Trip to Utah

Been quite a while since I've posted anything. Here are pictures from when I took Levi out to Utah. It was a long drive - over 25 hours. We saw parts of the country that were quite a bit different. The trip was mostly what you would expect - boring.

To summarize - We've been to Missouri a bunch of time - nothing new here. Kansas City was hot and flatter. Nebraska just kept getting flatter and dryer. Wyoming? wow - lots of nothing. Utah - finally a little green. Great to see friends in Utah. Had a wonderful time.

Other unique things about the trip: stopping by some church history sites. Almost getting in a wreck in Nebraska. Pirating into someone wireless with a rather crude name in Nebraska. Getting gas in a town in Nebraska where everything reeked of cow manure. Funny bumps in the road in wyoming - guess they are to help semi's stop when it's icy.

Hard to see - but there are like 30 rail road tracks below in Lincoln Nebraska

Windmills - guess they have a lot of wind in Wyoming
Wind break along the interstate.
Beautiful cloudscape in Nebraska

Very tame prairie dogs. This one would eat out of my hand

Beautiful sunset in Nebraska - complete with bug smeared windshield

Levi in his new place of employment - BYU housing. He has to dress up everyday.

Levi's apartment building.

Gotta love fotune cookies.

Eating oriental food with our good friends the Johnsons.

I eat this stuff everytime we go out there. Unbelievably good.


We stocked Levi up pretty good. He was alone for 3 weeks before his roommates moved in.




Levi's new room

Here's how Levi left his old room. Didn't quite meet expectations here I'm afraid.My good friend Clark Schaffer and family. Always wonderful to see him.

Levi's Eagle Court of Honor

We were able to have Levi's Eagle Court of Honor shortly before he left for school. It was touch and go to see if we could fit it in. My brother Matt recommended that instead of doing it at the church that we should just have a campfire ceremony. That worked much better for us - since Levi was just ready to move on and the whole idea of some kind of formal party-celebration thing really wasn't very appealing to us.


We decided to do it in our backyard - for two reasons - one - easy to organize and two - gives people an excuse to see where we live. I figured it wouldn't be much work, but I ended up taking the day off and working all day long to get set up for it - oh well.


We had a good showing and it went well. It was beastly hot and the bugs were out and about chewing on everyone, but it went OK. Levi wanted to roast marshmallows afterwards and wanted tortilla pizza with grape juice mixed with sprite. OK - doesn't sound like the most appealing grouping of refreshments - but it worked. We also had a cake - the new oven cooks weird so both cakes completely collapsed. We filled one with pudding and put icing on it and it came out fine. We had a second cake, but I bought the wrong kind of pudding and well - we just did without.

Here is the flag ceremony. The shop in the background is our neighbor's shop.

Here is the campfire, it got really hot really quick.

This is Michael Smith who really really helped Levi get to Eagle Scout. He wouldn't have gotten there without him. He's been a great help to the family in many ways.

Levi getting ready to be presented.Greg Waddell explaining what each of the awards is.
This is just a sunflower - nothing to do with the eagle scout thing - but it was very pretty, so here it is.

garden update

We eat a lot of vegetables. A lot of vegetables. We spend way too much money on vegetables. So in an effort to rectify that, we've spent way too much money becoming home gardeners.

Last year, our garden was pretty pitiful. We planted in the back yard where it got way too much shade and overrun by the animals in the forest who thought our garden was Great. Now - even though our garden wasn't the greatest, we did get some snow peas, lots of chard, a couple of tomatoes, no squash despite several attempts, some really delicious beets and after about 5 months some stunted carrots.

The principle we use is from a book called Square Foot Gardening. The principle is that you plant everything above ground in 4 ft by 4 ft boxes 6 inches deep. You lay out a grid in square foot increments, and you can mix and match what you plant in the same box. 1 tomato to a square or 16 beets to a square. You make the soil out of vermiculite, compost and peat moss. Last year we couldn't find any vermiculite either and good compost was hard to come by.

Well this year we tried doing it a little better and even moved our garden in early June when we moved our household items. It was a crazy amount of work to move the garden, but the results seem good so far. Read below while I introduce you to our current garden.



Above is the whole garden.

We're pretty experimental. One of the techniques we're trying this year is vertical gardening. Yep - that's a watermelon growing up a lattice. You have to support the watermelons or they'll get too heavy for the thing. It probably won't work out, but we'll see.

Now here's a more typical square foot garden plot. In this view is the following: two large sweet basil plants, one purple basil plant, two marigold plants (one you can't see), several radishes (in the front) chard, a couple sunflower, a couple tomato plants, some beets and a pepper plant. I think there might be some rosemary in the middle there. Below is a different picture of the same box.



In this one you can see some parsley, sage and arugula.

I've learned several things from this box. One is that radishes need to not be grown too long. see picture below - these are so hot as to be virtually inedible.

Another is that basil does best when you keep picking the top of it off because it makes it form a bush. One of the basil plants we were ready to give up for dead a couple weeks ago. You probably can't tell which one because it's ultra-healthy now. We're going to try and make pesto.

The arugula has also grown too long, but we'll make a salad and eat it this week.

The sunflower's were Sonora's idea. No flowers yet, but one is over 6' tall now.


Onto the beans. Beans like to be planted when it's warm. These one's were planted about 3-4 weeks ago. Some have already grown almost 5' up the trellis. No beans yet. But boy they look happy.

Below is a side view of the beans.


Below is more pictures of the garden from a distance. What you can't see well is all the tiny pepper plants. They just aren't growing tall. I fertilized them today, we'll see if that helps. We also have a volunteer squash that I think is a pumpkin, and some normal squash and melons, lots of tomatoes, eggplant, okra.


We used to have a bunch of cabbage a brocolli, but some moth like pest just ate it to the ground. We pulled them all up and disposed of them to rid the garden of the contamination.


You may have noticed the fence. We see a couple rabbits most days just contemplating how to get in the fence. They haven't got it figured out yet though.

Believe it or not, next year I hope to about double the size of the garden and get started on rhubarb, maybe some corn, a lot more peas and beans. A lot more carrots and lettuce like vegetables. On the backside of the shop you can barely make out an asparagus patch. We also have a very full pear tree.

Others have had cold summers, but ours has been unusually hot and dry. I have to frequently water the garden.

The one advantage with this soil is it takes almost no time to weed. I spend maybe 5 minutes a day weeding, and it's very simple almost zero effort to do.

Looking forward to the harvest.

Levi's graduation

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks. Of course, one of the more significant events is that Levi graduated from High School. He’s off to BYU to major in Computer Engineering come fall.

Two years ago, we moved to Bowling Green for many reasons, one of which was to provide better learning opportunities for our children. Levi was languishing at Barren County High School. His school counselor simply didn’t care and was unresponsive. Levi was being put in classes that would set him up to go to a local technical college instead of a University and was completely unchallenged.

Bowling Green High School is ranked in the top 3% in the nation according to US News and World Reports. Levi was very challenged and had to work hard. He did work hard and got all A’s and B’s. He significantly improved his writing ability and had the opportunity to take several AP classes. He did extremely well in his AP Statistics class. He’s very glad he got the opportunity to go to Bowling Green for High School. It helps me feel like the 58 mile drive to work is worth it.

Here’s Levi getting his diploma.



Here’s the whole graduating class (of about 250 students).

Here’s a couple of pictures of Levi in his robe after the ceremonies.


Well done Levi!

Sonora's eye

There are times when I just run into pictures on the camera that simply need to be shared with the world. There's no story on this, I think the picture says it all.

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.