Back Home

Our glads ...

Creative t-ball. Koria decided to field while on her four-wheeler, doing crazy stunts. Kept the kids busy while I worked on the garden ...

Can't you just smell the fresh-squeezed lemon juice?

The after shot ...

... and the before ... notice how many bags of beans we ended up with. I estimated that I picked around 12 gallons on Monday, August 8th. We had about 3 1/2 gallons of peas (before shelling), and a lot of peppers and tomatoes as well ... and some onions.

Like I mentioned before, we returned home on the night of August 6th, then had to get busy with all of the work for us here at home. Jared started on the garden and mowed the lawn, I bathed the kids and got them to bed, then hit the books to prepare for a gospel doctrine lesson that I had to teach the next morning at church.

Sunday was just as busy with teaching, meetings, neighbors dropping off a few things, etc. On Monday morning, after Luke and Layne took their nap, I headed out to the garden. It took five hours to pick all the beans and peas, peppers, and tomotoes that were there. Luke and Layne enjoyed an extended stay in their cribs. They did sleep for a majority of it. All the kids came home with colds from our trip, so the extra rest was good.

Hello sunburn city! The back of my neck and ears were burnt so badly that they blistered after all the garden work.

Then I had to prep all of the beans, blanch them, package them, shell the peas, do the same with them as I did with the beans, then make a couple lemon meringue pies for neighbors/friends in the ward who had had birthdays. We took a bunch of produce to neighbors too. I didn't want to have to take care of it all ....

Our Gladiolus decided to start blooming while we were away too, but all of the hollyhocks died as a result of extremely hot temps during our absence.