Spring has Sprung

I am perpetually awful at keeping this blog up when I am not in the throes of a large project.  Since the big chair project, there have been a number of small ones - updating some dog beds for our new pup, Pepper, making some Christmas presents for family and friends, some jewelry projects.  Nothing large scale.

Until Sunday.  Because, you know, spring has sprung.  At the end of last summer, things got a little crazy for us, and we managed to miss the fact that our sprinklers were not doing the job they needed to do on our lawn.  The result is that while we have spotty grass, we have a lot of dead spots, too.  It looks like we lost about seventy percent of our lawn, but very few were large patches, it was mostly interspersed.

So, we talked money and options and we picked one that will hopefully work for us.  We had the lawn prepped by a lawn service - power raked and scratched up, aerated, edged, and fertilized, and then we laid down Revive, new grass seed (a nice drought-tolerant blend from the good people at local garden source), and then we laid down 720 pounds of top-soil on top of it and watered the heck out of it.  I'll try to take some pictures this weekend, to give you all a good "before" look.  Now we baby the heck out of those seeds for a couple of months, and give the lawn a good chance to take root and get happy before the summer heat starts up.  We have new timers and new sprinklers, and high hopes that it will go well.

As a result of the re-seeding, we have blocked our puppy off of the yard - she has access to her doggie area at the back of the yard, but no longer has access to the yard to run and play.  Which means we go for more walks and outings, so hey, it isn't all bad.  We'll give her access back after the lawn is well established, hopefully by June.

The next step is to do some spring sprucing up of the mulch, and to turn all my new lovely compost into my vegetable beds.  I'll plant those out on Mother's Day, which the generally "safe" date here to plant outside.  My current plans are:

In the lower bed, cucumbers on one side, pole beans on the other, herbs and zucchini in the middle.
In the upper bed, two cherry tomato plants.
In the pots around the rear beds, mint, basil, and chives.
In the large pots down the side of the house, we'll plant patio tomato plants and some greens.

In order to prep the pots on the side of the house, we'll need to drill some holes in the ceramic pots - we have tried to make do with rocks in the bottom to give them drainage, but that just isn't working.

I'm looking forward to my garden this year!  And to veggies.  Mmm. Veggies.