Homecoming Parade 2023!

Our high school's homecoming parade was in September! They completely shut down the roads in Monroe. The elementary and middle school also closed down, so everyone could come outside and cheer on the high school! The Advanced Middle School Band was invited to play with the High School band (which was tiny because a lot of them were on other floats). Macey was all for it, so I checked her out of school and got her to the high school!

Harper, the boys and I met up with Scott to watch the parade!

 

Lucy's 1st Day of Dance!

Lucy had her first day of dance class, and she looked so beautiful and grown up--she deserved a picture! As you can see, Lucy put on her fanciest jewelry to celebrate the event!

Fixing the Shed!

Last fall/winter we had some pretty bad wind storms! It was so intense that it ripped the siding off our shed. We collected the pieces until the weather was on our side! Cooper and Scott climbed up simultaneously to help piece it back together. Some of the pieces of siding were warped and cracked, but they did a great job! It was fun to see them work together! (Also, a shout-out to Macey for holding the ladder so well!)

Our Garden!

Our very first start to our garden this summer was Harper's mustard seed that she planted in Sunbeams. His name was Herbie, and he grew to be huge!!

We did some quick landscaping in the back of our property, and then we tilled up our garden area! The first thing we planted in early spring was onions--and lots of them!

We tried starting some plants inside this year. Some worked and some didn't! I also found packets of seeds at Dollar Tree for $.25! I figured they were worth a shot...and they all came up! These were all Dollar Tree seeds! We got parsley, cilantro, basil, and lots and lots of cherry tomatoes!

We harvested our corn in late August! It is always a big day when we harvest (because we love corn and plant a lot of it)! (We had way more corn than pictured!) We had a lot of mosquitoes because of all the water we had this year. They got to be so bad, at times, that the city sent around a truck at night to spray for mosquitoes. Our harvest happened right before a night spray. We coated everyone with bug spray and then I had citronella patches and wristbands. I think with all 3 powers combined, we were able to mostly avoid the bug bites!

We had a couple onion harvests! This was our first one!

We ate a lot of them raw, but when they started to sprout, we diced them up, quadruple bagged them, and put them in our deep freeze!

TOMATOES! It was a weird year for tomatoes! We didn't get too many tomatoes during the summer--just enough. The season ended and the frost settled in, and we had to get them off the vine. We knew that they would mostly ripen in our house, so we went and cleaned the plants and then cleaned the plants off the garden! We ate many, many tomatoes fresh. We had romas, beef steak and cherry tomatoes! We bottled/froze tomatoes, bottled salsa, bottled pizza sauce and bottled spaghetti sauce!

We dug up potatoes! We had yukon gold, russett, and red potatoes. (I think we counted 114 plants!!!) Lucy needed to dig potatoes, and she let me supervise!

Green beans! I think everyone helped snap beans at least once this year! Even Owen and Charlie jumped in! 

I try to grow something new every year, and this year it was honey dew! They are my favorite melon, and I didn't think I would be able to grow them (we haven't had a super successful watermelon crop yet). But...WE DID IT! It was delicious!! We had several melons--success!

I'm confident our zucchini plant died several times this summer and prayer brought it back to life! It lasted ALL. SUMMER. LONG. The sqaush bugs were horrible, and we didn't ever have a large yield, but we had enough. We had enough to freeze zucchini bread and some shredded zucchini too!

PEACHES! Oh my peaches. We had a nectarine tree--that we ate about 15 nectarines off of, and then we had TWO peach trees! Our trees were loaded this year (and I thinned them several times)! We had each tree proped up with at least 5 boards, but the branches were so heavy, we had several tree branches split. We finally just called it quits, and we cleared the peaches off. The kids were more than willing to help, and we got SO. MANY. PEACHES! We gifted them to everyone that we knew! And I bottled peaches, bottled several varieties of peach jam, and we froze peaches for smoothies/milkshakes, and made peach freezer jam!

I didn't get pictures of everything, but we had spinach and lettuce, jalapenos, shishuto peppers, and green peppers, cabbage, carrots, apples, pumpkins, raspberries, peaches, cherries and cantaloupe! We were so, so abundantly blessed, and I am so grateful!