Henry is getting all grown up! He’s up and down stairs, and walking around, saying little words and giving raspberry kisses. He’s the earliest walker out of all the brothers, he won’t be a year old for a few more weeks.
He still adores nursing and won’t sleep through the night, so I still have my baby too.
We went on a small hike in the hills above our house.
I love this picture. I look good. No one else does.
PB doesn’t hate school anymore. C is almost potty trained. And H actually slept through the night last night. There is nothing to complain about in life really. Hey, I even lost 20 pounds without trying. (I actually didn’t think I needed to lose weight. It just kinda happened, I think mostly because I like to exercise and eat healthy.)
I don’t have any large deciduous trees on my property, so fall leaf clean-up isn’t an issue for me. But I wish it was. Leaves are valuable! I cringe when I see leaves thrown away in regular garbage (green waste is okay if you have to). Why? Well, because they are free organic matter. And organic matter is key to good soils and gardens.
How to you transform fall leaves into good soil? Here are some ideas for using them:
1)Mow. The year I did landscaping for a condo HOA, I raked only a small section of leaves. For the most part, I’d shred them up with the mower and leave them. I did it about three different times, so I never had over a couple of inches of leaves on the ground at any one time. The leaves nicely decomposed in the ground. It was super easy. This works really well for fine leaved trees like honeylocust (sometimes you don’t even have to mow those), but will also work with the thicker leaves like maples as long as you don’t let the leaves get too thick.
2)Mulch. This year, I piled the leaves nice and high around some spireas. I needed mulch there, and fall leaves are free. About any landscape area can use a good helping of leaves. Shredding the leaves will help them decompose faster, if that’s what you want. Leaving them large can work as a good weed deterrent.
3)Compost. Leaves are great in a compost pile. They are a good high-carbon material. I put a video below that talks more about composting with leaves.
4)Annual Garden. This is probably the most common use I see: adding a nice layer of leaves to the garden. Most people till it in, either in the spring or fall. I don’t like tilling, and instead just leaving the leaves on top and using them as mulch in the spring.
One of my actual fears in life is at some point I’m going to have a lot of leaves and some kind person will feel the need to rake them up and haul them away for me. I’ve worked on service projects where we raked up all the lovely organic matter out of landscape beds and hauled it away. I love leaves and firmly believe that they are far too valuable to end up in the trash!
Here’s someone else who loves leaves:
I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints I cannot say with absolute certainly that I know the church is true. I doubt I ever will. My faith is based on intangible proof. All faith is, that is why it is faith. I do have had experiences, feelings, and life that has led me to believe it is true and the right church for me.
My faith is not infallible. A while ago, I stumbled across some information that really made me question my faith. In just moments a lifetime of belief can be brought into question and even discarded. It was a little scary for me. And it led me to a lot of soul searching.
I remembered watching Life of Pi. At the end, what I took out of it, is that we are free to choose our beliefs. And life is better with God. Do we want stories of animals, tigers, and surprising adventure or stories of death and hardship?
I can choose what I believe. There is always evidence for both sides in matters of faith. I looked at the evidence before me, and realized I didn’t care about it. I wanted to believe in the faith I grew up with. I felt like all my faith had been taken away, and all I had left was a little kernel, just a simple desire that I wanted it to be true.
I wondered if that was enough. Do I need a strong, firm testimony, or is it enough to simply want to believe? The answer came in the following weeks as the faith I had developed in my life was restored, I had questions answered, and other questions that no longer mattered as much. My little seed of faith grew. It did not stay small for long. It was enough to simply want to believe, but God does not let faith stay that small for long.
There is still so much out that that could make me question again. I don’t care about it much anymore. I choose to believe, to have faith regardless of what is out there. Faith is not a matter of finding out what is 100% correct, but choosing that path that has God in it. When my life has God, it can be hard, but it is always beautiful.
Further Reading:
I had an overabundance of tomatoes, and not enough of everything else. The tomatoes are still alive even: it is odd to still have tomatoes in November here. I guess it is just making up for the late start I had with them.
I had a friend post her canning activity, and I was saddened because I felt like I hadn’t done anything. In reality, I did plently. I was just a bit lazy about it. Here’s what I have
My mom came to my house with apples from her trees and made me twelve quarts of applesauce. It was awesome. Moms are great. I also made about 12 quarts of tomato juice. I don’t drink tomato juice, but it does make some pretty awesome tomato soup. I’m sad because I didn’t do peaches this year. We had a peach tree in a community orchard, but it froze. I didn’t can tomatoes, because I still have some from last year. I made a grand total of one quart of pickles, but otherwise the cucumbers didn’t do well.
I froze a lot. It’s simple, and I’ve got a chest freezer to fill up anyway. There’s about 8 bags of grated zucchini, 15 or more bags of salsa, three bags of marinara, and another 12ish bags of whole and crushed tomatoes. We had as many tomatoes and tomatillos as I wanted. I simply stopped picking them after awhile. I also have a winter squash to break open and freeze soon.
Not a bad year. I think it’ll last me awhile. But next year: less tomatoes, more of about everything else.
We went up to the American West Heritage Center to the corn maze. They had a map. It was more fun. I would rather follow a map than get lost. It is also a huge bonus when you child has a potty emergency and needs to get out ASAP. We picked this corn maze over others because it had more activities as well. Curtis was in heaven on the train ride.
Pumpkin carving was memorable. Just as we were about five minutes in, Joe sliced his thumb and had to go get stitches. I was trying to help Joe out, Henry decided he needed milk right then and was sobbing. The kids were blissfully undisturbed and continued to paint their pumpkins. Luckily, Joe could drive himself so he went, I stayed and finished up the pumpkins and everything was fine. Except for Joe’s thumb, but it is almost better.
We had so much candy for Halloween. Peter’s opportunities for candy were huge. We had trick or treat at the nursing home, he had a school party and a party at the library, then the school carnival, trunk-or-treat at the church and finally regular trick or treating Halloween night. How about we limit candy to just regular old trick-or-treat and hand out stickers everywhere else? Curtis is apparently sensitive to eating too many sweets and ended up sick a couple of days.
I wish I could have convinced Peter to be a minion as well (he even had a yellow shirt and overalls), but it was not to be. He was Robin, using the same superhero costumes that we have use for Halloween for four years. It was a bit small this year, gladly, so he’ll have to do something else next Halloween. He did take his stuffed batman he got from Grandma for his birthday, which made the costume cuter. Curtis and Henry were minions, which is the easiest costume ever. Yellow shirt, overalls, some type of goggles. Well, Henry skipped the goggles part.
He had fun. The Sunday before we had a party with Joe’s family. It was a just because party, but Peter thought it was for his birthday. On his birthday we went down to Grandma’s (my mom) and visited with cousins, went to a small amusement park there, and ate pizza and cake.
He didn’t get a lot of presents. Minecraft (which was inexpensive, but now takes up much of his and his dad’s time), a couple of toys. He didn’t care he was just excited it was his birthday.
We went to the Denver Botanic Gardens on a recent vacation. It was beautiful and filled with different styles of gardening, good ideas, and lots and lots of plants. My husband was impressed with a crevice garden, I enjoyed the Bonsai. Here’s a sample of pictures.
I’ve always loved public gardens and recommend that people go to them. They are a great place to get inspiration and to see plants in person. If you go to one that is nearby or similar in growing conditions to what your own garden is, you can walk away with a great plant list, and know that the plants will probably do good in your own garden. It’s a far better way to find plants than just looking at nursery tags or even in books. I live in Utah, but we are very similar in climate to this Colorado garden. There were more short grass prairie plants than I often see around here, but I don’t think it is because they won’t do well here, just that people don’t utilize them as much as they could. I really want to put blue grama grass somewhere on my property; this plant was used in several different ways at the gardens.
My garden is nowhere close to looking like the gardens there. It was established in 1951, so it makes it 62 years older than my own garden. Gardens are just very slow to develop and establish properly. Even if you have lots of time and money (which I don’t anyway), plants can take years to establish, and re-evaluation needs to be done constantly. Gardening is an art with living forms, where the artist does not have full control but works within the constrains of environment and the results takes years to achieve.
We went out to Denver in October. It was a bit of a risky vacation weather wise, but we ended up with weather in the 80’s.
It took forever to drive out there. Baby H hates the car now. He screamed for a good portion of the trip.
Our first day of sightseeing we went to the Denver Botanical Gardens (for a little over an hour, but I could have spend tons more time there, just not with kids), the Denver Zoo (for four hours), and the Museum of Nature and Science (for two hours, but we needed more time). It was too much in a day! We were very tired walking around the large zoo, and ran out of time at the Museum. But we loved everywhere we went, and with the amount of time we had I wouldn’t have changed it much. (Also, we used this pass which made it rather inexpensive.)
The next day we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. It ranks low on my list of National Parks. Pretty good hiking, but the trails are crowded because we took the short easy ones, and it’s a national park. It is gorgeous, but one of the reasons I like to hike is for solitude. People taking selfies around you isn’t exactly solitude. There was also a pretty cool herd of elk there, that you can get pretty close to. We choose not to drive around the park either (see above), so we missed out a bit on that.
Final day in Denver was a trip to the Butterfly Pavilion. It was a zoo for invertebrates, very fun if you are into that sort of thing. (I did take entomology in college and might have been teaching a tidbit I actually remembered to a tour guide.)
We’ve been in our home two years. I don’t feel like I’ve been there that long. Here’s what we’ve done in two years:
Garden
Inside
I’m pretty happy with everything we’ve done, but we have tons to do still. I think I might live here for a long time, just because it will take me that long to finish everything I want to in the home. Hopefully we will finish our re-model project downstairs by next spring, and then we can start working on improving the garden. I want to construct some raised beds and start filling everything out with more plants.
Liz Braithwaite 