Five Boys Happy Home

Memorial Day is one of the few holidays each year that Scott has, and this year I used some of the time to work on the back yard. Not finished, but much better!  We finally pruned our chokecherry shrubs after letting them grow wild for a time. The late snow broke some of the branches, and last November I think the sudden freeze also killed some sections. Anyway, I can get around them a lot better to harvest, if we have any this year.  We also decided to go ahead and purchase rubber mulch, which is supposed to stay put better and last, well, probably forever! I think it goes a long way toward making the yard easier to maintain over the next few busy years!  Our garden is doing okay, despite a few freezing nights. Potatoes, beets, lettuce and carrots are all doing well. One tomato plant might pull through. Yay for the brown thumbs! I couldn't have done it without the weeks of rain though, ha! Potatoes in a barrel! Hope you have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Greetings! This spring seems quite rainy right now, for which I am quite happy. I think I'm going to combine the family blog with my school blog. I have two because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I don't have the time to write two blogs! Especially if they have the same audience. So silly.  Anyway, if I had not mentioned it before, Jack started 1st grade work about 5 weeks ago. We are so proud of him and he loves it still. His favorite subject right now is science. The theme of our textbook is life on the farm. So our year will go over plants, animals, geology, and weather mostly. Right now we are into plants: how they grow, how we use them, and classifying seeds and plants by type.  The most fun has been using our lessons practically by working on a garden! We have two roots growing in water on his desk, some peas starting in plastic cup "greenhouses" and lots more outside. We are mostly doing containers. We started 4 types of lettuce, a handful of beets...