My Green Thumb is getting GREENER!

We've tried gardening in years past, but we haven't had a ton of luck. We had several issues at our last house. Not enough sun, the groundhog that lived under our neighbor's deck, limited space, you name it. Josh and I both grew up with our families having gardens and we both agreed that we definitely wanted one here. There was so much going on and so many projects we wanted to do, we talked about putting it off until next year. We decided to prioritize, tough it out and just make it happen. I couldn't be more glad! 

This is (almost) our whole garden this morning. Note the NC State flag. :-) I bought it with the mailbox in mind, but now that we have flowers blooming in there, I kind of want to just leave that area alone. I planted Cosmos on the other side of the picket fence on Monday, so the garden should have flowers around it soon! I have other plans for in front of the garden. :-D

 Our first little baby bell

A little habanero blooming. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of heat, but Josh wanted to grow lots of hot peppers. I told him to go for it. I don't love habaneros, but I am looking forward to using them (in very small amounts) to add some variations to some dishes I already love! 

 This is a baby Dragon Cayenne. This plant was looking pretty sad for a while, but it's bouncing back and looks great now!

 This is my massive Spaghetti Squash. It was planted from seed and is probably the biggest plant in the garden right now. The slightly different leaves just to the left is the cucumber plant (also planted from seed) The spaghetti squash was only planted a week before the cucumber and it is about 5 times the size. It also gets more sun, so I'm sure that has something to do with it.

 These are our Pink Brandywine tomatoes We have several little tomatoes on the plant and lots of blooms.

This is our Bonnie Original tomato. This one has more tomatoes than the Brandywine. We're experimenting with a new watering technique and it seems to be doing very well. Even though this tomato plant gets the least amount of sunlight in the garden, it's growing the fastest.

A look at the bucket. I've been filling this thing up almost every day, so that is one thirsty plant! The stick you see was put there as a ladder for Kermit. He ran off one day and hasn't been back. :-/

These are our Roma tomatoes. We got 2 of these plants, so we definitely shouldn't have any shortage this year!

The little tomato plant you see here was started as a seed. It had a slow start, but it has taken off over the last few weeks! We have 2 of these plants. It's a Honey Delight Tomato and I'm really looking forward to trying it!

So, we have 4 varieties of tomatoes and 6 plants total. We may have actually gone a little overboard.

Same goes for squash and zucchini. Maybe we got a little carried away with those too. We've talked to the Martins about doing kind of a garden share. We planted 2 each of squash and zucchini and they did the same. We're going to have a TON! Luckily, we got different varieties of squash and zucchini than they did, so at least we'll have a little variation, right?

 Here's our first little baby zucchini

 Here's our first little baby squash. We got the crooked neck and the Martins got straight squash. We always planted the crooked neck squash growing up, but I think it's been a while since I've had any since it's not what you typically find in the grocery store.

 Here are our sugar snap peas. We rigged up a little trellis for them. I'm not so sure it's going to be tall enough, but hopefully we can still make it work! We need to put another line of twine up, they're growing so fast! 

 We don't have any blooms or peas yet, but it looks like we'll have some in no time! I can't wait to throw some of these in some stir fry! 

 This is some Okra. We have a full row of it, so we should have plenty this summer. I think there are 12 plants total. It started quite slow, but now that it's getting warmer, it's doing really well. Here are the beginnings of a tiny little bloom!

Here is some lettuce I grew from a lettuce stump. It's not doing so hot. Even though I chose a shady area of the garden, I think it's still getting too much sun. I would like to build a little planter to put on our patio or porch for it. That way it will be just outside the door and I can go grab some for salads really easily. Hopefully I'll get around to that soon!

We also have onions that are doing really well, carrots that are just sprouting (I planted those late), some peppers I started from seed (too late...so they're still tiny) and asparagus that I just planted a couple weeks ago. I'm looking forward to watching these things progress too!

All in all, our garden is doing really well so far and I'm SO glad we took the time to plant it! Hopefully in the next couple weeks, we'll be picking things from the garden!

Friday Favorites

TGIF! TGIF! Why is it that short weeks so often feel longer than regular weeks? 

Anyhow, here are my favorites from this past week.

1) Daves visit!!! - One of our best friends from MD visited last weekend and he brought a mutual friend with him. They got here Thursday evening and we spent the weekend catching up, lounging, touring breweries and trying new restaurants, along with some of our favorites! We had such a great time with them and we were both sad to see them go. Dave is the friend we lived in while we waited to move to NC. Bailey LOVES him, so she was super excited to see him too!

This is us at Trophy. Delicious pizzas and yummy beer!

2) Pack 9/impromptu date- Wolfpack baseball made it to the ACC Championship game! After everyone had left Sunday, we had planned to work in the yard some. Josh asked if I wanted to go to the game instead, so we did! Unfortunately, we didn't win. We didn't decide we were going to go until the 2nd inning and we didn't actually get to the game until the top of the 6th, so we missed the best part. Either way, we both had fun. 

The view from our seats. Not too shabby!

Since we had driven all the way to Durham, we decided to grab lunch while we were there. We walked over to Bull City Burger and Brewery and Oh. My. Goodness, their burgers are delicious! They get everything local and they even have a little sheet that tells you where they get most of their ingredients. Super cool! We ordered the secret burger. It's secret because you don't know what's on it until you get it. He did give us a hint and tell us it had a sunny side up egg on it (we asked and he said as long as that didn't scare us away, we would be fine) - it normally would have scared me away, but I decided to be adventurous. I am SO glad I did! We also got the duckfat frites. YUM!

Our burger had duckfat frites, a sunnyside up egg, bacon marmalade and truffle aioli on it. It tasted even more delicious than it sounds. Luckily, we halved the burger and fries. It was plenty for the two of us. We each ordered a beer and they did not disappoint either. We would definitely go back!

3) Bermuda - No, we're not going to Bermuda...that would be nice...but we do finally have some in our back yard! I was SO paranoid that we had wasted a full weekend prepping and seeding our yard, but so far, the hard work has paid off. It's still fragile, so we have to make sure we stay on top of watering and try not to walk on it for a bit, but we've got a good start so far. Josh noticed the first sprouts Sunday, which was a week after we seeded. It's coming up steadily and we're hoping it spreads well into the areas it hasn't come up yet. We're also hoping for some solid rain soon!

 It's coming in nice and thick! Obviously we still have some rye grass that should be dying off as it gets hotter. We definitely still have some weeds and crab grass. We'll be treating for those as soon as we can, but we have to wait quite a few weeks so we don't kill our new grass babies!

4) Chaise - I've been looking for furniture for our sitting room for quite a while. Josh wanted to make sure we got something comfortable and I wanted it to be cute. Neither of us wanted to spend a fortune. We ended up snagging this chaise from Wayfair. It fit all our needs AND I had a coupon that made it even cheaper! There was another one that I liked a bit better, but it was significantly more AND it was out of stock until at least July, meaning we wouldn't get it until around August. I also preferred this color to the other one. It's in the bedroom, but we haven't assembled it yet. I'll post a picture once we have it put together and in place.

5) More garden progress - Our garden is still doing great! I might actually do a separate post on this so I can go into more detail about what we have and a couple things that we're trying out this year! I'm super excited to be picking our very own produce this summer! We're already starting to plan for cool weather crops too! 

6) Fire - I mentioned last week that we got a fire pit. Josh and I stayed up late Sunday night by the fire and it was SO relaxing. Being by a fire in the mountains is just as relaxing to me as laying on a beach. Maybe even more. We're obviously not in the mountains here, but it's quiet enough to be super relaxing. We even got to see some fireworks that someone nearby was shooting off. They were short and sweet, then we got back to relaxing by the fire. We just took the time to enjoy each others company and reflect on us. It was some great, much needed, relaxing for sure!

Our first ever fire in our fire pit.

7) BBQ - We had a pork shoulder that we had planned to smoke when we had friends in town, but it just didn't happen. What better time that Memorial day to smoke it?!? Despite staying up late on Sunday, I got up early and started the day long process of smoking a big 'ole pork shoulder! It smelled heavenly. I finally woke Josh up after it had been in the smoker for a while. I had just checked on it, so I smelled just like the smoker. Josh said it was an amazing smell to wake up to. lol. It turned out amazing...it was definitely the best BBQ we've ever made! We had the Mortons over and Andrew made DELICIOUS green beans. We had corn on the cob and corn bread. I made 2 flavors of homemade butter. It was an all around great meal! The Martins came over later and we just hung out for a bit. It was a really nice day.

We plan on getting a smoker soon. We've talked about getting one as a joint gift for our anniversary, so maybe really soon! We're doing lots of research, but if you have one that you love, suggestions are welcome!

Recap of the past few weeks

It seems pointless to post a Friday Favorites post on Wednesday, especially when you're covering more than just the past week. How do I let myself get so far behind?!? 

Moving on...here's what we've had going on since I posted last. I've been absolutely horrible at taking pictures, so there aren't many of those to share, unfortunately. 

Gardening!

We've been doing quite a bit of gardening, which I love!!! We planted our garden a few weeks ago. I posted a picture right after we had the majority of the things planted, but since then, we've planted a couple more things and everything has gotten so much bigger! We also put a little fence around it to keep the curious pups out. 

This is right after everything was planted.

 This is a couple days ago. 

 Sugar snap peas. They are already looking for something to climb! We'll be making a trellis for them this week.

This is a spaghetti squash I started from seed. This guy is growing fast! 

Roma Tomatoes!

In addition to the vegetable garden, I've been busy trying to pretty up our yard a little. One afternoon after work, I made this little flower bed around our mailbox while Josh cut the grass. I planted Iris bulbs in it. Since then, several of them have sprouted and I added a few more things. I put some Petunias in there so I can have something pretty until the Irisis bloom and I added a few Sedum plants that will spread and provide pretty groundcover. I planted Shasta Daisy seeds, but they won't bloom until next year. 

 I love the way it turned out! These are the stones I used.

My Iris bulbs are sprouting!!! I'm really looking forward to seeing them bloom!

Concerts!

We're not usually big on going to concerts. We usually feel like they're not worth the money, so we only go when we find really cheap tickets. 

On Cinco de Mayo, we went to see John Fogerty. Josh won the tickets at work, so they were free! It doesn't get better than that! We had some friends come with us and we ate at Calavera before the show and it was delicious! It's like a 2 minute walk from Josh's office, so I just met him there and we walked together. 

This is the only picture we took at the show. We actually had "box" seats, but we ended up sitting on the lawn with everybody else for the show.

Last Thursday, we went to see Jason Isbell and Zac Brown Band. Both acts were awesome! The weather was perfect...it was a great show all together! 

I did get kicked out of the men's bathroom though. That kind of sucked. I should have taken a picture of how long the women's line was, but I didn't. I've waited in lots of long bathroom lines, but never one this long. It was ridiculous. Josh talked me into just going to the men's bathroom with him. We decided I would be fine if he was with me and he could just watch the stall for me. I decided there's no way it could be dirtier than the women's bathroom I had just gone in and I could save at least 30 minutes of my life. I went for it. NOPE...the security guard wasn't having it. Back to an even longer line for the women's bathroom than I left behind. Oh well, I get points for trying, right?

 This is us waiting for the show. We loved where we sat. We're going to go see Brad Paisley here on Saturday and I think we might try to get those same seats in the lawn even though we have real seats for this show. :-)

Chloe

Daddy got a new puppy about a month ago and he brought her to visit shortly after. She is SO cute!

Meet Bailey's little aunt...

 She'll grow into it soon!

 They took turns chasing each other around the house. So cute!

Tired pup!

When daddy came to visit, he also installed a flood light on our grilling deck for us, installed an outdoor fan on our covered porch and moved our breakfast nook light over. I'll post pictures of these things eventually. :-)

Composting on a Budget!

About a month or so ago, we started to think about composting. I wanted to use some compost in our garden and it was really hard for me to find. I thought it would be a good idea to try it for ourselves. Well, the compost bins I was finding were ridiculously expensive. I found out we could get them for free as residents of our county. I went out to the recycling center and picked one up. I thought it would be a small glorified trashcan or something. I was wrong. When they gave it to me it was a roll of plastic. You assemble it yourself and it turns out to be huge! It's about 3 1/2 ft in diameter and at least that tall. Way too big to go on our patio obviously. I gave it to my dad and we kind of gave up for a while. 

I had pretty much forgotten about our hopes to start composting when I was browsing one of my favorite DIY blogs one day. Then I found this post. I went to Target immediately after work to pick up one of these bins. I was totally up for a compost bin that costs less than $10! 

First, we drilled some holes in the lid of the bin.

Then, we drilled some holes in the bottom of the bin, so it can drain.

Then, we added some dirt, leaves, shredded newspaper and eggshells. It's fine to start with just the dirt and leaves and add as you go.

Fortunately, we still had a little bit of the compost we bought a while back. When we opened the bag, we noticed that there were lots of worms in it. They were actually still alive, so we threw that in there too! The worms will help speed the process.

This is the compost bin sitting out back. I know it's not pretty, but it doesn't look any worse than the grill!

...and it definitely looks better than this!

We've been adding all sorts of stuff to the compost bin and things seem to be going well so far. I just have to get into the habit of putting things that I used to throw away into the compost bin. I was really surprised at all of the things you can put in there. Like hair! Between Bailey and I, we produce a LOT of hair! We can also add dryer lint, paper, fruit and veggie scraps of course, tea bags, coffee, and lots more! You can't compost anything with fats in it, so no cooking oils, meat leftovers or dairy items...they can make smelly compost.

We've got a small container we keep under our kitchen sink to collect food scraps, paper towels, etc. Our tiny little pile is starting to grow, and I'm really looking forward to being able to use our own compost in our fall garden!