Monday Morning Chit Chat - Farm and Garden Edition

Hope all of you had a good weekend.  We had a very nice one here, with temps near 80° on Saturday and in the upper 80s on Sunday (anyone local know if it officially hit 90°?).  We had storms in the evening, so here we are on Monday morning with temps only expected to be in the 40s or maybe 50° today.  That's ok.  I have work to do inside and it's going to warm right back up starting tomorrow.

On Saturday, after doing some chores around the house, Kat and I spent a couple of hours at the Deanna Rose Children's Farmstead.  (Thanks go to Paula at Dishing Out The Good Stuff for reminding me it was opening weekend.)  We had a nice time watching the animals, riding the ponies, eating ice cream and just enjoying the day.  Here are a few pics, although I must have unintentionally changed a setting at some point, causing the later pics to look washed out a little.

Afterward we stopped at Bed, Bath & Beyond where I bought some kitchen items I needed (new quality 9x13 cake pan, new 2-quart saucepan, a set of wooden spoons and an oval shaped silicon colander that I've been hunting for for a while).  I used four of B, B &B's ever-present coupons...one for each item...and walked out paying only $30 for all of it.

Then after that, we ate at Five Guys Burgers and Fries.  If you want to know what I think of them, see my post from yesterday.

Yesterday started out rocky.  I'm not sure if Kat was over-tired from Saturday, nor not feeling well or just what, but she was a big grump all morning, which means I was also.  I sent her to her room to rest or play or calm down/regroup, and I headed outside to the garden. 

I planted potatoes, strawberries, and green beans, and looked in on everything else.  I see that most things that I've planted are doing fine, either still living if they were seedlings or beginning to germinate if I planted them from seed.  Everything is so small that I didn't bother with photos, but soon, they will be big enough to pose for pictures.

I had thought of cleaning up the yard -- raking up twigs and tree bark -- to get ready to mow in a few days, but it was so very windy yesterday that I scrapped that idea before I even started.  It was so windy that it blew the lattice skirting off the back deck. It was a good thing I waited, because now there even more twigs and such to pick up after last night's storms.  This is the hail that fell in our yard; the hailstones were about the size of cherry tomatoes or ping pong balls.

We were lucky.  Here's the hail that fell in other parts of the city.


I don't have anything specific planned for the upcoming week.  Today I'll do inside work since it's cold and damp out, but later in the week I'm pretty sure I'll need to mow the grass and I'd like to do some work cleaning up around the yard in other ways.  You know, like clean up our patio table and chairs, weed between the pavers in the patio, clean out the flower beds in front, etc.  I'm not sure how much I'll get done, but I hope to get part of it done at least.

What will you be doing this week?