Things Are Growing!

This is what the garden looks like currently. Those walls of water in the planter box are all tomatoes, the milk jug has basil under it.

The broccoli and cabbage plants are doing awesome!!

The only cucumber plant that is surviving!

 My only lemon cucumber plant bit the dust after about a week.

The other pickling cucumber is following the lemon cucumber to it's dusty grave. Sigh.

Check out those fun spiral vines though!

Lettuce!!

This is a first for me growing lettuce, and I thought I had buried it too deep, but I was so excited to finally see it popping up!

(This picture is really bright, I was trying to get better at manual mode.)

Sugar snap peas!!

The Dude is excited about these.

I feel like there is a lot of debris in my garden lot...

Early Girl tomato plants!

I have 4 sets of these plants and these two are doing well, the other two are doing so-so. The San Marzanos are so-so too, which saddens me!! I really want everything to pull through and do well!   

Those aren't weeds, those are carrot tops! 

This was another seed I had thought I had buried too deep never to see again. Miracles and blessings people!!

Chickens On The Loose

We let the chickens out the other night. All were excited for a chance at freedom except one that chose to linger in the coop.

You can see her hanging out under the walk way up the coop. 

They all migrated by the door a lot.....

and they like the little space between the coop and the fence.

Crazy birds!!

Apple Tree!

Our dear friend had a left over tree once she was done planting hers. She so kindly offered us the extra one.

Yay!! I have always wanted a fruit tree. It is a Extra Hardy Apple Combo Alaska Combo Semi-Dwarf. It has 5 apples grafted into it, Honeycrisp, Lodl, Noriand, State Fair, Zestari. I am only familiar with Honeycrisp out of those 5.

I love, love apple tree blossoms!! They are my absolute favorite!! And they smell absolutely wonderful!!!

Yay, for Garden Space!

The garden is in!! Doesn't it look wonderful?! 

We got some free compost from the city, and once we had spread that out over the garden, I got to planting.

This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago, so it is a little behind. I had planted everything on my list, except the 13 tomato plants, basil and two hot pepper mix plants. 

I waited on planting the tomato and basil plants until we got more compost for the raised bed area.

After we had spread out the compost and I went to go plant in the raised bed, I hit that stump sooner than I had wanted to with the shovel. So we decided to get another load of compost to fill it in. We didn't have time to go get more until the following week.

I am crossing my fingers that I have more of green thumb than I think I do!

Payson Temple

We were able to attend the LDS Payson, Utah Temple open house a couple weeks ago. 

 It was raining the whole time, and the line was outside with no covering. Luckily I married an always prepared boy scout, who had not one, but 2 umbrellas in the car!

The interior decorating in this temple was absolutely beautiful!! I loved the theme they went with.

How blessed we are to be so close to so many amazing temples. We are truly a blessed generation.

Annual Memorial Weekend Trip To Logan

For years, my Mother's side of the family has gone up with my Grandparents to decorate the graves of those relatives that have passed on.

It started out with all my Aunts, Uncles, cousins and Grandparents would go up. We would stop at the graves, then usually get a bucket of chicken, head to a park and have a family picnic. We would play games, go fishing at the stream in the park, and sit around talking and laughing.

Memories. Very cherished memories.

As you can see in the above picture, our number has dwindled significantly.

Our family has grown a lot, and it is just hard to get everyone's schedule to work out to where we can still all go. 

My Grandpa has passed on, but my Grandma is still dedicated to getting up to Logan to decorate the graves of her loved ones. 

I am so glad we were both able to attend this year. With living in different states, we were not able to attend together for a few years. 

On this trip we were able to stop and visit my Grandma's brother again. He and his wife are wonderful people!

The Dude loved his wood working workshop! He has made lots of things since I last came up and bought a recipe box from him, which I love and put to use right away!

Love these people! 

He is my favorite...

We had a wonderful trip to Logan! 

Along the way we also stopped at the Implement, The Aggie Ice Cream Shop, Angie's Restaurant and Gossner's Cheese Factory.

I feel so blessed to be apart of this wonderful family, they truly are the best.

Tilling Away

Who doesn't till their garden in shorts and mud boots?

 This is the only way to properly till your garden.

Death Star Pinata

In honor of May the 4th be with you and Cinco De Mayo, I made a Death Star pinata for my Young Women church group.

Mindy, if you are reading this post, I totally thought of you and your family the whole time I was making it!

I purchased a punching balloon from the Dollar Store, cut some newspaper into about 3 x 3 inch strips, made up a paste of flour and water and got to work!

I dipped the newspaper into the flour paste and enclosed the balloon. Let it dry and then did another layer. I did this a total of 3 times.

Once dried, we cut a hole in the upper portion to make the indented part of the Death Star. This also popped the balloon inside, which we removed and replaced with a bunch of candy.

We taped the inverted part back onto the rest of the pinata and then spray painted it gray. I would recommend spray painting it once before cutting away the hole, because the tape didn't stick to the floury paper very well. Once dried, the Dude drew the lines on the inverted part and wrapped electrical tape around the middle.

The girls loved it! 

Some may have had to look up what the Death Star even was, but they all thought it was pretty neat!

But, who doesn't love hitting a pinata that is going to produce candy as the end result??

Plus there is just something satisfying about fighting the Dark Side.

Stumped

As I was going through the dirt and trying to get rid of some the left over grass, my shovel hit something a little hard. I started to dig around it and noticed that there was a tree root. No biggie, right? It was just going to be from that dead stump we removed last year and should come out fairly easy.

So I assigned the Dude to get it out.

I was getting some things taken care of in the house, when the Dude called me out to see this.....

"This?! You couldn't see this?!" 

(Name that movie line!)

That right there is a twenty year old stump, of what used to be a giant pine tree like the other two in our backyard.

There wasn't any rot to this sucker!! 

It was healthy as could be. You would think it would of either grown back or just finally died off.

So, what did we do? We buried it back up of course!!

Ain't nobody got time for that!

(At this point, the Dude had to leave the room. He couldn't take the improper grammar. Let's be honest though, my whole blog is full of grammar/spelling errors, a'ght!)

We will just be putting a nice planter box area over this cover. 

You will never know it was even here!

Looking Good!

A couple of weeks ago I moved some of my plants into bigger containers since they were out growing the ones they started in. 

I meant to post this sooner, sorry I am a little behind.

The tomatoes are doing so well!! 

The Jelly Belly tomatoes look like they are doing the best so far.

I have not grown broccoli or cabbage before, but they seem to doing awesome.

I had to put my shop light on an angle since the tomato plants are so tall and some of the other plants were a little ways behind them in growth.

Fight for the Water Bucket

Forget putting out a roosting stick, these silly birds are fighting over who gets to spend the night on the water bucket!!

A little blurry, but there are 5 birds on that bucket! 

The one on the right spent a lot time trying to figure out how she was going to get on with the others.

They are more entertaining than watching T.V. :).