A photo journal of my little neck of suburbia over the last few weeks.
Nearly open sunflower in my mom's garden.
My first time growing okra. I was blown away by how lovely the flowers are. This is a Red Burgundy Okra from Seed Savers Exchange.
A summer supper: CSA coleslaw (cabbage, turnips, carrots) and homemade chili covered baked potato (with homegrown tomatoes).
Biscotti for a crowd. Recipe needs a some work, but is very delicious, it just wasn't dry enough.
The original baseboards at our new house. You can see the paint build up on the bottom. The original paint was oil based and there are at least two layers on top of that. Unfortunately, they were not properly primed before being painted over with a latex paint and as a result are peeling in some areas. Which means we have to replace them if we want our paint job to be durable.
There's a toe-kick piece at the bottom that we had to remove first. You can clearly see the paint layers here. As you can also see, they put in the baseboards and then painted. That order is backwards and is resulting in more work for us.
Here is the wall with the baseboards completely removed. The other issue we have found are that they did not smooth the plaster below the old baseboards. The new ones we are putting on are about 1/4 inch shorter, so we are having to improvise. Also, since they painted the baseboards in place and didn't tape off very well, there is a paint line on the floor around the perimeter of the whole room that I have the privilege of scraping off with a putty knife and some solvent. Fun.
When we closed a couple weeks ago I was so excited to discovered a volunteer watermelon plant! At the time I didn't see any fruit on it. Well this past weekend I discovered a couple. No idea how we missed them. Here's the little one. 
And here's the big one! I've never grown watermelon before and I've no idea what kind this is, so I'm not sure when to harvest it, but since we've yet to have a really good watermelon this season I'm salivating already! The vine is really healthy and spread out, with lots of flowers, so I'm hoping we get a few more fruit off of it.
