Sunday afternoon we went hunting for Camellias. I had horrendous allergies attacking me, but still we forged on and went to a nursery. When there’s a will, there’s a way. I went out to look for some on Saturday, but didn’t find what I was looking for and we hit the jackpot on Sunday and ended up buying not only 1, but 2 large Camellias. There were so large (15 gallon containers) in fact, that we had to literally stuff them in our car. I think the gentleman who stuffed them in thought we were crazy and scurried from our car as quick as possible because he didn’t want to be responsible if any mishap should happen to our car or our plants.

We had a blanket that draped between Glow and the plants that prevented her from pulling and chomping on the plants, and thankfully, she fell asleep on the car ride home. The plants were probably mostly up in Soul’s grill, and as we were driving she said, in her cute little Soulie voice, “Mommy, Papi, I can’t see Glowy!” Ben and I just started laughing because besides not being able to see Glow, the plants were literally pretty much covering her from seeing anything. I think this moment will be one of those that the girls will make fun of us for one day. We have a Toyota Highlander, so while it fits our family of 6, it is a tight squeeze, and then we made it even tighter with our large plants!

And don’t you just love how True, Brave, and Soul dress themselves?! Now, I personally wouldn’t have worn leopard pants with that dress, but when Soul put them on, I wasn’t going to contest it. I’m learning everyday, albeit a little slowly, to just go with the flow and relax. And yes, that’s Brave rockin’ that 80’s ponytail. Don’t really know where she learned that from, but that’s her new thing. Speaking of new thing, Lisa Leonard sent me this pretty necklace. I’m so jazzed that she now offers beautiful gold and brass jewelry along with her pretty silver pieces.

It was such a gorgeous day to be out looking for flowers and then spend the rest of the day gardening, even if my allergies were raging. I’ve been reading up on plant care for my Camellias (we use this book as a guide), but if any of you have any experience with those gorgeous flowers, please do share! I want to make sure these thrive so they can be enjoyed for many years to come.

on me: top, thrifted. trousers, vintage from viral threads. necklace, c/o lisa leonard. shoes, anthropologie. on all the girls: mostly misha lulu mixed in with vintage, with little bit of american apparel and soulie’s moccs c/o freshlypicked.

These girls love being outside playing in the dirt. They have spent a lot of time outside these past few days (when it’s not raining), just running around and building a forest. Ben’s been working on his mini orchard (another post to come soon) and so they take the branches he prunes off and they stick them in the ground to make their own forest. They make “chocolate milk” with mud and water and pick lots of flowers, which they proceed to “plant” them back in the ground. They chatter up a storm with Ben while he works, and even with it being so cold (and them having a little cold), they would rather be outside than inside. I’m so glad they love being outdoors. I don’t think we get out nearly as much as we should, so I’m thankful to have a backyard so they can run around and make lots of good, fun earth messes in.

Oh and besides tucking her dresses in her pants, Soul also loves to wear Glow’s clothes. That girl is an absolute riot!

Happy Monday friends. Ben goes back to work today and we will be missing him. I love having him home all day, everyday, but we’re very thankful he has a job, so as much as I complain about him leaving us each morning, I’m grateful.

We didn’t really watch the Super Bowl, we actually spent it gardening. Normally, we do watch it together as a family, but this year we opted to all get outside and pull weeds from our vegetable garden. Those weeds were growing like crazy and we still have 3 vegetable beds to pull weeds from! The Super Bowl was on for us to listen to it, but we couldn’t really hear it from outside, though us girls did go back inside to watch the half time show.

We kind of wanted to be festive so we ordered a pizza and I was going to order wings from Buffalo Wild Wings, but it was so frustrating trying to find any nutritional information on their site. I finally did find a hint about it and their site stated that I needed to email them to get the nutritional info. That’s just so lame and no bueno! Seriously! They should have that information easily accessible to their customers considering they are a pretty big franchise. After that, I was definitely not going to give them any of my money. I did continue sleuthing and manage to find some info on their wings from other sites and 1200 calories for 10 wings, not including the bleu cheese I was probably going to dip them in (I love bleu cheese!), made me extra glad I didn’t order any. I think I’m going to have to come up with my own for baked spicy wings.

After the girls were in bed, Ben and I did manage to catch the last 5 minutes of the game. It was pretty exciting and Ben was really happy Baltimore won. He doesn’t have a particular football team he roots for, but he tends to have a soft spot for underdogs and the less arrogant of the teams, so to him, Baltimore was his pick. What were you doing yesterday? Was football a part of your Sunday?

Well, we’re stepping into new territory and learning (Ben’s learning) all about how to cultivate a backyard orchard culture. Say what?!! Basically, it’s all about how to grow an orchard in a small space…

We live in your regular suburban neighborhood, in a tract home that we love (and are slowly infusing our own personality into), so while we have a decent size yard for being in Southern California, it’s still not that big. One side of it is already dedicated to our vegetable gardening (this side gets the most sun), but we wanted to venture out and start growing our own fruit trees too. Ben’s the lead on this project and honestly, I just have him tell me what it’s going to cost and what trees are going in, all the other stuff, it’s on him.

He’s been spending hours (and I probably should say days!) of research into this project and even with all his research, we have hit a few snags that has cost us more time (and money) to figure things out. He’s spoken to master gardeners, professionals, emailed people with questions, there’s just so much to learn and know that Ben really tries hard to do all he can to make sure he’s doing things correctly. First things first though, and we had to get all the grass ripped off from the side that was going to hold our mini orchard. Next, we had to go in and remove some dirt so that Ben could amend the soil. Here’s where the first snag came in, after we all have spent a day or so removing dirt, he did a drain test on the dirt and turns out we have really bad drainage even with the amended soil. After going back and forth for a solution that was going to be the most time efficient and cost effective, we decided to dig 2 feet deep and get all that dirt removed. OYE! Of course, that giant hole was going to be filled up with good dirt with better drainage and that’s what happened.

We found a company that came with a little bobcat to dig deep (can you imagine if we had to do that all ourselves?!) and then they hauled all that dirt out (we tried doing it ourselves first, but I’m glad we didn’t finish the job alone). While we were at it, we decided to rip up the rest of the grass in that area since we were doing such a major overhaul. We figured, might as well go all the way at this point and just take out all the grass since we had wanted to do that eventually. We had to buy giant trucks full of soil, which got dumped in our driveway, and Ben (and John, BFF’s husband) with another guy we hired to help, moved all that dirt to the back and filled up the hole. This beginning has been such an ordeal and has taken so much out of us already, but we know that the investment will definitely be worth it.

Now, we have good dirt in and so comes the tree planting. Last I thought, 23 trees were going in. Yes, I said 23!!! Ben informed me today that the number has been upped a little bit. Oh my world! Now, here’s the thing with a backyard orchard culture… you don’t let trees grow more than 5-7 feet tall and some holes have multiple trees in it. Sounds crazy, I know. This is just the beginning of our journey, so you can be sure there will be many posts to come and I will share more info soon. If you want to start reading about it, Dave Wilson has a plethora of information to get you started.

Do you grow any fruit trees in your yard? Any tips for us beginners?

Wowzers! These fresh tomatoes from the garden are all wonderfully fantastic. Store bought tomatoes cannot even compare. We’ve had a couple good harvests so far and love each and every one. It’s been our best tomato season thus far. They don’t last very long in our house because we all eat them up so fast. We are all tomato lovers over here!

How about you… do you love tomatoes?