Play farming

Last year my summer project was scraping off the wallpaper in the living room and dining room and then painting the two rooms plus the hallway. It took much longer than just summer break (look at all the different blog entries). This year I wanted to get a head start on some of my spring and summer projects. One such project I promised myself last year was to work on the yard. I especially wanted to work on the yard given that the woman who lived in our house before us had definitely taken care of and invested money in the yard.

With the lagging economy I thought planting flowers while pretty wasn't very practical. We have to purchase fruit all year round for the turtles. Blueberries and strawberries are some of their favorite fruits. When a flyer in the Sunday paper (my now weekly chore to cut out coupons) advertised blueberry bushes for $4.99 I figured it was worth a try. It might save on the fruit bill (at least for the summer months) and would be better for the turtles (organic as long as I don't use pesticides or fertilizer) and better for the environment (no long distance traveling and fuel expenditures to purchase them). So I mailed off my check and waited.

This Wednesday I was pleasantly surprised to find my box with my two little blueberry bushes enclosed. So today while running all types of errands (allergist for Perry, Dooley's for bagels, Bed, Bath, and Beyond for a bamboo dish rack ...yet another attempt to be green, Sears to return a Land' s End purchase) we also stopped at Home Depot. We bought dirt and gravel (for the pots) and then of course two patio pots (the blueberries are dwarf potted bushes). I also bought some cilantro seeds but haven't got to that yet.

This afternoon while Vincent and Sam were upstairs putting Vincent's clean laundry away (and playing Foosball from the sounds of it), while Perry watched basketball and blogged, and while the Easy-Off worked on the oven I planted the two little bushes in the two new pots. While this is a far cry from my Aunt Velma's garden (where everything for Sunday dinner came from her backyard ...including the beef) and isn't exactly Williams Road where my grandparents raised corn, potatoes (a pain to harvest), green beans, bell peppers (which I always heard called mangoes), rhubarb, broccoli, onions, and cabbage I still think of it as a step in the right direction.

Tonight I ordered from the same company a dwarf pomegranate tree and early had ordered raspberry bushes (they are supposed to come in April). We'll have lots of fruit for the turtles and maybe even some for us. This little investment might actually be fun as well as being prudent. Of course there is always the fig tree that I've had for years. It has fruited once and had exactly two figs on it.

Here's hoping that the blueberries this summer look like those below.

----Stephanie