Running and Gardening: A Good Weekend

Happy Monday! I decided it was high time I graced you all with my presence again. 

In light of the fact that the weather is finally warming up, I have a 10 mile race in a few short weeks, and that I enjoy/ draw inspiration from reading running roundups on other blogs, I thought I would start out today with something a little different for me: a workout recap from the previous week. This is the least amount of running-training I have done for a race (though the most amount of "cross training," so we'll see if that helps) and I need to keep myself motivated. I also got that fancy Garmin thing for Christmas, and I might as well show off what it can do!

Workout Recap April 28-May 4
Monday: off
Tuesday: off
Wednesday: kickboxing class
Thursday: kickboxing class
Friday: 4 miles @ 10:33/mi pace
Saturday: off
Sunday: 7 miles @ 10:35/ mi pace (Splits: 10:47>10:36>10:34>10:41:>10:23>10:23>10:40); 1.07 mile walk with the dogs @18.26/ mi

I'll probably run another long-to-me race at the end of the summer, so maybe this feature will be a common occurrence around here, but really, who can say.

And now onto the gardening portion.

I was relaxing in the yard with the pups on Saturday eying our "gardens" full of a lovely combination of dead and overgrown bushes as well as mysterious shoots sprouting up haphazardly, when my neighbor came over for a chat. She saw I had just replanted some of my indoor plants (and made a mess all over the patio table), so the conversation turned to gardening... which I know nothing about. She seemed to know a bit on the subject and quickly informed me, that the mess of half dead bushes in the back corner of our yard are raspberry bushes (she also identified a few of our other plants, but those weren't as exciting).  I was immediately thrilled (and so was David)! I've wanted raspberry bushes in my yard ever since we moved away from our raspberry bushes when I was 8 and my parents refused to replant them at our new house. And now I have them and I didn't even have to go through the hassle of planting and buying them. I did however have to spend a significant amount of time pruning them.

So Sunday after church and a quick stop at the hardware store to get some gardening supplies (I've never done any more garden maintenance than weeding or the occasional bush trim with our electric trimmer), the pups and I headed out back to enjoy some sunshine.

This is approximately what I started with. I was so excited to get going that I forgot to take a before picture til I had spent about 30 minutes in the bushes, and had lopped off maybe 1/4th of the total branches lost.

The pups supervised, from their blanket.

Nearly 4 hours, 4 bags of kindling, and 1 huge lawn-waste bag later this is what I have to show for my time/ effort/ scratched up arms:

There is still a bit more work to be done on the patch- I plan on creating a sort of trellis for the bushes to help contain them, and we also need to remove a few shoots that are "out of bounds" and transplant those supposed Tiger Lillies that are taking over (and of course edge and mulch). But for now it is infinitely better and we cannot wait to watch the bushes grow and eat some delicious raspberries from them later this summer.

 
Speaking of kindling (which we kinda were), David and I also sunk our fire pit this weekend while we grilled outside Saturday evening. Total this project took maybe an hour to pick the rocks and weeds, dig the hole, and then place the fire pit and fill in around it. I don't have a before picture handy, but for some reason this fire pit had been all filled in with dirt to the top of the brick and had a few dead plants/ weeds growing in it.

We opted to put the metal fire pit in the ground to keep clean-up easier and allow the use of our grate and cover. Though we could have just dug out the dirt and used it as-is (which would have given us bigger fires, but oh well).

Once all is said and done, I do wish we would have taken a few more minutes and sunk the pit just a few inches deeper, but assuming the rain doesn't wash the rocks and dirt under the metal pit, I think this will function just fine, and this too looks quite a bit better than when we started.

 
And lastly, for those of you with a keen eye (and who have probably seen our backyard in person), you might have noticed in the upper right hand corner of the pit-picture that the plastic and gravel bellow the swing set are gone. It's just dead grass now. But I'll take that over the messy gravel that was there any day. Though now our garage is full of buckets of gravel and thus even further from being used as it was meant to- to house cars....