Victory Garden and Mower

Yesterday morning Colin "helped" me mow the lawn. Actually, I had the lawn mower sitting under the patio until I decided whether or not it was going to really rain and set Colin out there while I got the extension cord. I came back (30 seconds?) and he was pushing it off the concrete into the grass!
So pleased with himself! In the back, you can see the cardboard diaper box where I stored his inflatable pool...soon I will have it blown up and we will have lots of fun-in-the-water pics for you!

Anyway, he actually played nicely while I mowed! Yay!
Last year I planted a relatively small garden in our side yard. We had okra, roma tomatoes, lettuce, and jalapenos, with some herbs in pots scattered throughout the flower garden.

This year, we decided to expand the plot and plant a "victory garden." We barely use the side yard anyway, so we might as well get some good out of it. We've been working on it off and on in the evenings and are nearly finished. If all goes as planned, we will have carrots, sugar snap peas, squash, zucchini, eggplant, okra, jalapenos, and roma tomatoes!

Colin is confused about why we keep telling him not to eat dirt. He really likes helping though!
We built the frame for the tomato plants and this morning Michael spread herbicide down under the black plastic. All that is left to do is plant the tomatoes and gravel the walkway to the left.
Call me crazy, but to my Missouri-girl eye, the dirt here does not look like dirt. It looks like black clay. However, I am assured, by people who presumably know, that our neighborhood was (fairly recently) prime farm land. Nevertheless, we have brought in a lot of topsoil to our vegetable garden area. What you see below is a mixture of the topsoil and the original "clay". It worked rather well last year and we had a bumper crop of okra and other veggies.
You can see the jalapenos are already going strong!
And the basil is doing well too. Can't wait for everything else to pop up!
***disclaimer: gross picture below***







My finger is doing much better (no red scortch marks - God bless Neosporin), but still looks fascinatingly gross (Michael is mortified that I took a picture, so I pretty much have to post it). :) Nice, eh?