ramonat latest

Nat and I started our spring cleaning Saturday. For the next few weeks, we are doing a thorough cleaning and decluttering.  In order to make it more manageable, we only do one room at a time.  Saturday, we cleaned our bedroom.  I didn’t think it was going to take very long, but it took about an hour.  We swept underneath our bed (which was very dusty and dirty), dusted, and got rid of things.  I think about half the time was devoted to sifting through things that we don’t use anymore.  I noticed that I keep a lot of keepsakes from various things throughout the years.  I realized that about 80% of the keepsakes aren’t as sentimental to me as when I first collected them, so I decided to give them away or recycle them.  Don’t worry, I still have a nice collection of precious things from my friends, family, and Nat!

It feels so nice to have a clean room.  I’m hoping that with this aggressive cleaning, that our household clutter will decrease at least by a third.  I know that this will be beneficial when we move so that we’re only moving the “essentials”.    I’m also hoping that I can do this type of cleaning each year to keep our stuff down to a minimum. 

Well, we finally got started on our garden today with help from Ellie and her boys. There was much discussion of where the best place to put the garden–we needed plenty of sunshine and distance from the trees in our yard and the neighbor’s yard. In the end, we decided to put the garden right next to our patio. Nat was very hesitant to plant the garden there because that is where all of our best grass is. In the end, he conceded that this was the best location. After we got the location set, Ellie got to work planning. She whipped out a piece of paper and pencil and began to sketch how we should layout the garden given the things I wanted to grow. She had the dimensions of the garden and the direction the garden should be facing.

With all the planning done, we began to dig our 7′ X 10′ garden. Nat wanted to salvage the good grass, so we dug up the grass in sheets, much like sod, and transferred them to the bare parts of the yard. This was a lot more work than I had anticipated, and I was about to give up after we finished our first little row. Eventually, the excitement kicked in, and I was able to work better. We didn’t get all of the grass dug up, but we got enough done for me to line one side of the garden with bricks and plant my herbs! The last thing we did was to lay some hair* (we saved Nat’s hair from when I gave him a haircut yesterday) around the herbs and water them before heading inside.

Our bodies are starting to ache, but it was really, really rewarding to get part of the work done! Now, we can look out our back windows to see our little herbs growing out there. I’m so excited to watch our garden grow and to harvest all the goodies.

I definitely couldn’t have done it without Ellie. She told me how to dig up the sod, how to prepare the soil, how to plant the herbs, and how to line the garden so that grass won’t creep in. She is just a wealth of information that I’m so grateful for. I’m also just blown away by her generosity to come over and dig with us. It doesn’t sound like very much fun to me, but she had a good time. Thanks Ellie!

* Supposedly, human hair keeps away the rabbits. We’ll see how it turns out!

We are planting a garden this year!   Yay!   I’m a garden virgin, so our friend Ellie* and her two boys are going to help us till and get started on Wednesday. Our plans are to plant the following:  lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, zucchini, snow peas, basil, oregano, chives, flat leaf parsley.

I’m hoping that the garden will turn out well, and that I won’t be lazy about keeping it up!

*  Ellie is an amazing multi-talented woman.  She was my doula for Sean’s birth.  She is also an amazing woman of prayer.  I wish I could have her around wherever I go!