Man vs. Nature

or Woman vs. Nature
or Taming the Garden

Here is the latest progress in our garden and yard.  We have had a lot of trouble keeping the landscaping fabric from blowing off.  It has been very windy here the past few weeks and rainy.  I got a bunch of paver stones and used some left by the previous owners to hold it down and added a bunch more staples to hold it into the ground.  It hasn't budged since I added all that, even through some pretty crazy winds.  We have had a lot of rain and some of the garden has flooded but other places the pumpkins seeds we have planted have started to sprout, so that's something.

It took a long time to get all the new staples in

But it was very exciting when I got them all in and it withstood the big winds.  It felt like a small a victory in the war of Man vs. Nature.  I know, I know.  Nature always wins in the end.

Some baby pumpkin sprouts have popped through some of the holes.

Very exciting!

Scott with the new mower

Matthew takes the mower for a spin

Anna posing with this shovel - I was actually taking a picture just of the shovel at the time.  We had been helping a neighbor dig trenches in their yard (to mitigate the damage from flooding) as part of a ward service night and I wasn't sure at the end of it which shovel was our.  It wasn't this one.  We found our shovel in the end.  Our neighbors have flooding problems as well.  We're trying to figure out how to fix ours.

I love flowers so made room in one small bed for a sampler of daisies.

I should have put the tall yellow ones in back.  Oh well.

My mother-in-law unearthed some fairly happy strawberry plants while doing some weeding in one of the raised boxes.  I bought a few more and added them.  There was already this little cover for the plants.  Maybe it will keep some strawberry stealers out.

John and Emma help me water.  They mostly like getting wet.

We had such a big wasp and yellow jacket population last year when we moved in.  There were nests all over and yellow jackets everywhere.  It made going out into the yard a risky business.  So we researched how to get rid of them or control them and one thing we read was to bait a lot of traps early in the spring to catch the queens, who will only go out early in the season (before they have offspring to do it for them) to look for food.  We have been catching a lot of HUGE wasps/yellow jackets.  Much bigger than the little guys we caught in August last year, so we are hoping they are queens and this will help our problem later on in the summer.  It's hard to tell the size of them in the trap, but they are big mamas.

Grant relaxes in the freshly mowed lawn

 

And speaking of flooding this is the playground at Matthew and Anna's school a few days ago.  If you look closely you can see that it is quite full of water.  We're hoping this rain and coldness will let up soon so we can have a summery Memorial Day weekend.