The Rebecca Jeanne Routine: Quinn's Bday, Outside Update, and the Pups!

We celebrated Quinn's 18th birthday June 23rd! Forgot both my camera's but the camera phone came to the rescue!

Now for some outside updates! Our fairy garden this year is no longer where the fairies will be gathering and living. Due to two four-legged creatures that lurk the backyard and the safety of the fairies in jeopardy, the fairies have decided to migrate South a bit and will shortly be dwelling in our front garden bed. In the meantime out butterfly bush planted last year has started to bloom with many more blooms about the open!

Another fairy garden plant starting to bloom.

Here is how our straw bales are doing! They have really taken off! Sweet peppers are in the forefront (actually there is one more bale in front of that holding carrots but nothing has come up yet), then our beans, then tomatoes. You will notice the tomatoes are a bit lacking in the back. We knew going into starting seedlings that tomatoes are difficult to get to maturity. In honesty I didn't expect any of our plants to live since we started them in our house and it was very much an experiment. I am surprised though that 2 tomato plants have held up and grown stronger out of the 9. The direct sow bean seeds have really taken off though which is even more surprising as I wasn't sure if they really would grow out of straw! The pictures may look a bit odd being that it torrentially down poured yesterday so everything is still soaking wet.

Meet our reinforcement tomato plants! We knew going in the tomatoes would likely not take so it was no surprise that I had to go buy some. 5 very mature tomato plants will join our other two in the straw.

Is it cheating that some already have tomatoes growing?!?!

Here is one of the remaining tomato plants

The 2nd surviving seedling. Need to get them a pole to climb.

Sweet Peppers looking great!

Some green bean action! You will notice in the background some mushrooms naturally growing. I'm pretty sure they are not edible and I nearly freaked out thinking we were doing something wrong since they showed up. Ends up after researching the straw bale group that mushrooms are actually great signs that your straw bales are properly decomposing becoming an even better growing ground for our plants and won't impact our plants at all. If only they were edible!

We only have a remaining cucumber and zucchini plant left. We are considering purchasing more for the sides of the bales or we may just not bother.

I decided to make a side-by-side comparison of the straw bales. Day 1 was after over 2 weeks of decomposing and you can see our tiny plants planted and where nothing is we planted the seeds directly into the bales. Day 26 speaks for itself! I didn't think we had as much growth until I went back and compared! You can even noticed how the bales have continued to decompose which is a great thing!

The strawberries have really taken off!

After picking a few ripe strawberries we are now getting a second wave of strawberries growing! Much to our dogs dismays they are safely behind the garden fence so will not be munched on by anyone but us once they are ripe!

My angel bell tree is also continuing to do well. Hoping for some bells soon!

The second is looking more like a bush than a tree. We made this one out of a small cutting of the other one last year and it really took off and even gave us several beautiful bells on it. Hoping we get some this year too!

The three bushes on the side of the house have also taken well to their new homes. The grass seed we placed around them has not taken off like we had hoped to its new home. This was an old bed that we took out that we hope grass will grow into.

We even had a few blueberries growing! Knowing these are young started plants we weren't expecting to yield anything this year but we are happily surprised by these little green soon to be blue guys!

I need to prune off the dead roses however our roses are absolutely gorgeous! They were a major selling point to us when we saw our house. I know we could have put rose bushes anywhere we bought a house, however these guys are very mature sturdy long lasting bushes and each have their own color and shade of roses. Just love them!

My favorite red ones just started to bloom this week!

The playground is completely stained and ready to go! We spent one evening working on about 1/4th of it then we didn't touch it for at least 2 weeks before finally last weekend we decided to put a few hours in and finish it up. It looks brand new and came out better than I expected to be honest. Staining was rather simple but it was tedious to get everything. Next staining job will be our fence, ya fun times to come. We will be buying or renting a sprayer as there is no way we will do it by hand like we did for the playground!

Not sure if I ever posted where "my sign" St. Francis ended up living, but here he is in all his glory. He found a perfect place in the shade under our tree where the dogs love to lay right in front of him. I always joke they must know he is St. Francis the lover of animals since they have grown an affinity for him themselves, especially Tucker who nibbles on his head and feet every so often :)

I'm sure you haven't gotten your fix of whippets this week so here are my two guys to help ya out :) Tucker is now 7 months and won't stop growing and Meeko is 22 months and has been done growing. We don't think Tucker will get as big as Meeko but he is catching up quickly!