It's a Girl!

Hope and I found out yesterday that we're having a girl. We both thought for sure it was a boy, but sure enough there was a body part missing in the sonogram. [insert joke here about how it still could be boy but takes after his father].
Sorry, Keith, I guess I won't be able to use the name LeBron after all.

Outer Banks

Check out the fishing post over at Carolina Guys and Flies.

Zucchini No More

On Sunday I decided to pull up the zucchini plant. It was just getting way too big. We actually don't eat zucchini too often anyways, so I didn't really care. Plus, it never produced the right sized veggies. They would be yellow until they were totally huge and not all that good eating. Check out this last one I picked just before I pulled up the plant.
I'm already looking forward to next year's garden. This has been a great learning year. I definitely won't put zucchini or vine plants in the raised bed. I'll have to put them somewhere else. Maybe I'll use the raised bed for smaller things like herbs, radishes, lettuce, and spinach.

Garden: 50 days

I think the pictures speak more than I can describe. This is out of control! So far I've picked radishes, spinach, lettuce, cilantro, zucchini, and cucumbers. And there are small sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes showing themselves.

Garden: 37 days

Man, I had no idea that zucchini leaves grew so big! They're covering up everything else. I'm starting to see zucchini and cucumbers now.

How Dolly's settling in...

I think she's doing pretty good. What do you think?

Garden: 27 days of growth

After 27 days of good rain and sun, I'm beginning to get my little jungle. I put some sticks in the soil as supports for the peas. The radishes are doing pretty awesome as well.

Trimester over, let's make an announcement!

I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on the title of this post, but I will anyways: We're pregnant!

We found out shortly before Easter. Although we were planning for it, it was still a bit of a surprise that it happened so quickly. We went to the first doctor's appointment and everything was good so far. We got to see the little "bean" and the heartbeat. That little heartbeat is so fast!

Hope went for the second doctor's visit today and although they didn't do an ultrasound, she did get to hear the heartbeat this time. Everything seems to be going as designed. Since we don't know the sex yet, I'll just refer to the baby as a "he" (not that I have a preference, right?) and we'll just call him Baby D for now.

Of course the future grandparents are all super excited. My parents could hardly keep the secret. I'm glad they can finally let the cat out of the bag. Speaking of cat, we haven't told Argento and Dolly yet, but I'm sure they'll accept the new addition.

Butters: needs a new name, meets the cat

Although Butters is a cute name, it just didn't fit with us. After going through several names and several days, I think we've decided on Dolly.
Dolly has been a great dog so far. It's kind of weird, actually, how good she is in the house. I know that whoever lost her must be missing her. She has slept in a crate every night with no major problems. She hasn't messed in the house. She doesn't bark. She lays around a lot. Just what we were looking for. We didn't know how she would do in the house or with our cat, Argento. But see for yourself.

Garden: 10 days of growth

Here's how the garden is progressing.

What do you get when you go to the humane society?

I am not sure what got into me, but somehow Hope convinced me to go to the Greenville Humane Society to look at dogs. We've been wanting to adopt a Great Dane for some time now, but the rescue organizations in South Carolina wouldn't give us the time of day. We really don't need a dog, we don't have a fence, we both have full time jobs, and we have a cat. But I figured I can't put off a dog forever, and there's really never going to be a good time. But at the same time, I didn't really think we'd come home with a dog, either.
We both like labs and golden retrievers, so we looked at the various lab mixes at the GHS. We walked one that was a lab/boxer mix that was beautiful, but pulled the leash quite a bit. We knew we wanted a lazy dog, so we asked GHS which dog was the calmest and laziest. They pointed us towards Butters - a Greyhound mixed with maybe Airedale. A Greyhound is not at all what we thought we'd get, but we couldn't resist. She was great with us and great with the other dogs. She came home with us.

Garden: I see green already!

It hasn't even been a week and some of the plants are already coming up. The radishes and melons  have started first, along with the cucumbers.

Garden: the seeds are in

We went to the store to get some plants for the garden, but plants are way too expensive. Instead, we just went crazy on the seeds. I realize it's a little late for some of these seeds, but this is an experimental garden year for us anyways. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

Like I mentioned before, we're going to try the square foot technique, where each square foot has a different plant in it. Depending on the plant, you either put 1, 3, 6, 9, or 16 plants in the square (or something like that - we're not exactly following the rules to the letter). If all of our plants grow, we're going to have a crazy jungle. We even put some vine plants like cucumbers, and even some melons. I have no idea how those types of plants are supposed to work in a square foot garden, but that's ok.

So this is what we planted today: sunflowers, marigolds, peppers, watermelon, cantelope, sugarsnap peas, spinach, radishes, brocoli, lettuce, cherry tomatos, cilantro, carrots, cucumbers, onions, and squash.

Garden: construction complete

Well I got this idea a while back to start one of those square-foot gardens. Actually, a coworker of mine was doing one and I liked his pictures. But, I've got rabbits that graze in my yard, plus a cat, and sometimes some raccoons, so I didn't want to just put one on the ground. Instead, I decided to raise mine up about 3 feet and see if it would work.
So that's what I did. I constructed an 8 x 4 square foot garden, raised up about 3 feet and deep enough for 11 inches of soil. I'm a little worried about the weight of the soil, especially when it rains, but I think it will hold. It's constructed of 2 x 4's and 4 x 4's. The frame is pressure treated so it should last a while, but the wood that actually touches the soil is not pressure treated. Who wants to eat pressure treated vegetables? In addition, I put holes in the bottom so that some water could drain out during the down-pours.