Sunday of awesomeness

So, I'm usually not one to toot our own horn, but we had a pretty awesome day.  As you all know, we've been working on the garden pretty steady for, oh, like 2 months now. (so much for quick and easy projects :) ) Well, when we first put it in, we weren't getting the every day downpours we have been recently, so Matt had the great idea of trying to get water out to the garden in a more permanent way than dragging a hose over there every time. The idea was to bury a hose line and then we'd have a dedicated line out at the garden every time that wouldn't kill the grass or inhibit mowing. We've been kicking around the idea for a while and today we decided to make it a reality. Of course, this meant digging another trench...

 It really didn't take as long as I thought it might and after about an hour Matt had it pretty much finished.

So we hooked up the now hose splitter we got (does it look like a fat little man to anyone else?), attached the hose and ran it under the railroad tie and down the 

In no time we were filling it back in

And I turned the sod back in the hopes of salvaging some of the grass. 

We even managed to scare a garter snake. I gotta say, its like a zoo over here. Squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, toads, frogs and now a snake!

And here's the finished product. We also bought some grass seed and sowed that over the the disturbed ground. We'll see how it goes but between the two I'd hope we'll get the grass back.

Then, we tackled attaching the hose at the other end. We tacked the hose up using some copper brackets and attached a shut off valve between the two hoses. Finally, we attached a hose holder at the top and we were in business. 

  

 Add on a watering attachment and it doesn't get better than that.

Here's Matt testing it out.

As if that weren't enough work, we also decided to tackle the grassy ugliness in front of the beds. While we aren't planning to put the other beds in this year, we do want to be ready. The plan is to sow alfalfa to prep the soil for next year. In prep for that, we needed to smooth out the beds and kill the grass so the alfalfa has a chance to grow. So I spent quite a bit of time turning over the soil. First in front of the beds.

And then back around behind them as well. Here's what it looked like when I got done.

Now, you might be saying, hey, you aren't going to plant anything in the walkways, why did you turn the grass over there? Well, the answer is that we are planning to mulch everything that isn't growing, and we started today. I figured turning over the grass would discourage it from growing more than just mulching would. We'll have to see how that pans out... looks pretty though.

Now I just have to do around the other bed.

In other news, our garden is producing! Look at all those awesome beans. And we have baby cukes and zucchini too.