Planning

Sadly, no surprise visit from HGTV this past weekend. That means no Dream Home in Stowe, VT for us. We could have really used that $500,000 (and the vacation/ski house of course). :-(

However, we had a lovely weekend otherwise.

CP went on an adventure to a nearby Asian supermarket. It’s called “A Dong Supermarket.” It’s really hard not to laugh at the name. REALLY hard. Anyway, they have ALL kinds of weird and interesting stuff there. Plus it is all so cheap! So CP decided to buy a bird and cook it Saturday night. The only problem? It didn’t exactly have a label, so we have no idea if it was a duck or a goose. CP had to completely clean out its innards (he mentioned that after doing so he really likes when stores put the innards in a bag- it’s a much easier process). Plus, it’s head, feet, etc. were left on the bird.

Duck or goose?

He decided to break out his Vietnamese cookbook for a marinade, stuffed it with herbs and put it on the rotisserie on the grill.

In the end, we had no idea what it was, but it was delicious!

We also took the weekend to plan out our garden using measuring tape, sticks and rope. We have an odd shaped backyard and the sun only hits part of the yard so we tried a number of different layouts to try to get as much square footage for the garden as possible, while trying to keep a big chunk of the backyard for Fuzzy Britches, future children, etc.

Our odd shaped backyard using MS paint. The yellow is our house, the gray our garage, red is the patio and the green circle is a large tree (clearly NOT to scale). The sun starts on the right and travels left throughout the day.

We plotted out a few options, but didn’t like them or they didn’t provide enough gardening space. We wanted to keep the beds no wider than 4’ because it would start to get hard to weed in the middle otherwise. We also had to leave at least 2 feet in between the beds so that CP could mow the lawn. This is what we ended up with.

The ropes are kind of hard to see, but here it is in picture form:





The four rectangles on the bottom left will be part of the garden and the rectangle against the fence on the right will be another box that will be for climbing vegetables (probably beans). Not counting the climbing veggie box we are going to have more than 200 square feet of garden space. Woo hoo!

Next we decided to put in planters.

We will have one in the back of the garage. Right now our yellow siding inexplicably stops halfway down the garage and it is instead a slab of gray concrete. To cover that up, CP will make planters and we will have to put some sort of plant in that doesn’t need a ton of sun (so sadly, no flowers).

The other planter is going to go on the side of the patio. As you guys may remember we usually have A LOT of herbs growing during the warmer months. So CP is going to make a two-tiered set of planters for all of our herbs.

It probably won’t look as nice as these (also no lattice in the back), but CP has instructions on how to make planters and I’m confident that he will do a good job.

So, I think that we have an awesome plan in place to really spruce up our backyard AND have plenty of garden room. :-)