Garden on the Mind

I went running with my brother Jarod yesterday and he asked me how the garden was. I asked if he had seen the blog. He just started laughing and nodded his head. We were in Vernal for a couple of days and I was more worried about finding someone to water the garden than I was about finding someone to feed the dog. Big thanks to Jeremy Nelson for taking care of both for me, my zucchini grew a bunch under his care for the weekend.

We were in Vernal for my sister Erin's High School Graduation. It was great to see her graduate. She also was awarded a full tuition scholarship to Snow College. I am going to go check out Ephraim with her tomorrow. (Just in case anyone is wondering, according to USU, Ephraim has more seed stores than any other city in the state. I can't wait to check some of them out and see if I find some sort of new plant I need to hurry and get in the ground.) The graduation service started with some comedy, they forgot to bring the US Flag. They had everyone say the Pledge of Allegiance. For the first half of the Pledge the whole crowd was looking around for a flag but there was none to be found, just a lonely empty flagpole. The kids that spoke were pretty good and the weather was great.

Congratulations Erin!!

Mom and Dad figured since we were all there handy, they may as well have us rebuild their deck. Jarod, the architect, did a great job of running the crew and getting it all together. My nephews were great to wrestle down and pick on. It looks like I only have about 5 years until either one of them will out weigh me. They are only 5 and 2 right now but they are BIG BOYS! Both of them are pushing 50 pounds and are solid.

Julie came in tonight as I was getting these pics loaded and asked if I realized I took more pictures of the garden lately than I did the kids! I told her I didn't realize it, but it made sense, the plants hold still longer!

Another week has gone by and the garden is still growing. I am quite excited to watch the plants as they develop. It is amazing to me.

Here are the beets:

Here is Mick's Big Max pumpkin:

Here is an over view of the corn, cucumbers (on the left), and tomatoes (on the right):

Here is one of the cucumbers:

These are our tomatoes:

Here is the corn patch (I think I am going to tear out half of it an replant it so we have corn for a few weeks this fall rather than all at once):

Here is what one of our boxes looks like. We have 2 4' X 4' boxes and 1 4' X 8" box.

Carrots, Radishes, and Strawberries:

Watermelon:

Zucchini:

Tori's little pumpkins:

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day we went to the service at Provo's cemetery then we went hiking to Stewart Falls. It was a fun hike. The kids were awesome hikers. Mick really was a trooper. It was amazing how many people were up there.

Tori was riding on my shoulders and carrying a stick. She let the stick hit a tree as we went by and it jabbed into the side of my neck and her leg. This picture was before our only injury of the day.

We were about halfway back to the truck by this point when the boy was beginning to wear down a little. Luckily he decided to sit down in a spot that didn't have any Stinging Nettle.

It was a great day. It so wonderful we are free to go out in some beautiful country without any worries of danger.

THANK YOU VETS and SERVICE PEOPLE!!

The Carrots Sprouted!!

Here are our carrots that decided to come out duing the night last night!!! Everything we planted has now sprouted.

This is Tori's little pumpkin plant at 7 pm last night:

Here it is at 11 am this morning:

We have some strawberries that aren't looking so good this morning. Anybody know how often to water them? I they might be getting to much to drink.

What Adam failed to mention in his last post was that he was born in Midland, Texas. He will deny it, but it is true!!

From the mouths of my babes (sort of)

My Grandpa Hall ran a trucking company in Vernal UT in the oilfield. He worked on oilrigs as a young man also. As such, he ran into quite a few Texans. In his mind, the only people goofier than Texans are O-kees. I grew up hearing lots of less than nice things about Texans and kind of picked up a little of this thought train. I may have mentioned it to Mick once or twice but can't be sure. One of my Grandpa's favorite stories was when my Uncle Ken Barker chased a room full of Texans and O-kees out of their office building after they cheated their drivers out of their overtime.

Today Julie took Mick to DI to buy some books. As they were walking through the store Mick asked her "Why do people donate things as precious and wonderful as books to DI?" She said "I don't know. I guess they just don't know how great books are." Mick responded "Good thing we have Texans to donate books."

This afternoon we were at Macey's grocery store and they were having a party in the parking lot. They had a blow up dragon there. They were selling hotdogs from a small trailor in the parking lot. Tori wanted to get a hotdog, she has some of her own money, she stepped up and asked for a dog then handed over her quarter. She grabbed her dog in one hand, took a bite, stuck her other hand as high in the air as she could and yelled "I LOVE AMERICA!!"

The Garden

We are now one week into the garden experiment and it is doing pretty good, everything but our carrots have sprouted and no plants have died.

If any of you knew my Grandma and Grandpa Olsen you know they loved gardening. They only had about 389.85 acres worth. (It was actually closer to 1 acre of garden and 4 acres of corn, I think) but it felt huge when I was little. They even had an outhouse in the garden, leftover from earlier times when they didn't have running water. Some of my best memories are panning for gold in the irrigation ditch on their property or driving their old 1978 Green Chevy Nova around in circles. If I kept the wheel cranked as hard as could be I could go in circles between the chicken coop, the burn barrels (that is how they dealt with garbage, in case anyone hasn't heard of burn barrels) and the massive Box Elder trees. It made it kind of tricky because I had to look between the steering will and the dashboard to see out. Cranking the wheel that hard put the support in the steering wheel right where my 10 year old eyes should have been looking out to see the coop, barrels, trees, coop, barrels, trees, coop barrels, trees.... My grandpa made sure I always checked the oil before driving off to go in circles then he would sit in the shade between the huge trees as I raised dust clouds over that half of the Uinta Basin. Occasionally he would have me water down my round racetrack before I got started but not to often. I would have the radio going and it seems like the only song that radio ever played was "Black Velvet." Anyhow...

I am sure Grandma and Grandpa are chuckling at my 32 square feet of garden but I am so proud of it I could pop. Here are some picture of our progress so far:

Our corn patch:



Here is a Celebrity Tomato:

More Celebrity Tomatos:

Here is our Lemon Tomato (they will be yellow) :

Here are some cucumbers:

Here are Tori's small pumpkins. It was amazing to watch the closer plant actually come out of the dirt in the time it took me to water the garden and take pictures this afternoon:

Last, but not least, our watermelons and radishes:

I got to go on Mick's field trip with his class to Thanksgiving Point. It was a ton of fun. I was in charge of watching Mick, his friend Zack (about the same energy level as Mick), and their female counterpart, Gabby. There was also a fairly mellow girl named McKenna. We got to see a beehive with clear sides. It was pretty neat to watch the bees do their thing.

Then they got to do a skit about how a seed grows into an apple tree (see our apple tree above), then a bee pollinates the blossoms, then a bear eats the apple, the bear then ___s (rhymes with skit) in the woods and that makes the trees grow better and puts more seeds in the ground. Then whole process starts over again.

Then we got to listen to a college sophomore talk about animals. It was amazing to me how wise and knowledgeable he was. It made me regret all the times I have taken my brain out and played with it in front of other people.

The kids got to play in the water around Noah's Ark. One of the poor teachers felt like she needed to keep the kids out of the water but there was an unstoppable force pulling the kids in. The rest of us just acknowledged the fact we couldn't stop them and enjoyed watching them splash.

We then went to eat lunch at a park. Beleive it or not the boys were all quite wet. As soon as we pulled up to the park a bunch of clouds covered up the sun and a breeze started to blow. It was pretty chilly.

There was one girl who was obviously quite poor. She only brought a half empty container of cottage cheese for her lunch. There were several of the other kids who shared their lunches with her. I was so impressed with their care and concern for classmate.

It was a great time getting to hang out with my lucky boy. Julie buzzed his hair awhile ago and since then Mick has had "Lucky Fuzz" instead of hair. Julie and I rub his head for good luck. Whenever Mick thinks his head is running low on luck he will hold his hands over his head and wiggle his fingers to reload the luck. It is pretty great to have some lucky fuzz around.

Tap Dancing Tori

Tori has decided that she loves to tap dance and what's even better, she taught herself (haha). She really enjoys performing for us. She probably would be willing to give lessons if anyone is interested. Anyone? And yes, she can teach you how to dress for the recital too. All you need is an old ratty shirt, an Easter bonnet, church shoes, red lipstick, and a tutu. No pants required.

Our Gymnast

Airtime Gymnastics had their annual "Spring Spectacular" this month. It's a chance for the little ones to show off their skills to their moms and dads. I am so proud of Victoria. She does her very hardest to listen to her coach and follow the coach's instructions exactly. It's been a fun year to watch her progress. She gets to move up a level this summer and the instructors say she should be ready for the 6-9 year old competing group this fall.

Summer is Here!!

This is a darling little ladybug figurine I got from Rodworks. I decided I have to go get the butterfly and dragonfly now.

We were trying to get a picture of the kids and Bandit together, but Bandit has a harder time sitting still for the camera even more than Mick.

Here Bandit had just jumped over Tori's head off the porch. I loved the smile on Mick's face, though. He loves that dog.

Isn't she so photogenic? Well, usually she is...................

The Gardening Bug

So here are some pictures of our first garden ever!! I figured we ought to get some pictures of it while it still looks good before we kill it. I don't know why Adam and I think we can grow vegetables when we can't even keep our grass alive, but we are going to give it a shot. We are trying to grow corn, tomatos, cucumbers, watermelon, radishes, carrots, zucchini, crookneck squash, pumpkins and beets, lots of beets. I can't wait to make bottled pickled beets later this summer. Yum!!

Adam and I are definately feeling old these days. I never thought I would see the day when we were so excited to grow a garden. And earlier this month we were given a deep freezer and we were ecstatic about it too. We kept going out to the garage all day just to look in it!! We are such dorks, but at least we are easily entertained.