When Did Life Get So Hectic?!?!

Hey all!  I meant to post this up a couple of weekends ago but I got side tracked (surprise-surprise) and didn’t get to it.  So I updated the garden pics and will add in everything that we’ve been up to since the last post.

The Garden:

WOW has this garden already started putting last year’s to shame!

We’re definitely still learning but I think it’s coming along now.  If you check the post above this one, you’ll see how much growth we’ve achieved and, as of this week, we’ve started getting some food!  This week’s harvest yielded our first beans, peas, squash and zucchini.  We’ve been weighing each trip back from the garden and thus far we’ve grown 2 to 3 lbs of food!!  All of which we’ve eaten with an immense sense of satisfaction!  That sense is only compounded by the fact that there’s visibly so much more coming too!

Our herbs have really taken off and out tomatoes are going to be hung upside down this weekend!  They’re already twice as big as last year!  So we got a little bit of a late start, but hopefully not too late.  We’ll see!

Summer…

Summer’s definitely here.  WHEW!  We went from chilly nights this spring to 90+ degree heat.  Honestly, it’s not that different from any other year, but it just seems to have snuck up on us.  The summer soccer season also started for me (Tad) and while I love playing, the heat is definitely going be an obstacle for me.  My first game went reasonably well, but by the end I was totally dehydrated, which is just not good.  Hopefully this summer season will move on and we can look forward to fall.

The good news is that even though it’s been hot, we’ve had a REALLY rainy spring and summer so far.  Our rain barrels have been rockin’ it hard, being almost constantly full.  Only one of them ran dry and later that day a band of storms crashed through and filled it up by the next morning.  Guess that’s why we have three of them! 

It’s been great to harvest rain water.  I definitely recommend it to all of you on the fence about it.  I have no figures to offer but I know our water bill went down significantly after we started using them.

Concerts…

We’ve been fortunate to catch a couple of shows recently and one that stood out was from a band called “The National”.  If you haven’t heard them, you should definitely check them out.  Really mellow, incredibly solid, layered and interesting music!  They put on a hell of a show at the Lincoln in Raleigh! Highly recommended!

The other show we caught was my Aunt Ruth (Wyand).  Check her out here! She played a set at this year’s “OcraFolk” festival here in NC on Ocracoke Island.  She’s always amazing and she really wowed everyone out there when she played!  It was also good to hang out with her and my Uncle Chris.  We simply don’t get out there enough to see them.  Hopefully we can change that down the road.

The trip was wonderful!  The music was perfect, we camped (again, perfect minus the mosquitos), biked everywhere, had time with family and just really enjoyed the break on the coast.

Web and Knitting Stuff…

The web dev work on the side has been gradually picking up steam.  Keep an eye on my site as I’ll have a cool announcement tomorrow!  I’m just finishing up one site and I’ve got another client right in line behind that one.

Mel’s been taking time to finish some projects she’s been focused on for a quite a while now.  As always they’re coming along amazingly.  Keep an eye her site to keep tabs on her.

All good things!

I’d let you know about how hellishly busy work’s been on top of all of this, but, it’s really not what you want to hear is it?

I didn’t think so! 

Take care all and Happy Summer!

All the best,

Tad (and Mel)

Tags: bands we like, day to day, eco-stuff, events, hiking and camping, purlingplans.com, Tad's Section, the garden

First off, HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!!! To all you mothers out there, I hope this day is a day of rest and happiness!

(the gard bed layout from before)

This weekend I built 2 of 3 of the last few garden beds that we can fit in the backyard and it was kinda bittersweet honestly.  Sweet, because we have more room to experiment growing our own food with (which is always good) and bitter because we’ve played out all the sunlit areas out back.  I don’t want to cut down more trees because… well… they’re trees.  But I can’t help but view this as one of many paragraphs in the prologue of our stay here.  It signifies much needed changed in our lives but yet it also hails in the end of a lot of heavy situations.

(garden bed layout after…)

Tough decisions ahead for sure, but, for now, I’m more than happy to be stuck with deciding whether or not I want to use the extra beds for more herbs or garlic (YUM!!) or a maiden voyage into potatoes and their various tuber brethren. Probably the latter.

We also, as shown in the post below this one, made a crazy bomber run down to New Orleans for the annual Jazz festival that they have down there. I won’t reiterate, just suffice it to say it was amazing!!! Every aspect of it. What an amazing part of this country!  It was my first dose of how different this country can be heritage-wise.  I‘m sure everyone says the same thing when they visit my native New England, but it was unbelievably cool (and humbling at times) being in a part of the US that definitely didn’t feel stereotypical of the United States.  It totally gave us the travel bug 10 fold!

Extra special thanks to our friends Heather and Cat, for showing us the ropes down there.  It definitely wouldn’t have been the same trip with out you!

That’s about it!  Summer’s definitely here and the garden will be in full swing before you know it!  Expect the lotsa pics and stories from the back yard!

All the best,

Tad (and Mel)