The Prophet Said to Plant a Garden

Okay, we are pretty obsessed with our yard, 'checking' it every day. It is fun to see the growth in all of the plants we have put in during the last year and a half. Especially right now during the Spring growing spurt.

Yesterday, we put in some stepping stones to get to the cement pad from the patio area. Also, we put a couple of larger stones at the base of the trampoline ladder--because stepping down with bare feet onto the large gravel is akin to torture (at least for the adults, for some reason the kiddos are tough enough to walk barefoot all around the gravel backyard). Now they can go from the back door to the trampoline in bare feet, which they did anyway, but at least I don't have to wince watching them walk on the sharp rocks.

It has been especially fun to watch the fruit trees this year. The orange blossoms were amazing! Our first two little orange trees are so pitiful now, but the newest orange tree (the Valencia) is looking pretty great. There are several baby oranges on all three trees, and we are optimistic that we will get at least one homegrown orange this year. If only we could figure out why all of the leaves on the other two trees keep dying and falling off. Then the branches just die. Fortunately, they are still alive, but I definitely wouldn't say they are doing well. :(

The pomegranate is gorgeous right now with a ton of bright, huge red blossoms on it. It would be so fun if it actually produced a pomegranate sometime, but we are not as invested in that idea. Maybe it is because our neighbors across the fence have a pomegranate tree that we can see, and one night we looked in a backyard and saw two rats run along the base of our fence, straight up the corner, and over to the pomegranate tree and start munching on the fruit. Gag!

The rats have been kind of an issue. We started noticing digging in our little garden boxes and we set out some mouse poison and a couple of mouse traps. I think we might have caught a rat in one of the mouse traps, but the digging and rat sightings didn't stop. We then invested in some rat poison and a rat trap. Ugh. As far as we could tell it seems to have been a mother rat and some babies living in the back fence. Sorry, not cute. We have a caught a couple in the rat trap and the poison disappeared, so we are really hoping we are out of the woods with this, which is what we thought we were this week. But when John went to put away the rat trap (it is kind of a hazard for our littlest), there was another dead rat in it!! Ugh. None since then though. Rats are gross. Especially because where we live, roof rats are such a problem. Nasty.

Tomatoes and cucumbers are planted right now in the garden boxes. We also planted two zucchini plants, but one got eaten (probably by the rats). One tomato plant lasted from last Fall, so we have been getting quite a few little cherry tomatoes off of it throughout this spring, which is so fun!

Here are our cute little garden boxes.

The cucumbers have been a little bit of an ordeal. We wanted to be sure to plant Armenian variety cucumbers because they are supposed to be more heat tolerant (a necessity in this climate), but it was a real trick to find seeds. When we did find them, we started soaking them in water (which normally starts the sprouting process). The problem is that the other variety of cucumber seeds that we tried sprouted just fine, but we couldn't get those Armenian seeds to sprout for our life. We tried two different seed packages, and my mom even brought some that she had. Nothing. So we had dumped little batches of unsprouted seeds that we had been soaking for at least a week (or three) all around our little garden boxes. But then we got lucky and found that Home Depot had gotten some little Armenian cucumber plants in stock that we could transplant in our garden. We got those in the ground, when what do you know--little sprouts start popping up all over the place. I have no idea which plant is which variety of cucumber, but I just want them to grow enough to actually produce a cucumber. They were getting dug at a lot for a little while there, but now that that has pretty much stopped (knock on wood), they have no excuse! Grow cukes, grow!!! *fingers crossed*