Lettuce Rejoice: Our Backyard is Complete
“Doing construction on your patio is just about the worst idea you could come up with. Like, ever. Apart from wearing socks with sandals.”
Well hello, friends.
In my last letter, you might recall the ongoing drama of our backyard patio/grill/fire pit debacle. If you remember, the company we hired started building all of this in the wrong place. Not once, but twice. Oh, and they were also about six months behind schedule.
Now, I don’t consider Danny and I to be divas (well, I’m not one at least). But we communicated one deadline that was important to us during this process. Just one. And that was a request that, since we had kicked off the project in the summer, even if the grill wasn’t functioning, that the backyard wasn’t a total disaster before we hosted our very first event in the house.
Well, after the thing was finally built in the right place (third time’s the charm!) all they had to do was come back and paint. For the next few weeks, they told us that they would be there tomorrow. But alas, tomorrow would never come, and they would no-show – over, and over, and over again. This happened almost daily. Maybe this is karma for all the times I’ve told people I’m on the freeway and five-minutes away when really, I’m still running around the house, frantically searching for my keys, or triple-checking that I unplugged my flat iron.
After a few weeks, they eventually came back to paint the grill area on the morning of our event. Let me repeat that. THE LITERAL MORNING OF OUR EVENT. I had visions of our friends and family leaning up against the bar area, only to pull away covered in white paint.
But somehow, it all worked out. Everyone kept their distance, only admiring the grill and fire pit from afar. So that was enough to keep me from a panic attack, right? Wrong.
The landscaping just about put me over the edge. After an initial conversation where we were debating our options, we decided to leave the plants around the perimeter of the yard and add a few more to fill in the empty spaces. Well, about two days before our event, a team of people showed up and began aggressively tearing all the beautiful mature plants out of the ground. By the time we saw what was happening, the damage was done, and we had to completely start over on the landscaping project, making it a much larger undertaking than we had intended.
Although the project was way behind schedule and way over budget (story of my life), we are happy with the yard and the final product. And although the grill has been built and fully functional for a couple of months, we have yet to use it. The firepit, on the other hand, has been put to good use. We’ve been out there almost every weekend, trying to get as much use out of it as we can before the million-degree temps roll around.
Besides the firepit, another new outdoor obsession of mine has been our hydroponic garden. We invested in a “Lettuce Grow” farmstand (I love a good pun) and set it up in October. Even though I was excited about it, I did not have high expectations. My mom is a gardener, but the green thumb definitely skipped a generation. I’ve never kept a houseplant alive. I even killed our lucky bamboo.
Well, who woulda thunk it, at the same time as I’ve been slowly killing half of our houseplants, this thing has been flourishing. The broccoli, cauliflower and peas did take almost six months to harvest, but they survived, and it has been a lot of fun to watch them grow. After every harvest (or every time I pick some green onion to add to our dinner) I will loudly proclaim to Danny, “LOOK, WE’RE LIVING OFF OF THE LAND!”
The lettuce and herbs have been growing like crazy and everyone who visits leaves with a bag of fresh cilantro, parsley and dill (whether they like it or not).
Until we beet again (except I’m not growing beets),
Elissa & Daniel Brown
