vegie garden

Spring, and some warmer weather is finally here! We decided that we would add a vegetable garden as our "yard project" this year. We bought 3 pieces of 8x4x2 lumber and Mark built a "box" to house the vegie plants. We then filled the box with lots of "goodies" like organic compost, peat moss and manure (based on a recipe from our local Lowes hardware store).

Heather stained the box with some polyeurethane that we had left over from doing our patio furniture, and Mark added some decorative caps to the corners. (He had lots of fun playing with his miter saw once he discovered it could do angles other than 90 degrees!)

We're not too sure what will grow well here so we've planted quite a mixture of things we like to eat including broccoli, zucchini, lettuce, spinach, snap peas, mint, basil, parsley, dill and the "fixin's" for a good salsa - tomatoes, tomatillos, bell peppers (capsicum to those of you in Aus), onions and cilantro. Here's hoping that the deer that occasionally pass through our yard aren't feeling hungry for some tasty seedlings!

so this is spring?

This is what we woke up to this morning. We had about a foot of snow at the house overnight (over 2 ft at the mountain resorts). You can see how deep it is piled up on the patio table. It's been a strange Spring so far. We've had days with temps in the 70's (20's C) melting all the snow at the house, (and encouraging us to get the patio furniture out and strike up the BBQ), and then a storm system blows through dropping temps into the 30's (around zero C) and we get more snow. The poor daffodils and tulips don't know whether to open up or hide!

powder day

Today was our last day at Solitude for this season. The resort closes this weekend, which is a shame since we've had sooo much late-season snow this year (76" this month and we're only 9 days into it!). We're still "learning" how to ski/board on ungroomed powder. It's quite a bit different to the normal groomed runs. It slows you down somewhat, but it's trickier not being able to see the bumps (or your feet)! As you can see we were nearly up to our knees in the stuff.