Preparing for the Gardening Season

So, we are beginning to prep the garden for the cool weather vegetables.  We're growing: carrots, regular peas, snow peas, broccoli, and romaine lettuce.  Oh boy, oh boy!  I am getting so excited for snow peas from the garden!  I remember eating snow peas from the garden of some family friends in Washington state and if these peas taste half as good as my memory, then these are going to be AWESOME!

It doesn't look that exciting right now, but soon that rosemary will look better (once I prune the dead parts off) and hopefully our veggies will start growing!  Now you might be looking at this garden and thinking to yourself- "Wait, I thought Kate and Doug lived in North Carolina (we do) but that soil . . . it's so porous (not clumpy for my non-agricultural readers) and brown, not red and clay-like."  Yes, well friends it has taken years of mixing leaves into the soil, but it has made a huge difference!  It's full of organic goodness. 

During Thanksgiving, Doug burned a LOT of leaves.  As you can see from the labeled above picture we have lots of trees (and gumballs) and therefore we have LOTS of leaves- which we usually put down at the road for the good city of Monroe to suck up into the vacuum truck, but this year Doug decided to burn them (yeah, yeah bad for the environment- tell that to my pyromaniac husband) and was putting a huge dent in our gigantic pile of leaves until the fire department showed up (thank goodness a former student was on the truck!  And they say teachers have no perks!) so there went that great idea- up in smoke. hahahaha

Anyway- we still have a pile of ashes and so Doug decided it would be a good idea to put them in the garden and mix them into the dirt.  Even more organic material (unless he used a little gas to start that leaf fire and then I am not sure how that'll work out)

Something else you might have noticed is that my son and husband are wearing totally different types of clothes.  My husband is wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt- a completely appropriate outfit for the temperature this evening.  My son, on the other hand, is wearing shorts and a t-shirt.  Well, I won't lie, but I got tired of arguing with him about whether he could wear them or not.  He's been asking for the last 2 weeks and well . . . I gave up.  I made him stand outside in the shorts this morning to be sure he really wanted to wear them.  Of course- the hard headed mule that he is- said it wasn't that cold outside.  Great- my brilliant plan to outsmart him backfired!

Oh- you were thinking to yourself, "Well- clearly Kate's taking the pictures, and we've seen Doug and Andrew- but where is the smallest (and currently the cutest) Latta.  She was strapped to the front of me in the Bjorn doing what she does best- supervising.