gardening with the calverts: month 1

ok so about a month ago, josh and i started a little veggie patch in our backyard using the book square foot gardening by mel bartholemew as a guide for our gardening shenanigans.

here's what it looked like when we first built the planter and got the dirt and seeds into it:



and here's what it looks like now:


(these are just the radishes - check out everything else by clickin' the pic!)

josh and i had a tiny balcony garden for like 2 years before this, and expanding the operation now that we have a little more space has been so fun! we're both pretty effing amazed at how crazy some of this stuff is growing; in theory soon we'll have watermelons, peas, pumpkins, corn, radishes, chives, tomatoes, carrots... i think it all kind of depends on the weather - we started all this pretty late in the summer but the growing season in california's longer, so who knows! (we got to eat a few spinach leaves the other night, so freakin delicious!)

we also started a compost bin in the backyard, which both of us are a little unsure of - mostly because neither one of us has done that before, so there's a whole lot of "uhhh are we doing this right?" goin' on... we put this little vinyl fence up for like 60 bucks to hide the composting experiment:


(if you click to see the larger version of this pic in flickr, and you look at the telephone wires, you can see some of the zillions of birds waiting for me to go inside so they can get back to the bird feeder...)

so we'll see how that goes! we added worms to the bin tonight... the gal that we bought em from basically made us smell worm poo, she says to prove that it smells like dirt, but i think it was so she could tell her friends later she got people to smell worm poo.

i feel like i need to get a better handle on timing out what we're planting... what are good fall/winter veggies? anyone got any hot tips for what to plant and when in southern california?

hearts and laserbeams book report: ya yas in bloom by rebecca wells

ok it has been AGES. sorry about that folks. the only thing that's been constant lately is change, and lots of it - transitioning into having a full-time job again and still keep hearts and laserbeams alive has been a trick and a half but i'm workin it out and it's all startin to mesh, which is awesome.

plus i'm bloggin 3 times a week over at oc weekly now, did i tell you that? if ya click here, you can read all the gettin' made posts i've written thus far. and if you check out the one about twisted handmade and comment on it before midnight friday night you could win a set of courtney chesley's awesome telephone-wire bracelets!

so anyhow, i may have been missin from this blog but i haven't been neglecting my book reports, here's one i've been putting off for weeks! i've had my copy of ya-yas in bloom for a couple of years now and finally got a chance to read it!

hearts and laserbeams book report: ya yas in bloom by rebecca wells

ok did you read the divine secrets of the ya ya sisterhood? did you see the movie at least? both effing awesome.

ya yas in bloom was like those designer imposters at rite aid - did you like ya ya sisterhood? you'll love ya yas in bloom! the same, but a little cheaper.

like it was a fun girly summer read, and i LOVE the characters and getting to enjoy more of their adventures and shenanigans... but like most sequels, this one was a little weak.

ummmmm i was gonna write more but there's 2 problems.

number one, i finished reading this book like weeks ago and should've written about it when it was fresh in my mind.

number two, there wasn't a whole lot of substance or anything heavy to report. some crazy southern gals get together have lots of drinks and madcap mayhem results.

so uh, sorry this is so short but that's pretty much it... let's get to the ratings!

hearts: 3 hearts - these ya ya books are so much fun to read y'all; they make me wanna move to the south immediately!

farts: 2 farts - there was so little thinking going on while i read these that i kinda missed my dense high-school reading list books that usually have to come with a cliff notes for me to get through em.