August Ends And September Begins

Wow, summer is officially over and our school year has begun again!!  The girls started back with school work half way through August to ease our way into the routine, but now it's full speed ahead for Hannah in the 5th grade and Lauren in 3rd.  This is a case of the students being much happier about this than teacher, aka Mom.  I like my summer breaks and wouldn't mind it lasting longer, but let the homeschooling begin again.

I'm a bit behind in posting so I'll do a recap our our last few weeks of activity.  We had another chance to visit with the Bartlinski family at their vacation house near Orlando.  It was another fun day for the girls to play and the adults to spend time talking.  Loved it!!

The last of the shed's came together and we can now pull stuff out of the garage to organize and make more space that will allow a vehicle to actually park in there!!

After the heat of the last couple of months we cleared out the struggling and dead plants from the Vertical Garden System and Towers .  With this done, I took apart and cleaned one of the towers and I've started seedlings to begin our new growing season.  Over the next couple of weeks we'll take apart the other two towers and clean them as well.  We have a lot more shade cloth up on the structures Kevin made to help offset the intense afternoon sun.  As cooler temperatures arrive we can remove these.

The empty and cleaned tower on the left, the middle one has a few new lettuce plants and kale that is still thriving, the last tower on the right still has okra, eggplant and a tomato that are healthy.  I'll wait until I can clean it before adding more plants to the second and third towers.

With most of the plants removed from the vertical garden, we cleaned the pipes, trimmed the remaining herbs and root systems and are ready to add the seedlings once they have sprouted enough to put in here.

Seedlings started

Our raised gardens on the opposite side of the house got a good trimming to tame the jungle of squash vines and keep what was left healthy.  Once we managed to control the awful pickle worm that ruined so much of our squash, we got a pretty good harvest of butternut squash and pictured here are only a few of the MANY eggplants we harvested from the towers.

Our gardens each have papaya's growing in them.  They were each about a foot tall when I planted them, but look how much they've grown and they have fruit starting on each one.

We celebrated Grandma's birthday with a party and swimming at Pat and Jen's who were down here from Pennsylvania.

Cameron's on his 3rd month and 3rd set of classes after getting A's in the last 4 classes he took over the past 2 months.  It is a very accelerated paced school program, and really keeps him on the go, but he is loving it.

Dragonfly on the top of my tea plant and a lizard on the trunk

Closeup of the dragonfly, not bad for this having to be photographed from inside the house

Finally, we've been anxiously awaiting new updates on my dad and praying for complete healing as he was admitted to the hospital this past Tuesday with blood clots in both legs and lungs.  He's in great spirits despite this and still brags it's only the second time in his almost 80 years that he's been in the hospital.

Dad with a get well bear my sister got him along with a snickers bar to ease the boredom of being in the hospital

That's a quick recap of the last month of summer and the beginning of Fall.  The temperature doesn't reflect this new season yet, and I will be happy when it does.  That's it for now.  Take care.