#98 He Makes His Own Honey-Do List

My summer break started approximately 23.928475827 hours ago.  This has brought just a tad bit of excitement into my life.  The kids finished last week and the teachers worked this week for shortened days of 9-3.  It has been glorious.  I've been able to wake up a little later--7 am; if my teen self heard me calling that time late, she'd have a fit--I've had my exercising done by 8 am, and then I've come home in the afternoon to find myself practically twiddling my thumbs in boredom.

Okay, that last part is so not true.

Thursday morning, despite my freedom to 'sleep in' until 7, I woke up at 6 am.

By choice.

Someone have my head examined, please.

This choice was made due to another fun fact of this week: hubby has been off all week.  Somehow, for the past four years that I have been a teacher, hubby has always managed to be forced to 'use or lose' vacation time either right before I finish for summer or right when I go back for the new school year.

It's almost like he does it on purpose.

This week I can't complain.  Although knowing he had the whole week off had my brain formulating and devising a plan for the wide variety of things he could get done around the house, I fought all urges and did not make him a 'Honey-Do" list.

And just like the great husband that I know he is, he started Monday morning building a vegetable box garden for me.  I've given you a little inkling that such a thing might eventually happen, and now it finally has.  I must admit, I am a little leery to post this because that means I will have to follow through and let you know if I am successful with this little garden.

By the time I came home Monday afternoon, this part was already finished.  I was beside myself with joy for a few reasons:

1. Hubby built a box garden for me.
2. He did it (the building part) in one day.
3.  He did it on his first day of vacation.
4. He did it without me asking or even suggesting that he do it.
5. If this was how productive the first day was, what would the next days be like?

Now, fast forward to Thursday morning, 6 am.  The box was in place, the soil had been purchased and was sitting in the back of my car, the plants had been purchased (we decided not to start from seed because of how late in the season we began this project), and for some reason I had volunteered to help hubby with the planting early in the morning before going to work.

The one plus I can say about working so early in the morning is the smells.  There is a crisp, cold, summery smell to the air, and then after an hour or so the delicious smell of sizzling bacon wafts about like a tortuous temptress.

It is clear that I have never done this kind of work before. Without having seen how many bags of soil hubby had bought I thought to myself, "Oh, it will take only a few minutes to bring the bags out to the back yard.  That clearly seems like an effortless task."

My arm and chest muscles are still screaming at me today after what felt like a painful year of walking back and forth our alley way to the car to pick up one bag and carry it to the back yard.  Hubby managed to carry two at a time, yet my brain is still trying to figure out how I managed to carry one.

We bought way too many marigolds.  I read that it was a good thing to plant them around your box garden in order to keep animals away.  At first, Hubby thought I meant deer and so he decided we would not need marigolds as deer cannot get into our backyard.  Then when he realized that bunnies and cats are animals too, he bought two flats of marigolds right away.

I took most of the pictures for this post on my phone because it was 6 am and I certainly wasn't pulling out the fancy camera for 6 am.  I thought this picture was the best expression of what 6 am in the backyard looked like.  

Hopefully you like marigolds, because they are in practically every single picture I took.

We planted zucchini plants...

yellow squash...

green peppers...

and corn!  I'm not too hopeful on the corn growing, but I saw it and wanted it so I got it.

That is the story of my life.

We also planted sweet peas and tomatoes, and a few seeds in hope that they would sprout, but again, not too hopeful on that.  This whole garden is a trial and error project.  We'll see what works this year and try again next year for even better.  Hubby has already informed me that we could fit a few more boxes if we wanted.  My brain is already scheming up what else we could plant....I'm thinking fruit.  That was the one thing I kept wanting to get as we were plant shopping that Hubby kept avoiding me on.

The good thing is that in building this garden, hubby and I both got inspired to make our back yard more livable.  I sort of alluded to the state of my backyard in this post, but if you only knew the true terror of my backyard/porch you would be embarrassed to call yourself my reader.

Luckily, you don't know right now, so you can continue in ignorant bliss.

Because hubby went overboard in his purchase of marigolds, he planted the extras around our Charlie Brown tree in our front "yard".  He had already put mulch down on Tuesday to get rid of the unsightly little green sprouts that had already begun to poke through the ground.  I think the marigolds add a nice touch of brightness.  The next step is to spruce up the paint on our porch.  It's a little ratty, don't you think...Hubby?