First, a little update on the state of the kitchen design. Friday morning the designer came over, accompanied by a carpenter lugging a rather large (and apparently heavy) box of samples. The designer was also lugging something, but the rolls of designs in his hand were likely significantly lighter – one copy for him, one for the carpenter and one for us. It’s the complete to-scale drawings that include not just the top-down layout, but also detailed sketches of each side of the kitchen as seen from straight on. We now know where every cupboard and every drawer will be located. There’s even views from all sides of the center island.

The carpenter came along because next up on the To Do list was the cabinetry. Since we knew Richard wouldn’t be able to be there to meet with them (he was at work, while this was my Flex Friday, and thus I was off), we’ve been poking around on various websites, checking out stains and colors and door styles to make sure we were in synch on what we wanted. Luckily we share pretty similar taste in this sort of thing, so I’d printed out the door style we both liked, in preparation.

So far most of what we’ve done for this kitchen design has been pretty painless, and this step was no exception. I showed them my print-out of the door style, and then brought up the same image online so they could see a better picture. When it came to color, I just trotted right back into the office and brought up the picture of the sample kitchen with the stain color and treatment that we both liked. And by the time we were done, we’d made an appointment to go look at countertops, and the carpenter left me with three little sample squares of what our cabinet doors will look like, and I had tacked the new detailed design specs to the wall so we can now stop and look at it at any time.

Now for the ‘dirt’ part of the entry. I’ve been wanting to do a vegetable garden for a very long time. But the thought of getting outside and actually setting one up has always been extremely daunting. I am not an outdoorsy type of person, and my idea of yardwork has always leaned more towards the ‘pay someone else to do it’ side of the spectrum. But a vegetable garden is something one has to do oneself.

I’ve seen people talking about the Square Foot Garden idea online, and thought it sounded fairly simple. I got the book last year for a birthday or Christmas or something, and dutifully read through it, and looked up directions, and so this weekend we planned to build ourselves our own garden box. I even enlisted Richard to help me because I knew that if I could just get it set up, then taking care of it would be easy. It’s the way I am for a lot of things – it’s always the ‘getting started’ that is the hardest step.

Here’s where the previous owners’ (one of them, at any rate) love of raised garden beds came in extremely handy. There are a number of raised brick beds lining the backyard, most of which are filled with trees and bushes and random flowering things, including a few scattered bulbs (which we didn’t discover until a month or so ago, when they suddenly started popping up and blooming like mad). But there are two beds in the very back that have been filled with nothing but weeds, and I have long suspected that a lot of the strange cement configurations back there were originally set up as garden plots.

So on a whim, we went outside and measured the larger of the two weed-infested boxes, and what do you know. Turns out it’s exactly four feet wide inside, and one foot tall (just the height a square foot garden box is supposed to be). It’s also ten feet long, but we didn’t need to use all of it. Just a little less than half.

Saturday we dragged over a drip hose and coiled it all over the top of the weeds and let the water run all morning and all afternoon to thoroughly soak it. That evening we went out and pulled up enough of the weeds and grass to clear out a four foot long section of the bed, and then we hopped in the car and zipped over to the little local nursery and, armed with information from the Square Foot Garden book, bought some huge sacks of compost and an assortment of spindly little vegetable seedlings. It seemed somehow appropriate that Sunday morning, on a day one is supposed to celebrate new birth anyway, was when we went out, armed with large serving spoons (they work fine for digging in dirt), and planted ourselves a vegetable garden.

I suspect we’re probably going to regret planting as many tomatoes as we did (four regular, four cherry). But there were so many heirloom varieties to choose from that it seemed a shame to just pick one. Plus my little sister and I have already been tossing around the idea of getting together (once we have our nice new kitchen) and doing a bit of canning. So I figure by the time that happens, I’ll be positively swimming in tomatoes and more than ready to turn a majority of them into sauce.  We also put in two green bell pepper plants, and a square each of butter crunch lettuce and spinach, and I put in two squares of carrots because I remember how delicious fresh-grown carrots can taste. There is also one square of garlic planted, just to see if it will grow.

We didn’t end up filling up even the four-foot-by-four-foot section we’d cleared. And some of the plants I really want to try growing (beans, peas, cucumbers) will need a trellis so they can be vertically trained, so I suspect that won’t happen until next year (although luckily the smaller of the two empty beds already has its own trellis so when we get around clearing that one out, we’ll be all set). Right now, though, I’m just excited that I finally have a vegetable garden. Here’s hoping that somehow, despite ourselves, we’ll manage to keep at least part of it alive long enough to get something edible out of it.