First Year Garden Update

Being I posted some late-surfacing Trinona "Time Trial" photos on Monday (and I'm planning to post more Trinona Triathlon photos this coming Monday), I figured I'd show some more old photos. Just over a year ago, we built a new garage. Here's a bunch of photos of garage-building the timeline from a year ago.

Just after spraining my ankle last April, we put in the final backfill along the back 2 sides of the garage:

Pitching dirt with Henry to haul home.


Final 2 sides of the garage re-graded (shot from my neighbor's yard).

Zoning code states that a new structure needs to be 3 feet from property lines, so we had 3 feet of "wasted space" back there where we decided to put in a small garden.

Then, on the weekend that Charlie was born in May, we had hoped to get some plants in the ground. Little Chuck had other plans. But this is what it looked like on May 10th on the far side of the garage:

Skinny raised beds (18" x 9' each), pavers, and re-graded yard
ready to be seeded. Those pavers go RIGHT up to the edge of our property line!

I posted some more pics in this post from mid-July, but many of these I haven't posted before:

May 16th: Tomatoes and peppers on top, and herbs and onions to the right.


View from the other side.


June 11.


June 16: Henry helping me water the herbs (with water from the new rain barrel in the background!).


June 25: Tall grass, GIANT tomatoes, nice sized basil, and zucchini spreading out at the lower right.


Some cherry tomatoes a few days later.


Picking some cherry tomatoes on July 3rd before visiting some family. (50 harvested at that point.)
And that's a zucchini on the upper right, LOTS of basil, and a ton of cucumber blossoms.

Here are 4 photos from July 11:

Overall shot.


Tomatoes went CRAZY.


Lots of basil and our zucchini.


Just before harvesting the first cucumber of the new garden in early July.

I didn't get a great photo of this, but a few weeks after taking those last photos, the biggest 2 tomato plants reached above the gutter, and then they flopped over on themselves. I need to be better about pruning them back this year. (I hear that leads to more fruit too.)

July 24th's harvest.


Aug 16th's harvest, which included a tomato nearly as big as Henry's waist.


Henry (pantless) helping me carry the rest of the Aug 16th's harvest into the house.


Aug 21.


Charlie with the the day's tomato harvest on August 24th.


Aug 26.

On Oct 19, we drained the rain barrel to get it ready for winter. The running water made Henry's "water" want to "run" as well:

Rain barrel draining, Henry peeing. This is my life.

Then on the 27th of October, we got the remaining veggies out of the garden before they froze:

Lots of green tomatoes, Charlie, Mama, and empty beds in the background.


The last fall harvest.


Two layers of green tomatoes in a box wrapped in newspaper. This is supposed
to help them ripen properly. It worked pretty good.

Sidenote: In mid-November, I took a photo of the tomatoes ripening outside in the fresh snow, which was posted on my Photo Blog:

[click the image to enlarge]

That photo ended up being used on "Things Organized Neatly" - one of my favorite tumblr sites. Sweet!

Here was our final harvest count for 2014:
- Cherry Tomatoes: 121
- "Bigger" Tomatoes: 113 (from a early variety plant and and heirloom plant)
- Zucchinis: 16
- Cucumbers: 35
- Purple Peppers: 4 (but 1 was TINY)
- Red Peppers: 4
- Green Peppers: 4
- Yellow Peppers: 2
- Onions: 20
- Too much basil!!
- Lots of random herbs

That's not bad for 18" of garden in "unusable" space, right? We're not going to do too much different this year. We had a wet June, so I think the peppers didn't do well because of that (we had lots of yellowing leaves that dropped off, and I think that's due to too much moisture), so we'll try them again before giving up on peppers. We don't need as much basil, and I don't think we need onions either. We'll maybe have room to do more cukes or maybe even another zucchini this year.

Oct 29, 2014: Henry (with his truck) by our emptied garden. Ready for winter.

I can't wait to see more green grass and lush plants like those photos above. This made me want spring back ASAP! (Again, here are more photos of our 2-story garage being built if you missed that.)

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Friday Funny 859: New Year's Resolutions

TheOdd1sOut really nailed the truth about resolutions for 99.9% of us:

Lots more funny stuff posted all throughout the day on steveinaspeedo.tumblr.com. Happy weekend!

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Friday Funny 858: Home Inspection Fails

The Star Tribune recently shared the "best" home inspection fails from 2014. These are awesome/scary:

Tree supporting attic.


Stacked boxes.


A loop to nowhere.


No drain pipe - the water mostly hits the next pipe.


Hot water in toilet.


Deck support.


ALL HAIL THE ELECTRIC PANEL!


Handrail on the roof.


If one filter is good, 4 is gooder. Right?


Smells like cooked mice.


What a tiny tiny leak looks like years later.


"Call us if the mountains turn blue."


Functional toilet in (carpeted) kitchen, blocking drawers and cupboards.
(This might not be as weird as you think if it was an elderly couple who needed
a toilet on the main floor and didn't have a good spot for it. Wait... still weird.)

Check out lots more funny stuff on my tumblr: steveinaspeedo.tumblr.com/

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Friday Funny 857: Grading Finals

I got my grades turned in a few weeks ago... and then I saw this. This is SOOOO true:

"I might have to give them extra points... cuz they suck." Golden.

Lots more funny stuff posted all week long on steveinaspeedo.tumblr.com.

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Friday Funny 856: Funny/Strange Bathroom Signs

Ummm... what?










I like how the quotation marks become more and more "unnecessary."
























I think everyone voted wrong. Who's with me?

More funny stuff found on steveinaspeedo.tumblr.com.

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Thirsty (for knowledge) Thursday: 50x50!

I first posted about this workout over a year ago. In that post, I shared info from a workout on Triathlete Magazine's website where they had a 50x50 workout that looked like this:

Main Set: 50×50 (aka 10 rounds of 5×50) All on 50” or 10” rest (50” is lowest interval, take 10” if you’re touching the wall past 45”), then 30 secs rest between sets of 5.

• #1: Easy
• #2: Breathe every 3rd stroke
• #3: 25 fast/25 easy
• #4: Breathe every 5th stroke
• #5: FAST!

I bet I've done SHORTER versions of this workout about 10 times over the last year. I started with a 30x50 workout, and since then, I will commonly do a 40x50 workout. Here was my thoughts on the sets after the first time I swam this:

• #1: Easy: The first one was easy "for a 50," but the rest were EASY easy. I needed the rest!

• #2: Breathe every 3rd stroke: I do this anyway, so it was just a moderate 50 "normally."

• #3: 25 fast/25 easy: This was a fun set - I liked the quick speed with a short rest.

• #4: Breathe every 5th stroke: This SUCKED much more than I thought it was going to. I was BEGGING for the wall on each length to get an extra breath. I think it was probably good for me to break the "breathe every 3rd" norm.

• #5: FAST! Fast is always fun. Good way to end each set of 5.

Not much has changed with those thoughts. I'm getting a little more used to the hypoxic 4th interval, so that doesn't feel AS bad. But really, the last 2 of each set gets rough, and I'm ready for that 30 sec break after the 5th FAST 50.

Earlier this week, I did 50x50 for the first time! It's a workout that IS possible to get through, so TRY IT! It's broken up nicely, so it doesn't feel too bad. And it's nice to do some short, hard swims when used to longer, prolonged efforts. The first time that I did 6 sets (30x50) a year ago, I did the sets between 4:15 and 4:35, and I was happy to have averaged 41 secs for the "fast" 50s. Most recently when I did 10 sets (50x50), my sets were between 4:08 and 4:28, and my "fast" 50s averaged 37.6 secs!

Oh, and related to swimming but unrelated to all of this is this video of this 91 year old swimmer:


Direct Link: http://youtu.be/-Uw2FLNDU1U

Life goal.

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The Dad Life

If you follow me on twitter, you'll see me use the hashtag #DadLife now and then. Here are 6 photos of my #DadLife from the past 7 days:

1/8/15:"It's snowing... but it's above 0 (finally). So let's go out for ice cream."


1/8/15:"Cooking fish tacos like this. Yes, really."


1/9/15:"Rub-a-dub-dub, two boys in a tub."


1/11/15:"Cousin time: an epic battle in the kitchen last night, and bath time now."


1/12/15:"Henry sat down to stretch with me. Is THAT what I look like?!?"


1/13/15:"A typical lunch in our household."

Follow me on twitter and on Instagram.

I've been meaning to do a bigger #DadLife post about my time at home with the boys since Mama went back to work in August. Maybe I can get that together one of these weeks. Now, I'm off to do some laundry. Really. There's always something covered in some bodily fluid that needs to be scrubbed. But I'm not complaining...

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