Woo Hoo! Spring is Back!

(I'm going to ignore the fact that I haven't posted anything in almost a year. Just roll with it...)

So with the warming of the weather (*cough*snowed last week*cough*), I'm getting out and doing some outside work on the house. We have three big outside projects going on right now:

1. Trimming back the foliage that is threatening to topple over and/or grow INTO our house.
   
2. Planting and sprucing up our front flower beds.
   
3. Getting our vegetable garden started (we're doing container gardening where everything is in buckets/pots)

I'll take these one at a time. First off, I can officially say I have pruned the hedges (any "Three Amigos" fans out there?) I bought a pair of huge shears and went to town on the shubbery separating our house from the next-door neighbors. They've been neglected for years, but a little straightening up has done wonders for them.

Also, there is a errant tree planted right in front of our house. I don't particularly like that type of tree, but it does provide a ton of shade to the front window in the summer. Unfortunately, one of the large branches was starting to grow dangerously close to the roof. So, being the manly-man that I am (*cough*), I grab my handsaw (didn't want to buy a chainsaw for just one limb) and proceeded to hack that bad boy off. Once my arm recovered and I regained consciousness from being whacked on the head by a mysterious falling branch, it occurred to me that perhaps I should cut back on the manly pursuits for awhile.

Front yard flower beds:

'Nuff said.

Vegetable gardening is something new to us...kind of. We had a bunch of pots sitting around so we decided to see if we could grow some veggies. We had tomato plants last year, but they were given to us. This year we have tomatoes, leaf lettuce, carrots, zuchinni, bush beans, onions (walla-walla sweets), and strawberries. We'll see what happens...