Weekend

The past week has been crazy. In addition to my normal work load (teaching 3 classes this semester) we had to have our annual review documents in by Friday so I had to write a narrative about what I've been doing this year and update this ancient official computer program with all my yearly activities, I'm giving a guest lecture this week so I prepped an extra lesson last week, I'm getting peer reviewed in 2 of my classes this week so I worked extra hard on those lesson plans and had a meeting about that with the people reviewing me, and I had to edit the page proofs for one of my upcoming articles (and journal editors always give you like a week to finish them at this stage).

But the weekend was great. Yesterday we went to home depot and got lots of gardening supplies, some plants, and paint for the bathroom. A few months ago Max ate the plastic support holding up the wall mirror in our bathroom, and the mirror fell down. The mirror was fine but the wall was damaged. So we spackled the wall and fixed a spot next to that as well. The previous owners had left tons of cans of paint, and we figured we must have that color too. Well, it turns out we had every shade of beige except this one (which we figured out after testing several colors on the area behind the mirror), so for several months our bathroom was in limbo and we just propped the mirror up against the wall.



Yesterday using a box cutter I cut off a little piece of the wall behind the mirror- about 1.5 inches square. I stuck it in an envelope and wrote down the info on all the other paint the previous owners left behind (since they were all the same kind, we figured this had been that kind too). And we headed off to Home Depot, where this old painter guy who seemed kind of scatterbrained mixed us up a can of paint that matched it nearly-exactly.

So we came home, I painted, and then we used a studfinder to find some wooden beams and screwed in new metal mirror supports into those beams (the previous plastic supports were screwed into drywall which wasn't helping) and rehung the mirror. The paint is the tinyest shade darker, but it's so close you can't tell unless you know where to look. Bathroom accomplished!



Also today I put out a bunch of black mulch around some bushes out back where I pulled out a ton of ivy last summer (The mulch looks much nicer than bare dirt). In plant news, I picked up a strawberry plant that is already growing mini strawberries, a second rosemary plant (one is going to be potted and one is going in the ground when it gets warmer) and a baby oregano plant. Yesterday I started some zucchini and eggplant seeds.

Now there is nothing to do but make sure my plants get enough water (but not too much water) and make sure the pea vines climb up the trellis for about the next 3 weeks, until all chance of frost is gone. At that point I'll be hardening off and then planting bell pepper and basil seedlings and cilantro and dill seeds and one of the rosemary plants directly into the ground, and replanting other pepper and basil seedlings into containers for the north facing deck. I'll also be moving the oregano and lemon tree outside. About a month after that the zucchini and eggplant will go outside.

The lemon tree is growing lots of new baby leaves. It's been pretty cold this past week so the Crape myrtle outside hasn't put out any new growth since it's been planted, but it seems to be doing ok as far as I can tell. The peas are slowly growing and the onions seem to be loving this cold weather.

I think this place is going to pretty much be my gardening blog for the next few months.