Planting Season in Our Garden

At the end of April we finally were able to plant our garden! We finally decided we wanted a salsa / herb / pizza garden. We wanted to make sure we grew things we actually eat and use on a regular basis. This year we bought all of our plants locally at Green Acres and picked up a few veggies from Home Depot. We hope to plant a year round garden and hopefully if I plan accordingly we'll start planting our future veggies from seed and then transplant them into our raised garden beds. We added two sections of trellis,to help support our tomatoes and bell peppers as they grow. 

Let's take a look at our newly built garden bed we recently built and added irrigation to. 




I still need to properly mark our veggies, I found these wood markers for a steal on Williams Sonoma and plan on giving them a little makeover so they'll work better for our garden. 
Here's a list of what we decided to grow. 
Back: Red Bell Pepper, Orange Bell Pepper, Yellow Bell Pepper, Greek Basil, Roma Tomatoes, Cherry Tomatoes and Beef Steak Tomatoes
Front: Jalapeno Pepper, Sweet Banana Pepper, Sweet Pickle Pepper, Sweet Basil, Rosemary and Cilantro 

Its hard to believe a few short weeks ago these spot in our backyard was full of weeds, and debris and now we're this much closer to producing herbs and vegetables for our home. Look how far we've come!





This view from my kitchen window is so much better than the old one! 





This area of our yard is still a work in progress, in the future we plan to add a privacy trellis to help conceal our waste containers. We also want to layer in more plants around our raised garden bed to add color and more visual interest.


I'll share updates as the months go on as our veggies start producing. 

Have you planted your garden for this year? Any tips on growing lots of veggies?

Spine Bookcase for Teen Bedroom

My oldest son and I are beginning to work on his bedroom and take it from its current blank slate and add personality, his personality. Lucky for me, my oldest loves to read! He's the type of kid that will use his allowance money on books and sometimes video games. We've slowly been rebuilding his book collection since the fire and he wanted a fun way to display his books and allow them to be close, like me he likes to re-read his books. A few months back he was flipping though the CB2 mailer I got in the mail and loved the look for the Array Bookcase. I loved it too, its such a fun and cool way to display books in a modern and compact way and adds to much visual interest to a room. Here's the Array bookcase from CB2



Image via CB2
Now for some book spine inspiration. 


Image via The Red Thread

Image via Decor Pad

Image via The Nest Blog

What I didn't love was its  $189.00 price, so I looked online and came across one a similar version on Amazon. The one on Amazon was less than half the price of the CB2 version, only costing me $87 + tax and free shipping, gotta love Amazon Prime. Tabari loved silver the best, but on Amazon they come in a few colors (yellow / silver & orange) 
The bookcase arrived on Monday, and I was shocked how heavy the it is and its height. It was super fast to put together, I used the Allen wrench it came with and took only about 15 mins to put together. Tabari picked a spot in his bedroom and started filling the tower up. Since Tabari's bedroom is on the small side like most 60's ranchers, the bookcases compact and size makes it perfect space saver for for bedroom. We have a ways to go before its full, but regardless love the look. We plan to hit up thrift stores and buy books when there on sale, It shouldn't take too look to fill up the book spine up. He's super happy and already decided he's taking it with him to college, he needs to slow down and start high school first lol. 





Next up for his bedroom, shelves and artwork! He's found a slew of artwork he loves on Etsy and I've already bought a few prints for his bedroom. I plan to share progress of his bedroom as we tackle projects. 

What do you think of Spine Bookcases?