Tour of Our Garden and Property

Our burn pile. Gotta love a good cooking fire. :)














Some of the far garden tomato plants. These were the runts that Mom saved and nursed back to health.


















Our grape arbor with our dilapidated old barn in the background and my old Chevy beside it.














These are a couple year old hemlock and cedar trees that I got from the forest service. They were shutting down the refrigerators that they keep seedlings in for some reason and needed to give away a bunch of trees. Most of them have survived.














This is on the edge of our new orchard looking into our old orchard where I am currently building a chicken coop.













This is our front flower garden. The bed on the right is new this year. The other bed has been there as long as I remember.




















This is the back of our house














This is the far walnut tree - see canoe to right of tree for scale.



















Back of our house again this time showing the tomato plants that run along the edge of our back patio













Our compost pile... lots of good dirt is made here.















View looking toward the front yard












Front yard. Bottom of the huge blue spruce on the left. Front of house on the right. Few year old baby gynco(sp?) tree in the middle.














Looking east from our house. That is one of the tomato beds with sunflowers on the left side. One the far side of the tomato bed is Twedt's property.












This is in front of the house again. The front garden bed. Daisies, squash, kale, leeks... potatoes that you cannot see















Our wonderful juniper tree. There used to be a massive Doug Fir towering behind it... the juniper is doing much better with that gone.



















Our blue spruce which towers at least twice as tall as our two story house. This is by far the biggest blue spruce I have ever seen anywhere.
















The planter beside our front porch with sweet peas in it














The fig tree in our front yard. The juniper is just to the right of this picture. That's an old cedar hedge bordering the road behind the fig tree.













One of the only roses still blooming... right by our front porch

















A view of the front garden bed from the porch side. Lots of kale!













This picture is one a took a month back when all the poppies were still blooming. It's right out by the road at the end our our long driveway for everyone to see.















This is a closer up of our back patio pictured earlier with the tomato plants running all around the edge.

Chicken Coop

When I am not day dreaming, doing odd jobs, or reading... I am working on this chicken coop. I helped my dad tare down his old house and used his truck to haul the scrap lumber into town for the coop. I was de-nailing it for a couple weeks. Now we have started on the coop.








Here is the trailer full of scraps of scrap lumber.












































Here is the pile of 1" by

1" indicates one inch
1' indicates one foot





















Here is the pile of floor planks.
2"x10"
2"x12"
2"x8"



















Here is the pile of timbers for under the floor and beside it is the pile of 2"x6" full dimension lumber.




















Here is the pile of standard cut 2"x6" lumber. It's mixed in with a couple full dimension. Notice the full dimension is dark brown, the standard cut is lighter.




















Here is the temporary chicken coop. We have 13 chickens living in there right now.
















Here is the bucket that is a third full of nails I pulled out of that lumber. That was the most time consuming part of all of this for sure. But it was worth it to save on the cost of lumber.

Waterloo Rapids

Yesterday Colby and I got to run a whitewater section we have been wanting to run for almost three years. Mirlandra liked our idea of making a party out of it. She planned the party, we took care of the water aspect. When all was said and done, we had a small group of folks to enjoy a very hot Saturday afternoon with on the water. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of the whole group, but I promise Rob and Shae, Rob and Monica, Steven, Lila, Mirlandra, and Mom were all there too.

I never did make it through the shoot upright... but here is a link to my first attempt. I think it's humorous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh26QcQHg84


On this next one I made it through the two big waves, but I was too off balance when I came out the other side and lost it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZcqbzcxVbA

This one is the worst looking of all of them. I'm glad I was the one doing it because if I had been on shore I would have been sure the guy died. I fell out of the boat at a very in-opportune moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhmRYoK1pA4

On this last one I tried a drastically different approach. I almost had it! But no... Colby to the rescue again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=001C3AXvFwQ

Thanks so much to Caryn for the filming! She did an excellent job, as you can see. And thanks to Colby for being there to fish me out. :)

Day Ten - Finale!

It's coming off. I have answered my self-asked question if I can grow a beard yet. The answer is obvious from the pictures. Maybe I will try again next year... maybe not.

Day Nine

Me and da bunny are good buds.

Mary's Peak Ride

These pictures are a teaser for the full story with is on Facebook. The rest of the photos from that trip are in an album I uploaded called Mary's Peak 7-8-10.

Day Eight

Well, much more exciting things happened to me today than this... I gave Mirlandra a pleasant (or not so pleasant) surprise by showing up at her window that overlooks our garage roof. I was there for other nefarious reasons, (delivering a present to her out of sight of our mother so it could be wrapped for said mother) but I asked her to go ahead and take today's picture while I was in such a good spot for it.