Before and After: The Summer/Fall Edition

Its officially FALL!  The trees have turned, the air is crisp and the Harvest is winding down.  I had a busy ushering in of Fall this year thanks to our hard work during the spring and summer my garden did extremely well... Actually maybe a little too well!!  With my hubby gone to Fort St John, BC for work since the beginning of august I was left to labor independently in the yard this fall.  Of course being the crazy person that I am I may have over committed a couple times with little "side" projects.  However its over now and I have learnt some valuable lessons, including what I can handle and what I want to do!  (In regards to yard work and projects ;))

Here is a before and after look at the Russell family's Summer/Fall.

 Yard/Garden-

BEFORE                                  

AFTER

Nominated for our Community in Bloom competition.  We didn't win but got a free meal!

The tip of the ice burg!!!!

HARVEST PROJECTS-

Salsa and Apple sauce.  To help control the tomato harvest,  I made 2 batches of salsa, have froze/gave away tomatoes and still have 1/2 a Superstore bin left of tomatoes!

An example of me over committing.  My friend and I decided to make Apple jelly/ Apple sauce.  We picked 4-5gallon buckets of crab apples from our friends tree.  In hindsight 2 buckets would have been sufficient.  And yes that is smoke.  We had a COUPLE mishaps with boiling jelly over... Thanks Joe and Tiff for your hard work cleaning up!

Jelly and Pickled Beets.  Lots of work, but so YUMMY

SUMMER FUN--  BEFORE

AFTER

OVER COMMITMENT TO "small" Projects

BEFORE/ AFTER

Cleaning and organizing the Car.  Thanks once again to http://orgjunkie.com/blog

Potty Training.

The daily laundry pile!  And my basket of clean clothes to change in to after accidents.

Its a work in progress!  2months, doing pretty good with one aspect... and not so good with the 2nd!

Hair cut

William learnt to walk the dog and Ride his bike.  (FYI He usually always wears a Helmet )

William also feeds the dog.  He is becoming a very good helper to Mom since Dad has been gone.


WELCOME FALL!!!

Our bike rides remain  but toques, jackets and mitts are becoming more frequent guests.

The yard is all cleaned up ready to sit under feet and feet of snow!

And here we go TRUCKING in to Fall! 

LONG WEEKEND!!!!

Just a quick shout out to everyone!

HOPE YOU ALL HAVE A FUN and SAFE LONG WEEKEND!!! Lets hope the sun enjoys this long weekend too!!!

Summer is Here

Hey everyone!!!

As I'm sure you figured out SUMMER IS HERE!!!! And with summer comes busy days, BBQ nights and lots of FUN!  Unfortunately its a short season in this part of the country!!  Therefore I will just warn you that I may not write many blogs over the next few months, as I attempt to squeeze every ounce of summer out of June, July and August!!!

As a quick up date we are all doing well.  William and Clayton's Farmer tan's are coming along nicely, Mine is not quite started, but should be coming along nicely by the end of the June.  We have been busy busy in the yard.  We undertook a big project and made a garden along the back fence in May, which took a lot of evenings to dig out the countless large rocks and clay to make room for 'growing soil'!!!  Now that all the planting is done we just have to watch it grow!!! And pick weeds!!!  we have already taken the trailer out 2 times and are looking forward to a few more camping trips this summer!

Ill end this short blog entry with a couple pictures of our yard, I'm pretty happy with how things are looking right now!  Just have a couple bags of mulch to spread and a couple other things to do this week!
Hope everyone has a GREAT SUMMER!!!

 Looking kinda straggly right now, Started some of these from seed and they still are kinda sickly looking.

 My 6$ find!  Love it!

 Doesn't look all that wonderful now, but have tonnes of tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuce and carrots planted!!!  Actually this is a very bad picture... It looks much better then this in real life!!! lol

 Calla Lily's!!! so pretty, started Sweet peas from seed around the lily, still super small!  The other two pots have strawberry plants.

 All my perennials came up nicely!  And check out my 2 new hanging pots!  I heart these cone shaped pots!!!

My $10 find!!!(2 planters for 4.79 each!) A quick project to add something different to the front door!  I really like the way this turned out!

CANT TURN YOUR BACK FOR A MINUTE!!!

 He was out playing in the dirt.



When we were camping last weekend, William and Tessa chilling out!

Easter 2011

HAPPY BELATED EASTER!!!

Hope you all had a wonderful Easter weekend celebrating in which ever way is important to you!

We had a AWESOME Easter this year!!! 

William and I decorated the house a couple days before.  He was a great help, however we did have several disagreements regarding the Easter eggs.  He loves "eggs" which is kinda ironic considering he is allergic to them.

BETCHA didnt know there is such a thing as EASTER BALLOONS!

My Easter basket this year... Kinda sparse thanks to the resident 2 year old

The object of many 'discussions' regarding not touching the 'eggs'.

SO MY KID!  He took over as beater licker this time!

Decorating cupcakes for the weekend

Finished product!  Watch out Martha Stewart!  haha

 We started the weekend by driving to Fort Saskatchewan to stay with Clay's sister and brother-in-law; Meagan and Matt, and there dog Rollie!  It was really nice to visit, and William was sooo excited to see Auntie Meagan and Uncle Matt!  Saturday Clay and I headed out to look at some trucks, we test drove a couple that day and ended up buying one!  It was a really nice day with just the two of us.  William stayed with his Auntie and Uncle and had a BLAST!  He was still going strong when we arrived back in the afternoon, Matt and Meagan however looked a little tired!!!  Haha...  We got to relax a couple hours in the afternoon because William wanted nothing to do with us, he was much too busy with his Auntie!  (THANKS M&M).  Saturday evening Clayton and I headed to Jubilation's for a nice date night.

Sunday we woke up late (yes M&M 715am is considered 'late' with William!  lol).  William found an Easter basket and some eggs that the Easter Bunny left!  The eggs lead to a special Easter basket filled with goodies!  The Egg's had jelly beans in them, which William soon discovered and they quickly disappeared.  Luckily he also had a Banana.  However after a 30min car ride the jelly beans and banana were re-discovered, and we had our first road side puke-cleaning adventure!  Yeah!!!!

Following the Egg trail

Finding the Easter basket!

During one of my chats with the easter bunny he told me that in the SPIRIT of Earth day (which was Good Friday this year) he found an basket from a thrift store and used some left over ribbon and spray paint to make it all fancy.

Jelly beans...(insert horror music here)

We went to Baba's and Gedo's house for brunch and had a great time visiting with family.  It was such an amazing day the kids were able to be outside and had an Easter Egg hunt!  Thanks to the big kids for being good sports and helping out the little ones!!!  It was lots of fun!  I dont remember doing egg hunts when we were little, but will for sure be adding this event to our easter celebrations in the years to come!!!

The egg hunt

We arrived home that evening and continued our outside time by breaking in the deck chairs and pulling out the outside toys!

My boys putting together the Bike Trailer- LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!!! 

 (The snow is almost gone, and I will put in a formal retraction to my previous blog post regarding how Spring had Sprung.  Not 2 days after that post we had a huge DUMP of snow and icky weather which lasted about a week!  I guess I jinxed us!  sorry!!!)

AN UPDATE ON William's and My little garden experiment we started last month!

After transplanting the tomato plants we seeded in March, I have learnt a lesson, One or two seeds per peat disc is plenty.  I had 3-4-5 shoots come up in each peat disc this year and had to transplant over 65 plants to larger containers last week.  In retro-spec I should have transplanted a little earlier as they are super stringy and kinda sickly looking right now, but I am lovingly tending to my indoor garden that kinda got outta hand.  I now have a 'green' table set up in the dining area, similar to my Mother's house.  Not esthetically pleasing but Hopefully I will have lots of Tomatoes this year!!

Post Planting In March

Pre-transplanting April 20, 2011

All the containers I had to wash, cut and prep for transplanting.

My 'Green' table.  As you can see the plants are pretty pathetic looking right now!

I'll Keep you updated on the progress!