We are quite pleased with the outcome and have gotten lots of complements on the look.  We have even been able to eat the first herbs from the herb garden portion. Through the process we learned a lot, and I thought I would share a quick rundown of some of the things we learned in our first landscaping attempt:

1. No matter how many bags of rocks you think you need… you really need at least twice as many. (We made 4 trips to Lowe’s to buy more and more rocks).
2. Just because a plant says it is a perennial, doesn’t mean that it is a perennial in your growing zone.
3. It takes the patience of a saint or my mother-in-law to correctly use landscaping paper.
4. Hostas grow to twice the size they appear when first breaking the ground and should be spaced accordingly.
5. It is very very important to wait until tulips are done blooming to try to transplant them.
6. The cost of plants, rocks, and landscaping paper add up deceptively fast.

Now what I know you have all been waiting for: Here are photos of the landscaping in progress and completed. Enjoy!

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The options were:
* Go on a group ride
* Leave a nice note on a bike, or say hi to a cyclist at a red light
* Schedule a bike date with a friend or partner — dress up!
* Recruit a non-biking friend for a ride
* Ride with your family
We chose to do a Ride with your family and also ended up doing an impromptu group ride.

For the Ride with your family, Matt (my husband) and I biked to church. It is pretty common for us to do so, but it was the first time I got to bike to church on my new bike. I am still loving not having to try so hard to keep up with Matt.

Here we are in our church clothes after returning home.

Our Group Ride turned out to be impromptu.  We were heading to buy some gas cards for a friend moving out of state after church, and one of our other biking friends biked with his.  We were quite a bunch. I rode my recumbent, my husband rode his converted mountain bike/commuter bike, and our friend, Kurt, rode a home-built long-tail cargo bike.  It was a lot of fun and made biking up the hills seem less difficult.

Matt took pictures and video while biking behind us.

I am really enjoying participating and can’t wait to take on some of the items in the next category.

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They are also hosting summer games for bikers, and I think both Matt and I are going to participate.  There are three categories of bike related activities and participants will complete two items from each category in a three week period.  Some of the activies are go on a group ride, ride with your family, read a biking related book, perform maintenance on your bike, haul groceries on your bike, and ride on a greenway.  A lot of these things are things Matt and I do on a regular basis, but it will be fun to join in with everyone else.  Not to mention the fabulous prizes they are giving away!  Check it out!

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So when the opportunity to purchase the bike for an amazing price came up, I jumped at the chance.  I have had the bike for 7 days and for 6 of those days I have biked to my office and back (5.8 miles round trip).  This is a huge improvement over the number of times I road my fun purple bike to work. I am sure some of the increase can be chalked up to the newness of the bike, but it is really much easier to ride.  Because my old bike only had 3 gears, I was often either having to pedal too hard to get up a hill or not able to increase my speed while going down hill.  My new recumbent has 21 gears and give me more flexibility.  I can easily keep up with Matt, who bike commutes nearly everyday, whereas on my old bike he was constantly out running me.

The other added bonus of this new bike and my increased desire to ride is being able to get in exercise everyday without having to carve out time for the gym.  When I am commuting to and from work, I am getting a workout in time that would otherwise just be spent riding in the car.  It works great for me because I tend to have a crazy schedule.  I do usually make it to the gym once or twice a week to play racquetball, but that wasn’t enough to keep up with my sweet tooth.

So far I have though of a few reasons that riding the recumbent won’t always be ideal so I will keep my purple bike for riding when the recumbent isn’t the best choice. First is the seating position. Because on a recumbent you are seated lower to the ground with your feet out in front of you, biking in a skirt can be tricky.  Not only is there the chance of flashing oncoming traffic, there is also the fear of catching my skirt in the exposed chain.  Second is my LOVE of my basket on my purple bike.  Because of the angle of the recumbent’s handle bars, my super-cute woven basket will not transfer to my new bike.

None of these things have kept me from riding it so far though.  I am even planing to bike home from work carrying my CSA, something I would have never tried on my purple bike.  I don’t yet have any photos of the new bike, but I will share them as soon as I have them.

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As part of the design process we also selected a handful of perennials we thought would fill the space well.  Our hope was to use some existing hostas from our yard, a hand full of hostas from a friend’s house, and a number of other plants that won’t need replanting next year:

List of plants selected:

1. Hosta
2. Cherry Bush
3. Phlox
4. Ornamental Grass
5. Hyacinth
6. Tulip
7. Primroses
8. Lilies

Unfortunately, a lot of the plants we researched online and thought would work well were not actually available at our local garden centers, so we had to improvise.

List of actual plants purchases:

1. Purpleleaf Sand Cherry Bush
2. Winky Double Dark Blue & White Columbine
3. Winky Mix Columbine
4. Neon Star Dianthus
5. Purple Picotee Dianthus
6. Cranberry Ice Dianthus
7. Red Wing Creeping Phlox
8. McDaniels Cushion Creeping Phlox
9. Hyacinth
10. Tulips
11. Hostas

We also decided to use lava rocks in place of mulch to keep from having to replace the mulch every year.  The previous owners of our house used mulch for all their landscaping, and by the end of the summer last year, most of the munch had been washed away.  We are hoping that rocks will be much more permanent.  I also like the look of the red lava rocks more than the mulch.

The last part of our plan was to put down gardening paper to keep out weeds.  For us this is a no-brainer, as neither of us have time to spend weeding our flowers.  We don’t have any previous experience with putting down this type of paper, but hopefully it will come with directions.

Stay tuned to see how it actually turned out.

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Matt and I have started on a new adventure this week.  After living in our new house for a year and a half, we have decided it is finally time to take on the front lawn landscaping.  While we are pretty competent food gardeners, neither of us have any experience with this type of work. But as Matt says, “people do this every day”. So, we have decided to rip out the existing, unpleasant landscaping and replace it with an herb garden and flower garden.

In front of our house we have two landscaped areas: one containing 7 euonymus bushes and 2 bushes of undetermined variety and another containing various small ornamental plants. We spent a few hours Saturday & Sunday afternoons digging out the bushes. I ripped out the 7 euonymus bushes myself and let me tell you, that is hard work! Now the front of our house stands mostly bare waiting for us to make decisions about what plants to put back.

Unfortunately, it seems making the decision about what to plant in the flower garden portion may be more difficult than actually ripping the plants out.  I know for sure I want tulips and hyacinths (already purchased actually) but beyond that we are mostly unsure.  I want a lot of color, a mix of flowers and ornamental plants, and a garden that looks good through at least three seasons.  Not much to ask for I know.  We have started to do some serious research online and have scouted out some other potential plants at Lowes, including some cherry bushes we think would look gorgeous in the area just in front of door.  However, there is still a lot of work to do before we can put anything back.

I will catalog the process here to share the ups and downs of taking on landscaping for the first time.

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I made them with a combination of Cascade 220 Heather and Cascade Alpaca wool, and they are slightly fuzzy but not overly so.  The pattern called for a wool and mohair combination, but I didn’t like the overly fuzzy, worn out looking results.

The mittens are quite warm and I can see that I will get quite a bit of use out of them.  Now to make more!

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I also started another new knitting project from “One More Skein“.  I am knitting myself a new washcloth using the Pencil Sketch pattern.  I started using one of the knitted washcloths I made for the Co-op sale, and I fell in love.  It is so much nicer than using the store-bought kind, so I am making myself a second.  This way I can actually wash my first washcloth .

The pattern includes a chart, which is not something I am familiar with, and it has been quite a learning experience.  There are definitely some mistakes, but I have learned a lot, and I am very excited to see the finished project.

While I was enjoying the snow and knitting, I also tried out our new Apple TV and the Boxee Beta app to start catching up on LOST episodes. Misleading name aside, the Apple TV is actually a set-top box that allows you to watch TV shows or movies, stream podcasts, listen to music, or view photos all through your television.

Despite a few moments of jerky video, it was a great experience. Using the Apple TV and Boxee, I was able to access Hulu and all 5 seasons of LOST on my TV totally free of cost.   This is especially exciting because Hulu allows you to watch pretty much all of the major TV networks’ shows (everything I watch except American Idol and Survivor is available).

Before we got our Apple TV, I was forced to watch shows on Hulu either by sitting at my desk or hooking up my laptop up to the TV. Now I can easily watch the shows from the comfort of my couch without any added steps.  There are still a few bugs in the system, and the threat of internet outages is a deterant, but I could see this a potential cable tv replacement in the not-so-distant future.

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I knit a scarf, which was originally intended for me but will be going to my mother-in-law instead, using the linen stitch.  The stitch itself is neat and creates a very thick fabric in the end due to a lot of slipped stitches.  What I like most about the stitch is the way it shows off and highlights variegated yarn.

Other than the ultimate goal of having a beautiful scarf, one of my main goals for this project was to be able to keep the cost under $30 and still buy my yarn from the local yarn shop. (I could have easily bought a $5 skein from Walmart, but it would have felt wrong.) And I am happy to say I was able to do that quite easily.  With Vicki’s help, I picked out James C. Brett Marble Chunky in a beautiful colorway that came out to a total of $13.  The yarn is gorgeous, and I love the feel of it.

Unfortunately this is also where my particular project went a little off course.  The pattern is intended to be knit with yarn that has short variegations of color and create the effect of knitting with multiple strands of different colored yarn.  The yarn I chose had much longer sections of color, and I ended up with blocks of color.  The end result was very pretty and the transitions between the colors was beautiful, but it was not quite the effect I was going for.

I really enjoyed knitting the scarf and watching the way the colors played out, so I plan to try a different yarn and  make another scarf that I will keep for myself.  That is of course, after I finish the 5 other projects I have committed myself to

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Normally this would be a disaster.  There is no way a year & 1/2 after I purchased the yarn that the yarn shop would still have 3 skins of yarn in the same dye lot. But they did!  I couldn’t believe my luck.  For those of you who don’t knit or crochet this is very important because if you purchase yarn from a different dye lot it is very likely that the yarn will be a slightly different color and it will be very visible in your finished product.

Considering the time I have put into the scarf and it will require to finsih, I super excited to actually find the exact yarn I need and not have to “wing” it.

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