I'm Giving Peas a Chance

I spent this morning tilling and improving the soil in a portion of our garden box. It was the spot where the tomatoes and the corn used to be. I haven't reworked any of the other areas yet because we still have a steady stream of watermelons, birdhouse gourds and pumpkins growing back there. Anyway, today I put nutrients back into the soil (hopefully as much as the tomatoes removed) and planted mixed lettuce seeds and either snow peas or sugar snap peas. A friend brought the pea seedlings over and I forgot to get the specifics at the time. I hope they grow.

UPDATE: They're snow peas. And I also planted garlic.

Switcheroo

This summer one of our red Japanese Maple trees died. Yesterday we returned the tree (or rather, a tree trunk with a few bare dried up branches) to the store where we bought it. It was one of many maples we have in our yard so we weren't too upset about it, but it was still a bummer. Last week Chad and I decided we wanted to plant a fig tree in its place. We already have one in our yard and we love everything about it. The leaves are beautiful, the branches are funky and weird, and the entire tree has more than doubled its size since we bought it in late May. I hope this new tree does as well as our current one.

We also bought a purple Crepe Myrtle bush for the front side yard. Chad planted it in the dark and did a great job despite the lack of lighting!

I walked for Liz (and Matt and Madeline)!

I usually take a break from exercise on the weekends but today I chose to participate in the Liz Goodman Logelin 5k Walk/Run. (I walked. I am not a runner.) If you don't know anything about Liz, Matt and Madeline you should visit this blog to read their story: http://www.mattlogelin.com/. Or read this post to learn exactly what happened.

Matt and Madeline live in the same area that we did in Southern California. While we have never met them, we feel like we have.

Balloons Again

Saturday we attended the annual air balloon festival here in our area. It started bright and early at 7:00am and we made it in time to see most of them set off. We were able to get a lot closer to the balloons than I thought we would. In fact, some of them flew low just above our heads. Pretty cool.

Watermelon!

This evening Chad and I decided to finally pick a watermelon. We have five more melons in our yard at various stages of growth. Another one (we think) will be ready in the next week or two. After Chad cut the watermelon we weighed it using our bathroom scale.


Today's melon, if you can believe this, weighed 30 pounds! It was huge and heavy.







After we cut and tasted it we realized that there's no way we can eat the whole thing by ourselves. We cut it into quarters and delivered large chunks to three of our neighbors. Hopefully they like watermelon! We had some this evening after dinner and it was great.

Camping Again

Last Friday we went with Chad's family to Hume Lake for the weekend. There were eight of us and we all had a great time. We managed to fit a lot into the quick trip and really could have used an extra day to do some more. We walked around the entire lake, ate good food, hit the Celebrate Sequoias Festival, swam at Sandy Cove, made marshmallow guns, shared bear stories, cooked in a dutch oven, paddled around the lake in canoes and visited Boyden Cavern, a marble cave deep in the Sierra.