Day 291

This morning everything outside was covered in a layer of frost! It was quite beautiful, but it killed my pumpkin vine. My stupid pumpkin is still green, so I'm gonna put it in the window in the sun, and hope that it turns orange in the next week and a half.

Day 261

On the way home from picking Ryan up from a play date, I stopped on the side of the road to pick some wild flowers. These are the last ones of the season before everything goes brown and dead.

Day 259

At the bus stop this morning I was surprised with a tin of "get well" cookies from one of Ryan's schoolmates. I thought that was veyry kind of him, and for a 13 year old boy, he did a pretty good job. I may have had 3 of them for breakfast LOL

A check in the garden revealed that I have 1 measly pumpkin growing in my patch. That's 1 better than last year. I don't know why I can't grow any pumpkins. I have seen a few gardens around here with big orange pumpkins already and all I have is this little green thing about the size of a baseball.

Day 221

Black Eyed Susans are one of my favourite flowers. This little guy had decided to make one of my flowers his home.

Day 205

This plant was sitting at the curb with a bunch of trash, so I made Wally pull over and I hopped out to get it. I can't believe someone would just throw it out. We did a little trimming and now it sits in the bedroom enjoying the sun. Better than in a landfill!

Day 200

A busy bee working hard in the yard.

One of the sunflowers that I have been growing has finally bloomed

Day 185

We are in the middle of a disgusting heat wave, so to try to beat the heat, I took Ryan out for his first ever Slush. He was insisting that he was never going to drink it, and no matter what I told him, he was convinced I was trying to feed him some kind of poison. So I said "It's like a melty popscicle, stick your finger in it and feel how nice and cold it is." Suddenly he perked up and said "Hey, it is nice and cold!" He took a sip and exclaimed "Mom, this is even better than ice cream!" Ahhh...never doubt The Mom young grasshopper.

Here is a self-portrait showing off our slush stained tongues

I also noticed how many wild lilies are blooming around the property. They are beautiful, but a real nuisance. Once you get them in your garden, they are almost impossible to get rid of, each flower/plant has and makes a million bulbs at it's roots. If you dig them out and miss just one bulb, it will grow back. I have a few pop up every spring in places I don't want them, and no matter how many times I try to kill/get rid of them, there they are again the next spring.

Day 179

This bird is called a Bobolink. We don't see them much around here, so I had to stop the car and get a picture. The plant it is on is called Poison Parsnip and it's everywhere around here. If you ever see it, stay clear. The juices in the plant will stick to your skin, and when the juice is exposed to UV light (the sun), it will cause a reaction that burns and blisters your skin. The blisters will cause scars that will last for years.

Day 176

For some reason, one of the kittens thinks this cactus is a tasty treat. I don't know how he's managing to eat it with all the spines, every time I get near it, I end up picking splinters out of my fingers for days.

Day 169

The garlic plants we transplanted from the woods have started blooming, so I guess that means they like their new home in our garden and we'll have lots of new plants popping up in the spring.

I baked the cakes for Ryan's school BBQ tomorrow and ended up with my feet looking like this...Apparently, I make a real mess in the kitchen when I cook and bake.

Day 133

I wanted to take a nice close-up picture of a dandilion, but when I uploaded it, it came out a little dark. I put it through the auto adjust function of my photo program, I got this. I love the funky blue background, so I saved it this way :)

I planted my wild garlic garden today and surrounded it by 2 big ostrich ferns. Not much longer until the leaves die off of the garlic plants and the flowers bloom, only then will I know for sure if it has taken to it's new home.

I also dug up 2 of these gorgeous flowers I found in the woods. I thought they were pitcher plants at first, but it turns out they are called Jack in the Pulpits, and you can eat the root bulbs. Apparently they taste like turnips, which doesn't appeal to me, and I couldn't destroy this beautiful plant just for a taste of it's tiny bulb.

For supper I made bacon carbonara with fiddleheads and some of the wild garlic, and for dessert, a lemon poppy seed loaf.

Day 132

After finishing our garage sale cleaning and sorting in the barn today, we took a nice walk in the woods. We took another old over grown horse trail that nobody has been on in over 10 years. We went off the beaten path and found this little lake. It ran down into a creek that was filled with minnows and tadpoles. Must go back with a bucket and a net :)

On the way back towards the house we went straight through the deep woods and came across a large patch of wild garlic, or as some people call them, ramps. I picked a leaf and tore it in half taking a sniff, and was instantly hit with that garlic-y smell. I have been looking for some of this stuff in the woods for years, I can't believe I finally found some. :)

For dinner we had planned on making hamburgers, so we chopped up some wild garlic bulb into the meat, chopped some of the leaves into the rice, and I sautéed some smaller bulbs and leaves up with tomato in olive oil with salt, pepper and rosemary for Wally.

Day 114

At the park with the giant rock. Alex is big enough this year to crawl to the top (with a little help from Dad)

Pretty flowers I spotted in the woods. I might dig some up and transplant them in my garden.

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Ryan doing a chicken imitation. Buck buck buck!

Day 100!

I had noticed lately that my pond wasn't looking as deep as I thought it was, and that after I turned off my waterfall I was losing over an inch of water a day. Wally and I decided to give it a thorough cleaning to see if there was a leak in the liner or something. Well we ended up spending hours pulling up bucket fulls of gravel, rocks that Ryan has thrown in over the years, and nasty goop. I have an awesome pair of pond gloves that go up to my armpits that made the job a lot easier. After adjusting a few rocks on the falls and turning down the water flow, we got it all running again only to find out a few hours later that the water line was still going down. This might mean that I have to disassemble my whole waterfall, which is going to be a huge job that I'm not looking forward to.

We then took another hike in the woods where I came across these gorgeous little flowers, one are of the woods was covered in them.

When it was time to head home Alex had a spaz and didn't want to leave. We kept walking and said "Ok, bye Alex!" Hoping he would come running when he saw we were serious, but he wouldn't budge. So I kept walking and said "Ok Alex, we'll leave you here in the woods and maybe a wolf or bear will want to raise you" Then Ryan stopped and said "Oh no, my poor baby brother is going to be all alone in the woods!" So he runs over to him, gives him a hug and says..."Bye, I'll miss you." LOL!

Day 89

We were expecting company today, but they cancelled at the last minute. Alex ended up in daycare and Wally and I just took a day to ourselves to relax. We took another walk in the woods and decided to try and take a walk once a week on our kid-free alone days from now on. We'll try and find new spots to explore every time. Here are some nature pics from our trek today.

After we got home I used yesterday's apple sauce to make a spice cake with a buttermilk syrup topping.

Day 48

I spent a better part of the day cleaning up the bay window in the kitchen. There was just stuff everywhere... cat food, cat hair, kids toys, tools, dirt from the plants, it was terrible. I gave the windows a good cleaning, took down the old x-mas lights outside, fixed the blind, and re-potted a bunch of plants (I've been pulling cactus needle splinters out of my hands all evening, youch!). It looks great now, I don't think it has been this clean in a long time.

Day 21

This is the lone flower on an African Violet I picked up at the grocery store. The poor thing was sitting with a friend on a discount shelf for .99 cents. They looked so pathetic and I knew if I didn't take them home, they would probably either die, or be thrown out...so I brought them both home. Yes, I actually felt sorry for a plant.