Settling In

It's been a tiring 6 mths since we moved to Wisconsin! My new job, the house and baby have kept me more than busy! The newness is starting to wear off, and as fun as it is to make a new place into home, there are times it would be nice to just be bored and have a lot of it already done!

Here is a little recap of the last few months.

We brought a few containers of plants from Iowa, so our back deck wasn't bare.

Flowers from Mother's Day- mostly edible

Sunflowers we didn't plant, but showed up in a pot so we kept them!

I took some pictures of the exterior for times like now, when the ground is covered in snow and I want to make some landscaping decisions. I really haven't had the time for that yet, but here is what we have to work with.

Front

Side- between bedroom windows, possible a good spot for a little garden?

Back Deck

Back- a good spot for a patio?

You can see there is not much for landscaping here already, except for some lilies. If you read my Iowa post a couple years ago about de-daylilying our house, you know that these are not my favorite landscape filler. We will see what happens. Maybe I'd like them better if they lived more than a few hours in a vase.

So, before it got too cold and snowy, we did take a little time to get out for a few hikes and just spent time sitting in the yard, looking at the landscape that we hope soon to make our own.

Hanging out in the yard

On a walk near home

Picking apples

Taking after her Daddy, picking fruit already!

Here's a little view of the landscape around our yard. 

the view from our backyard

view out our living room window on a foggy day

Our driveway after a snowfall, before the snowblower attacked it!

So, I personally don't have much actual gardening action to contribute to this post, except for this page of garden-themed computer games that I just stumbled upon. A very fine winter time-waster for those who love cultivated plants!

Mike, on the other hand, has a little more going on in his garden plans. Here is his vegetable garden plot:

 It is 115 feet x 30 feet in size, and i have no idea what it is going to hold, except that I'm pretty sure he has ordered a packet of every variety of heirloom vegetable possible, and his excel spreadsheet with a color-coded map of what he is planting is more detailed than an intricate Amish quilt.

He had a bit of trouble finding the best way to kill the grass in preparation for next year. He tried renting a sod-cutter to cut chunks of sod to then flip over, but the dirt was too sandy and it just didn't work. Then he tried the method pictured below- laying down sheets of paper and covering them with grass and leaves.

He just didn't have enough material to cover a 115 foot long garden (even after a dozen trips to Starbucks for used coffee grounds!), and the paper just blew away. So, this no-till man might end up resorting to tilling in the Spring. We will see. I do not read farming books like he does, thus I do not question his methods. 

 In addition, he has ordered 16 fruit trees to plant in our yard: apples, pears, peaches, sweet and tart cherries, plums, and a quince. The last was a surprise to me until just now when I had him list them off. Seriously, who even knows what a quince is? Guess I will find out! You just never know with this farming man. Although I do know, if the apocalypse hits and the grocery stores close down, we are going to be set! And I suppose if he plans big and there's a big fail (late frost, swarms of pests, whatever), hopefully we'll still have at least something left.

So I will keep things updated here as the growing season progresses. Soon I will lose my craft room to shelves of peat pellets and grow lights, and no, officer, that is not a marijuana operation, those are wholesome vegetables, but now that you mention it, pot would be a whole lot more profitable...