Gardening in April

The warm weather has hit Massachusetts and I've been reveling in it. In addition to getting to run in a ball cap instead of a sock cap and gloves, and the infinite relief of not having to fight the Epic Coat Battles with a two year-old, what this warm spell has done is jump start my gardening impulses.

This summer, I'm hoping to grow as much food for our table as I can with a container garden. So far, so good. I've got two pots of herbs (pictures to come).

I've got two major hurdles with the our space, both indoor and out. First, we've got mostly shade in the grassy part of our yard. This is the reason for the container gardening, since the sunniest spots are the sides of the house, which are covered in asphalt.

But the second problem that I'm seeing is that we don't have the appropriate indoor space to effectively start plants from seeds. (Actually, the window in our daughter's room would be great, except, well, that's just heartbreak waiting to happen.) So that means that I'm going to have to use mostly all transplants from the garden store. Which means that the garden will take a while to fill out. But I plan to post updates as the garden does just that.

As for now, here are my two helpers, Thora and Georgia, actually being very helpful, since they're where I can see them and neither of them are up to something, which in this brief moment, allowed me to weed and mulch the flower garden.

More pictures to come...

While Traveling: Note to Self

My husband, daughter, and I spent a week in Puerto Rico last week. (Here we are at one of the waterfalls in El Yunque, the rainforest outside of San Juan.) It was a lovely, warm week full of lots of swimming and sleeping. But the one thing that nagged at me the whole time was the absurd collection of plastic bags we were accumulating while there. It was nice to have a Walgreen's right across the street for those items that we deliberately didn't pack (we could buy diapers there; we didn't need to pack them") or didn't realize we'd need (the condo where we stayed had a kitchen, but no dishwashing soap). At first, these bags were a blessing, since one of the other things that the condo didn't have on hand were trash bags to line the garbage cans. So we were thankful to have a few extra bags to use for our daughter's dirty diapers, etc. But by day 5, it seemed ridiculous. So note to self: put cloth/reusable bags on the travel packing check list. I'm so conscious of reusing bags here at home; it was so wasteful to have forgotten that practice while traveling.