It’s official folks, school is out for the summer! I can hear Alice Cooper’s song now, SCHOOLS OUT FOR THE SUMMER. It’s been a long time coming: a year of assignments, research papers, exams and report cards, but I’ve made it – and it was good. Now begins a much needed summer break and quality family time.
Now that school is out, I plan on hitting up some projects in the garden and being outdoors as much as possible. We’ve already started preparing the ground behind one of our fields for a greenhouse, and the job is nearing completion (I will go into detail shortly).
In the meantime, the crazy parenting life persists, as my children continue to surprise me with a whole bunch of unexpected things – like when I caught Isaac yesterday eating sugar directly from the sugar dish…yeesh!
It’s been a while since I last wrote (even though my blog post about the Catholic Church and roosters is steadily bringing in viewers), so I hope you enjoy today’s blog.
Garden Projects
The process has been long, but my garden is slowly transforming. An area where the wild bushes flourished, and weeds were the common plants, it’s been quite challenging preparing the ground. If you could imagine the environment: large, mature birch trees running parallel to a dirt field, with rhubarb and Black Current bushes directly opposite on the other side of the field.
Every year, we have grown all kinds of crops in our field; but this year, I decided to expand the growing area by preparing the ground adjacent to the field with a greenhouse and two flower gardens.
I first measured off the ground for the greenhouse, and then I drove over the ground with our 1956 Massey Harris tractor (which I badly want to give a paint job! As the faded red, chipped colour is long overdue for a refreshing coat of paint – Vision style, bright green with yellow), with the forked teeth attachment for tearing up the sod and unusable ground. After this was finished, myself and my father raked the ground, used a pickaxe for troublesome rocks, and leveled off the area as best as we could. By far, this was the most laborious of the tasks, as many of the rocks in the area were about a foot long (which turned out okay, since I used them to make a natural wall for my first flower garden, as seen in the first picture).
My dad then bought about fifteen five-gallon buckets of crushed stone, which we dumped onto the ground and leveled off with my rake. The next step of my reimagined garden is to assemble the greenhouse we bought from Princess Auto, and then plant all the veggies in the greenhouse and field. I’ll keep you posted in the coming weeks.
Before I keep going, I want to mention this amazing app that I downloaded (and no, I don’t get anything from promoting this app), it’s called PictureThis. This app lets you take a picture of any plant, shrub, tree, etc and then it uploads the picture to its massive database. The amount of information I learned in five minutes…blew…my…mind! I found out right away why my Rhododendron leaves were turning yellow – I was watering it too much! It only needs water every 24 days (based on June water data, for the area I live in).
Yes sir, it actually takes into account your location (if you share it) to tailor the average temperature and water rainfall. I then roamed around my yard like a hunchback, taking pictures of every flower, weed, and shrub. Everything came back accurate, with identical pictures and interesting data. It’s $9.99 a month, which might seem expensive, but honestly it’s worth it.
Funny Quotes
I’ve found myself saying some strange things lately to my children, things that I never thought I would utter in an intelligent sentence. I shall record some here for your reading pleasure.
First example, “Take the pillow away from the toilet.” Why is there a pillow by the toilet? I have no idea, but one of my children placed a pillow on the floor underneath the toilet bowl for some unexplained reason.
Second: “Tie a rope around my stomach and pretend I am a cow.” Yes, this one just happened today when we were all outside. It was my oldest son’s idea of starting a new game. All my children began mooing like cows, and apparently “escaped” the fenced in yard (which was the pen) and escaped into the wild.
Third: “Of course not!” Sure, this might seem normal enough – but try adding it to every sentence possible, even with those that don’t even make sense. For instance, Railene asked Isaac if he had milk with his cereal the other day. Isaac exclaimed, “Of course not!” Strange, because he has milk with every other bowl of cereal or meal, yet he decided to absolutely shoot down the idea of him having milk that day. “Isaac, do you want to play?” “Of course not!”
Four: Last week, a teacher asked Isaac at our school concert, “What are you going to be when you get older?”
“A police officer,” Isaac responded.
The same Teacher asked Ava what she was going to be, Ava responded with, “A queen.”
I hope you enjoyed this blog! Please remember to share, like, and subscribe to my blog.
Christian
The Eason Clan 