September 2023

 

After staying home all summer, busy with gardens and projects, we took a trip to the East side of the mountains and met our newest great grandson, Atlas. Another happy baby!

Grandpa Tony is teaching the older kiddos how to do chin ups! He's a total believer in core strength and knows the earlier you begin building muscles, the better you do as an adult.

Our oldest great grandson with knife and sheath he created using paper, glue, and imagination.

This one prefers Grandpa Ron to Grandma Rosie. He crawled right up on Ron's lap, ignoring all my friendly overtures. I may be losing my baby touch!

And sometimes, you just need a grandma lap and a short nap.
Back home to more projects:

The hillside where you can see Ron on the excavator, has been covered with blackberries for many years. He first scraped the blackberry bushes off, then we moved four 40 year old rhododendrons from where they were encroaching on the driveway to that hillside. Although an excavator makes this move possible, there is still a lot of hand work involved! At the base of the hill, I planted several hundred flower bulbs - tulips, daffodils, and dahlias. It should be beautiful if everything survives the move. We gave the plants the best possible start by waiting until they were dormant, and doing it in the middle of a torrential rain event.

Sixty-five years ago, as a teenager, I helped my father build a huge septic tank from brick. It has served the house all those years. When we relocated the driveway to come by the tank, we had to protect it from big trucks driving over it. We had railroad ties around the edge, but they weren't very pretty, so Ron removed them the other day, and we created a berm of dirt as a barrier. I robbed various plants from other places on the property to ensure that people can see it and hopefully avoid driving on it.

While harvesting most of the garden is over, winter squash time is just beginning. We had our first acorn squash stuffed with butter, brown sugar, pecans, and craisons yesterday! Still no frost, but the squash was hard enough it took a saw to cut it in half.