How does your garden grow?

Fun things have been happening at the the Bracken house lately.  A few weekends ago Jen, Danielle and I got together to make another cake for our coworker Aimee that was moving to Tennessee.  She was the wonderful lady that introduced us to the marshmallow fondant and it seemed right to make her a cake to send her off.  Plus we really wanted to eat some cake.  As usual there were a few snags in the process.  Namely me managing to mess up a white cake from the box.  I don't know what happened but my 9" round cakes were about half the size of Jen's.  We pressed on and the cake ended up being a bit special but still tasted delicious.  I'll hopefully find the pictures I took of it to share next week. 

 

After making the cake, I got to take some of our young women down to the conference center for the General Young Womens Meeting.  The meeting was fantastic and our girls were pretty well behaved.  I'm not quite sure it was worth the 2 hours of driving to sit in the 90 minute meeting but I'm sure a lot of the girls loved it.  Next year I'm voting to do a PJ party at one of our houses to watch it on satellite.

 

The next week I was able to successfully install a new project at work and a successful install means my 5 days of coverage was cut into 4 days and a partial day.  It worked out nicely since Friday Jake and I had a show down in SLC scheduled.  We played at the Vertical Diner in SLC.  It's a Vegetarian and Vegan restaurant.  When Jake had initially booked it he told me it was a hippie restaurant which made me a little bit nervous but it's a really awesome place and we had a great time playing there.  I hope we get to go back soon.

 

As for Shad the majority of his spare time has been spent getting our garden ready to plant in.  Here's kind of what our garden looked like last year (after the random garbage left by the previous owners was removed).  Just look past Jake and I.

 

Notice the nothingness in that nice fenced off area in our back yard?  Yeah we did too, it was just low on our priority list for things to do with the house.  We pretty much just planted plants in the mounds of soil left by the previous owners garden boxes and called it good.  The garden last year was kind of successful.  Most of the plants grew and produced fruits and veggies.  Pretty much all of them except the ones that I wanted to grow and produce things.  We had a couple pumpkins that got off to a good start and were then consumed by mold (which we've heard of is almost impossible but whatever).  The peppers we planted didn't really get watered by the drip system so they grew maybe 5 peppers all year.  The squash (gross!), peas, beans and tomatoes (double gross), all produced a lot which was a little bittersweet since I wanted nothing to do with most of them and left that responsibility up to Shad (read: we threw away a bunch of veggies last year). 

 

This year the garden had made it up to the top of our list.  So that's where Shad has been for he past few weeks.  He's been building garden boxes (we figured out a way to make vinyl garden boxes for $25 each which is a total steal compared to paying $100 for one from the fence company).  Digging, running sprinklers and tilling soil and putting down ground cover to keep the weeds down (we have awesome secondary water which is nice but brings all sorts of weed seeds with it.)  It's pretty close to being done.  My raspberry,blackberry and strawberry plants came on Saturday which means I spent a few hours planting those in the boxes that were ready to go.  I can't wait to see if I can get some good things to grow that I will actually use when they're ready.  Wish me luck.