How Our Garden Grows

Heading into our second year of gardening, Mr. GI and I have been talking about some lessons we learned after our first year.

• Don't sow eight okra plants unless you have LOTS of friends and families who reeaaaalllllly love okra.
• Happy bees = happy squash. Our poor squash only put out a few tiny little fruit last year. It turns out that there's a short window each morning when the female flowers can be pollinated by male flowers, and if you don't have happy bees around to do that pollinating each morning, you don't end up with any squash! This year we're giving it another go, but planting some flowers close by to see if that attracts some bees. The last resort is to try hand pollinating.  We also ended up with powdery mildew last year-- more about that in a bit.
• Mulch! Last year we only mulched around each plant to help with weed control and water retention, but this time around we're also mulching the aisles to clean up the whole look.
• Planting radish in the summer. Radish is definitely a cool weather plant, and if planted in the hot summer it will peace out. Last year we didn't do very well about planning a fall/winter garden, but I'm definitely wanting some carrots, lettuce, and other cool weather goodies.
• Our tomatoes last year went crazy. We got the plants from my sister, who threw a tomato in her backyard and ended up with plenty of volunteer seedlings to share. We sowed the plants underneath our clothesline so it would be easy to stake them up, and it worked pretty well last time.  So far we've had at least three volunteer plants from last year's tomatoes.  Looking forward to some tomato sandwiches again this summer!

Around the House: Laundry Nook

Rather than a whole room for laundry, we've got a nook in the main hallway.  When we moved in, it had bi-fold doors, but it didn't take long for us to rip those suckers out.  I really hate bi-fold doors (we've only got one set left in the house, our master bedroom closet doors), but they were especially useless in the laundry nook:  our pretty new washer and dryer were too deep for the doors to close!

Five Feet High and Rising

As much as we love our house, I really don't know what I would do if we were the folks living along the Mississippi right now. On the one hand, we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into our home; but on the other, aren't the things in it just things? Then again, there's the inevitable fights with insurance that come after disasters like this one. Maybe it is just easier (though more blood, sweat, and tears) to build your own levy. Thankfully, the people living along the river and its tributaries have had enough warning to build these structures.

via Daily Mail Online

If you had enough warning, would you build a structure around your house to protect it from flood waters or other natural disasters?

Kitchen Itchin'

No, Mr. GI and I don't have some weird disease. Keep readin'.

As I said in this post, we worked really hard during a crazy time of year to paint all of our cabinets white. But I got this itch in the last few months to introduce some color in the kitchen, mostly because all of our appliances ended up being white (although we're dreaming of upgrading to stainless steel look when we can afford to) and now the whole kitchen looks a little like a bottle of Wite-Out. What I'm really hankering for is a different color on the bottom cabinets, like a nice olive-gray. And Dana over at House*Tweaking really didn't help things with her latest post about the kitchen in the Underdog. I know, I know... I said not one week ago that we had temporarily exhausted ourselves in the kitchen. Call me fickle.

Jenna Lyons' kitchen via House*Tweaking

Until I convince Mr. GI that we should move out of our kitchen cabinets again (only the bottom ones, though!!), I think I could settle for color via artwork. Like this precious conversion chart on Etsy that's beautiful and practical. Yummy.

Via SweetFineDay on Etsy

Around the House: The Kitchen

The kitchen is the space we’ve done the most on since we moved in, and it was also the space that had been updated the least before we bought the house.

Those cabinets. Whoa.

Even after settling in, it was still so dark.

Contain Yourself

I can't even tell you how excited I was for this little guy. We got a $25 gift card to the Container Store (cashed in on some bank rewards points), and I bought a few things we'd been needing around the house. Our random assortment of under-cabinet junk is now all orderly thanks to a $4 cabinet rack from the Container Store. How I love that place.... almost as much as an office supply store.

I didn't get any sort of promotion for this post- just singing the praises of having an organized cabinet!

Around the House: Living Room

Our living room has evolved quite a bit in the past few months. When we moved in, it looked like this:

You can see the dining room area in this pic [plus that hideous fan I'd like to violently rip out of the ceiling. Ugh. Those lampshades should be illegal].

After getting rid of our embarrassingly-awful college furniture, we made a Clampetts-come-to-town trek huge trip to IKEA in the old Nissan (R.I.P.) with the new home owner tax credit to get an all new living room. Much assembly later (thanks to two very good friends), we had two Karlstad love seats, a Poang chair, and other fun stuff.