures, I’ve posted them in our Picasa album for your viewing enjoyment.  Happy spring from our house to yours!  :-)