Chattanooga wedding

Our good friends Jinna Anne and Aidan are finally hitched!  Friday morning we headed up to Chattanooga TN for their wedding weekend.  It was a great weekend all around. The weather was wonderful!  Beautiful and sunny and temperatures in the 70s. Couldn't have been better.  Their rehearsal dinner was at the Tennessee Aquarium and at the end of the night when dinner and toasts were complete, we all got to walk through the aquarium.  It was a cool way to wrap up the evening.  After the rehearsal dinner, most of us walked to a local bar for the evening to visit with friends and family that had driven into town for the weekend.  It's so fun having all our friends together from Birmingham, Auburn, Louisville, Indiana, and so on.

Saturday went smoothly (well as far as I could tell!). The weather was warm and sunny again.  Greg was Aidan's best man (along with Aidan's dad). So he left for pictures while me and some of our other friends hung around the hotel killing time.  We all met back up at 5 for the wedding in a beautiful chapel on the University of TN, Chattanooga's campus.  The ceremony was beautiful. They even had 2 soloists sing one of my favorite songs that we also included in our own ceremony...The Prayer.

Their reception took place on Lookout Mountain (same mountaintop as Rock City).  The views were gorgeous, the banquet hall was beautiful, and their band was AMAZING!  Seriously, once we had dinner and the real party started, we danced and danced and danced all night long! It was so much fun!

 Me and my sister-in-law, Callen

 Lindsay married Greg's friend John last September and they live in Kentucky. We really wish we lived closed to these guys!

 Greg and John

 Birmingham gals (and future brides themselves!)

Dana and Laura

 

 and today (April 8th) is OUR 6 month anniversary! One year will be here before we know it!

Congrats Aidan and Jinna Anne!! We love you guys :)

day 2 of gardening

We made a lot of progress today on the garden. I bought some weed-killer to spray along the fence lines, got a few more strawberry plants, grape plants and a few more garden necessities.  Here's some of the containers I planted last week...

These are strawberries...like I said, my strawberries didn't do well last year, so I'm trying different containers in hopes something works this year. I have a mixture of Ozark Beauty, Quinault, and Sequoia strawberries.

 These are 3 different types of cherry tomatoes...Husky Cherry Red, Super Sweet 100, and Amelia.

 

But the biggest achievement of the day was our backyard garden area. I got the veggies planted into the raised bed.  I mixed the dirt we piled in it yesterday with the remaining compost from my bin.  Yep, a whole year's worth of composting all gone in 2 days :/  Oh well, that's what it's for.  And check this guy out...

 You know you have good dirt when it's filled with earthworms, but seriously, this guy was HUGE!! Definitely the biggest worm I've ever seen!

 

While I finished planting, Greg went to get us some gravel to make easier pathways (and to help with drainage). It looks so great now!

I have large tomatoes (Celebrity and Better Boy), red and green bell peppers, cucumbers, and more strawberries. I've never grown cucumbers, but my step-dad said they are vines so I added a trellis for them to climb.  The cucumbers are at the top of this picture, along the chicken wire trellis.  The 4 plants in front are the other strawberries.

I mounded these strawberries up to help them drain (again, in hopes of better growth this year).

And I got a soaker hose that winds throughout the garden.  I've only used it once so far, but it's so easy. You just turn on the water and it slowly waters the whole bed.  But eventually, this little beauty will water our garden...

Yep, it's a rain barrel.  We got it last fall as a wedding gift and it collects rainwater that can be used to water our garden and plants.  It was completely full, but unfortunately we had to empty it to get it up onto this shelf that Greg built.  We figured out that in order to get water to flow through a hose connected to the spigot, you need some help from gravity.  So we had to figure out a way to elevate the barrel.  Greg took a wood pallet and nailed some 2x4s for legs and support beams.  Now we just have to wait for rain to fill it up again (and hope the weight of it doesn't crush the pallet!)  Once it fills though we can use this to water the garden rather than precious (aka pricey) water from the house. 

Oh and one more thing. I bought us 2 grape vines that will hopefully grow along the fence line. One of them is a Concord grape plant, and I don't actually remember the name of the other.  They are both red grapes so hopefully they are good!

So there ya have it.  Lots of progress this week.  Of course it's not 100% done. I still have cantaloup and watermelon to plant, but that will have to wait till next week!  I'm back to work for 3 days and then we are celebrating our first wedding of the season on Saturday!

the gardening begins!

Last week I was off from work for 4 straight days...can we say "hallelujah!"  The first day was cleaning and laundry day.  I worked overtime both weeks prior to this break and the house had gotten out of control.  And we all know how much a dirty/cluttery house drive me crazy! So, first things first, lots of cleaning.  Next, I decided this was pretty much the only opportunity I would have to get our garden started since we would be crazy busy in April!  We will be out of town 3 weekends for weddings and all my workdays will be during the week. So, if we wanted a garden this year, now was the time to get things going.

I have been putting off going to Lowe's or Home Depot since the warm weather set in because I knew I would buy way too many plants and flowers!  I LOVE a garden center.  But, I needed to get a raised garden, so I finally gave in.  After doing some research (on Pinterest, of course!) I decided although building a raised bed with pallets would certainly be cheaper, I couldn't do it on my own.  And Greg was working all the days I was off so I couldn't expect him to devote his work days to building us a garden. And I couldn't be sure if the wood on pallets had been treated with any chemicals, which I didn't want mixing in the soil with all our veggies.  I read on some websites that cedar naturally resists rot, so I figured that was my best bet.  Home Depot sold this one for $80 and it was 4ft x 8ft which fits perfectly in our garden area.

 

And it was SO EASY to put together.  Seriously, it took all of 10 mins to set up.  The rest of the garden preparations were anything but easy.  First of all, our garden area (which was built by a previous homeowner) had gotten completely overgrown with weeds. It was a total jungle!  Greg and I cleared out one side last week (where the raised bed will go), but today my step-dad came over and helped us clear out the other side, as well as tilled up the ground so we could fill the bed with dirt.  Thank goodness for a motorized tiller.  There's no way I could have loosened up the ground with a hoe.  So he tilled, and we filled the beds with a mixture of dirt and compost.  It would have been better had it not rained the past 2 days since this made the dirt pretty clumpy, but hopefully it'll dry out by tomorrow and I can put veggies into the ground.  Here's some of our work today....

Here's the view from our back deck looking out towards the garden area.  There's my sweet step-dad working away!  By the way, today was his birthday, and he still was more than willing to do manual labor to help us with the garden :)  Thanks Dwayne!

Here is the side of the garden that had not been weeded at the time (and what the other side looked like prior to last week's work).  And by the way, I learned what poison ivy looks like today and also learned that we have a lot of it in our yard :/  Luckily, though, we didn't get it on us, and I sprayed the heck out of it to hopefully kill it all!

And here's today's progress on the raised bed...

My mom had some landscaping liner that we laid out under the bed to help keep weeds from growing back up.  We will cover the areas around the bed with gravel to make pathways and help with drainage.  So far I have bought 3 types of large tomatoes, 3 types of cherry tomatoes, red and green bell peppers, strawberries, cucumbers and watermelon plants.  Yep, really hoping that watermelon actaully grows!  Last year I did tomatoes and green bell peppers and they all grew wonderfully!  My strawberries did not do as hot.  The plants grew but didn't produce any berries. I changed up the way I planted them this year (added rocks for better drainage and planted them in large containers so they'd have more room).  Maybe this year will be better.  Dwayne suggested putting some strawberry plants in the ground just on the other side of the raised bed.  So I may build-up some mounds for them their and see how it goes.

We also did lots of work on the front yard today. Greg trimmed up a ton of wisteria vines that were out of control and taking over some trees. He also mowed the grass and raked up a giant section of mud and leaves that had collected in the driveway all winter.  Lastly, we dug up all the ivy growing around the mailbox (that was also taking over the yard and growing out of control). I would like to plant some flowering plants around the mailbox, cause our front yard is desperately in need of some color.  Seeing everyone's azaleas in bloom these last few weeks has made me realize how bare our front yard is.  We need some color!!

I didn't get around to taking pics of the front so I'll be sure to do that tomorrow and hopefully give an update on the veggie garden.  But I can't guarantee how much work I'll do tomorrow. My hands and back are pretty sore from today's achievements.  I may not be able to move tomorrow!  But I'm happy with our progress :)