Memorial Day Memories

Today we had a very homey type of day. After being away for a wedding over the weekend, we decided to take advantage of the sunshine and get our garden started. It had already been plowed, rotor tilled, and four wheeled.

Yes, I said four-wheeled.

I allowed one of my son's friend to do donuts with his four wheeler to help "throw" the soil around to flatten it out a bit. We have VERY VERY VERY VERY rocky soil, and it was much easier to let a machine take care of as much of the work as possible. It worked really well!




This morning we bought some plants and some flowers. By the time we got home everyone was hot, tire, and ready for our bbq dinner. We had cheeseburgers, potato wedges, a big veggie salad, a cake for dessert.

After dinner (and I mean a midday meal here, not supper) we dispersed into our different jobs. My daughter Elizabeth had stirred up some bread dough while Esther was making cake earlier, and punched it down into loaves while we were eating. It was ready for the oven, so I put it in, set the timer, and told Josiah and Caleb, who were on for dishes, to let me know when the timer went off.

Meanwhile, Esther and I went out and cleaned out the memorial garden, and started planting the flowers. Dale and Elizabeth went to the veggie garden and started planting tomatoes and peppers.




You can see around the edges that we need to get some gas for our weed whacker and put it to use!


I helped plant the onions, lettuce, cabbage and herbs.





It isn't finished yet, as we still plan on planting green beans, and squash. But it is good to know we have a very good start on it! Hopefully we won't get any more hail like we did last night!

We also have lavender....




chamomile....



Spearmint, Peppermint, and Oregano....



There is also Lemon Verbena in there, but I neglected to get a picture of it! It is a tall plant, with little white blossoms on it, and smells very lemony!

The herbal part of the garden is something of an experiment for me. I tried years ago to have a nice little herbal garden where the memorial garden is, but failed. I don't think it got enough sun. We have streamlined our vegetable garden this year, and I have the space to play with some herbs. My guess is that they will do much better in the full sunlight.

Benjamin did some prep work for putting up our pool and fetched water for all us gardeners and played with Isaac when he was up from our nap. It is such a blessing to have so many good helpers!


After all the hard work we went down to the creek to cool off. The current was quite strong due to the recent storms we have been having, so the littles stayed up in the shallow end with Daddy and I took the older, better swimmers to the "swimming hole" as they call it.



We are all having a "grazing" type of supper, baths, then popcorn and a movie.

It has been a very busy, productive day here! I hope you all had a great weekend too!

Blessings!