I’ve been politely ignoring the blog for the past few weeks. It would nudge me and whisper “please write something” and I would quietly respond “I’m just too busy right now, maybe tomorrow.” Which promptly turned into three weeks. I think.
Anywho I’ve neglected to mention on here that we are expecting another baby at the end of the summer! We are so excited!! But there is a lot to do to get ready. Since we moved to a new house last fall we haven’t really done anything with the bedrooms. Now we are doing the bedroom shuffle. Our son is moving to a new room, his room is becoming the extra room, and the new nursery will be in the room that currently houses all our extra unpacked boxes from moving. So we are basically redoing 2 kids rooms, though I am having a lot of fun decorating.
My son also recently turned two and we had a party for him at our house for family and a few friends. That involved some new craft projects which I am excited to share.
Finally we have been rushing to get the garden planted once the weather finally warmed up. We had snow on May 2nd! We finally finished it for the most part this week, and I have a few pictures to share today.
If you remember from the last update, we turned a tiered rock bed in our backyard into a vegetable garden. We were able to get the second tier tilled and fenced in addition to the first section. We are going to leave the third tier empty this season.
Unfortunately all of our seedlings died. I have no idea what happened. They were growing just fine and then pooped out. So we bought some transplants at the local nursery. In the newly tilled and fenced upper tier, we planted two Roma tomato plants, an early girl tomato, a cherry tomato and two genovese basil plants.
In the lower bed we also planted three bell pepper transplants. We still have room for 3-4 more.
The lettuce and radishes we planted several weeks ago are finally getting going. The first planting looks great and I think it will only be another week or two before we start harvesting.
The second planting did not come up as well. Possibly because of the late cold spells we had. The kale we planted never did come up so I planted mesclun in its place last weekend.
I also planted a short row of bush beans about 10 days ago and they are starting to come up now. I’ll do another planting late this week.
Above from top left: close up of baby lettuce, a bush bean sprout emerging and some marigolds planted outside the fence to try to keep the critters away. Along with a new rain gauge.
It’s so nice to look out the window and see plants growing in the garden. Fingers crossed that they actually yield something this year. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much just in case.
Everything Is Homemade 
Good luck with your garden! I know how frustrating it is to have your seedlings die. My husband and I just started gardening last year and he over watered our babies so they all molded and died. Whomp whomp. And we had to reconfigure our garden twice just this weekend because it didn’t occur to us to leave aisles to walk down when we needed to harvest =P It’s fun but we’re still learning!
Most of the time when seedlings die it’s from something called ‘damping off’, which comes from a fungus. Seedling will just wilt and die. It’s what’s hardest about starting your own seedlings and why most people don’t do it. That being said, I have found that parakeet gravel (the stuff you can buy at the grocery store in the pet section) mixed into your soil mix, or as I do it, sprinkled on top of the soil you plant the seed in, will eradicate the problem. Read this in a book years ago, and have been doing it ever since with great success and no damping off. Hope this helps.
Thank you! I think that is exactly what happened to them. We never had an issue with seedlings randomly dying at our old house so it must be something about the climate of the new house. Good information to know for next year.