POV {Outdoors} Feature

Thanks to everyone that participated in this month's Point of View party.  There are some pretty great ideas linked up.  If you haven't already checked it out, you should!


My favorite idea came from Lisa over at Moore Minutes.  She wanted to do something fun with her boys and decided to have a neon day.  She has some great ideas that would make some GREAT memories. She has neon activities including shooting neon water balloons with bb guns, and cute neon treats.  Seriously.  Go check it out.  I love the idea!

Thanks again for participating!  For those of you that would like to participate next month, our theme is going to be FAMILY.  Can't wait to see what you come up with!

Dinner on the Grill

I love to grill.  Seriously.  I use the grill whenever I can because I feel like it just makes everything that much yummier.  I decided that I would show you a delicious dinner that I made the other night and show you a couple of pointers that maybe you already know, but maybe you don't.

I found this marinade at the grocery store the other day and YOU GUYS, this stuff is amazing!  Seriously!  It made the chicken tender, flavorful, and so so good.  Anything you get from Famous Dave's is going to be good.  I especially love their signature spicy pickles.  If you like pickles, you MUST try these.  They are the best on hamburgers.  Trust me.  You will never go back to ordinary pickles on hamburgers again.  It's the same with their signature spicy relish. It is the best on brats or hot dogs.

(They aren't even paying me to say this.  I just REALLY like it and thought I would pass it along.)

Moving on.  I decided to grill up some chicken tenderloins, pineapple, and some zucchini that was straight from my garden. It was all so good.  Here's a couple of tips.  When grilling, I always spray my grill with the Pam grill spray first.  It makes it so that the food doesn't stick to the grill.  

If you're cooking pineapple, sprinkle it with brown sugar before hand.  It makes it extra tasty. 

To cook zucchini, sprinkle it with olive oil, salt, and pepper before you stick it on the grill.  It helps to enhance the flavors.

The chicken will be the most tender if you cook it at a lower temperature for a longer time.  I know that sometimes I get impatient waiting for the chicken to cook and am tempted to crank up the heat, but this will just dry it out.  Keep the temp at around 300 degrees on the grill.  Also, don't pierce your chicken.  It is tempting to do it to test if it is cooked through or not, but it will make all the juices flow out of it and make it so that it isn't as delicious and moist. 

 There's a couple of tips for you and hopefully they were useful!  What you have in the end is a delicious and healthy meal for your family.

Point of View {Outdoors}

Today is the day to show you the Point of View projects.  If you remember, the theme for this month is Outdoors.

 

Here are the links to all the projects since I KNOW you are going to want to read all about them!
1. Gwen {Gwenny Penny}
2. Me {Just Between Friends}
3. Leanne {Organize and Decorate Everything}
4. Ashlee {Topsy Turvy}

Amy is taking the month off because she is spending time with her sweet newborn.  We wish her the best and can't wait to see photos!

Now it's your turn.  Link up all of your Outdoor projects whether past or present.  It doesn't matter which blog you link up to, your link will be seen on all of our blogs!  And we will be featuring some of our favorites from the party.  Be sure to check back throughout the weekend and see some of the other links that are added.

A Little Elbow Grease

You know how the best laid plans are usually thwarted?  That is pretty much what has happened to me yesterday.  Between a shipment that isn't going to be here till next week, photos that I thought were taken but weren't,  and a sick baby, this Great Outdoors week has not gotten off to a great start.

 My sister and my husband hard at work.  Don't let Ellie's gloves and shovel fool you and make you think she did all the work.  Her finger was broken and she couldn't get those weeds out.  Just sayin.  :) (love you sis)

I mentioned that we did a lot of work to the flower beds.  We took out all the weeds (it was a TON of work) and planted 8 trees and some other various bushes and plants.  This is where the wrench was thrown into my week.  I thought I had taken photos, but apparently I didn't.  This is what our yard looked like after only half of the trees were planted, and only a few of the flowers or bushes  Since a picture is worth a thousand words.....

We had a dump truck full of dirt delivered to our house to go into the flower beds and garden boxes.  This pile was enormous!  If you look, you can see just how wide it was, and then imagine that it is as tall as my husband.  I only thought to take a picture after he had put all the dirt in the back yard and was on his last wheel barrel full.

I am hoping that I can take some pictures tonight of what everything currently looks like so that I can show you how much it has changed even since these were taken.  It has been a long and hard process, but it is so worth the results!  We still have a long way to go until we can say that everything is done, but we love our yard and are having a great time making plans of what to do in the future!

Garden Boxes

My husband and I have been talking about adding garden boxes to our yard for a year now.  When we moved into our house, the yard was basically dirt and weeds.  We didn't have sprinklers, grass, curbing....nothing.  It was pretty sad to look at.  After a TON of work (mostly by my awesome husband) we now have a yard complete with sprinklers!

This is the before:  (don't I have the best view?)

The reason I tell you this is so that you can see just how far we have come because we really still have a long way to go before it is complete.

When my husband installed the sprinklers, we needed to map out exactly what we wanted to make our yard look like so that we would know where to add curbing, a shed, and the garden.  It is a lot harder than you would think.  But, we did it.

You can see from the diagram that we wanted to have our garden on the north side of our yard and that we wanted 3 garden boxes that measured 8 ft. X 4 ft.  When my husband put the sprinklers in, he added a line to where the boxes would go so that we could set up a drip line into the garden.  He also added a spicket so that we could have a hose out by the garden/shed area.

To build the boxes, we headed to Home Depot and bought our wood.  We got the pressure treated wood in 8 ft lengths which means that we bought 9 boards that were 2in X 12in X 8ft long.  We also bought some 4X4 posts to use to secure the corners and the middle so that there was no bowing in the wood.  Last, we bought 3 inch deck screws to put it all together with.  The deck screws are a must when putting these together.  They will hold up to weather and watering better than anything else.

Here are the cuts we made.  For the 8 ft boards, we cut three of them in half to use for the ends of the boxes.  The rest of them were left as is since the sides of the box were 8 feet long.  The 4X4 posts were cut into 12 inch pieces (four per box) and then we also cut two 16 inch pieces per box to use in the middle of the boxes that we could attach and bury the ends to keep the boxes from bowing.

Now we just need to get the dirt and plants in there.  I want to make sure that we have the best soil possible for our boxes because who wouldn't want their garden to be a success?  I have a surprise for you later this week, so you are going to want to check back.  I always feel bad that I can't give everyone that reads my blog something, but today is the day that it all changes!  I will give you a hint.  It has to do with gardening, and dirt.  Check back, seriously.