My new baby garden and an announcement!

Hi!  Hubby and I recently moved (like 3 weeks ago-ish) from Utah to the great state of Iowa.  He finally graduated college with an engineering degree, I am so proud of him, he did so well and got straight A's most of the time!!  We found a big old farm house to rent (built in 1880s and it is huge, with 4 bedrooms and plenty of space).  The house is surrounded by corn fields and neighbors that live 2 standard blocks away, if not farther.  We are loving it!  How can you beat this as your front yard (that is not my house-its part of the farm).

And this as your back yard!

Now that I look at that picture the clouds in the distance look grumpy, I wonder what that means.  In this back yard, we saw 30 deer our first night, which greatly surprised and excited us, but apparently its not unusual to see deer here all the time.  I was talking with the dude that hooked up our satellite service and he said that people come here to hunt all the time, that someone got a 16 point buck one time...or that its not unusual to see deer that big..or something like that.  The first time it rained for 3 days I looked out the window and saw some wild turkeys running around out there, and when I took these pictures, there were like 6 to 8 out there playing in the cornfield.  Its so neat seeing wildlife!  I might've seen a dead possum in the road...AND, as part of my brand new bug adventures, there were ladybugs everywhere, but they got taken over by box elder bugs.  I HATE BOX ELDER BUGS!!!!!!  THEY ARE SOOOOO GROSS!

Does anyone want some pretty little yellow flowers? (dandelions)  But most people don't water their lawns out here, so I don't think people here mind.  Weird.  

Which brings me to...my new baby garden!  It looks kind of sad, but I just planted it last night!  I'm not a real good gardener, so we'll use this year as kind of a practice run.  I think that the deer and birds are probably going to eat more of it than we will, but its worth a try anyway!

 It measures 16 feet by 16 feet.  Hubby got excited with the tiller, so we have some grass to fill in in some spots. :) And I'm not a real good row maker so I just kinda water the whole thing and hope for the best, which probably isn't the best way to do things, but we'll see what happens!

 I planted: a few yellow onions, cucumbers, sugar baby watermelons, early girl tomatoes, bibb lettuce, iceberg lettuce (I got the bibb kind on accident but figured what the heck), white potatoes, bush beans, sugar snap peas, and carrots.  I think that is it!  I'm pretty excited that the cages I got for the tomatoes are pink and red.  Yay!  I also have a 6 pack of strawberries that I am going to plant in a plastic bucket thing that I got from Walmart today.  We want to plant them in a container so that when we move from this house we don't have to leave them here.  We wanted to do raspberries too, but I couldn't find any at the store.  Maybe its the wrong time?  Are you supposed to plant them in the fall?  Hmm...

And last, but not least (as far as the pictures go), I got chicks and hens that will soon be planted in this adorable chick pot.  I'm so excited!  I love chicks and hens!!!

Along those same lines.....WE ORDERED OUR BABY CHICKS YESTERDAY!  We are getting 22 of them!  They will be available for pickup on June 1!  Because we live only a couple of hours away from Murray McMurray Hatchery we decided to pick them up from the facility rather than have them mail them to us.  WE ARE SO EXCITED!!!!!!!  We are going to build their brooder here soon, in which they will live for about a month.  Then we are going to build a smaller coop that should only cost a few hundred dollars that they can live in for a couple of months, by then we should be in a better financial situation so we can build the real coop.  They will all be portable so that we don't leave any more coops behind.  Then, when we decide to breed our chickens we can put a pair in the smaller coop so that we can keep them separate. ;)