Riot and Frolic

a mostly ballroom dance, but also a bunch of other stuff, blog

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about

I own and rock people’s faces off teaching ballroom dancing at Dancers Studio in St. Paul, MN. My husband and I compete professionally in American style and wrangle eight children in our spare time. I’ve been teaching and competing in ballroom dancing for over 25 years and have lots of opinions on it. I am an expert by any means, but there are quite a few dancers who are better than me and I have a solid knowledge of basic technique, so suck it.

The Garden of Good

I'm a first-time gardener.  Oh yeah, there were those tomato plants I grew in fifth grade for a science project and that summer after we bought our house where I had some sunflowers and tomatoes, but I have never Gardened.

I was going to Garden last year, but Minnesota's weather (and my motivation, let's be realistic) were not cooperating.  

But I did do a lot of planning in the winter of 2010 and now it's coming to fruition!

Here's what I've been carrying around in my purse for a year and a half…

  • My very technical drawing of our backyard and how I want my raised beds to be placed.  I like that I drew a compass rose and included the "not to scale" consideration.

Gardenscan

  • A list of all the plants I needed to buy seeds for.  Yes, I'm going from seeds.  It's working so far because of this .  

Thelist

  • A list of plants and vegetables that grow well together, called companion planting, in case I want to get all hippy and organic up in my gardening.

Thelist

I got my garden ideas from Better Homes and Gardens Magazine.  I'm planning on doing the Children's Vegetable Garden and the All-American Vegetable Garden, more or less.

The Children's Garden has a teepee.  A teepee covered in morning glories and adorable miniature pumpkins.  A TEEPEE!

Children's Vegetable Garden from BHG

My new home

The G built me the first raised bed (of 3) from some treated cedar 4x6s and 4x4s.  

There's a lot of choices when it comes to what kind of lumber to use and we liked the treated cedar for its longevity and durability.  With the kind of treatment that they do to the wood nowadays, it won't kill the plants (or us) by leaching any chemicals into the soil.  Back in the day, they used to treat lumber with asbestos, which I hear might not be the best thing to eat.  

raised garden bed

here fishy fishy fishy fishy!

There's some construction mumbo-jumbo involved in putting these together, so if you're interested in how he made them, let me know.  There was rebar and a drill press and a saw and that's all I heard before I lapsed back into Facebooking or something with pictures.

Raised garden bed corner

Fancy-schmancy

We're going to till the area it's sitting in to level out the ground and then I am going to town in my transplanting mode.  

All this will translate into some awesome fresh produce in a few months.  It should make for good eatin' and cookin' and fun news to tell you about!

Jesse-Metcalfe

Get it? The hot gardener?
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