This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
After we spent the morning at Lake Wappapello State Park, we took a journey to one of the more remote options in the system: nearly in the middle of the state, a few miles from the border with Arkansas, lies Grand Gulf State Park. Again, if the goal was to hit the parks that we otherwise are highly unlikely to randomly cross, we had to make sure we hit this one! It was a two hour drive from Lake Wappapello, so that allowed a bit of rest time in the car before seeing what Grand Gulf had to offer.
The park itself features a cave system that collapsed thousands of years ago, leaving behind Missouri’s “Little Grand Canyon.” Before checking out the landmark itself, we took the 0.75 mile Natural Bridge Trail, which was among the easier ones we’d been on over this trip. There were some ups and downs, but it was generally suited to a wide audience of visitors. We always appreciate loop trails like this, too, so we don’t have any backtracking and are otherwise seeing a new landscape the entire time.
After the hike, we descended as far as we could down the hill toward the opening to the canyon. The history of the area was rather interested, though it is disappointing no one can go into the cave system. In the late-19th and early-20th century, there are records of folks attempting to explore the cave system, but a series of collapses over the millennia have made it mostly impossible. Aspects of the system were accessible into the 1920s, but a series of storms and floods washed trees and other debris down into the caves, shutting off sections. Even today, rains that get heavy enough can collect water in the canyon as high as 100 ft, taking weeks to drain.
While we were there, there was water down in the depths, but nowhere near that high. The “100 ft line” is essentially where the bottom of the deck hits here, so it’s crazy to think of what it looks like with that much rain!
I should note that this cave system has been traced another 9 miles away, emerging in Arkansas at Mammoth Spring. Apparently, that’s a state park, too, but for now, we aren’t planning on adding parks from other states to our list!
All in all, it was an interesting, albeit brief, visit. I think we’re glad we knocked this one out while we were down in southern Missouri, since making a special trip down there to hit this park may have been more disappointing. The trail just isn’t that long, and you can’t go deep enough to see much of the cave like you can at Rock Bridge State Park, so while it’s a beautiful view and an awesome sight to see, in a state where you don’t normally see formations like it, there just isn’t much to do there after you’ve seen the sight. Glad we went, but probably won’t return any time soon!
Like I said back in June, we ended up catching a few swarms for the first time ever. Early on, we weren’t entirely sure they would decide to stay or anything, but we kept an eye on them all summer. Brooke and Calvin added supers, and at one point in July, Calvin and I added another one to the south hive (the one that survived last winter).
Back on July 26, Calvin and Brooke took a look and claimed maybe 8 or 9 frames from the south hive that had capped honey (in the bottom super), and at the time, the northern hive had honey in it, but it wasn’t capped yet, so we didn’t take anything.
Flash forward to today, but we got more honey! They got another 11 frames, this time mostly from the northern hive, with a few to supplement from the south hive. Brooke said there’s more honey in that southern hive, but it isn’t capped and the bees appear to be feeding off of them, so they removed the queen excluder and are just allowing the bees to move up into the super that we left behind.
Last year, we didn’t get any honey, so it has been a few summers since we got to use our extractor! Brooke de-capped the frames and Calvin loaded two frames at a time into the extractor.
Calvin likes spinning the hand crank, of course, so that’s how he helped. Is it annoying to do this manually when we could use an electric one by taking the frames to Hannibal??? Meh. It’s fine. When we only have 8-10 frames to deal with, packing them all up into a cooler or bins would be worse, so using this cheap extractor is just fine for our purposes.
In the end, Brooke thinks we got maybe 5 gallons of honey this year! Ironically, this may be our best harvesting year at our house, which is crazy because two of the hives were collected from our apple tree in the yard! It’s always interesting the color that late-summer honey turns. It’s substantially darker (right) than what they collected in late-July (left…obviously…).
Speaking of the middle hive, we didn’t get any honey from it, but that’s partially because we didn’t have another queen excluder, and we don’t have that many supers. Since we didn’t get anything last year, Brooke was ready to throw in the proverbial towel (until she caught the swarms), so she’s still pretty hesitant to make any investments in these hives. Given this year’s haul, maybe she’ll change her mind! It’ll probably depend on if any of these survive the winter, though!
This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
Having not traveled far with the kids this summer, we opted to throw in a classic man-made Missouri lake beach excursion onto the trip. Lake Wappapello State Park is about 20 minutes outside of Poplar Bluff, MO and features camping, fishing, boating, hiking, and a beach area. It isn’t all that dissimilar from Long Branch State Park near Macon, MO, which we’ve visited a few times just before school starts. Lake Wappapello feels a bit bigger, though, and aspects of the park seem a bit more spread out.
Lake Wappapello, like many (all?) of the lakes in the Missouri State Park System, resulted from a river that was dammed for either electricity generation or recreational purposes. Given the fertile Mississippi River basin farmland down here, you can imagine that there were communities that were not all that pleased with the prospect of the lake going in, but ultimately the lake went in and it has been here ever since.
Still, weirdly, there weren’t many people there! We went to the beach, first, and saw another couple eating breakfast at a nearby picnic table. We drove around to the marina to see about renting canoes for an hour or so. They ended up being $50 a day to rent, and we didn’t want them for that long, so we skipped them this time. Still, they have 3 canoes to rent and one of them was spoken for. There was a pontoon being put in, but otherwise only two other trucks/trailers in the parking lot putting in. This was at 9:15 on a Saturday morning in early-August: prime time to get in a camping trip, some boating, some fishing, etc. before school starts and before the Fall hits. It was just surprising to feel like we had the park all to ourselves!
The beach itself felt a bit smaller than Long Branch’s. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it probably can’t handle a crowd like Long Branch or even Thousand Hills (I never really visited that beach, so could be wrong there…). The depth of the water was very reasonable for kids, where 75% of the swimming space was 4′ or less in depth. I went out about as far as I could and the water only got up to my chin, so we’re talking maybe a little more than 5′ of depth at the most?
Behind the beach, there were multiple picnic tables, a pit toilet (with decent space for changing clothes), a water fountain and a spigot for washing off sand from feet, and a small playground. The parking lot was bigger than could probably support the beach, honestly, so I’d be very curious to see what it’s like on a “busy day.”
We didn’t drive through the camping area, but there were campers around. Compared with the other parks we’ve visited on this trip, it sure seems like it should be a pretty popular location for this region, and has some fun opportunities to check out: it was just surprising that there weren’t more people there!
I didn’t get anything posted in August (a lot was going on!), and since the garden is dying down, I figured I’m running out of time to talk about it. There are only a few things left to focus on, at this point, but overall, we think it was a solid year!
It hasn’t rained much in the past few weeks. It has also been unseasonably mild, temperature-wise, so I think the plants just know it’s time to wither away. There are still some green tomatoes on a few vines, but they’re pretty small and don’t show any sign of developing further.
A few weeks ago, though, we were getting some good hauls! We had a lot of good slicers this year, so we had our obligatory BLTs for a few weeks in mid-August. Brooke thinks we got at least 3 bags of tomatoes processed and frozen, so while more would have been nice, we still did pretty well.
The sweet potatoes are just about all that remains of the big plot. The zucchini died off about a month ago, and the squash never amounted to anything. I think we ended up with two squash, but beetles got to them both pretty quickly, and they didn’t get much larger than an apple, so not as successful as we’ve had in the past.
The eggplant, though, did alright! We probably ended up with 8 or 9 eggplants about this size?? They all looked pretty good! Brooke made baba ganoush once, but otherwise, she dehydrated them and mixed them in with various ground meat meals in the past few weeks. We’ll probably plant them again in the future, since they didn’t take up much space, and we actually got some fruit out of them.
Brooke processed the sorghum two weekends ago, just like she did the last time she grew them. She ended up getting about a quart and a half of sorghum extract. Not really all that much, but it’s still in keeping with our quest to make sweet things off the land.
Peppers are also one of the few remaining things we’ve got growing. The “banana peppers” ended up being hotter than we’d anticipated, so Brooke is letting them all turn red and then dehydrating them. We’re going to smoke some of them so we can make smoked paprika, which sounds pretty good to me!
The soup beans are the other thing that took over the bean plot. Again, we didn’t get much from our green beans this year (we got enough, but it wasn’t exactly a bumper crop here in 2025…). The soup beans, on the other hand, are doing just fine as always!
In that same plot, we had some cantaloupe growing. Of the 9 or 10 that ultimately grew, only one of them was viable (the others rotted or never really got big enough to ripen). The one we got was pretty good, though I’m not convinced the space those plants took up was worth the one cantaloupe.
And last, but not least, Brooke dug up (dumped out??) her laundry basket of potatoes and….this is what she got! We ate these last week and, honestly, they were pretty good! Again, was it worth it to use a laundry basket for what amounts to a dollar or two of new potatoes? Meh. Still, the process worked! Maybe I didn’t water them enough, or maybe they were so deep down in the soil that the water didn’t percolate down far enough?? We’ll try potatoes again next year, but probably without as deep a path for the water to take.
There’s a chance I’ll post one more thing for the end of the season sometime in the next few weeks, but there isn’t much more to develop for Summer 2025’s garden season. Here’s to looking toward Summer 2026!
This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
Like I said in the previous post, we were knocking off a bunch of state parks this year since we couldn’t really travel far for a traditional family vacation. There were multiple parks within driving distance of Poplar Bluff, so we centered our focus around there. One of the options was Morris State Park, which, again, a). doesn’t include camping, and b). appears to not be a heavily attended park.
To be fair, we didn’t check attendance measures until later (apparently got something like 8,500 visitors in 2024, whereas Van Meter State Park got 47,500…), but it became evident as we started on the 2.7 mile trail (I say “the” because it was the only one). There was a sign when we first got going that mentioned poison ivy being a thing, but we took that as, “well, it’s Missouri, so of course it’s a thing??” We quickly found, though, that there was poison ivy growing on the trail itself, which wasn’t ideal.
What was growing on the trail wasn’t too bad, but small little plants growing up will eventually create problems for visitors. There were larger plants off to the sides that we took care to avoid, but there were three or four large branches/trees down, crossing the trail, that forced us to move off-trail a few times, complicating our journey and increasing the chances we’d hit the poison ivy.
Still, the trail itself was pretty good, or at least, if a). we were there in October, and b). if the parks service would come by to remove the downed branches, it would be a pleasant hike with some limited elevation changes and decent views. The park is settled near a peach grove, so it was pretty obvious we were hiking right next to a semi-open field with some trees in it. We also heard tractors off in distance, so it was an oasis of woodland clearly located within farmland.
Honestly, we weren’t all that impressed. The state park website plays up the fact that, geologically, Crowley’s Ridge (upon which some of the hiking takes place) is a raised portion of the ground that used to be lining the ancient Gulf of Mexico, then millennia of ice age meltwater continued to shape the area into what it is now. Impressive, I suppose, but ultimately, it’s kinda just a hill with some trees on it (sorry, geologists….).
So yeah, if you’re in the area and want to give it a look, I’m not going to say skip it….but none of us were particularly impressed, especially given the lack of maintenance on the trail!
This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
Brooke and I went to Alaska earlier this summer (I know, I know, I haven’t posted the details yet….getting there….), and given the kids’ other time constraints and camps, we didn’t really have the opportunity to travel far or for very long with them this year. Soooooo, we opted to knock some state parks off the list kinda like we did in 2020! Brooke took off Monday so we could get a jump on the trip, so we headed toward the bootheel to hit parks we otherwise are highly unlikely to cross in our usual travels.
First up on the list was Big Oak Tree State Park. A theme you’ll notice over the next few posts is that these are a). not heavily attended, and b). don’t include campgrounds (hence their lack of attendance). If anything, it made for a somewhat relaxing visit where we could take our time and explore a bit! On the other hand, it also meant that there weren’t a ton of things to see.
The “claim to fame” for Big Oak Tree State Park is really the history of it. Meg has been reading from a State Park coffee table book we got from our donation to KBIA a few years ago (support your local public radio stations, folks…), so we get a bit of the history as we’re heading into each site. This one was interesting in that it’s one of the older pieces of land set aside for state parks, largely because we had the collective wisdom to deforest a lot of the region in favor of farm land along the Mississippi River in the early 20th century. This ended up affecting the ecosystem to a substantial degree, but thankfully they saw fit to save at least some acreage of the old growth trees so we now have a sense of what the swampy forest would have looked like had it been left along 100 years ago. While more land was ultimately purchased around the trees, only about 80 acres of the original forest land remain, containing trees averaging 120+ feet tall. It’s currently designated as a National Natural Landmark!
There are (were?) several state and national record-holder trees on the site, though few remain now, unfortunately. There were at least four there for awhile, but severe weather events and old age have taken down some of them over the years. They’ve got signs along the boardwalk trail indicating where the trees once stood, and in some cases, even if the tree fell, they left it for visitors to see.
One of the really interesting things we saw was the bald cypress trees. I guess we must not have many up near where we live, but apparently the root systems of cypress trees include these little “spires” that grow up from the ground?? They look like stalagmites in a cave. The effect in a natural swamp like this is that they end up holding the soil together so it doesn’t wash away as quickly. Fascinating!
Another weird quirk of the site is that the original plans were to included a man-made lake in the center of the space, so they built levees, added pumping systems, and tried stocking it only to find they were fighting constant battles with the Mississippi River floodplain. Costs were too high, so they abandoned that project. Still, they found that water collected in sloughs outside the levees and those actually did alright with keeping more native fish, and the levee itself served as a decent hiking trail around the area.
We hiked about 1.5 miles along the boardwalk trail, and it was a pretty flat and easy trip. The main issue we ran into was that there were cobwebs at points, especially later on, that got kinda annoying. Again, it was clear that the trail wasn’t visited all that often, yielding the opportunity for stuff to keep growing and not get knocked down.
All in all, it was a good “first stop” on the trip. Pretty light and easy, an interesting story behind the park, and the weather was shockingly good for early August (highs around 80 F?? Can’t beat that!).
As usual, it’s been a bit since I updated things here, but figured I should hop on the garden before I take care of a vacation and a house project! We’ve had pretty consistent rain this summer, so the garden is in full swing, and we’ve had to weed it more than we’ve had to water it.
Rain/storms have been pretty consistent, seemingly one a week, so it’s somewhat surprising the sorghum has survived without being completely blown over. Brooke also planted popcorn, but it hasn’t really taken off like we’d hoped. Those did blow over and haven’t really recovered, but they never got all that tall, anyway, so we aren’t all that hopeful that they’ll turn out in the end.
Brooke planted eggplant this year! Who knew that they grow down like this?? I thought they grew like zucchini, but apparently not! This plant has about 5 or 6 more fruit (??) on it right now in various stages of growth.
Two picked so far, though we don’t really know what to do with them. Eggplant wasn’t really a staple of either of our families growing up, so we don’t have much of an idea of how to prepare them or what to use them for. Apparently we can grow them relatively well, though, so we’d better figure something out!
As usual, the zucchini are doing pretty well. This year, we didn’t have a plant just shrivel up and die like we frequently do (likely due to fungus?). The leaves are all pretty healthy still and we’ve got maybe 6 of this size so far this year, with a few more smaller ones on the way. Maybe not as prolific as we’ve had in previous years, but one of these things is enough for us (fried, preferably, though I hear we may be having zucchini lasagna this week?), so we aren’t disappointed.
The bean plot is doing alright, though we planted more soup beans than we did green beans this year. Those two rows in the front are the green beans and we didn’t get to picking them as soon as we probably should have. Around now, we’d expect them to flower and start a second round, but as of today, flowers are few and far between on them.
Incidentally, though the soup beans look good, we aren’t seeing many flowers on them yet, either. Some buds look like they’re ready to pop though, so we’re hopeful!
Brooke canned three pint jars today of beans, so we’re making progress! We still have some from last summer, so we aren’t in dire need quite yet, but it would be nice to pad out our stock a bit…
Cantaloupe! We’ve got, like, six cantaloupe growing in there! No telling whether they’ll all make it or not. This one is the largest of the bunch, but there’s more coming on, so hopefully we’ll actually get some melons this year! I’m not sure we’ve actually ever successfully grown a melon…I’ll have to go back through the blog to see if I can find an instance…
Not much to tell about tomatoes yet, except that we’ve got them and they’ve just started turning. Since it’s been so rainy, the leaves are starting to yellow a bit and Brooke had to pick some non-ripe tomatoes because they already split, due to the excess rain. Hopefully we get some dry days to let them turn before splitting, for once… More updates on these in a few weeks!
The peppers, though, are looking good! We’ve been picking some green bell peppers, but haven’t done much with the banana peppers yet. Brooke thinks they may turn colors yet, so we’re leaving them on, but they’re getting pretty big, so getting about time to pick one and see how it turned out. Since we got a new outdoor pizza oven, some pepperoni and banana pepper pizza sounds pretty good (more on that in a future post!).
Last, but not least, Brooke and Calvin got in the hives today and harvested 10 frames of honey! Only two came from one of the swarms we caught a few months ago, while the others came from the hive that survived last winter (against all odds). We’ll extract tomorrow, but this bodes well for having some honey available! There are two supers on the south hive, and the top one had tons of honey, just none capped. Brooke’s hopeful we’ll get another round of honey in September before it’s time to treat for the winter.
That’ll do for now! I’ve got a backlog of other posts I need to work on. It’s been a busy summer, so I haven’t had a lot of time to compile everything we’ve been doing, but hopefully I can get a few more posts going in the next week or so.
One more quick update before we leave on our trip, as I suspect the garden will…er…not look like this by the time we return… I spent awhile weeding and tying up the tomatoes today, let alone mowing and trimming. It’s looking good, so figured some evidence wouldn’t hurt!
The big deal for the day was getting the tomatoes and peppers prepped (see what I did there?) and ready. I put in the posts, one per tomato plant, and one per shared grouping of peppers. In the past, we’ve used twine and “rope” made from old t-shirts to get the tomato plants suspended, but this year, we’re just going to try one plant, one post, and see how it goes. I’m pretty sure I only snapped one tomato plant (and only one branch…nothing too crazy….), so not bad, overall!
The weather has been especially good for the eggplant, acorn squash, and zucchini plants. They’re spreading their leaves wide, but no flowers on them yet. A bit early, I suppose, but again, we’ve never grown eggplant, so I don’t have a good sense of what to expect on that one. The popcorn and sweet potatoes keep truckin’ along, too.
The sorghum….may just be a lost cause, at this point. The plants are getting taller, so that’s a plus, but there just aren’t many of them. Some seeds were planted in the holes between larger stalks, but I’m just not seeing a lot of evidence that they’re doing very much. Hopefully this is one of those things that turns around substantially while we’re gone!
And last, we’ve got the beans. They look really good! By the time we’re back, they’ll probably be gigantic. No flowers on them just yet, but July is typically when we’d expect them to really get going, so it’s somewhat soon.
Regardless, we’re leaving the garden in good shape. The sorghum has quite a few weeds around them, but most of the rest of the plots are looking pretty good. Was this post necessary after the last one a week ago? Probably not….but again, I wanted some evidence of how it looked before we were gone for over a week. I suspect I’ve got my work cut out for me upon our return…
I’ve been pretty lax on getting things posted this season, but honestly, there’s been a lot going on between going on the Field Biology trip in May and preparing for the vacation Brooke and I are about to go on (more on that eventually!!). The garden’s looking pretty good, though, so I wanted to get something on record while it’s still June!
Brooke planted a few new things this year, including eggplant (upper left); acorn squash (middle); and zucchini (not new, but oh well). We’ve also got sweet potatoes in this plot this year.
The rest of this plot, though, looks mostly terrible. Brooke planted popcorn this year (it’s been a few years since we planted that!) and sorghum, but the latter has been pretty slow to establish. She added a few more seeds to fill some gaps, but even they’ve struggled to come up. We initially thought it was because of the unseasonably cooler weather we’ve had this “summer” thus far, but the longer it goes on, it seems like we may just get nothin’ from the sorghum. The popcorn isn’t perfect, but at least it’s doing something!
The beans appear to be doing alright. She’s got green beans and soup beans mostly in this plot, though we didn’t plant very many green beans this year. We didn’t get as many soup beans as we expected last year, so Brooke’s kinda “flipped” the proportions a bit for this one.
For that bottom row, Brooke put in cantaloupe. We don’t usually have much luck with melons, but hey, can’t win if you don’t play, right?
I also want to note that the edging looks good, right??? Calvin helped a bit with weeding, but I’m trying to keep on it more than I usually do to keep it looking nice. We’ll see how long this lasts….
I need to tie them up still, but here we’ve got 9 tomato plants and a series of pepper plants. This time, Brooke’s got four plants per spot for the peppers (left-hand side) and multiple tomato plants in two rows on the right. I’m a bit curious as to how this will go, as this plot frequently is used for things like kale and lettuce because it stays relatively shaded for most of the morning. We’ve had tomato plants here before, though, so hopefully we have a good year!
In other “planting new things” news, we’re trying asparagus! These are just south of the strawberry plot, currently outside the official confines of the strawberries (not that they ever stay within said confines….). It’s going to take a few years before these really take off, but again, gotta start somewhere…
Speaking of strawberries….. we had another good harvest from them this year! Probably three or four of these containers’ worth of them? They were kinda small, but there were some good-sized ones occasionally, as well. Brooke made some jam and froze quite a bit of them for smoothies in the fall, or whatever else she thinks of! Not a ton of slugs this year on them, but something definitely ate on them a bit.
The potatoes are looking pretty good! Given all the rain we’ve had, some of the leaves have “yellowed” a bit, but there’s plenty of greenery on there. Like last year with the above-ground bags (pictured to the right, yet unplanted this year), we’ll just tip over the soil to get the potatoes out rather than having to dig them up. “Work smarter, not harder”….
Not a literal “metric ton,” but we picked at least 10 gallons of cherries. And there are still cherries up there I can’t reach with a ladder. Tons more. So many more.
For whatever reason, it seems that the birds just don’t like them? We’ve never really had a problem with birds going after them like they did my parents’ tree back when I was growing up, so that’s helped get us a good harvest, I guess.
What did we do with all of them (at least, the ones that didn’t mold? We had to throw a bunch out that I’d picked because they went bad too fast…alas, we’re doing fine on cherries……)? Brooke made some cherry preserves, froze a lot of them (again, for smoothies), and she dehydrated a bunch of them to add to salads or otherwise snack on. Pretty versatile uses, honestly! We’ll see what next year brings, but this was definitely the most we’ve ever gotten!
One last “new addition:” gooseberries! I don’t even like gooseberries, but Calvin, for whatever reason, found out he loved them when participating in Missouri River Bird Observatory’s Young Explorer’s Camp last year in Arrow Rock. Brooke and Calvin started a plant from a single berry and it took forever to establish itself (remember Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree? That’s what it looked like after sitting in our house for almost a year…). Calvin and I went to Arrow Rock for a festival in late April and bought a more established plant (pictured) and we put it in the back yard behind the clothesline. We also planted his “from seed” plant and that thing has taken off since being moved outside. It’s looking a lot better!
Like the asparagus, it’s going to take a bit for these plants to get big enough to where Calvin can get a bunch of berries, but again, gotta start somewhere!
And last, but never least, the bees. Soooooo, the southernmost hive survived the winter, so they’re the most established of the three hives we currently have. The other two came from swarms! Funny story about that…
In late April, I got a text from someone we know over on Eastwood that said they had a swarm. She asked if we wanted it, so Brooke went over after she got home (an hour or two later?), and by then, they were gone. Shucks… Well, that following Sunday, Meg and I are at our Philharmonic Concert and Brooke and Calvin are about to start walking over when they notice a swarm in our apple tree! They quickly grab their gear and get it put into a hive box. A few days later, there’s another one in the exact same tree! So yeah, she’d never caught a swarm before and this year, she caught two within a few days of one another. Crazy!
Thus far, the bees appear to be alive, but Brooke and Calvin have hopped in a few times so far and have struggled to find brood….and yet, there are still bees in there, suggesting that they’re sustaining themselves somehow?? We’ll see how this progresses, but we’re not in the time of the year that we’d expect them to go anywhere. Fingers-crossed they like their new home and share some honey with us!
<whew> Big update for June! I may do another one before we take off on our vacation…we’ll see if I have time… I don’t expect things to be radically different by then, but honestly, I kinda want a record of what it looked like before we left….so I can blame Calvin when things fall apart in our absence…. 😉
Things got pretty crazy between November and March. School got busy, with Meg being in High School and Calvin being in 5th grade, meaning that both kids have orchestra concerts and piano lessons/recitals, Meg has band and musical, and Calvin now has robotics with GATE. Maybe I’ll circle back to the winter months, since we actually had a decent amount of snow and cold.
For now, though, we begin with this year’s garden plot! We’ve had some weird “heat waves,” of sorts, on and off these past few weeks. We were up to 77 F yesterday, so we took the time to get some yard work done.
I went and secured the burn permit for the garden and Brooke got started taking care of the plots. She and Calvin raked the leaves and detritus up from the yard last week and got it ready to go, but it’s been so windy these past few weeks, we weren’t sure when we’d be able to actually burn. Thankfully, we hit the sweet spot: an overcast Saturday with low wind and somewhat elevated humidity.
The burning itself was done by 10:30ish, so we took a break and went outside to hit some of the other plots, pulling up some weeds and cutting some small trees that were going to create problems in a few months. Our neighbor was outside and we chatted a bit, and he reminded me that he bought a tiller for his tractor that he had offered to share (really, I think he bought a toy that he doesn’t have many excuses to actually use, so we present an opportunity for him!). He kindly came over, we moved the edging bricks out of the way, and he went to work! We used Brooke’s Dad’s rear tine tiller years ago to establish the gardens, but since then, we’ve used our other neighbor’s front tine tiller to reset the gardens each year. The rear tine variety just goes deeper than a front tine, so it’s been a few years since we got a really good turn-over of the garden. We were very appreciative!
Regardless, the plots look really good now! Brooke went ahead and planted some kale, lettuce, and parsley to get the season started, but we’ll wait to put beans and such in. I don’t think we’re going with anything “exotic” this year, but Brooke’s talking about putting popcorn in the ground again. It’s been since 2017 when we last planted it, so excited to see how it goes.
In other news, Meg got her driver’s permit a few weeks ago, on account of her turning 15 this year (!!!!!!). Calvin is starting to run an engine of his own, now tall enough to move the push mower around! Granted, he isn’t quite tall enough to maneuver the mower around the yard, but he’ll get used to it as he gets bigger. We aren’t planning on him making this a regular chore or anything this year, but we’re moving slowly in that direction. He’s at least showing some interest in helping out!
