Sunday Scenes: Garden Toes

June 3, 2012 By Leanne Vogel June 9, 2015

I’ve spent the weekend with my toes covered in soil, my face in the sun, and a tummy full of grilled meals. It’s been spectacular and totally unplanned. We kicked off the weekend with a Summer feast of grilled baby back ribs, corn on the cob and steamed veggies.As I dug my teeth into the cob, I figured it had been about 5 years since I’d corn on the cob last. 5 years! It was such a treat, didn’t even need any butter/coconut oil. After our dinner, we headed into the city for a movie and a walk through the mall. Of course no trip to the city would be complete without stopping at the grocery store on the way home. On Friday nights, Superstore puts out all the older fruits and vegetables on the 50% off rack to make room for Saturdays fresh produce. You better believe I hit up that rack every week. It’s usually packed with organic bananas, peppers, cauliflower, strawberries, bakery breads and, if I’m lucky, apples. I just wash, cut and freeze them all on cookie sheets and pack them in freezer bags for smoothies, pasta sauces, and salads. I majorly scored with this last trip. There were 6 bags of organic bananas that were so mushy they couldn’t even be cut up for smoothies. I put the whole bananas in the freezer and plan to make a couple batches of grain-free banana bread for Kevin today, possibly try my hand at vegan, gluten-free banana bread… but we’ll see how that goes. We woke up on Saturday morning to a blustery, cold day. The sky was grey and the wind was quite chilling. Instead of heading outside for a run as I usually do on Saturdays, we cuddled up on the couch and made a batch of banana bread upside down pancakes for second breakfast. With the weather being like it was, we decided to get on our sweat pants and head out into the backyard to care for our garden. It’s rare that I have the time to help Kevin with the yard, so it was really nice to be able to push around the wheelbarrow, get my hands dirty and have spiders crawling into my sandals (ick!)

• The lights on the house were switched out – the ones we bought with the house are atrocious. We’d purchased new ones over a year ago, but never got around to it.
• We planned to replace the mulch on the side of the house with gravel – so much easier to take care of.
• We removed the grass from under the deck and replace with gravel – we added an extension to our deck right before the winter last year which meant building over grass.
• The trough (only word for it, really) was filled with lawn soil and reseeded – the trough developed as a result of the conduit we ran to the backyard for the lights.

And… I got to plan my very first vegetable garden! I did very little research before deciding to do this. We found 2×2 cedar planters at Home Depot that I’ll make into two garden beds and try my hand at growing organic, non-GMO arugula and cilantro in one, and colorful beets and garden carrots in the other. I found the organic, Non-GMO seeds and organic planting mix and home depot, but linked up to the amazon products if you’re interested. The planting mix was downright robbery, but I’ve been told that it’s great stuff so I’ll suck up the fact that the Canadian price was $19 a bag… for now. We’ll see how it works. If it’s successful, I’ll share the process. If it’s a bust, you’ll never hear of this project again. We ended up spending 7 hours working on the garden so decided to make a big dinner of sausages (for Kevin) and salad (for me) with apple bowls for dessert and park our sore muscles on the couch for the evening. Have you spent time in your yard this weekend? What sort of house projects do you have on the go right now?

This entry was tagged: garden, weekend