Wonderful Weekend

For my birthday this year, I received gifts from people who know me well: my mother and my mother-in-law. Along with several pairs of gardening gloves (which will probably all be worn out by the end of the summer), I received gardening soap (which works very well) and a few other items to start off the 2010 gardening season. I looked forward to gardening all week and was a bit fearful when we woke up to the sight of snow out the window. Thankfully it was just flurries and it was gorgeous by noon-time/nap time for little man.

While Andy tilled up our garden with the tiller we borrowed from a friend for the weekend (last year we turned our new garden by hand and it was not pretty), I dove into the raspberry bushes. Had I not attended a "Village University" class on fruit trees and bushes, and not spent countless hours looking up 'pruning raspberry bushes' on the Internet, I would have guessed that I was completely wiping out my bushes. For those of you who have never pruned raspberry bushes, you clean out all the branches that produced fruit the previous year to make way for new growth and help the new stuff get some sunlight so it can flourish. The reason it was such a big job is that the guy who had owned the house 5 years prior to us never lifted a gardening tool, and up until this spring I was not ready to tackle the raspberry bushes. So, there was a lot of cleaning out to do. Thankfully I had little man's two hour nap time to tackle it (the threat of the toddler being awakened by the Chinooks circling our house from the Nat. Guard training site behind the house kept me moving as well). I have to say that part of my garden looks great! I took pictures of it to show you, but then forgot the camera outside overnight in the rain. Needless to say, Andy is not happy with me, although I have to admit I am very thankful it was not his new very expensive camera that I had also been using to take pictures of my flowers.

After I finished and little man was up and running around in the yard, excited about the helicopters flying over, we commenced helping daddy with the vegetable garden by using his wagon to cart top soil (that we got for free from my dad) back and forth from the barn to the garden plot. He was all too happy to unload the bags just so he could jump in the wagon and ride back to the barn. After letting the plot sit overnight, we planted our cold-hearty plants in the ground (peas, carrots and lettuce), although I have to admit it was a bit cold and wet today and not as fun as yesterday. Oh well, there are plants sitting happily in the ground that will soon be providing us with some fresh wonderful greens and that makes it all worth it.