Eagle Scout

Levi had his Eagle board of review today. He passed with flying colors!

I think it helped that one of his letters was from a teacher at the highschool. This particular teacher wrote a 3 page letter of recommendation for Levi - Levi has done a lot of website work for this particular teacher. It just so happens that the main representative from the Scout Council is good friends with this teacher. In fact, this representative suffered significant losses during the recent flooding and the first person they called for help was this teacher (Mr. Skillern).

Mr. Skillern basically said Levi was as good a candidate for being an eagle scout as any of the other students he's come in contact with in 25 years. The council representative had very few questions after reading that letter.

Way to go Levi!

Also, way to go Uncle Matt, without his efforts in giving Levi the chance to attend scout camp when he had no troop, there would be no way that Levi would be where he is at today.

We’ve been trying to garden. Shoot anything grows in Kentucky. There’s no bare ground anywhere. If nothing is planted there, weeds will be there in a couple weeks – it’s supposed to be easy, right?

Well, we haven’t had tremendous success in previous years. Last year, we tried a new technique called square foot gardening, which was mildly successful. We planted the garden in too shady of a spot, so it didn’t do the best, but we could tell the plan would work.

The square foot gardening technique is to do everything in 4’x4’ raised beds that are 6” deep. The soil is an equal mixture of vermiculite, peat moss and compost. It makes for a very loose soil which holds water well and is exceptionally easy to weed. The other idea, is that instead of planting things in rows, you plant things in 1’ squares. Certain plants take 1 whole square, others are planted 2 to a square, other 4 to a square, all the way to 16 per square.

This method makes it immediately identifiable where weeds are, because everything is laid out in such an orderly way. Also, it makes for a very varied bed, with all sorts of interesting things growing next to eachother. Here are some pictures of our garden. Note how each square is laid out and the variation between squares. You can also see where things aren't growing like they should.





Last year, we had 6 beds and tried to grow a variety of things. None of the broccoli, cabbage or cauliflower made it. We had some mild success with the tomatoes. The chard did wonderfully. The beets were fantastic. For a while the peas were doing well. The beans did OK when the wood chuck didn’t get to them first.

The carrots we mostly ignored, but in the end (after they had been in the ground for about 5 months), we harvested them. They went well in the soup we made. We learned several things, one of which was – have good compost. The compost we had was pretty weak, and plant them in good light. I also felt that the 6” depth that was recommended was a little short, the carrots certainly didn’t do well.

This year we made a compost bin, made 4 new square foot gardens that were 8” high and actually found some vermiculite. We also moved the beds to a sunnier part of the yard. I treated the wood with linseed oil which is a natural preservative. We also started lots of seeds indoors in February or so, many seeds didn’t quite make it, so we tried a separate round.

Around this time, we discovered that the chives from last year that didn’t do much of anything had a good winter and just came right up, nice and thick. We transplanted the whole thing and it worked well. We have all the chives we need right now.




I made a fancy compost bin and dutifully put leaves and kitchen scraps in it all winter. It didn’t compost very well though.


I put off planting the garden until we had pretty much decided we were going to stay in this rental property all summer. Then out of the blue, we got a call from the sellers of a property we had made a low offer on back in December. They said they would sell it to us for the amount we offered. I was just finishing up the garden when they said that. Well, we’re buying that house, so I’ll have to move the garden 5 miles, which should prove more challenging than moving it 200 feet with only one growing plant. Still, I intend to give it a try. The new property has a lot more space for gardening, plus it has an established, very happy pear tree and an asparagus patch.

I'm growing several new plants from seed for when we make the new garden - hope it won't be too late.




Compost bins are supposed to get so hot that they kill seeds. You can see from this garden (that has nothing actually planted in it) that not all the seeds in the compost died. Lots of mystery melons in here. I’m thinking of doing worm composting (vermi-composting). For whatever reason, compost wasn’t readily available from stores this Spring. It’s made it complicated to make new mix for our raised beds. Still looking forward to having a garden though.

gundam

Levi very much likes Japanese shows. He watches them in Japanese and reads the subtitles. One series in particular he enjoyed was Gundam 00 (that's double zero).

He actually made me watch one, and I liked it so much, I watched all bizillion episodes of it last summer too.

Several months ago, around Christmas, he begged Julie to paint him a scene from Gundam. It's not Julie's favorite work - but Levi sure likes it. It's fairly large and takes up a lot of the wall.


Here's a cool superfast video Levi put together of the event.

More on Levi's eagle project

In addition to the cemetery cleanup, Levi built a sign for the cemetery. It took several tries and quite a few hours, but the sign looks very nice and should last quite a while. Each of the letters is routed in with a dremmel tool, and then the black letters were burned in using a torch and hot metal. Lots of layers of wood sealer were put on top of the treated wood.

Levi's board of review is on May 31.

Levi's Eagle Project

Today was Levi's Eagle project. He helped remediate a cemetery that was in disrepair. 75-100 manhours went into the work today. Lots of rock had to be removed. The rock was from where they had to dynamite to get deep enough to bury people. Then there were several graves that were sunken in that needed to be filled in with dirt. Levi is also working on a sign for the cemetery and putting the cemetery information up on the county genealogical website. Noone has been buried in this cemetery since 1973. Some civil war veterans are buried here.

Here is a collection of what it looked like Before. Note the thistles (they'll grow back unfortunately). Also the piles of rocks.

Here are the activities. Among the most challenging was moving the rocks. We filled in a large ditch and some other low spots. My wheelbarrow was pretty new before this endeavor. Now - it's definitely a "used" wheelbarrow.

After the rocks were moved, we were ready to fill in with dirt. Two fresh piles of dirt had been delivered and donated by the New Salem Baptist church (though Levi wasn't involved with getting the dirt).

After the dirt was in place and the weeds knocked down, we were ready to call it a day. Over 30 of us worked for 3+ hours to get it done.

Here's the end result picture. Quite a bit of work. Good leadership by Levi to get so many people there and get so much done.