Mom & Dad's Visit

Last week mom said that they may come and visit me. Uncle Bishoff was being called as a bishop in Ely so they invited Mom and Dad to come to their Sacrament meeting. They decided to make the extra drive up since they would already be about three and a half hours in my direction.

Yay! It was fun to have Mom and dad come visit me. I got to show them Boise and how beautiful it is up here. We went to the shop first so that they could see what Ryan does.



We went to a farmers market, Picked up some corn, peaches and apricots. Yum! Then we went for a picnic. The weather was so nice.


Later Dad wanted to go to Cabela's (outdoor/camping store). He didn't know that there was one in Vegas until we were already there and I told him but we still had fun walking around in there. Then for dinner I decided that we should pull out our Dutch Oven since we hadn't used it yet. We bought it just before I moved up here since we decided we should have our own. We made BBQ chicken and corn. Mike took over since he teased that Ryan wasn't jumping in and cooking. He started to put oil inside the oven and then set it on the charcoals. I didn't know what he was doing and tried to say aren't we going to put the chicken in yet? He teased is it ready yet? I didn't understand that he was gong to fry it until he set it right in the oil. I thought maybe he was trying to season it like we had to season the grill when I first built it. I was thinking it said it was already seasoned. Well fried BBQ chicken was yummy.

We have cooked quite a few times outside since Mike helped us decide to buy a charcoal grill instead of a gas grill. He said they taste better and are less expensive to cook with.

Starting a Garden

I wanted to write all of this down so that I remember how to do this later. Also I am so excited about all of this that I kind of hope that this will help get my sisters excited to try for themselves.

First if your dirt was as bone dry as my dirt was you need to really soak up the dirt and then rototill it once it has dried up to be moist and not sopping wet.

When you bury you plant dig a deeper hole and put a handful of steer manure in, plant, bury, and then sprinkle a little more manure on top. With tomatoe plants you break off the lowest limbs and then bury the plant so they are now under ground.

Water about every three days with a soaker hose for about an hour or so. That allows the water to soak deeper into the ground. Water with miracle grow about every 7 days until they are within a month of crop to induce growth.

I have cherry tomatoes!

I have been working on the website

so I haven't been paying too much attention to the garden so these little babies have really popped up without me noticing them. All of the tomatoe plants have had blossoms for a while but none have created tomatoes just yet till now :-D


And I have some blossoms on this green bean plant! Going to be watching it closely to see it produce some green beans.


My chives and carrots are doing good.


All of my pepper plants have peppers now!


Are these green been leaves pretty or what. I love them!
My Orange pepper plant with the biggest peppers.

Romaine Lettuce Yum!

This leaf is having a little trouble.... I don't know what it is or if it's something that I need to do to help it.
And last but not least the whole garden. Mike bought some wiring to build these cages for around the tomato plants. Ryan helped him build them so that they fit inside the tires. These will help hold up the branches of the tomato plants since they will get heavier when they have large tomatoes on them.

I have Peppers Growing!

Mike brought up some tires to put around the tomato plants. The black line you see running through the plants is my sweater hose. It kind of acts like a bubbler in a way but it looks like it is sweating from tons of tiny little pores throughout the lenth of the hose.



My chives and carrots are definitely getting a lot thicker :-D



This pepper has what you call white disease hehe j/k. It is the stuff I put on it to keep the ants from eating the leaves. There are three little peppers growing already! :-D Yaay!

Our New Ward

We have been enjoying out new ward a lot. There is diversity in ages unlike our last ward. Ryan would always tease that we needed to check pulses in our last ward since there were a lot of older people in our ward. So far we have met a lot of new people all the time we have people coming up and talking to us.

When we knew we were going to move up here I teased I didn't want to be put into primary again since I wanted to get to know the ward better and sooner then I did in the El Camino Ward. I immediately got put into the primary and didn't really get to know too many people for a long time.

The first week I got to go to the new ward the kids in primary were singing in Sacrament meeting and I got the feeling that I was going to miss primary. Little did I know that I was going to be back into primary. They called me first, and then Ryan the week after. I am the Valliant 10 and He is the Valliant 11 teacher. His class is all boys and mine is all girls. I would have had one of his boys, but the teachers felt bad for the boy being the only one. So they put him with the older class since they are still on the same book anyway. They called me to be the teacher of this class since there is a girl that has autism in my class. It is kind of nice knowing that I was called for my patience since I've always been told I have patience but it really feels good to know that my Heavenly Father sees and Admires my patience. ;-D I really like the Idea also that Ryan is in the same book as me because now we can prepare our lessons together. I like this cause we really are terrible are FHE and this can be our FHE study together.

I really have only been recently introduced to Autism. I've known it was out there but I have only interacted with people with it in the last year and half. Daphne was the first. She was a sweetheart. Very quiet but was bright and mostly liked to play on her own. The other girl in Safekey was way different, very active, and sometimes loud. The last was J.J. he was not very talkative but active and liked to be around. though since this was at church it was more difficult to work with him since we wanted him to be quiet while we tried to teach the other children. It was very difficult. Sydni is much more mellow at church. Though Sis. Swenson makes it sound like that is because she is one a new medication than she was before and this one seems to be working well for her.

Garden Update

The very tiny little specs to the farthest left is my romaine lettuce, next you will see some smaller leaves and that is my row of green beans. In the third row you will see my peppers and broccoli. I planted two red, one orange and one green. The farther part of that row is my broccoli. The next too very faint rows are my chives and carrots. You'll only see them if you enlarge the image by double clicking on it. Then the last row in the back is my tomatoes. The two closer ones are cherry tomatoes and the farther are large round tomatoes.

When you enlarge the image you will see some grass in the lower right hand corner. I had about that thickness of grass throughout my whole garden. It was a pain in the but to go out there and pick it all especially around my romaine lettuce, carrots and chives since I didn't want to pull them up with the grass. Luckily I haven't had too many weeds just yet.... cross my fingers. Today I just found one of my least favorite weed pop up near my carrots. :-( Another plus to having this garden is that it gets me outside of the house though I haven't started work yet and I'm getting some color to my whitey self haha.

Here are the little bitty romaine lettuce. I was getting a little nervous if they would come since these the carrots and chives took a bit longer to germinate than the green beens. Also a guy at Fred Meyer said that they don't like the warmer weather when germinating. At first I thought that they might be more weeds since I was getting a TON of grass growing in. But as I let them grow I noticed that they were definitely in a row and not scattered everywhere like the grass was. I'm happy since this will more likely be one of the things I eat more of.

My happy and sad broccoli plants. I had an ant infestation on my broccoli plants. They were living in the root of the four plants on the left. When I look close to the ground I can see that the ants were eating the stems also. I put the chopsticks in the ground next to them and a twisty around them to hold them up in last attempt to save them but I'm pretty sure I will be pulling them. :-( Though I am grateful that I still have four healthy plants :-D

The green bean process. First we have the bean on the left that still has his head stuck in the ground. That's how they start. It's quite funny to me. Then one they pop up I notices that they had two things to the side of them that remind me of cashew peanut halves.

This is my orange pepper. He's already got some blooms on him, so maybe I'll start to have some peppers growing soon.

The little grass in front is my carrots and the very fine grass in the back is my chives. :-D

This picture is for Tara. This is her favorite flower, I think, I know that she likes them though. I got lucky to have them in my front yard though. One time I was watching Jaiden and Rylan when I was their nanny and she had these in a flower pot from Pete. They were gorgeous but I couldn't figure out what was this funny pee scent coming from. Since the boys were still in diapers I thought it was that. Well I figured it out these blooms may be beautiful but I don't care for their scent :-D So I'm glad to have them outside.

Here is the rest of that clump of bushes waiting to bloom.

Some of my strawberry plants. I have alot of these in my planter. It's fun. Though I realized that you need alot of these plants in order to get even a few strawberries. I still need to pick more of the surrounding plants. I'm not sure what they are but they're crowding my strawberries. I even had quite a few onions in my planter area though I plucked most of then by now since their leaves were looking dead. Though most of them out since I don't really eat a lot of onions but I did keep a few in my fridge.

More pretty flowers. I have rose and flower galore in my yard.

And another set of those pink flowers waiting to bloom.

Fourth of July

We made hamburgers in our bitty George Forman that my mom gave us for Christmas. It's small so it was only able to cook one patty at a time but we didn't want to quite buy a bbq grill just yet. And Ry will probably want to look up a good model on the internet too. He likes researching things before we purchase :-D

Here are some fruit pizza's that I made. I bought the sugar cookies to make things more simple. The frosting is a pkg of cream cheese and 1/3 c. sugar and I used my egg slicer to slice the strawberries. I've been eyeing these kind of platters for some time and decided to buy one for now and buy more later.

These are blue Kool-Aide star ice cubes on a red drink :-D

I will add more pictures soon since I was able to capture a few fireworks while sitting on my couch.