– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I discovered a hidden treasure today that has been under my nose for 4 YEARS!  I CANNOT believe my local friends have not told me about it.  I only stumbled upon it because last week, 2 of my friends had the most amazing tomato and pepper plants in their cars and I asked where they got them.

There is a “mom and pop” nursery in town that, hands down, has THE BEST plants available in our little life here in the northwest.  And CHEAP too!  The tomato plants were $1.50 each for 1 ft tall plants.  I had already bought 5 plants from the farmer’s market this evening for $2 each, which look a bit sickly and tiny compared to the “treasure” ones. 

On Friday, this nursery is having a sale, and I plan to go back armed and ready to purchase plants.  I’m going to take pictures too!  A four pack of anything is $1.50 and I plan to stock up on pepper plants as well as marigolds to line the ends of my garden rows.  I’m sure growing my own plants from seed would be cheaper, even than this, but it really takes a greenhouse, or at least some space to have all those flats of plants starting in your home.  Our home is already small, without trying to carve a corner out of it to be a greenhouse!

I have yet to shake my finger at my friends for not telling me about this nursery.  I always share my “good finds” with everyone I can, so I kinda don’t get why nobody ever told me about this place.  Maybe it was a secret they wanted kept, but there are plenty of plants for everyone!  They also had this type of ground cover cloth that I got information about, and I’m going to try some this year under my tomato plants.  If I can prevent weeds, I will be a much happier girl this summer while trying to maintain our huge garden while my husband has to be working.

I think it has finally, officially, arrived.  The sunshine is warm, the birds are singing, and we’re planting things in the garden.

I finally got the photo resized properly to fill in the whole background of the blog, and it looks a little more cheerful now.  I have been journaling on my iPad, instead of blogging here, because I just didn’t like the way my blog looked, and it was like writing on ugly stationery.  Why would anyone bother to write a letter on ugly stationery?? 

I still don’t get all the details of the settings, but I did my best with what I could figure out.  I won’t mention that I had the Blogger Book For Dummies, but never had time to read it, and when I tried to check it out again, someone was “waiting” for it, so I had to let it go.  Typical of my life, great intentions, no time to follow through with all the things I want to do.  Maybe I’ll check it out again, or maybe I’ll just be satisfied with the way my blog looks now (not, I can already assure you that it will change regularly because I get bored with the same thing over and over again). 

I have been getting our bills and finances in order for the past few days, and neglecting school.  It was so out of control, I had duplicate bills sitting here for the past 3 months.  I had haphazardly been paying chunks to the utilities, Credit Card, etc., so things wouldn’t get disconnected, but I never knew if I was paying enough or overpaying.  This nonsense had to stop, so I found a budgeting app and I love it!  I’m going to track our spending, and Daryl can track his spending, and the apps will sync with each other, so we will always be on the same page (if he enters his spending).  I am hopeful that we’ll finally be able to really see where the money goes each month.

The next thing that needs to be tackled is the kids’ bedroom.  Oh My!!  Darien will be home in 3 weeks for the summer and their room needs to be able to function for 3 kids.  It’s going to be a whole day long job, and not a lot of fun.  I’m really not looking forward to it, but I am looking forward to the final result, so I will keep that picture in front of me for motivation.

Watched “The Kings Speech”, and while it was a good movie, it wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.  It’s rated “R”, and all I can see is that there was foul language several times, but other than that, I think it’s a good movie for my kids to watch.  It’s interesting to see that even Royalty are regular people with their own set of problems and challenges.  I like how determined he was to overcome his difficulty, so overall, I think it’s a great story.

Tomorrow is town day.  I’ve been making my list so tomorrow will be a busy day making sure everything gets done in town that needs to be done.  I guess I better get some sleep!!

I am disenchanted with my blog.  I don’t like the way it looks right now.  I don’t like my entries.  I don’t like that all the recent pictures are UGLY because everything is dead still around here.  I spent at least an hour today, trying to give it a facelift, but couldn’t get the photos large enough to be a single picture background.  I wish I understood blogger better, and how to edit the templates, backgrounds, fonts, colors, photos, layout, etc.  It takes time to learn the details, time that I do not have.

I see so many things that inspire me to write, but I don’t have the time to get it on paper.  I’m starting a journal on my iPad.  Maybe I will be able to capture more there.  I need to be able to spill everything out, the good, the bad, the ugly. I can lock the content and write everything that is on my mind.   I think I will like that a little better.  I’m still deciding how much I’ll share here, how transparent I want to be.  I don’t know the answer to that just yet!

I hope my blog will look more “springlike” soon.  I have a great background photo, if only I can figure out what size to make it so it will fit the background correctly.  Until then…

Since the weather here has been so “wintery” for such a long time, we have to take advantage of any day that is dry outside, whether or not it is sunny and nice. So, today we worked in the garden, getting the beds ready for planting.

My first project was to attack the garden boxes and get the onion sets planted in them. We didn’t do anything at the end of last year, as far as cleaning up old plants and weeds, etc., so we were greeted with this…

After a bit of work, the box looks like this.

Since the soil is so soft and easy to work with, it doesn’t take long to make it look nice again. Kaelyn planted the onion sets, 80 in each box, 5 per square foot, so if all goes well, we’ll have 80 of each type of onion, red, yellow, and white, in each box. I’m hoping that they will do well in the boxes and will require minimal amounts of weeding.

One of these boxes had volunteer onion starts from last year, so we pulled this out and are getting them ready to dry. I started with a nice bath in the sink.

Then we trimmed them into small pieces and gave them another bath.

Finally, we put some in the fridge to use fresh, and we are drying the rest of them. More and more I’m feeling like it’s a good idea to eat organically grown produce. It’s especially nice to get it for FREE!!

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