Our house!

At long last, we are finally homeowners! We went out this morning, closed on the house, bought some supplies, changed the locks, dug a garden bed, planted tomatoes, and moved a few boxes in. The rest will have to wait till later!

Planted: the four Cherokee Purple tomatoes and one sage plant. John helped dig the bed and it didn't take long at all. Both the bricks to edge it and the tomato cages were lucky finds right on the property! And there are still more bricks, so more beds will be following. This one will also extend further to the right, as far as the porch. The next project is to dig and edge the rest of this bed and plant it with my home-started beefsteak seedlings, which will be ready in a couple of weeks. I'm also going to add basil to this bed. I hear basil and tomatoes grow well together, and they certainly taste good together anyway!

The soil was way better than I'd expected. Yes, it was a little compacted and sticky, being clay, but crumbled quite easily and seemed pretty rich. There were even black earthworm castings, and I saw several of the worms themselves! I had to dig carefully so as not to disturb them ... it's all about the worms when you garden organically.

The baby loved the house and yard. He spent the whole afternoon running around babbling and exploring!

My bright, airy, non-mustard-colored kitchen. Its only faults are that it has a microwave and lacks a dishwasher. As a person who likes cooking from scratch and hates dishes, I'd sooner have it the other way around.

Can you picture a grapevine growing up here? Apparently grapes grow very well here; it's wine country. And the vine growing along the "porch" would be beautiful as well as delicious.

The back yard is shadier and lumpy with tree roots, so I don't foresee doing as much gardening here. But that back corner, being lower and damper, might be good for some elderberry bushes. Elderberry syrup is supposed to be a great cold fighter, so a few bushes would be excellent. Further up, along the fence, I could see making a raspberry bed. I love raspberries!

As for the inside ... this is all we got done, in addition to some boxes going into the attic. The rest will have to wait till we go back again. At just under an hour, the drive's a little too difficult to do every day. We won't be moving for real till near the end of the month.