Quick Update

THE COUNTDOWN'S ON: Like so many others, we are counting down the days until the election. We decided to do so literally and I ordered a DIY advent calendar.

Annabelle used her Cricut to cut out numbers for the drawers. She also cut out letters for the sentiment in the middle of the calendar.

Now, we just need to figure out what to put in the little drawers. I bought some chocolate coins tonight at Winco. They are blue foil with an eagle on one side and John F. Kennedy on the other side. I thought they would be perfect! I was wrong. They're just a tad too big, darn it. Now we have 50 blue foil covered coins we don't need and nothing for our little drawers. The search continues.

TRAGEDY: Remember me crowing about finally having one little pumpkin growing in our garden? We were so excited.

Well, yeah, pox on that. I took the dogs out yesterday morning and went to check on our pumpkin and found it has become detached from the vine. Nooooooooo!

I'm blaming the dogs. They like to walk along the wall and I'll be one of them knocked it off the vine. Drat!

In happier news, we do still have a few flowers around, including a couple of dahlias, some poppies, the clover is blooming again, among other bright spots. We also picked a couple dozen more tiny red tomatoes.

So there's our gardening round up. 

And So It Continues

DIGGING IT: So, here we are again, blogging about nothing other than planting stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with planting, per se, but there are WHOLE lot of things we'd like to be doing in addition to that, but COVID. Sigh.

Anyway, a few weeks ago a friend messaged me a photo of a cute pumpkin planter stuffed with succulents. I tucked that away in my mind and this week we go around to creating some of our own.

We scored a couple of cute, vibrantly orange pumpkins for $2 apiece at Grocery Outlet. We hollowed those out.

Then we filled them with potting soil and went 'shopping' in our yard, where there are so many succulents growing.

I don't have photos of our scavenging, but I do have photos of the finished product. Below is CJ's planter. Isn't it pretty?

And here's Annabelle's succulent stuffed pumpkin. So pretty!

SCIENCE CLASS: CJ has started his sophomore year of college. One of his classes is biology. There are a few things about the course that are already red flags for me, but I'm trying to stay open minded.

In the meantime, the kids started a controlled experiment today involving planting and growing mung beans.

The first step was potting soil in four pots.

The dirt was supposed to be within an inch of the pot's top.

The mung beans were planted at a precise depth,

The seeds are germinating even as we 'speak.' Once they sprout, there will be some controls and variables employed.