Meet our boy, Francis

Lots of outside work lately :o) The veggie garden that we laid out in April was planted right before Mother's Day and is doing fabulously. Yay veggies!

The photograph on the top is facing the alley, the photograph on the bottom is facing the house. The white building is our neighbor's garage whose vintage look is proving to be a perfect backdrop to the garden, don't you think?

We planted:
tomatoes
zucchini
yellow squash
jalapeño peppers
banana peppers
red bell peppers
broccoli
cabbage
onions
string beans
red lettuce

So far, no fertilizer, no pesticides, no insecticides, no nothing! We mixed in our compost pile with the soil when it was planted and since then, it's had just sun, water and love. We're keeping our fingers crossed that we'll continue to get through the season with only those three ingredients.

We also moved Saint Francis to his intended place in the garden. What? didn't you know Saints should be placed behind the lettuce?

The Saint Francis statue was given to me by two amazing people, Jean and Wally Dolan. Ol' Saint Franny was chillin' in their gardens for nearly 30 years, where Wally unfailingly took care of him with a fresh coat of spray polyurethane every other season or so. Then, a few years ago, the Dolans decided to downsize and moved into a condo. They gave a lot of things away when they moved, downsizing not only their landscape, but also their possessions.

Of course, Saint Francis made the cut, and found his new place at the foot of the stairs leading up to the new Dolan home. Wally and Jean always knew that they wanted to pass the statue onto someone, but they wanted to find someone that would care for him and get as much joy out of him as they had for so long.

A couple months ago, they mentioned Saint Francis and their quest to find him a new home to a group of us and I jumped (no really, I jumped), clasped my hand together, and gushed about my love for the Saint and how he is just my favorite Saint ever and how we just dug up our yard and how I would have just the perfect place for him once we put in the gardens and I promised I would take care of him and could I, could I please, keep him? Please? Please, huh, please?

I think primarily in an effort to shut me up, they said yes. I picked him up that afternoon.

So, Francis has kind of been hanging out here and there in the yard since April. This weekend, he picked his preferred location in the lively, colorful and serene vegetable garden. (Click the photo to enlarge it.) He looks perfect there, doesn't he?