Garden Photos

I missed the peonies, which were lovely, but the spirea is in bloom and the front gardens are overrun with evening primrose. A friend gave me about a dozen or so plants the first spring after we moved into this house, about three years ago and did tell me they would quickly fill in the bare patches in the gardens. No kidding! I really need to thin them out now, but they do look very pretty across the front of the house.

We Have Lettuce!

This is the first year we've tried lettuce, but we were convinced by the lady at the garden centre who said growing lettuce from seed is easy. We are looking forward to eating it! Those are our dwarf pea plants at the top of the photo.

Keeping Busy

We kept ourselves fairly busy throughout the day yesterday and I was definitely ready for my bed at the end of it! The day was sunny, though still not very warm. Adrian left very early in the morning to meet his Dad and sister to move furniture a few hours away. He got home late in the afternoon and went for a nap! The kids and I just made our way through the day, doing one project after another.

Our piano teacher, K, stopped by for half an hour in the morning to review Andrew's and Nicholas' piano pieces for the concert her students are giving next week. Andrew was a bit upset that she had changed the pieces he is performing for the third time, but has gotten over it. I pointed out that the latest ones she has asked him to play he could have done with no practice time anyway. They reached a compromise and he will do four altogether, the two she suggested this week and two of the others he has been practicing for a couple of weeks now. Nicholas was relieved that he had a chance to practice his duet with her and it sounded pretty good! We go Saturday for a quick run-through of the performance, just so all the kids will know where they will be sitting, where they go to come up on stage and the order they will play in.

After lunch, we read for a while. We're reading the third book of Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember series, The Prophet of Yonwood, and while the kids are liking it so far, I'm less impressed than I was of the first book.

The kids finally got to their math books and with a little prodding on my part, Matthew and Nicholas finished theirs. They need more supervision still than Andrew does and he had gone to his room to do his.

I decided after that to get my run done. Since finishing the Couch to 5K program, I've found myself less than enthusiastic about getting down there and running. I haven't been pushing myself and the result is that while I've tried to be consistently running every other day or so (well, maybe twice a week or so...), I have shortened the runs to only ten or fifteen minutes. Not very motivating and not getting me any closer to reaching 5K in one run! This week I thought I'd just walk the entire 5K and find out how long it would take me. I ended up running for about ten minutes in the middle of it, but the walk/run combination had me finishing 5K in 50 minutes. Yesterday I tried it again, only spent more time running, ten minutes here, three minutes there (interruptions forcing me to walk instead of run included Andrew requesting some help with his math and a phone call from Adrian). I finished 5K in 43.5 minutes, a fair amount less than earlier in the week. Now I have a goal - to see if I can shorten that time significantly!

Later on, Matthew and I checked out the veggie garden and noted that the lettuce and peas are growing well, the sunflowers are getting there and the corn and carrots are not up yet. Oh, and quite possibly two of our tomato plants have actually survived our terrible transplanting woes and the subsequent flooding from a rainstorm. We still need to transplant the rest of them, but I'm a little reluctant to do it for some reason! lol! Each time I think that the seeds are finally done germinating and we can send in our results to Tomatosphere, another one pops up! This has taken so much longer than I remember last year.

Matthew and I also watched the honeybees dancing on the allium flowers at the side of the veggie garden. I tried to get a close up of one, but the focus was off. The flowers are pretty though!

We did some more reading after dinner, I visited with a friend on the front porch while the kids played, and then we had a lovely visit with G & K for our prayer time. A full day, for sure, and I slept well last night!

Saturday Fun

Besides transplanting our tomatoes on Saturday, the kids helped weed the vegetable garden and finish planting the seeds. We actually have peas, lettuce and sunflowers growing at the moment. We planted more peas along with corn and carrots on Saturday so we'll see how things turn out. Have I mentioned before we don't have the gardening knack? We are stumbling along each year and we have deemed all our gardening efforts 'experiments' so we don't feel too poorly when things don't grow well! lol!

Saturday was a beautiful day, nice and warm with sunshine making its way through the clouds much of the afternoon. The kids decided it was a great day for water games. The backyard was filled with seven boys ranging in age from 3 to 13 at one point! There was much laughing and squealing in delight.

Avoiding the sprays of water, I managed to get a few shots of the last of the fancy tulips that grow in the grass at one side of the far back of the yard. They are a little more frilled than the tulips in the front gardens and the petals turn down a bit more. They're pretty and I'd like to move them; I'm just not sure where so for now they stay in the grass. Adrian's good about waiting until they've gone over before mowing them down! lol! I also took a shot of one of our apple trees in blossom. Those are nearly finished now, too. We don't usually get much fruit from our trees - the squirrels enjoy chewing the apples and pears before they've finished growing.

Saturday evening I was treated to a lovely performance of The Nutcracker by our local dance academy. I had heard wonderful things about their year-end recitals, but had never gone before. This time, some friends of ours asked if I'd mind taking their daughter (who was in the show) and their sons (who were there to watch) since they couldn't make it for the Saturday evening performance and I am so happy I was able to!

The recital was held at the local public school and I was surprised to see that parking was at a premium - we had to park on a side street and walk over to the school. After I got V settled in with the other dancers in her group I found the boys and we sat down to wait for the start of the show. The chairs arranged on the gym floor were nearly full by the time the show started. We were sitting in the bleachers above and to one side which was great for seeing the stage (and the dancers' feet), but not so great for my back! lol! The bleachers were fairly well filled, too!

The costumes were spectacular, so much more than I had expected and the dancing was wonderful. I was surprised to find that in almost every group of girls who got up there I recognized at least one or two! I had no idea so many little girls in our community danced. There had to be nearly one hundred involved in the show! It was a lovely treat!

Spring Garden

Tulips, bleeding heart and forget-me-nots in one of the front gardens at home. The photo was taken May 11 and since then most of the tulips have had their petals blown off with the high winds we recently had.

Vegetables

Yesterday the boys and I got out into the garden and turned the soil again. Adrian had done it twice already, mixing in some compost as well. After the soil was turned we finally planted some seeds: romaine lettuce and dwarf peas. They are the only seeds we have that can be planted before the soil warms up. Once that happens we'll be adding corn and carrots to that garden plot. Oh, and the sunflowers we started inside last week will go at one end of the garden. That just leaves a second type of pea, a climbing variety, that we're going to try alongside the sunflowers so they will hopefully climb the sunflower stalks.

More than half of the sunflowers we started inside have sprouted and are growing well. We'll transplant them next week, I think. The tomatoes have also started to sprout. The kids are certain they know which seeds have been treated and which ones are the control group because at this time one group has only one seed germinated and the other group has five. Maybe I won't be scrambling to find homes for all the tomato plants this year and we'll only end up with a small number for ourselves!

Andrew's Garden

This photo is of the windowsill in Andrew's room. He has a number of different plants there - coriander, basil and oregano that the kids planted at The Book Club one night, grass (he keeps it trimmed using scissors), and I believe he also has an acorn, a maple key, mustard seed, and some beans that are in containers on a table near the window. These last ones haven't sprouted yet, though. I'm hoping he's this interested in helping in the garden this summer!!!

The First Flowers!

These hyacinths are the very first flowers to bloom in my gardens this spring!

Fruits from the Garden

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. I swept the porch, took the hanging baskets to the back deck to await their trip to the shed, rearranged the potted mums I bought on the weekend, and finally picked the pumpkins from our garden.


We only ended up with three, but with three kids that worked out very well. Nicholas has already claimed the smaller one that is still mostly green. It had been growing outside of the actual garden in a spirea bush so didn't get much light. I moved it a couple of weeks ago so that the sun could reach it. Most of the vines have died off now which is why we decided to go ahead and pick them.


The little gourd is the only one that grew. This was the first time trying gourds and we used seeds from some gourds we had from last year. The kids wanted to hollow them out just like pumpkins and carve them so we saved the seeds. Only one plant lasted through transplanting and only one lonely little gourd from that one plant.


Oh, and I've attached a pic of our one little tomato from our Tomatosphere seeds. There are some still on the vines that are very green. This is the only one that turned a nice orangey-red. Lesson learned. There isn't enough sun for the tomatoes at that end if the beans are right beside them.

Glorious Evening!

Thursday evening was gorgeous! One ash tree in our yard has turned brilliant yellow. The oak hasn't done much yet, other than dropping acorns all over which the boys have been collecting (I'm not sure why!). The maples on our property are not the kind that turn beautiful fall colours. They kind of go a dingy dark green and drop to the ground. However, around town there are many that have a lovely red colour already. I need to remember to take the camera with me the next time we go out to do the papers near the pool.

Nicholas and Matthew spent some time outside practising their Tae Kwon Do moves. Their instructor can go into a full splits and do push ups in that position so all three boys have been doing their best to do the splits. They have learned their first pattern this week as well, which is necessary for them to know for their yellow belt testing. We found a website that has videos of each of the patterns, along with a written list of the steps. They have been eagerly studying this and Nicholas can do the pattern from memory now. This week they've also learned in class how to count to five in Korean. Andrew has made himself a little booklet of Korean words and has been studying them. They are totally fascinated by the language and are soaking up the new words.

Late Sunflowers

It's taken a while, but the second of our two sunflower plants that survived transplanting is bursting with flowers. It's so pretty out in the garden. The beans are still coming on strong so we'll need to get out there and pick some more. The pumpkins are turning a lovely orange, too.

The biggest surprise for me yesterday was finding two great-looking pears on our pear tree. There are two others that are on the smallish side and not looking nearly as nice. The first summer we lived here the pear and apple trees were full of fruit. Unfortunately, before most of it ripened we had some problems. The boys (not just mine, but some neighbours as well) thought it was really cool to toss the pears to each other and swing a bat at them. At first they were just taking the ones that had dropped off the tree and would amount to nothing edible anyway. Then they started picking them right off the tree to use. Ugh. Not more than a half dozen pears left! The apples didn't fair much better, other than being rather nasty looking and nobody wanted to eat them.

The second summer, all the trees had loads of blossoms, but only one apple tree and the pear tree started showing fruit. The fruit didn't last long. The squirrels knocked off all the pears while they were still tiny and most of the apples, too. The rest of the apples attracted a huge amount of wasps that enjoyed boring holes into every one of them so that they were actually rotting on the tree. Yuck!

This summer I didn't hold out much hope when I saw the squirrels in the trees again and saw the little apples and pears on the ground early in the season. There are no apples left on the tree. We've seen no fruit on the plum tree at all since we've lived here and the other apple tree hasn't produced anything for the last two years. I'm not good in the garden, as Adrian will attest. The fact that we've been able to eat something from this year's garden has surprised us all. But I do enjoy getting out there and mucking about in the soil, planting things and trying to keep them alive!

All for One!

My boys love to duel with whatever is handy (sticks, paper swords, Lego creations, etc.). Beans is definitely something new, but they couldn't resist. The beans are coming in really fast and we've neglected to pick some since, well, since that last monstrous one last weekend. The beans are on the large side and there is no way we'll eat them so I've had to search for blanching methods.

Playing in the Garden

I grabbed the camera when we took Panda out this evening. It's beautiful outside and too nice to spend it inside. Nicholas wanted me to take a photo of him and Panda. Matthew is such a little monkey, he kept trying to get in the way of the photo. I deleted several of his blurry fingers or face in the middle of the shot. Nicholas took the one of me; turned out pretty good. He likes using the camera and is very patient in framing the shot he wants. He actually takes good photos most of the time. While we were goofing around with the dog and the camera, Adrian cut the grass. He's plugged in with his MP3 player so he didn't even notice me taking his picture!

Beans!

Our garden has finally started producing beans! We picked some today and Matthew was totally taken with the size of them, especially the largest one which measured 27cm!!! We had them for dinner and they were really delicious. Well, everyone except Adrian thought so. He ate them, but has a dislike for "squeaky green beans"!

Spring at Last?

Yes, it's true! There are signs of life out in the front gardens. I only took one photo, but there are greens sprouts all throughout the gardens! How exciting! It makes it seem as if winter really will end soon and we'll be able to get out there and get our hands dirty. Now, to be honest, I'm not sure what these are coming up in the photo because I cannot remember what was in that area of the garden last year. Tulips? Hyacinths? No idea! I don't care, though, because spring is on the way!