Garden Party!

I am the secretary of the womens organization at my church and we threw our yearly garden party this week which was quite a hit. We held it this year in my friend Candace's beautiful backyard.

We had lots to eat, which included 2 different kinds of quiches, chicken sandwiches, a strawberry salad, fruit, two different kinds of muffins, and lots of homemade jam... I donated one of my strawberry jams from my last post.

Of course we had to use some cute Martha Stewart table decoration ideas. The hearts are actually made of napkins. Smart Martha!

 I made a bunch of flag banners to decorate the yard with. I think they turned out pretty cute!

 My friend Cathy is a gourmet baker and made 5 different desserts! I had about 4 cupcakes by the end... good thing Cathy's also my walking buddy.

All and all this was a lot of work but a great party!

We're jammin'!

I wanna jam it wid yoooou...


I made jam this Sunday... It was my first time without some help and it turned out good, a little too sugary, but good. I might have to try out a few new recipes in the future but for now we have LOTS of strawberry freezer jam.

Oh and I made this apron back in May for my sister Kim and I keep forgetting to post it...

My new backyard!

Here is our backyard when we moved into our house a year ago. 

During the winter time weeds and grass grew on top of the rocks and cement.

 

It was really pretty at the moment but didn't last long...

These are some pictures we took a few weeks ago.

We tried to clear our backyard out ourselves. Over two saturdays we cleared a strip about 3 feet wide. After that 3 feet the debris got much thicker, and we gave up.

But then tragedy struck! Orange, frolicking through the rocks and weeds, at last succumbed to them.

"No more!", we said. We hired some industrious gentlemen to do what we could not. They made short work of our weeds and rocks, clearing them all in half a day. We felt a little silly.

The backyard also hard a very large deep pond that Ryan, with a little help from me, dug out.

Civilizations to come will never know there was a pond here.

We have a terrible time keeping our front yard watered, so we didn't want to find out what would happen to this much larger yard.  We called around and took many estimates. A shady-seeming guy on craigslist quoted us half the price of everybody else. Come on over, shady-seeming guy!

He actually did a really, really good job.

He put in fancy wood border things and rototilled and mixed manure stuff into our dirt and put sod down and installed our automatic sprinkler system, with an extra pipe dealy that we can extend if we want to put in a drip system for a future garden around the borders.

Kitties don't like it… they sit on the dirt and stare disapprovingly. It's for your own good, kitties!

Fully automatic sprinkling! Isn't it gorgeous?!

Tentative…

Now on to gardening!