Green Garden

All of Don's hard work preparing our garden is paying off. We have a lot of planter boxes and pots that we are growing in since our neighborhood is infested with gophers.

We have green stuff growing everywhere and we love it.  Don did a lot of research on the internet and even did "refrigerator incubation" on the spinach seeds to get them to sprout.  I just water, fertilize and harvest.  It's been great to have food from our garden every day.It was so wonderful to come home from our trip to Utah/Idaho and have everything going strong.  Our tomatoes have reached the rooftop. Click here to see how they used to look.

On the side of our house Don built a planter box system that grows all of our lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, chives, green beans, snap peas and some of our strawberries. Ethan helped plant our lettuce when he was here the beginning of March.  We haven't had store bought lettuce since April. 

This is the planter box that Don designed, his dad built and Don painted.  It is lined to lengthen it's usefulness and even has a drain system that Don installed.

This is the view from our back door. Totally green and mostly edible. It looks almost like a park until you get up close and see that the greenery is really edible stuff like tomatoes and squash.

Fear Not

"Fear not. Be of good cheer. The future is as bright as your faith." President Thomas S. Monson
This was by far my favorite quote from conference. It really says it all doesn't it?

We are thrilled to hear that the new member of the Quorum of the Twelve is Elder Anderson. We heard him speak with Elder Uchtdorf while we were in Louisiana.

We have been working on our vegetable garden (all potted veggies due to the gophers in the neighborhood).  I've had a garden before, but was never able to get lettuce to grow in Arizona, here in California is doing wonderfully well. We have been eating salads from it for a week and have a lot of 1 inch tomatoes coming in. 

Here are our tomato plants: February 9th (left) and today (right). 

Don just finished painting the tiered planter box that he designed and his dad built. His dad also built 5 more planter boxes that we will grow veggies in. Don put wheels on them so we can roll them out farther onto the patio as the plants sprawl (zucchini and watermelon).

Don's Green Thumb

Don has been busy at work, but has also been making very good use of his time at home.  Upon our return from our mission he was called to be the Family Preparedness Specialist - he loves this kind of stuff.  Actually we both love this kind of stuff.

I've been the gardener most of our married life, but Don has recently become very involved in it. This is an amazing thing, since he's allergic to grass and a lot of plants.  So allergic that we had the grass in our backyard replaced with cement a couple of years ago.  While on our mission his health dramatically increased and now he is in the garden every day.  Oh, but then the problem of gophers and no ground to till was not going to stop him.  We call it growing "food". We go to the plant store to look for "food".  It's actually quite fun.

This has been a great joy for me to share this time outside in the yard with him.

His project this week - old whiskey barrels.  We bought four of them and he put in drainage holes with tubing, wheels on the bottom so they roll around and then he painted them white for me.  They are so beautiful and watertight. 

We planted tomatoes in all of them.  Roma tomatoes, Early Girl tomatoes and cherry tomatoes.  

Then it rained, and rained and rained some more.  Then we had a really cold night, so they got to have covers on them that night.  

Here they are tonight.  Still alive and so in about three months if you come visit, we will probably be having something with tomatoes in it.

By the way, lettuce and squash are next.  We'll see what he comes up with next.  As for me, I'm still working on the weeds and dead growth in the back yard.  My strawberries in the front are doing great and we should see a nice harvest this year.