Happy 16th Birthday Alex!!

Alex turned 16 yesterday. It will be a while before he is a driver but we are working on it. He will be taking a couple of classes at Temple College this fall, which starts in a couple of weeks or so. He spent some time with his cousin James this summer in South Carolina.

This is how Alex likes his hair but I chopped it all off the day before his birthday!!! I don't have a very good picture of it yet.

Justin's Vocal Final

Oil Change

I was letting Teyla out when I looked over and saw Mark "helping" change the oil in the van. I thought this was really cute. I don't think you can tell, but he was pulling grass out with his toes. You can't see Alex in any of my pictures as he was completely under the van.

More potatoes

OK. So I have a dozen other things I've been meaning to post and I post about petunia's and potatoes?! Kind of embarrassing. When I first planted these potatoes I watched a bunch of videos by this man who had planted some in a cut up 55 gal. drum and some 5 gallon buckets. I don't know what kind he planted, but he only yielded about 2 -3 lbs. per bucket. Yes, my scale is reading 3 lbs. 10.7 oz. Kinda neat. This is one plant and we only did the one tonight. I will probably do the others next week sometime.

Petunia's

I've fallen in love with Petunia's. I used to think that they were not very pretty, but this spring I've changed my mind. It started with this 4 x 4 post. I hung the upside down cherry tomato on one side and a basket of Petunias temporarily on the other. My plan was to take the basket apart and get the 4 or 5 plants and put them in my boxes (see below). They do this in Germany and it is so pretty, but I've always liked the hanging Geraniums better. Unfortunately the hanging Geraniums are hard to find and I've not had good luck with them in this heat. So I bought the Petunias and it was cheaper this way. I found that I really liked the basket of flowers hanging there. So when it turned out that there were 5 plants in the basket, I put two in each of my boxes below and one back in the basket. That is right there is only 1 Petunia in the hanging basket. Every time I look at it I think, "I can't believe there is only one plant in that thing!"

The hanging cherry tomato was the plant that had the five tomato horn worms on it.

Side view toward my messy front porch.

My two boxes.

Left side of my back porch.

Right side of my back porch.
In this picture you can also see the potato plants on the left and my garden way back there on the right. Most of the green you see with the potatoes are actually grape vines.

Alex & his pet Delaware, Stacy

We ordered some Delaware chickens about 8 months ago. At the time it sounded like a great idea, not so much today. I picked them (10 pullets) up and while Justin was looking around for chicken supplies (he had been warned days, weeks and months in advance) the chicks were in the living room. I was not paying attention because I was making dinner. I kept hearing Alex say, "but we are not having chicken". I thought he was talking to his cousin Stephen, thinking that maybe Stephen really liked chicken and Alex didn't want to share. Or something. As it turns out Alex had been holding one of the chicks and introduced me to her as 'Stacy'. Then it hit me, he didn't want Stacy to know we were actually having chicken! (Yes, and this is a good day for me ;)

It didn't stop him from feeding Stacy a noodle from our chicken helper. I told him it probably wasn't a good idea, but it didn't stop him.

She ate that whole noodle!! We were all impressed. I'll let you know if she survives it.

It's Official!!!

Justin is officially an Eagle Scout!!! He passed his Board of Review today. All that is left is the Court of Honor. Go Justin, go Justin, go Justin . . .