Working in the Gardens & in the Treetops

   We were very busy today working in the yard and in the garden.  I did a lot of shoveling, Benjamin resembled a monkey as he pruned the trees and we also planted a few more plants and mulched another section of the yard.

   I worked on turning up the soil for the “East” garden.  It was quite a job using the Maddox to bust up the chunks of sod.

 

 

 

 

 

Benjamin trimming the trees

Benjamin thinks he remembers reading about a woodpecker that’ll place acorns inside of a tree, but he can’t remember for sure what species it was.

Noah cut down some bamboo to use as posts for the tomatoes to grow on.

The west garden mulched

 

The new blackberry patch

Mulching the Yard

Yay! It’s mulching day!

I’ve always enjoyed mulching our yard because of the huge difference it can make in such a short period of time.

Thankfully we’ve already gotten both riding lawn mowers running, although the mower won’t engage on one of them.

 

We had to make a couple of berms last year to help manage the enormous amounts of water that are eroding our yard.  We’ll also add some ornamental plants to the berm.

 

We’ve also ordered some grass plugs that should hopefully transform this yard into a lawn.

A White Christmas…

…can sometimes be a bad thing.

When we woke up this Christmas Eve the yard was covered with snow and the snowflakes were still falling!

Benjamin shoveled our driveway and then did one of the neighbor’s driveways.

I guess that I was so delighted by the sights that met my eyes I forgot to check the settings on my camera and later found that it was still set to night photography from the night before.  Just in case you were wondering why the photos look like they were taken in the 1980s.

(Right) He’d l strike any pose as long as it wasn’t a smile (Left) What a menacing look! Now I know why he’s always the villian in our videos.

 

UPS stopped by a couple of times today to deliver some last minute gifts.

 

Our long time friends and cousins of the Bauwens family got to drive down from Detroit on Christmas leave. They came over to our house and visited-it was so good to see them!

We all really pulled together this evening and started getting the living room in order. Mom finished the trim, so we could move the piano against the wall.  Take a look at the time lapse video below of us tried to get our construction site ready for Christmas tomorrow morning.

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We laid down some of the left over carpet to use as a rug tomorrow morning

We were walking out of the van to meet up with Grandma & Glenn when they called and told us that they had slipped on the roads and were in the median of a highway. By the time that we grabbed a tow strap and drove to where they were a couple of people had stopped including a guy with a big truck who towed them out. Their Mustang (rear-wheel drive, big engine, light car) hit some ice and spun around for awhile, when it stopped they were facing the oncoming traffic so they slid backwards down the hill. Thankfully neither of them had gotten hurt even though they were a little shaken up and also the car didn’t get messed up.  Glenn turned the car around and we followed him back home. The roads were in pretty bad shape and we had a slow drive back home.

We still had some wrapping to do and had to setup some decorations before going to bed and we fell asleep from 2am-3am.

Snow

  

When I opened up the shade in my bedroom this morning I had the pleasant surprise of seeing snow!