Blogs of Beauty

Sallie at A Gracious Home is again hosting the Blogs of Beauty Awards. Nominations are open until July 9th. This is a great way to get the word out about your favorite blogs by Christian women and find out about other wonderfully gifted and God-fearing ladies in bloggerland.

Have fun nominating and browsing!

Times have changed

My husband's mother is quite the technology tackler. She had Web TV for emailing for a few years. Then she was getting frustrated with that. She tried a laptop and now has a pretty high-tech deskstop with a 19" monitor. I won't tell you how old she is, but suffice it to say that she has some years under her belt and most her age have never understood what the world wide web is.
We got her a web cam a few months ago so we could see each other when we talked as we live about 3 1/2 hours from each other. It took a bit of practice, but she is doing great.

A couple days ago, my husband was talking to her over the internet and she got a phone call. I had to chuckle when I heard her say, "I'm on the web cam with my son...yea, I'll call you back later."

Twenty years ago, I don't think very many people would have had a clue what that was, and most of her relatives and friends her age probably still don't.

Then the conversation went to my husband walking her through doing a web search for a new part for her dishwasher.

"Now type this in the Google box."
"Now do you see this?"
"Click there."
"Scroll down."
"Now which model do you have?"
"Is that the part you need?"

They found the part and he had her save the page on her favorites.

I thought it was all pretty amazing.

Sandbox

When we built our house, we had to haul in sand for under the cement slab. Needless to say, the front of our house turned into an excellent sandbox.

Now that we are planning on putting a patio on the front, we thought we better build a regular one for them, so last week we put one together. The children all helped my husband with bringing screws and support boards.

Today they were burying themselves up to their rib cage in the sand.

Like father, like son

Last night after supper, my husband said with a smile as he often does, "That was great, honey. Thank you!" Then, as he had projects to attend to right away, he got up from the table and headed outside.

Fifteen seconds later, my 4 year old son said as he was leaving the table to follow after his dad, "That was great, honey. Thank you!"

I smiled. My daughter giggled. It was so cute.

Sick and praising the Lord

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur. I have been sick much.

Yes, we are expecting baby #4 in our house around the end of January and we are all very excited!

Despite times when I have felt too awful to get out of bed and having the flu over the weekend, God has been with me through it all. I admit to having to remind myself of that fact.

I have been blessed with friends that have come to help me cook and clean at times. My wonderful hubby has burnt the candle at both ends to keep up with work and cleaning the house. On Monday, a special friend came unexpectedly, folded my huge pile of laundry and brought lunch. I almost cried.

Today, praise the Lord, I am able to function!

Ps 34:1

I will bless the LORD at all times:

his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

KJV

Backrubs

Yes, my husband gives me wonderful backrubs. But if I am craving a backrub in the middle of the day when he is at work, I've found a tolerable option:

Just lay on the floor and your children will crawl all over you like a jungle gym.

It kind of works.

Raised Bed Gardens

So what have we been doing the last couple weeks in addition to many other tasks? Building and planting our garden.

I've had this thing about wanting to use raised bed gardens for some time. Yep, there is quite an initial investment of time and money, but weeding is easy, there is no problem with drainage, moisture is better controlled, you can do concentrated gardening to maximize your space and crowd out weeds, etc.

When we lived at our previous residence, we made 4' x 8' and 4' x 16' raised bed gardens. We had grass around all of them, so we had to trim, which was NOT fun. Experience is worth gold. This time, we put plastic down when we seeded our lawn so grass did not grow under the garden area. Then we hauled in road gravel (class 5) on top of the plastic. No more trimming!! We discussed many options for how to build the 4' x 48' boxes. We checked into the cost of plywood, 2" x 6" tongue 'n groove boards, brick and plastic lumber. In the end, we went with the 2" x 6" treated tongue 'n groove boards because they were strong, would last a long time and were within our budget.

(Plastic lumber was VERY appealing, but it's quite expensive, we would have had to pre-drill all of our holes for assembly and getting the pallets off the semi was going to be challenging.)

So here is the initial stage of framing up the first box after the Class 5 was put down over the black plastic.


Because we used treated lumber, we had to line the boxes. We ordered custom-sized 19 mil plastic. I had called the Extension office about any dangers of using treated lumber. They said that in all their studies, if the boxes are lined with plastic, there is no leaching from the wood to the plants.

You will notice here that we also covered up the cross braces of wood with plastic. We took a shovel to punch holes in the bottom of the beds through the plastic for drainage. Because of their height and our experience with raised beds before, I'm happy with this set-up as it will allow some drainage, but will also maintain some moisture in the boxes. Then we filled them up with compost manure from a farmer friend.



So now we have 3- 4' x 48' raised garden beds that are about 20" tall. There is almost 5' between boxes so that our lawn mower with trailer will fit inbetween when I need to haul in mulch or compost. This picture was taken this morning. The box closest on the picture was planted about 2 weeks ago. Overall, the plants are doing well. I think that the soil has a bit too much nitrogen. I didn't take the time to test the soil. It was getting late in the season and I just wanted to get plants in the ground. Some things are growing like hot cakes and others aren't doing so great. I plan to test the soil for next year and also am thinking that the soil will just naturally compost itself more by next year as well.

The initial couple years of compost manure takes diligence to get rid of weeds, but after that, it's very easy to keep ahead of them and with raised beds, you don't have to battle quack grass! Sure, premium black dirt without weed seeds would be ideal, but we got what was available to us and it will work fine. Because there were a lot of weed seeds to contend with, and for other reasons, I was behind on weeding. I am SO thankful that family who came to visit this weekend helped me get a handle on the weeds.

I also am trying companion planting this year. I think I'll write more about that in another post.

May you be blessed today as you draw closer to Him!

My precious bouquet

Here is the very sweet bouquet that my daughter and son brought in this morning. God knew that I needed it today. God is so good!

"Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares...!"

Matt 6:28-29
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
KJV