Garden Club Friday

Hello Fellow Garden Friends! How does your garden grow these days? We finally have a dry stretch, and we are making MUCH progress in our gardens!

- Our garden plot from last year has 4 rows which are 4'x 30'... the first has my strawberries, and they look GREAT. It also has a lavender plant, and some thyme. Both weathered the winter well and look wonderful.

We have a full row of scrawny looking pathetic broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. It remains to be seen if it will live or not.

We have a full row of more strawberries, but these were the old plants we got from friends, and only about 1/4 have any leaves at all. I will pull out the ones which are dead and put something else in there. I will let these which are just starting out to grow well this year (planting between them) to get established, and transplant them next year to a permanent strawberry bed. [Ahem... Eric - if you are reading this... just skip that paragraph. Oh wait - it's too late. ;) Yet another project for my wonderful husband...]

That leaves one row to be planted (120 square feet), and whatever is left between the strawberries. And watching to see if anything lives of the broccoli... thankfully we can try that sort of crop again in the fall, I am not holding my breath for it.

- We have another smaller plot which one of my sons cleared for us. I'd say there are 3 rows of about 4'x 20', and another smaller row, but the ground is really rocky. I am going to plant corn and green beans in this one, as I read they are forgiving to rocky soil. In each 4' "box" I will be planting green beans on the outside, and corn in two rows on the inside. This does not have a fence around it, so we will see how it goes, or if the animals will eat most of it. [Eric- ignore this one too... just in case I want to fence this plot in too...]

- We have two small 4'x4' boxes which are not fenced, and actually in our planned volleyball court, so I am not yet sure if we will plant them or pull them up. Anyone have a vote?

- Our close "kitchen garden" is completed. 3 boxes of 4'x 30, 26, and 22 feet respectively. In one I have about half in peas (sugar snap) interplanted with lettuce, spinach, and radishes. They have not sprouted, but the peas look great. On the other end (about 1/2 the remaining space) I have the 4 - 6 broccoli which escaped the rabbits before the fence was up, and some more pathetic looking cabbage.

These boxes are ready to be roped off in the gridlines to help with the square foot planting methods, then planted. That is what we will do today. I have lots of tomato plants, and seeds, but will have to buy some pepper plants, and depending on how many tomatoes look healthy, may buy a couple more of them too. Last year we did 40 tomato plants and the canned tomatoes / spaghetti / and salsa lasted only until January. So this year we are doubling the efforts, hopefully. Once again, we will see how it goes. ;)

No photos again this week, sorry. Maybe next week will not be as busy. ;) Maybe not.

Add your link to the Garden Guru Linky! And go check out Teaching Good Things If you link to them also, you get entered to win prizes! Don't forget to send people this way to link up... the more people we have link here, the more we can all learn from each other.

Another Nathan Funny

Nate is just so funny these days. Today he checked the mousetraps, and commented, "Pet Store mice are nice, but house mice are MEAN."

That kid cracks me up.

I am home from the convention... had a wonderful time. Today we are visiting friends, tomorrow someone has to take Mercy to Cincinnati, and my in-laws are in town land hunting, so I may be scarce these days... talk to you later!

Some more April Photos

Another family post... those of you not interested... see you next week!

Garden Club Friday 4/ 17 / 09

Again, the weather has been bad in Kentucky. Too bad to do more than just check on our garden, not quite time to plant the warm weather crops yet.

My garden so far has been failing, though. I doubt that my cold crops will make it... my broccoli had all but one leaf die. My cabbage might make it but is still really small. My peas, spinach, and lettuce we planted a couple weeks ago have not sprouted yet.

We have been eating salads from the lettuce and spinach I planted last fall, so all is not a total loss.

I am looking forward to seeing how well your gardens have gone! Hopefully better than mine! I hope to have good weather next week to plant our warm weather things. Stay tuned! I'll keep you posted.

I am posting this via my scheduled ghost writer since I am enjoying myself at the Cincinnati Homeschool Convention. If something doesn't work with Mr. Linky... please just leave your link in the comments section. I'll be back in living color next week.

Bible Memory

I thought I had posted about this already, but with the Bible Bee registration ending soon (EVERYONE should register their children!!!), I thought to re-run this post. Then I couldn't find it, so maybe I only THOUGHT I wrote about it. Anyway....

Quite often we go through a topic, and pick out all the verses we can find on that topic. This week we have researched what the Bible says about arguing. We write down all the verses on paper and add them to our Bible notebooks.

Then we pick 5 special ones. We put them on index cards. On the front of the card they write out the whole verse. On the back of the card they write the first letter of each word. So the verse, "Do everything without complaining so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God." says, "Dewcstymbbap,coG." This helps to remind the children what the words may be.

We add a colored index card stating the topic to our ring, then add the other cards behind it. They now have a way to review their memory verses.

When they have a problem with a certain character quality, and need extra work on it, they get to add another verse or two to their ring and memorize it.

This is something that Works for Me! And PLEASE! Go check out the Bible Bee before registration closes on April 30th!!!

[People who live near us IRL... we are going to be having a Wednesday night class at church for those children preparing for the Bee... sign them up!]

The Stink on the Happenings Around Here

We have been having another rough week health wise around here. We went all year without a single illness and then we get Mercy on a medicine she cannot take while sick... and we have been sick for 6 weeks!!! First rotavirus, then croup, and now RSV. Beth and Mercy are still coughing. Bummer.

Other than that, our only excitement happened yesterday. My wonderful, awesome husband had to leave for work at 6 in the morning. He got up before 5 to be able to take a run before work. Our dogs LOVE running with him. So they all headed off to the river. As they were going, Eric saw something waddle across the road. He couldn't figure out what it was... too big for a rabbit, too slow for a cat.

One of the dogs chased after it, and just as Eric came even with them he realized it was a SKUNK!!! And the dog got sprayed. Eric got caught in the crossfire... he said it was like when you spray a room with deoderizer and there is a fine mist settling. He ran through it at about knee level before he was even able to synthesize what was going on.

As if that is not bad enough, without knowing what had happened while his Papa was out, Josiah was wearing this shirt when Eric got home.



He said Eric stank (stunk?) so badly that both their eyes were watering. No one else was up yet. But when Angela came down in the morning, she said the upstairs bedroom smelled really strongly like skunk.

This is what I saw when I took a shower yesterday...



We are chalking this up to a, "If it will be funny later, it is funny now" event. It SURELY will be laughed at for years to come, so we have been laughing all day about it.

We have a Winner!!!

We had several people enter the video giveaway, but unfortunately can only have one winner... remember the rules? Leave a comment is one chance, write a haiku get 5 more, and if you wrote one that made me laugh, you got another? The only person to write a funny one was Lady Why, and wouldn't you know but the funny vote was #11 on my list and random.org chose #11!!! So LADY WHY is our winner!!! Just goes to show you that having a funny bone is a winning combination! E-mail me with your address Lady Why, and I'll get your video out to you. But I warn you, if I cannot get it out tomorrow it'll be next week as I will be at the Cincinnati homeschool convnetion from Thursday to Saturday.

And speaking of funny bones... the seriously funniest thing to happen to the Petersons in recent years happened this morning... stay tuned for what it was. I am still working on the post between the giggles. It definitely falls in the realm of "If it's going to be funny later it'll be funny now." And involves tomato sauce. Any ideas on the adventure?

Head over to Lady Why and congratulate her for her winning Haiku!!!

Weddings and sunshine
The promise of happy days
of endless laundry.