Well needed Rest and Relaxation

It has been a beautiful Sunday in south Mississippi today.

I woke up this morning before 7 AM, which is relatively early for a Sunday, and went out to my shop and worked on a project that I recently started.

The project is a small fishing boat that I am building. I will have something about it on here soon. The reason that I wanted to do some work on it this morning is because I wanted to take a scooter ride to Gulf Shores, AL this afternoon.

After I accomplished what I could and wanted to do in the shop, I went back inside and settled into my usual Sunday morning routine of drinking coffee and reading the newspaper prior to streaming the service at Church In The Now.

For anyone interested in checking them out go to http://www.churchinthenow.org/ and just look around and you will figure out how to tap into the streaming. It is on at 9 AM central time on Sunday mornings and at 6 PM on Wednesday nights.

I've never seen or heard anything like it, and I've been a church person my entire life.

But anyway, Her Majesty and I got on the scooter this afternoon and rode over to Gulf Shores. It was a nice ride and the temperatures were perfect.

We found a nice, quiet spot on the beach and relaxed for an hour or so before returning home.

On the way over we stopped at a place that sells tons of items for outdoor projects like patios, sunrooms, etc. We are planning on making us a little oasis in the backyard and have been looking around for stuff to get some ideas from.

Check out the pics and eat your heart out. It sure is nice to know that we live only about an hour and a half from beaches like this.

Square Foot Gardening

I have always been a fanatic about gardening. Over the years I have had some fairly good results planting conventional gardens, but it has never been as successful as what I thought it should be.
Usually the garden would start out looking great and I would spend huge amounts of time weeding and watering and then later in the season when rains came quite frequently the ground would stay so wet that I could not get in the garden to maintain it properly and weeds would finally win the battle.
Also, it seems that once the ground got saturated the plants started to rot. The plants that would be most susceptible to this would be my squash. The tomato plants themselves held up through all the rain, but the tomatoes would start to rot before they would get ripe.
I tried every concoction I could find to prevent this from happening, but nothing seemed to work.
Someone told me about a concept called Square Foot Gardening. I found a book about it written by Mel Bartholomew and started reading it. What I read in the book made sense so I decided that this year I would give it a whirl.
I built a container for my plants out of some wood that I had laying around in my shop and this afternoon I finally had a chance to get something planted in it.
I went to a local plant nursery and got some "special" soil that they had and a bag of "worm castings". I think that it is soil that is taken from an earthworm farm after they get through crapping in it for awhile. While I was in the nursery buying this stuff a lady asked me if that soil grew worms. She acted like she was serious! I told her that it would and that Cheerios were really doughnut seeds.
After that I went to Lowe's and bought a bag of mushroom compost and a bag of cow sh.. I mean manure.
Once I got home I mixed all the this stuff together in a specially designed soil combining container. OK, so it was an old kids swimming pool, but it worked.
As you can see from the pictures in the slide show, I was able to get 16 plants in a relatively small area.
Check back every few weeks and I will post some pictures so that you can see how things are progressing.
Who knows, you may decide to try it yourself.

Oh by the way. That ratty looking fence you see in some of the pictures is my neighbor's fence. I've already told him that I would replace it for him since he doesn't seem to be concerned about it.