How does your garden grow?

Another first for our family: a garden. Yep, that's right, after twenty years of marriage, we've finally gotten around to planting a garden. With Grant and I being raised in families who pretty much always had gardens and fruit trees and grape vines, I find it hard to believe that we've taken this long.

The soil in our neck of the woods is pretty rocky, so most locals recommend building raised garden beds. It took several weekends, several loads of dirt, and several ibuprophen, but Grant got them built and planted. Then miracle of miracles! Three days after a Miracle Grow treatment, things just took off!
These are my babies. Strazzberries! I've been wanting to plant strawberries, but kept putting it off. This year, I ran across these in a catalog. Strawberries that are supposed to have the flavor of raspberries. My curiosity got the best of me and I ordered 20 plants. Since we didn't have another garden bed ready for them, I found this neat patio planter. I hope it works! So far, so good. We'll see if they put out any flowers pretty soon. Then hopefully we'll get a few pieces of fruit this year to sample the raspberry flavor.

Happy Anniversary

Grant and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary. We're still happily married after all these years and looking forward to another 20++++++ years. We were able to enjoy a little getaway to Asheville, NC for the weekend. It's so nice to have our anniversary near Memorial Day weekend because it always affords us the option of the long weekend in case we decide to go somewhere fun.We enjoyed visiting the Biltmore Estate, had one great dinner, one really, really bad dinner, and two nights in a nice place. Before leaving, we stopped off at the Asheville Farmers Market and picked up 4 gallons of SC strawberries. When we got home, we experienced our first family event of topping, slicing and freezing strawberries. We'll probably check out our local farmer's market and try to do it again sometime.