Nevada, Tuesday

Tuesday -
The children spent lots of time helping Grandfather in the garden. He'd already taught them each how to harvest the asparagus - something we did daily while we were there.

First Rebecca helped Grandfather tie up the tomatoes that Daddy had helped him plant the weekend before. Grandfather was very impressed with how quickly Rebecca learned how to do this and said he'd never been able to do it so quickly before. By the time we left he said it was time to tie them a second time, and he wished Rebecca could have helped him again.

Then the kids helped Grandfather deadhead the daffodils. They each ran inside and got their little safety scissors so they could better cut the flowers stems.

Grandfather is growing celery for the first time in Nevada this season and wanted to try blanching a portion of a row so it would be white, instead of green. His method - in his words - was crude, but hopefully effective. He and Sam cut widths of coorugated cardboard and then created little tents - basically just digging a shallow trench on either side of the row, inserted a length of corrugated about 8" wide in the trench to shade the celery from the sun. I'm very curious to see how this experiment works.

Oh the cute thing about the cutting of the corrugated ... as you can see from the pictures, Sam had his scissors and Grandfather had his - they would start at opposite ends and play "bumper cars" as Sam called it. It was an extremely effective way to have Sam help and still get the job done quickly.



Tuesday night our friends the RJ and Rachel came up from Las Vegas to visit and brought their four beautiful children. Our kids were so excited to see them, after eating a fast dinner of BBQ chicken and veggies from the garden, they ran for a solid hour all over the garden paths. RJ got pictures of the entire crew, and promised to send me a copy of the file ... with eight little kids, there was no way they'd all wait for me to dig my camera out of the car!