Eat Your Veggies, or Better Yet Grow Them!

While I'm on the subject of improving our outdoor living space, Brad's been working hard on our vegetable garden this year. The kids too! They have their own little corner in the garden where they planted watermelon (of course they pick the one thing that really needs the space of the entire garden), so hopefully we will have success with it this year. Last year was pretty disappointing, but we had a very cold summer and sounds like it was a bad year for everyone. This year we've already had a lot of hot days and quite a bit of rain, so things are growing fast! I'm looking forward to enjoying all the yummy veggies we're going to get in the months to come!

And while our little gardeners in the making aren't helping daddy, they can most likely be found in their clubhouse using their imaginations :).

We've also started revamping our fence that we added back when Riley was a toodler to keep him from running into the driveway from the back yard. Since the kids are at an age where they are riding bikes and scooters and doing all kinds of things in the upper part of the driveway, we decided to remove part of it and rebuild it so that it crosses our driveway mid-way rather than up at the garage which isn't a garage but that's another story (and there's still room to pull two cars in the driveway). That opens up the back yard from the house quite a bit and keeps the kids safe from the cars while they do their thing :). It also gives us more "patio" space. We'll also be adding another stairway down from the deck to make that easily accessible without going through a gate. And I'm working on restaining that from the awful messed up orangey-red I ended up with last year - it's now a very neutral, soothing gray :). Much better.

This was our view from the house to the yard before.


And here it is now! It still will be fenced it the fence will be here ---->
rather than <--- there :)