My garden grows way too green

Ok, remember our super cute baby garden, way back when it was first planted?

This is what the garden monstrosity looked like about a month ago:

Yeah, believe it or not, that is actually our garden.  Though it looks like a giant man/dog eating weed patch, it actually is a ridiculously generous vegetable garden.  Last weekend Matt and I took a pruning shears to the garden and cut back all of the tomato plants because they had grown 2 feet out farther that the above picture shows.  Yeah, our tomato plants tried way too hard this year.  Freaking over achievers.  (And I realize we should have used those tomato cage things, but I was too lazy and cheap to pay $6 each for them)

Check out the mini bell peppers though!  They stayed a nice normal size.

And here are SOME of the tomatoes and other peppers we picked:

Ok, so take a good look at the above photo.....now times that giant bowl by 3 (got that mental image?)  3 GIANT bowls of tomatoes, that is what our 6 tiny little plants produced.  And we didn't even use Miracle Grow or anything!  Just organic potting soil, and our dirt already in the backyard.  And not to mention, we had a pretty dry early summer and my lazy butt only watered the garden maybe 3 times.  The above bowl went in my belly (yep, almost all of them...which is why I no longer like tomatoes quite as much as I used to).  The second bowl went to my best buddy Courtney's house...you remember her, right?

She is obviously the photogenic one in our friendship. :)

And the third bowl went to our lovely wonderful neighbors...whose yard our garden was taking over.

Next year, we're going to move the garden into our yard more, so the plants don't move into unwelcome territory (aka not our property) and I plan to only plant 3 tomato plants, and space them out a bit more...and cage them in. :)

How did your gardens do this year?  Did you end up with psycho plants?

~S~

How to spend a hot and sweat Sunday

Hello strangers, if you don't remember me, my name is Steph and you sometimes check in on my blog.  It's been a crazy couple of weeks, so I apologize for not posting in so long.

I recently underwent a major career change.  As of this last Monday, May 16th, I am now a Specimen Receiving Technician in the Surgical Pathology Department at UW Hospital in Madison!  It has seriously been one of the best decisions in my life.  And what exactly does one do with that job?  Good question.  I myself didn't know exactly what that meant until about 3 days into the new job.  I work in the Pathology Lab and I am the person that enters all of the specimen/patient information into the computer, before the specimens are tested for various diseases (aka Pathology...I actually had to google Pathology to find out what it meant : / ).  At some point I will be doing more lab-like work, but for the first couple weeks, I'm simply observing and doing computer work.  Now, I have zero experience in this, however they hired me because I am tend to be anal about attention to detail and can be compulsive about organization (remember this project?  And this one?) and the department needed someone like that.  And even though I admitted to having zero experience during my interview, I was told that the bosses like being able to train someone from the ground up...which is me for sure.  But anyway, I am looooving the new job.  And all of the gross stuff that comes with it too. :)  On my first day I saw an ovary the size of a football.  On day two I saw a finger in a jar.  I think it can only get better and better :)

But anyway....back to the topic at hand.  Today Matt and I built and planted our garden!  We picked up three 2x4's at Home Depot (and plants and dirt) and then came home and built a 2'x8' frame, which we then brought into the backyard, filled with dirt, and planted our 2011 plants. :)  We picked out 6 different tomato plants, 9 various pepper plants, and Matt grabbed a watermelon plant (how weird is it that you can even grow watermelon in WI...).  Check it out!

{In case you are blind, notice the difference between the grass on the right and left side of the garden?...That's because our neighbor's yard is on the left and our's is on the right.  Our grass has actually come a long way and thanks to True Green doing some treatments this year, our yard will hopefully flourish}

And our lilacs!!! (they were not planted today, I'm just excited about all the plants and flowers)  I love them :) We have 2 purple lilac bushes and one that's a little different with dark pink flowers.  (The garden is to the right, up the hill from the lilac bushes.  That medium sized bush in the middle is Russian Roses, but they haven't bloomed yet.  Also, the Hosta, Russian Roses, and garden are on the edge of our property line.)

And the rhubarb...which is growing like a madman everyday, even though it was planted in crappy dirt behind the garage and I always forget to water it...

Here are the flowers I planted out front a couple of weeks ago.  We're ripping those ugly timbers out next weekend and putting in cement pavers/blocks, to make it a bit more classy looking. (Sorry for the shadowed picture...the flowers are a deep purple color, the ones on the far left still need to go into pots).

{I got the frog at Saver's for $2.99!  Matt hates it, but I love him :) }

Stay tuned for our plan for the rest of yard...I rattled off about 60 things to Matt this afternoon about what we're going to be doing this summer.  He's almost as excited as me....almost. :)

~S~