Garden Update

I thought that since it's getting to that time of year where the first frost has hit I would brag a little bit about our year long summer. It's really hard to be so far from family and when something happens (good or bad) it just sucks to not be there to help out or celebrate. It's humbling to realize exactly how easily life goes on without you even if you are missed (or Brayden, Sydney and Madison are missed) and family traditions continue without pause. SO, to be so far sucks. But the one thing Ryan and I can do that most of you can't do right now is show you all pictures of how fabulous our year round garden is doing :P Muahahaha (devious, somewhat evil laugh).

While we went home to Canada our garden was left unattended and turned into this huge overgrown jungle in just those 4 weeks. I couldn't believe it, we seriously couldn't find the water tap for the sprinkler in all the overgrown grass. Thankfully for us a boy from our ward was preparing to leave on his mission a few weeks away and needed a little bit extra money for his last minute supplies. It was such perfect timing and so we took advantage of the situation and hired him short term to relocate our garden and weed it back into tip top shape. He did a great job and even plated a couple of papaya trees for us in the back of the garden... then Danny left on his mission and our garden once again became the jungle. We could see the tops of the corn seeding and once I even saw a tiny red tomato from the upstairs window but just barely. Thankfully, Jane was is in the same situation Danny was in and needed just a little extra to get her mission papers all in order and into the right hands and again we totally jumped all over that opportunity. She got it all cleared away for us and even made sure that the little damage that last typhoon that blew through the Philippines did was fixed. She used the leaves from the corn stalks to tie them upright again after being blown over and beat down from the rains!
We did notice however that our poor lemon tree was really suffering in the garden. The insects were eating the leaves and the birds kept stealing all our baby lemons. We decided to drive down the road and buy a couple of pots, one for the tree and a few others for my new herb garden. We spent some good quality time out in the garden and planted some herbs, carrots, lettuce, peas, pumpkin and squash. We also made sure that the plants that are still alive were well weeded and watered! We picked all our tomato's but left the green peppers to grow a little more and are now waiting for our corn cobs to grow a little larger so we can pig out on them one night for dinner!

SO, as you start preparing your homes for Halloween (something they don't do here) think of us over here and our garden so we don't feel quite so bad about our kids missing such a fun day of fantastic costumes and running around door to door (or trunk to trunk) filling their pillow cases with loads of candy I would help eat.