Lab flood #5

No, this is not a joke.  Our lab flooded again this past weekend.  5th time since the end of last May.  Well, really, I guess this might actually be flood #4.5, because the 4th flood was more like minor water seepage rather than an actual flood.  Luckily we did not have to shut things down for renovations again like we did last summer and fall, as it seems it wasn't as bad as before during floods 1-3.  But some of the baseboards have been stripped away, and we have big fans going to dry out the walls and floors, so there is some degree of mess.  Let's just hope they get whatever is broken in our building fixed soon, because the spring and summer showers have only just begun.

Adventures in planting blueberries

I have been all talk about this for about a year, but I finally decided to take action and plant some blueberry bushes in our backyard.  Now, I must disclose that I am not a gardener.  In fact, my ability to keep houseplants alive is really not good.  But I really wanted to give this a go because I think it would be really cool to have some sort of fruit-bearing plant right there in my yard.  Plus, I think Ally would get a kick out of picking berries.  So I took the plunge and purchased a set of 3 blueberry plants from Burpee.com. 

Now, I will admit, I kind of thought that the plants we were going to get in the mail would be fairly substantial looking, like this:

I had found something online that said we were supposed to dig holes 2 ft across by 2 ft deep.  So last Saturday, Ben and I went to work digging 3 holes in our yard 2ft across by 2 ft deep.  Well, actually Ben did most of the digging as I am 7.5 months pregnant and not exactly in the best physical shape right now.  It took a pretty good chunk of time to do this, and we ended up with holes looking something like this:

But what came in the mail looked something like this:

As you can imagine, I felt a little silly having had Ben spend a greater part of our Saturday morning digging 3 ginormous holes for tiny seedlings.  Also, I came to the realization that we probably wouldn't have a blueberry crop until next summer.  So last night, we back-filled our 3 holes with dirt and peat moss and planted the little seedlings in the backyard.  Now they look something like this:

My next task is to construct some wire cages to put around the plants so that the deer and rabbits don't get to them.  I guess in about 14 months, we'll be swimming in blueberries!  I did find something at Lowe's yesterday that might give me a little more instant gratification though:  hanging potted strawberry plants.  I'm going to get one today and try it out.