First fruit

It was the first WARM weekend of the year, and we spent it outside doing gardening-activities.

On Saturday, Santa Clarita hosted an Arbor Day and Earth Day festival at Central Park, where we have our Concerts in the Park in the summer.
In the top photo, Cora and I are checking out our new ladybug friends, given out by city people to children. We took them home and put them on our roses.
For the first half of our time at the park, Cora pushed around her little stroller, with my old Cabbage Patch doll. It's fun seeing her share my doll, which I was so thrilled to get when I was six.

We then went to the plant nursery and bought our vegetable plants - four tomato plants, a six-pack of zucchini (courgettes) and a bell pepper.

We also bought the necessities for Stace's next project. Our yard has a raised bed around the perimeter, surrounding a large patio and a side grassy area. Right next to the back of the house, beside our sliding glass door and the spare bedroom, is a small dirt patch and the air conditioner. The sprinklers don't hit this area, so we have been (when we remembered) hand-watering a few mums and ignoring a number of weeds.
Stace transplanted the mums, dug up the weeds and smoothed the dirt down. He then laid down black plastic sheeting and mulch/bark, for a neat and tidy look.

We've moved our decorative pots to the patch now, and hope to get a few more. I also would like to put in a decorative storage bench, to keep the small gardening tools so I don't have to walk through the house to the garage, where we now store them.

No photo of this, but during the week Stace also set up a new composting bin.

The bottom photos show the vegetable garden, and the first handful of strawberries we enjoyed eating. Yum!

In other house news, on Friday we had a local company come out to measure our patio doors, for replacement! This is very exciting to us. Our current doors - one in the living room and one in our bedroom - are inoperable, and old ugly metal. It will be fantastic to have nice pretty new ones, and the bonus of being able to open and close them, and get fresh air in our bedroom!