Plants installed

Oh how I love going to nurseries.  What's even better is taking two cars and having Peter go home early so I'm free to load whatever I can in my car (hehehe).  We went to Evergreen Nursery yesterday.  Peter put two mandarin trees in his car and then headed home for a meeting.  Connor and I picked up shade plants, an apple tree that does well in part shade and when the trunk and front passenger seat were full we called it a day.

 These are all shade tolerant plants and I still have a few left to plant and need some more for the top box.

Here are the two mandarin trees and we moved the compost box over.  Now I think we need to put some wood chips/mulch down so I don't have to worry about weeding this area and it'll look nicer.  Peter plans on putting all the fruit trees on one sprinkler circuit and the rest of the gardens on other circuits.  The sprinkler manifold for the backyard is right across from the compost bin, so it's important to keep this area easy to get to. 

We have grass!

I just love it!  When we bought this house the backyard was nothing but concrete.  We had the majority of the concrete removed last year and then were left with sand for awhile.  We built some garden boxes and then had mulch/soil delivered and our backyard was loaded with dirt, all we needed was some grass.  Except, that we were in a huge drought and ordering grass sounded like a bad idea, so we lived with the dirt.  Now that we're expecting a ton of rain this year we decided to get the grass.  It arrived today on a forklift and Peter, and both grandpas installed it.  It looks great!

Connor helped water it down, while daddy adjusted the sprinklers.

Chloe wanted her picture taken too...she and Connor love the sandbox.

Daddy invited Connor to play in the sprinklers with him.  Connor took him up on that offer and had a blast getting soaking wet.

Now what should we plant here?  Peter and my dad made these two boxes a little while ago and we haven't figured out what to plant in them yet.  They are nearly always in the shade.

We also have this area left to plant.  I'm thinking we can squeeze in 2-3 more fruit trees here.  The one directly next to me is a 5 in 1 fruit salad tree.  It's supposed to bear peaches, two types of plums, apricots and nectarines.  We've had it a couple years in a pot and less than a year in the ground, so we'll see if anything happens.  Directly behind the fence-in the front yard is a row of trees-pomegranate, lemon and a mandarin.  Our mandarin bore fruit this year and they were super tasty, I think I need at least one more mandarin tree. 

Our Newest Family Member

Today we picked up our newest member of our family this cute little box turtle.  A co-worker of mine has several pet box turtles that she keeps in her backyard.  Well apparently at least one was a female and while working in her garden she found 8-9 babies.  She let us have one and we brought it home today.  It's tiny!  It's about the size of a quarter.  This is the smallest food dish I could find.

My brother gave us a 40 gallon tank (3ft long) and we picked up the rest of the supplies on Saturday.  Then today we brought the turtle home.  It likes to burrow in the wood chips making it difficult to find to show the kids.  Chloe has named it "Happy" and Connor has named it "Mr. Slow."  The gender cannot be determined until it is significantly older, so we're calling it a boy.  He'll stay relatively small so his giant tank will be plenty big enough for him.