Mat & Amie Levine

We are being overrun with veggies from our garden…we love it! We can’t miss a day of going out to the garden and picking the new stuff otherwise we end up with enormous zuchinis and yellow squash. Which are not as tasty. Mat’s been busy chopping them up and putting them in our freezer. I’ve cut down our basil bushes and made up 4 batches of pesto to freeze and I still have basil leaves left to either dry or make more pesto!  We have started making lots of salsa with our tomatoes and our banana peppers.  We are also dehydrating our tomatoes and then we are going to freeze them.  We are stoked that the manure investment seems to be paying off in our garden this year…oh yeah, and the rain definitely helps!

At the end of June, we went to Roan Mountain to check out the flame azalea and rhododendron blooms.  We were a little late.  But we had a great time watching the sun set and eating cheese and crackers!

We did see a bunch of beautiful and rare gray’s lilies.

A couple of days later at work, I found out that if we’d only gone into the actual state park we would have seen a ton or the rhododendron and flame azaleas blooming!  A visitor was telling me how on Friday (we went on Saturday) they’d gone to Roan Mountain and it was so beautiful and they showed me some pictures otherwise I wouldn’t have believed them.  And then they told me that it was up the road from where we went…we never even thought of going there.  We like our jaunt up on the Tennessee/NC border!  Next time, we’ll have to do both!

Last weekend, we went biking down the Laurel Creek trail and enjoyed swimming in the Laurel River and jumping off rocks!  We chose a nice spot to have lunch where there were some waterfalls and cascades and we could basically sit right on a rock in the river.  It was sweet!  When we finished up lunch we saw a family of four tubing through the rapids above us and we actually thought the cascades/waterfall that we were at were pretty big, so we waved to the family and the dad checked it out and picked a route and he floated on down it and then the mom floated and she only lost her hat, and then the boy went.  He looked about 10 years old!  The little girl didn’t go instead she through sticks for Maddy to get!  When the dad offered us his tube, we couldn’t say no.  So we both got to float the rapid section…it was awesome.  So now, we are hoping next weekend will be HOT and we are gonna tube the whole length.  Yippee!  We are searching for tubes with handles…

it’s here, or at least it sure feels like it.  The rest of this week the lows are supposed to be in the 50s.  Doesn’t really feel too much like winter around here.  The trees are all blooming, tulips have bloomed and we have planted half of our garden.  We are hoping to plant the rest this weekend.  It’s been raining quite a bit, so our yard is quite green and we’ve had to mow twice all ready!  I seem to recall that happening last spring and once it hit June we mowed about two times throughout the summer.  Hopefully, we don’t have a drought again this year. 

We have enjoyed having Mat’s gram living close by and being able to hang out with her at the family dinners.  She’s a great addition to the gatherings!  On Monday, she and I had a lovely girls day out.  We shopped until we dropped and then went out to lunch.   Funny thing is, I don’t think we actually bought anything!

Gram is hanging out on her porch enjoying the nice new bird feeder.  She also has a hummingbird feeder that has had several visits all ready from hummingbirds.  Lucky her.  I’ve got my fuchsia hanging plants out and although I haven’t seen any hummingbirds at them yet, I enjoy looking out the window at the plants!

For the past month or more, I have been getting really excited about the garden and have been contemplating and planning what we’ll plant this year.  Mat and I have also been on the search for compost (mushroom, cow, horse) to add to our clay garden.  We found it yesterday.  Sara told Mat about a spring melee that Mountin’ Hopes was having on Saturday.  For a donation they will give you composted horse manure.  Since we are heading to the beach on Saturday, I called to see if we could get some in advance.  They were very accommodating and said we’d be more than welcome to come shovel some manure early.  (On Saturday, there will be a machine loading your pickup.)

So we spent some time out shovelling manure into the pickup and brought it home to our garden.  When we return from the beach, we will till the manure in and then we just have to wait until the last frost date (mid-May) and we can plant up our garden.  Yay!  (We do have peas, spinach and mesclun mix planted all ready.)

Yesterday, Mat also spent some time chainsawing out a hole in the stump that we have in our yard to turn it into a planter.  It was a dead tree we chopped down last year.  So I am perusing container gardening materials to determine what will be the best plants to plant in there.   We are getting excited for spring to be here fully!  The Bradford Pear and Cherry trees are blooming right now and they are beautiful.

Our garden is happy again…it’s rained the past three days. Yay! It surely enjoys getting a couple hour rainfall every afternoon much more than us having to go out and water it w/ our watering pail!

A couple of bell peppers…next year I think I will plant where they get a little more sun.

I can’t wait for the tomatoes to be ripe!

It’s still a little while until the basil is going to provide us with herbs!

Our eggplant is battling the flea beetle much better than last year. This plant is huge for this time of the year. Last year, we thought they had died, but didn’t pull them out and they came back in late August.

Our garden is full of rocks, as you can tell from this picture and other pictures I’ve posted. But it also has an amazing amount of pottery shards and glass. I sometimes wonder if our garden is what once was the previous owners’ landfill.

We are slowly turning the front area into a native flower garden. I LOVE the echinacea and black-eyed susans. They seem so perky and happy!

While out at Mat’s parents we walked down to the river on the property and went exploring up the river. We were going to try to spot a rare plant on our way down, but there was WAY too much poison ivy, so we just walked in the water. Here are some pics from the walk.

We also went on a beautiful bike ride out in Dupont State Park where there was some different types of terrain. We rode up the side of a waterfall on some slick rock after riding some regular single and double track trails and roads. We also pushed our bikes under a waterfall at the top in order to cross the creek/river. It had some awesome views. (Sarah and Mom, this is the same park we hiked up to with all the waterfalls, just a different area.)

Our garden is doing great. I spent the afternoon weeding it yesterday. Seems like if you don’t weed for a couple of days, the garden is full of them! I planted sunflowers at the top of the garden and the are starting to bloom. Sunflowers are so cheery!

We have been enjoy the salads from our garden, but now that it has become so HOT, our lettuce is getting a tad bitter. We did enjoy our first zuchini a couple evenings ago. Today, when I went and checked on our garden to make sure it hadn’t burnt to a crisp, I found this:

I think we’ll have stir-fry tonight…

When we got back from Utah the garden had grown!  Our squash now has flowers and the lettuce was huge…so were the weeds.

The lovely squash…soon we’ll be eating zuchini and yellow squash.

We enjoyed a delicious salad last night with our pasta dinner.  You can see the weeds flourishing in this picture.

A couple of weeks ago, Mat set up a rain barrel so that we could collect rain water to water our garden with. We had been talking about doing it all winter, so we did it the first weekend we were back at home. We were really excited to see it in action, but then it didn’t rain for a couple of weeks.

It finally started raining yesterday.  Yeah!  The rain barrel has all ready been drained once. It is pretty exciting to see how much water it actually collects just off of half of the roof!  (The garden is also really excited to have some good rain to soak into the soil.)

Summer is on the way. We barbecued out for the first time on Saturday night and we have a couple of hanging baskets out on our porch now!

Yesterday, in honor of Earth Day, I planted some of our starts out in the garden.

I planted these peas and also zuchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, beets, beans, lettuce, butternut squash and some sunflowers at the edge of the garden. Now, I’m hoping there isn’t a cold front or a hail storm heading our way. I am still waiting on the hot peppers, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes to germinate indoors.

We also went to an Earth Day concert at Asheville’s infamous concert venue…The Orange Peel. It was my first time in and it was cool. I guess the sound system is pretty amazing and it is ranked #5 for the top 5 venues for concerts. I suppose that explains why Smashing Pumpkins came for 10 days last summer for their getting back together concerts! We had a great time down there and we found out information on how to Adopt-A-Street! All you have to do is pick up the litter along the street at least 6 times a year…since we all ready do that along our road, why not sign up, eh?

Yesterday, I planted our starts for the garden and they are now incubating in our back bedroom. I am excited to see the plants pop up through the soil.

We hope to have even more food from our garden than last year!  We’ve planted yellow squash, zuchini, hubbard squash, eggplant, peas, beans, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, 2 types of basil, cilantro, sweet peppers, hot peppers, beets and more.

Yesterday afternoon, the news announced that there is a forecast of snow for Sunday night!  Luckily, we have just planted these little seeds in start flats and didn’t plant them directly in the soil.   Hard to believe snow is in the forecast, we’ve been enjoying some beautiful sunny, spring days.

Our tulips are rocking right now!  It is so cheery to see them as you arrive at our home.

Below is a picture of Maddy and Shelby playing.

Maddy has been getting out and seeing some other friends, but I do think she misses having another dog to play with when she’s just hanging out at home.  Seeing the two of them play together makes us think of getting another dog!  But, one is plenty and she has loads of friends to play with so she will remain in a one dog family.