we recently tilled our garden! we rented a tiller from home depot for 4 hours, which was super easy, and got our backyard ready for spring planting. our garden plans are moving along and we hope to finish planting this week.

we realized our backyard was full of tons of random debris while tilling. we found rusty nails, roofing tiles, concrete, bricks, tools, and lots of other junk.

– ryan & gub

we noticed our horseshoe pits were looking rough recently, so we decided to give them a face-lift. we started by getting rid of the weeds and adding more sand. that alone made a huge difference. then we spray painted the poles bright colors, we went with blue and red, and topped it all off by adding our bottle cap collection.

we’ve been saving bottle caps for years, although we never really found the right use for them. gub has fond memories of her grandparents general store where they threw caps from soda bottles out front for gravel. the rusty gravel must have made an impression on her, we’ve been saving bottle caps since i’ve known her.

we’re excited to find a new use for our bottle caps! it’s gratifying to reuse something that could easily be thrown away. we plan on filling our pits a good bit more, our collection seemed a lot bigger inside the house. we are going to ask our local bartender to save bottle caps for us to help the cause.

– ryan

we celebrated easter by spending a fun morning drinking coffee and dyeing easter eggs in our new yellow kitchen. there will be a blog post on the kitchen re-do later, but here are the steps we took to create our colorful and recyclable eggs:

– hard boil eggs
– set up easter egg dye kit (we used a cheap grocery store paas kit)
– add stencils and resists to the eggs*
– stir dye bath and carefully place egg in the dye
– leave egg in the dye for 5 to 10 minutes (lighter colors take longer)
– remove from dye and remove stencil or resist
– place eggs in basket or nest (we used shredded paper scraps for our grass!)

*we created leaf stencils by picking small leaves from our yard and placing them on the egg. we then tightly wrapped panty hose around the egg and secured with a rubber band. small, thin leaves with few veins work best for the stencils. we also used electrical tape to add stripes and lines to the eggs.

yay easter!

deviled eggs for dinner!

– ryan & gub

ryan and i are beginning to plan our very first vegetable and herb garden. we’ve been composting for over a year and have planted a few vegetables here and there, but this summer we’ve got big plans. we carved out a sunny 16′ by 10′ spot in the middle of our backyard, found some helpful info on the uga center for urban agriculture website, and we’re off!

we need to do a bit more research, come up with a planting schedule, and finalize our vegetable and herb list based on our garden space; but here’s our wish list:

we took some before photos and will post updates as the summer progresses. the garden will be under the blue tarp you see in the photos.

– gub & ryan