In The Garden - Week 2

On Friday, we made an after-work Lowe's run to pick up two more cars full of dirt as well as the most important garden ingredient: plants!  I spent Saturday afternoon filling up another bed, and planting all my happy little veggies.

The garden currently includes:

2 - regular tomatoes

1 - cherry tomato

1 - green bell pepper

1 - red bell pepper

1 - basil

1- cilantro

2- strawberries

1- acorn squash

1 - cucumber

1 - butternut squash

3 - artichokes

I'm a little excited because the cherry tomato already has flowers and tiny little tomato.

I'm also interested to see how the artichokes turn out.  I've never seen an artichoke plant before, so this will be a learning experience.

To see what the garden looked like last week, read In The Garden - Week 1.

Revenge of the Nerds 5k

Happy E-Week everyone!  For all my non-engineering friends out there, this week, known as E-Week, is special in the engineering community.  For the last 60+ years, during the third full week in February, engineers have been crawling out of their cubical caves, donning their favorite pocket protectors, and venturing into their communities to remind everyone just how awesome engineers are!

Colleges and engineering groups across the country host special events to celebrate engineers and to educate the public on what it is that engineers do.  One of the events we decided to participate in this year was the Revenge of the Nerds 5k. 

This race raises money for scholarships to be given to local high school students who decide to go into engineering.  It's also a chance for us grown-up nerds to poke fun at ourselves with silly costumes and to quietly chuckle while watching a bunch of engineers try to run a race (we're not known for being the most athletic bunch).

Chris and I geared up in our best engineering t-shirts and ran/walked along with a bunch of really well-costumed nerds (there were cash prizes for best-dressed).  There were several people from my office that participated as well.  

Chris was sweet and agreed to run at my super-slow pace even though I'm sure he could have walked faster than I was running.  To my surprise, our 34:34 time managed to land us firmly in the middle of our age group.  Not too bad for no training!  Maybe this running thing isn't so bad after all... no, who am I kidding, I still think running for fun is just plain crazy.

In The Garden - Week 1

This is the first of what I hope will be a weekly garden update.  Enjoy!

While if the rest of the country was digging itself out from under several feet last week, I was getting my garden ready!  One of the few benefits of living very, very far south.

Because the soil in our back yard is half sticky, yucky clay and half fist-sized rocks, I decided to build a few raised beds in the only full-sun spot in our yard.  

I started with several ideas for raised beds I had found on Pinterest.  After reading over various websites, I settled on these beds, made from ceder fence planks.  Cheap, easy, and made of boards less than 8' long:  perfect!

After a few hours of measuring, sawing,

assembling, and leveling,

I had three 4' x 6' boxes ready and waiting to be filled with dirt.

Dirt is heavy, and I knew we'd need a whole lot, so we took two cars to Lowe's and filled them up with as much top soil, peat, and compost as they could carry.

We added the bags of dirt to a bunch of leaves from the back yard (thanks Chris for that awesome action shot),

and manage to fill just one of the three beds.  Looks like there will be more trips to Lowe's in our future.