Andrew’s Garden

I haven’t posted anything in awhile again — sorry, everyone! I never feel like we’re particularly busy, but neither Andrew nor I ever seem to have a lack of things to do in our free time. Andrew recently finished his CDCs (career development courses), which all new airmen complete at their first base. He was happy to complete them in only 5 months, and he got a great score! He will be receiving an award for his score in the near future — I am so proud of him!

Since Andrew is no longer devoting all of his spare time to studying, he has had time to start his big project: the garden. When Andrew lived with our friend Jeremy, he was given a row in Jeremy’s garden to plant some tomatoes. For those of you who don’t know Andrew really well, you should know that when Andrew gets involved in a hobby, he goes into it with 100% enthusiasm. What I mean by that is that he will spend hours researching things, he will read all kinds of books, articles, and blogs about the topic, and he will put any necessary time into it. Now that we are in a house (instead of an apartment) with enough room for a small garden, Andrew is excited to put his research into practice!

He has his little seeds planted in the conservatory already. The warmer weather has made our conservatory pretty toasty — perfect for those baby plants! While those are getting started, Andrew has started tackling the plot of land he would like to use as the garden.

This patch of grass is enclosed in our patio, which is kind of cool. Andrew measured out his rows so he could have aisles of grass to walk on between them. Lots of hard work went into digging up the sod here!

You can see the first few rows there, and the grass dug up on the last couple of rows.

Andrew’s perfect rows. 🙂 Now he’s working on sifting through the dirt. He’s found quite a bit of gravel in it, plus random things (glass, plastic, even a small wrench!). It’s been a tedious process for him. I go out to bring him snacks & water, and the weather has been nice enough that I bring a chair out and crochet while he works.

That’s one thing I like about us: we have very different hobbies, but we like doing them together. Even when we’re doing separate things, we prefer to be in the same vicinity. We barely even talked when he was digging and I was crocheting, but it was still nice to spend time together.

Hopefully my next update on Andrew’s garden will have pictures of little plants growing outside. I’m excited to document this first go at gardening…and to have some yummy fresh veggies this summer! I have lots of recipes that call for tomatoes and zucchini, but we’ll have to wait and see what does well and what we have a surplus of as the months go. I’ll keep you posted!