Visiting Pittsburg Pittsburg isn't the tourist attraction that our last home was, but it's closer! Clint, Anne, Jack and Nate came down for the weekend.

	Needless to say, Big Brutus is a must-see for the 6-12 set (and the geek of all ages!), and Max and his cousin made the most of it. You can see the rest of my Big Brutus pictures here.
	No visit to Brutus would be complete without the "everyone in the scoop" shot! And no visit anywhere would be complete without a bug or flower shot (below). After lunch, we dropped by Pitt State, where the cousins went bananas....
	After we got back from our adventures, I did a circuit around the yard with the Nikon. Left, a Zinnia bud in the garden. Below that, one of our ripe (but still largely tasteless) pears. Just below, a young robin in the branches.

  ¶ Sunday, July 11, 2010 0 comments

  Shed As I reported back in February, we got a new riding mower earlier this year, and also a shed kit to house it. When my parents were here in Spring, we got the shed up.

	First, of course, finding a flat, open but not too obvious spot in the yard. This is the back corner (northwest, if you're keeping maps) surrounded by cedars on two sides and pear on the third.
	We were too busy putting the thing up to take pictures during the process, but here's a finished view
	Obviously, the first thing to do with a mower shed, is park the mower! The T-Shirts are in honor of Woody's new internet radio home, Mushroom FM. We had a little trouble with one side of the roof, and I 'fixed' it with foam filler and silicone caulk. When we got back from vacation, I discovered that that half of the roof had slid entirely off the shed. Taking the opportunity of the now-half-empty roof, I got up and recentered the skylight piece, and we got the roof back in properly. Now we're slowly moving gardening stuff out of the garage, and the shed is looking more and more shed-like inside!

Postscript: Here's a better shot of the shed in place.
  ¶ Monday, July 05, 2010 0 comments

  Yard Work Aside from the travel, our big adventure this summer has to be Max's garden. Of course, calling it "Max's garden" doesn't begin to describe the work that's gone into it, starting with one set of grandparents (plus a cousin!) helping with the tilling and the other set helping with the initial weeding and planting, not to mention the work his parents have put into re-weeding after our neglectful travels. We had some bad weather luck early: a run of rain which wiped out a lot of seeds and kept us from weekding during the critical early stages, then a run of hot, dry weather right after we replanted the tomatoes (and abandon them, because we were having fun in other states). In spite of it all, we've got some plants growing.

	Stage one, after deciding what the garden would involve, was pre-planting the tomatoes indoors. They got to a few inches high before we replanted them and nearly killed the lot. Below, you can see the initial weeding and laying out of the garden. It looks so neat and promising! And then we planted the seeds and .... it started raining. And raining. And raining. Then we went on vacation!
	As you can see, when we got back from our trips, the garden had sprouted..... WEEDS. The tomato plants had disappeared entirely, which is what you're looking at here. As you can see below, the entire garden was something of a mess. There's almost no evidence of the original lines, except for the morning glory on the right. It was a little while before we actually got back to weeding, as you can see below. By then the pumpkin was showing flowers and some real life.
	The rain has been a bit inconsistent: first that huge wet spell, then a really dry spell. Aside from a couple of times, though, we've not had to water it much: since we got back, rain's been pretty reliable.
	This goes in the "if we'd had time, we should have done this at the beginning of the summer" category. As we've cleared the weeds -- working in roughly half-hour daily shifts in the morning -- we've been discovering what's still living and laying down weedblock. Turns out that we've got a little of everything, almost. The morning glory and pumpkin, true to their viney nature, are growing like gangbusters. There are a few sunflowers now starting to get tall and, much to our surprise, a few carrot tops. I don't think any zinnias made it, though.
	Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the survival of two tomato plants. We'd actually taken the tomato frames out of the garden for a while, but we put them back to support the two that are growing.
	It's me, of course, so I have to share a bug picture! This cute fellow was hanging out on a sunflower.

Postscript: Those "Sunflowers" I was going on about? Zinnias.
  ¶ Monday, July 05, 2010 0 comments