Package one apparently contains the bulk of my order, and it has yet to arrive.  I’ve emailed the company repeatedly, yet to no avail…

Guess I’m going to have to track down a phone number and call and give the hell tomorrow.  But in the mean time, I would recommend that you don’t order from directgardening.com – I’m very disappointed in their service!

36 quarts of grape juice concentrate.

28 pints of grape jelly.

And Russ still doesn’t hink we have enough – he’s planning on going to pick more grapes on Saturday morning.

We were so excited yesterday to pick the first strawberry of the season, and on Father’s Day, at that! We have a few more that are starting to ripen. As we really didn’t expect any strawberries this year, as my mom has tried them before without any luck, we’re real happy with the strawberry patch and hope to expand it some next year.

We’ve been eating our spinach and lettuce for a few weeks now, and they’re both thriving. Even my little herb garden is starting to actually look like an herb garden!

Hey, this gardening stuff may be more fun now that we’re actually seeing (and eating) some of the fruits of our labors!

We’ve also finally gotten both our bedroom and David’s bedrooms painted this past weekend. Yeah! Only three rooms left to paint – and then well, there is still the front room…

Hopefully better than ours! This gardening thing is somewhat harder than we thought. Although we didn’t expect a big haul this year, we did expect our garden to look like a garden, not just a big dirt patch in the middle of our spotty lawn.

We have spinach, lots of yummy spinach that we’re already cutting and eating! Too bad the lettuce didn’t follow suit, but it’s starting to come up somewhat.
The strawberries are doing much better than expected.
We have corn, that’s doing good!
We have peas, although not a whole lot, because they were one of the things that I didn’t expect to grow well, because dad has never had any luck with them.
The bugs totally ate off all of my green beans, save one, and all of my lima beans… Dang bugs, those beans were coming up pretty good too! We may try replanting them tomorrow too, if I can find seed.
Only one hill of cucumbers has sprouted, but we are planning on replanting those tomorrow night.
Our carrots are starting to appear – or well, turn into something we recognize as carrots (thanks to my mom), good thing I didn’t pull those ‘weeds’!
The garlic and onions are coming in well.
All of my tomato seedlings, save two died before they ever made it into the ground. Guess sitting them under that bench didn’t block the sun as well as I thought it would, instead it turned into an oven and baked my poor seedlings… Well, it was a learning experience and next year I’ll know better. But the two tomato plants we bought at Wal-Mart are doing good, as are the two pepper plants.
My herb or kitchen garden is looking well, although my seedlings looked pretty sick when they went into the ground, they’ve really perked up, except for the rosemary… All those seedlings died, and the new ones I started are dying too, guess I just don’t do well with that herb. But I did buy a nice looking plant at Wal-mart that is still living, although it doesn’t look any bigger than when I bought is a few weeks ago… My corriander is looking alive, my dill seems to be thriving (too bad I won’t have any cukes to pickle), my basil is looking slightly better, and the spicy basil seeds that I just planted straight outside are coming in spottily. My thyme may make it, but my chives and parsley are looking great!

All in all, I don’t think it’s going to be a total washout. We are learning lots, and we do have somethings looking great.

As for other Price Family News, not a lot going on…

The kids are out of school for the summer, Ariana made it into first grade, and David we are sure has made it to eighth, although his report card hasn’t yet come in.

David turned fourteen on the very last day of school, and got a swimming pool for his birthday, that took almost two weeks to get set up and filled, now it’s going to take another two to get it totally clean, because our water got dirty while we were filling it… What a mess! But the kids enjoy it, and swim most days that it’s over seventy and not raining. I don’t know how they stand the oh so cold water yet, but they seem to like it!

Ariana’s lost her second tooth and had another visit from the tooth fairy.

Russ and I work during the day, and work in the yard/garden/pool in the evenings and weekends when it’s not raining… But in the end we’re hoping that it’s worth giving up our lives for… Oh wait, we didn’t really have lives before we started the yard work…

So how’s everyone else?