Let the weekend begin.....

We had some big thunderstorms in the area yesterday. In the town where my Mom and Dad live, the roof was blown off the local cafe -- a not-so-pleasant surprise for the customers in the dining room enjoying the noon special. Fortunately, there was no damage at Mom and Dad's house. The storms moved through fast but here's a picture I took from our driveway of the last line of storms moving into Iowa around suppertime. Wow, I love seeing the towering thunderstorm clouds (as long as they're not heading towards me!)

We had an unexpected visitor show up in the backyard for afternoon snacks today! I'm always amazed at how their summer fur is so completely different from their winter coat. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see this old doe has quite a few scars -- I suppose from running through the woods and hitting all kinds of branches, fences, etc.

She was hearing or seeing something farther down in the yard......I don't know what it was, but it sure got her attention!

I did some work in the vegetable gardens this afternoon. The squash, zucchini and tomatoes are humongous and I had to trim some of the branches and vines out of that garden so the plants could get more sunlight. The other veggie garden got some attention too and I pulled out all of the lettuce, onions and beets. Except for a few smaller ones, these onions are all quite nice. There are so many though that I may have to put some in the dehydrator to make sure they don't spoil. The beet crop was mighty disappointing. I'd like to try replanting some more seeds, but I'm guessing it's probably too late in the season for that. (There's a couple small golden zucchini I picked too.)

The weather's been so cool and predicted to remain so into the next week, so I'm going to replant some leaf lettuce and more peas too.


I finally got my rain barrels set up today. I read in a Birds & Blooms magazine about one gentleman who used garbage barrels as a less expensive substitute for those +$100 rain barrels sold in home & garden stores, so I bought a couple of 50 gallon Rubbermaid garbage barrels and some downspout adaptor tubes. I installed them this afternoon on both ends of the garage where the downspouts are closer to the ground and I have level surfaces to set the barrels.

It looks like kind of a "Rube Goldberg" set-up, but I think it's good enough for who it's for and both of these together cost me way less than $100, so I'm happy.

Not much else going on with me. Tomorrow we'll be riding with some friends in the motorcycle "Cruise for Kids" benefitting our local Ronald McDonald House. The weather forecast sounds perfect and we're looking forward to a fun day. I'll take my camera and see if I can get any interesting pictures to share with you. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Only 30 More Days

Did you know the first day of spring is March 20th? That's only 30 days away!! Even though it's only 4 degrees outside right now, it's a beautiful, sunny afternoon and I noticed some signs of thawing--on the deck......
and on the patio below where snow is melting and dripping off the roof......

(gotta remember to watch my step here tomorrow morning--my birdseed bins are right next to this icy spot!)

I've been inspired by some of the other gardening bloggers like Robin (Bumblebee), Barefoot Gardener (the queen of raised bed gardening) and Tracy (who posted links to seed catalogs the other day) and I've already decided that this year I'm going to expand my garden by adding one more raised bed and try to be more conscientious about pulling weeds and faithful to the idea of growing and preserving more of my own produce.

After looking at some on-line seed catalogs this morning, I also did a little "googling" to find out more about compost tumblers and rainbarrels. Gosh, that was so much fun I completely forgot about work for a while!

Here's the Envirocycle Compost Tumbler

I think this would be a little bit easier for me to work with and obtain good compost results than the composting box I have on the ground next to the garage (that I forget to turn faithfully). Plus the cost includes the price of shipping (which is rather substantial on a unit this large). I would really like to get one of these and if anyone has any experience or information they'd like to share with me, I'd really appreciate it.

I've been reading and hearing quite a lot lately also about saving water. Did you know you could use the rinse water from your washing machine to water plants? Now I'm trying to figure out what sort of bucket I could use to collect the rinse water as it pumps out of my washer.

We also have a gutter downspout on each corner of our house. Ideally, I need to figure out a way to divert the water from the downspout on the back of the garage out to the garden for watering purposes, which would still leave me with 3 downspouts where I could place rainbarrels.

They sure have come a long way from the old 55-gallon metal drum my grandma in Wisconsin used to have outside her house.....

I still need to do some thinking about the whole rain barrel idea because if it's raining enough to fill the rain barrel, then I wouldn't need to worry about saving water for the gardens since Mother Nature is already taking care of that, right? So if any of you have thoughts or advice on rainbarrels also, please feel free to share them with me in an e-mail or in my comments section.