More yard work and preparing for guests

The garden and yard are almost ready for the guests we will be receiving in a couple weeks. I am sure my wife would have loved for the house to look more presentable (this weekend, she called it a "disheveled hole", I was offended) but I guess there is only so much that can be done between work, family, holidays, birthdays and other obligations. I did not do much this weekend, since we were away for most of it but I did get to finish the screen door to the basement and did some much-needed cleanup near the rear gate.
I learned quite a bit with the screen door project - I am not sure I would attempt to do a real door for an existing (and crooked) house but I think this one will be fine once I get some weather stripping to fill the gaps. I need to add: the door is very quaint and the spring-loaded hinges give it that creek when it opens and make it snap shut with a crack. It makes me think of the sound of the front door in "The Waltons".
I also took the time to check out the rest of the yard and a lot of my transplants are doing well. The sunflowers look great. I hope the ones in the front get just as tall. Maybe I don't need to repair the garage - just plant sunflowers in front of it next year.
The flowers in the front look nice too. There is quite a variety and only a few have bloomed but I bet it will look great in another week or so. There were on too many zinnias out front so I thinned them out a bit to let some of the other things grow. I moved the zinnias to pots and put them in and around the raspberries.

By the way, our raspberries are infested and the leaves are all getting eaten. If anyone has and suggestions that can help us salvage them for the rest of the season, I am all ears.

I also built some trusses and tripods for the african black-eyed susans in the back. These are doing really well and look pretty cool. I wish I had anticipated how good they would do and I would have been more creative with the trellising.

We also dug into the garden and had some cucumbers and squash this weekend. To my surprise, we have a lot of cucumbers and a few squash. I did not think these would do well at all. I just can't wait until we can start harvesting tomatoes.

Our garden is officially out of control

After a lot of acrobatics, I was finally able to cut out our first harvest from the garden: a "small" squash. They were supposed to be baby-sized but I guess I didn't get to it quick enough. The garden is all great - if only the small paths I made to get the veggies weren't covered with plants. I stopped trying to count the veggies on the plants, there are so many.

We are shocked. We have gardened before but things in this yard are going crazy - I am almost afraid to eat the stuff. Maybe all that landscape fabric was preserving all these great nutrients in the soil.
I don't think we have a tomato plant less than 42" tall and tying them up has become a sort of race against gravity. Oh, and the cucumbers. They continue their crusade to take over the garden. I guess I should be excited, right? Now that I know how out of control it can get, I have to plan the garden more carefully next year. We decided to try and make a dent in our mint tonight with a mint dinner. We made a chimichurri sauce (with mint and parsley) and put it over some shrimp and grilled it on a cedar plank. We topped the dinner off with some mojitos. For breakfast it is chimichurri steak and eggs with mint juleps. Needless to say, we have not put a dent in our mint plants.

Stay tuned for the next blog where I'll reveal the secret of how people from the OP get so much done on a Saturday.