Garden – Sannipanni

Spring is here!

Finally finally finally spring has arrived! This winter was unusually cold for North Carolina. It’s not every year that we get a foot of snow! Strangely enough zee parents kept telling me it was an unusually warm winter in Germany. Go figure!
In any case, spring is here now and will hopefully stay. Mind you spring in the Carolinas usually means 25C all of a sudden with a few days of what us Central Europeans think of as spring.
So while in the fall and winter we spent a lot of time working on our house’s insides now we’re hitting the yard.
I have this experiment going on called “a garden”. You could also call it project “I hope my thumb is greener than it looks”.
Michael helped me build a raised garden bed and fence and I sowed carrots, beers, spinach, arugula, mesclun and lettuce. Three weeks later things have sprouted!!! To me, that’s success! If all goes well we should be able to harvest our own organic, locally grown, garden to table veggies in a few weeks! OMG! My farmer step-dad is so proud.

Then we also got patio furniture! In fact, I’m sitting on one of the comfy chairs right now typing this! The birds are chirping, Alfi-Dog is laying next to me and right at this moment life is good.
The patio is still work in progress and I have lots of plans for some more additions once I get back from next week’s trade show in – drumroll – Sweden!!!
For now, cheers my dears!

Weeds! Weeds! More Weeds!

Something that never crossed my mind when we compared new construction homes with mid-century houses were lawns. I thought of wonderful mature trees (some so mature that they had to be chopped 🙁 ) but not of ill-maintained lawns.
Well, our lawn is pretty mediocre and got even worse this winter when we didn’t rake round 3 of leaves fast enough but eventually raked up a lot of grass with them, too. Still lots to research and work that needs to be done there to get somewhat of a lawn going again. And oh did I mention: mature trees = lots of shade. Great in the heat, not so great for the gardening. Shady grass por favor!

Anywhooo, I spent the last two hours weeding about a fifth of our backyard. You know something ain’t right when it smells like onions and garlic when you mow the lawn! Wild onions galore! Pesky little basturrrds! You can’t just rip them out like some of the other interesting specimen, nope they need to be dug up. Otherwise their cute little onions stay underground and just rapidly regrow their greens. Uffda! Peeps, one thing I’m learning: organic gardening is not for wimps!

But here it is, my proud bounty: a giant planter full of onions and weeds!