Festival Season

Fall is for Festivals!

First, we went to Tinkerfest at the Amazeum.  By the way...  best gift ever!!!  We really got our use out of our 1 year Amazeum family membership, it was GREAT!!!  Thanks again!

 Do you think this kid is in heaven?  ;)

Then, came the Hobbs State Park Fall Festival.

 They got to press then drink apple cider.

 This family got a kick out of Reed showing them a caterpillar.

Then, I checked Charley out of school one day to attend the Insect Festival.  This event only happens once every 2 years, and when I was teaching at HHA, the entomology prof at the U of A who organizes the event spoke to my students, and I took them to this festival.  I knew it would be great!

 This kid wanted to touch everything!  Must've touched 6 different species of roaches!

 A scorpion!

 See it glowing under the blacklight?

 Tarantula exoskeletons.

 "Field of cotton"

 Bumblebee races!

 Aquatic insects

 Reed's very favorite thing.  While C ran off to find her friends Emily and Brendan, Reed stood mesmerized for quite some time!

 The lady finally got it down for him to touch!

Yard Makeover

My summer project was the yard.  We had a big drainage problem in our side yard.  The previous owner decided to dump a bunch of (what I later learned was called) chocolate rock over the entire expanse of the swampy area in order to...  well, I'm not sure.  But as the grass started to grow up in the flooded rocky area, it couldn't be mowed, and we had a mess. 

First I had to rake up all the chocolate rock.  This proved to be the hardest part of the entire project, and took days.  Then, I dug a deep trench, and used the fill dirt to build up the ground on either side of the trench, and slope it away from the house and toward the ditch.  Rod devised an underground pipe with a drain on top.  I pulled out plenty of big old rocks from our rocky AR soil as I dug the ditch, that I was able to fill it over halfway back in with these rocks.  Then, we paid a neighbor to bring a load of river rock in his trailer, which I used to fill the rest of the ditch up.  A layer of landscape cloth, topped with the original chocolate rock, and we had a nice pathway over a deep trench that seems to have solved the flooding problem - yay!!!  I wish I had before pics - I'm sure I do, buried somewhere on my external HD, but it was basically a wet sloppy grassy rocky patch.  Here is what it looks like now!

Rod scored the bird bath from our neighbor's trash, and I scoured the $1 rack at Lowe's a few times this summer for the landscaping.  I'll continue to fill in this year.

The other side of the house became our butterfly/bee garden.  I'm pretty impressed by the array of wildflowers I have growing.  The pink cosmos were from our Nebraska friend Ulrike, in memory of our sweet Haley, and because of that they are my very favorite.  I collected lots of seeds from them this summer, to be sure I'd have more to enjoy year after year!  The zinnias are from Donna Cotten - aren't they beautiful?

I was given some swamp milkweed seeds last winter, and desperately want milkweed to grow.  Can anyone tell me if this is what this is?

Also, I planted 3 blackberry plants, so hopefully we'll be picking our very own this summer!