Happy Mothers Day!

 For my Mom!

For me cause I'm a Mom!

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers who read this. ;)

Garden shots.

The Newest Plant in the yard!!



It's called a butterfly bush. I love butterflies!

  While at the hardware store I always look at the garden section for discounted plants. And I found this butterfly bush. A little old man was standing there and said he has one in his yard and they look great all year and get pretty big and bushy. That's perfect for a yard with nothing in it right. Well let's see how green our thumbs are. Chris planted it and it kinda blends in with the grass in the picture. I think he picked a good spot for it, right near the deck.

It has the most beautiful flowers.

 Garden Time!

Our tomatoes are growing great. They love the sandy soil and sunshine.

This is an eggplant. It's a variety I've never tried. Looks like we're going to get at least one anyway.

This is suppose to be a cucumber.

This is our other cucumber. Some one told me they are suppose to be a vine. Maybe next year I'll have a fence for them.



Bell peppers are doing great.





We finally got a squash. I think the ants or some other bug was taking off with the flowers right after they bloomed. So this makes us happy.



 I think we were too late for broccoli. They don't look so good. We'll try them again in the fall.

Traditional egg plant flowers.

 Banana pepper. Garden doesn't look so great from this angle.

 More peppers.



 This is my container garden. They are still alive. They've been in there now for a while.



Even though the cold hit hard last year the fig tree made a come back and we already have some figs.

I may not have the best gardening skills in the world but I'm learning and fresh veggies actually do taste a lot better. So... I'm not going to give up. Hopefully, some day, one plant at a time, my yard will be a lush garden that people will want to actually look at instead of a little patch in a sea of grass.  

Oregano!

I've been harvesting lots of Oregano. It's good that I love the stuff. We've had this one plant now for three years. The older the plant is the bigger the leaves get and our leaves are about the size of a quarter.

It's so good we put it on pizza and in spaghetti like every one else but we also put it on all our meats, cheese sandwiches, anything that has garlic. It's good with tomatoes. Oregano is awesome as far as spices go. I use it way more than black pepper.

I've got a little experiment going to see what the best way to propagate it is. I've got some in a glass with water and some in some pots which I'm keeping really wet. Maybe I'll be an oregano farmer. Mmm... Oregano!

We took a trip to rainbow springs.

We decided to go check out Rainbow Springs all together to see if it would be a good place to go when my sister is here for the summer. We all had a great time. It was very reasonably priced and I think it would be a good place to go. Either way we will definitely be going back. There was a lot of exploring left to do.



First we found a good place to set up for our picnic. This is the bar-b-q king.



Then we sat in the sun bathing area. People were playing football. It was very nice.



The swimming area was a little crowded but Chris jumped in. Even though it wasn't really hot enough for us.

 We did some exploring and found that this use to be an attraction and they had a zoo back in the 70's. We discovered some old animal cages and examined them.







This is out side of some of the cages.



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Looking into one of the cages.



Paused to take a picture.




Panoramic view. One of the man made falls is on the left.





We checked out the butterfly garden that had a lot of native plants.



 There were a lot of caterpillars. Soon those gardens will be full of butterflies.

All of us back at the picnic area.



Spring break!

 This week is spring break and about a week before it started all I was hearing was, "We never do annnnythinnng. It's soooo borrrring around here. I don't want to sit around the houuuuse all week. Other people do stuuuuuff. Let's do somethinnnng for sprinnng breaaaaak. So we decided to drag the kid to some of the local spots.

 Rainbow Springs:

 Chris took her to rainbow springs on his day off. They had a lot of fun. Hopefully we can go back and go canoeing when it's all of us. The spring waters here in Florida are crystal clear and are sought after by bottling company's but in the parks you could swim down to the spring opening with a bottle and bottle your own water. That's how fresh and clean the water is.



Small fish in the spring head.









Man made waterfall



Hontoon Island:



We sat down for a break.







Standing on the edge of the island.



On my day off I went and got Gramme and we went exploring on Hontoon island. Even though we didn't walk that far we could see an example of some Native American totems that were excavated. We talked to some people that were siting on the edge of the island fishing. They said the fishing was pretty good. We had brought a picnic lunch and it was a nice place for it.



The Beach:

Then finally we couldn't stay away... we went to the beach. The water hadn't warmed up yet and with the wind blowing, it  was too cold to do any swimming.



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Chris did some kite flying.

 Veronica tried to go swimming but it was just too cold.

This guy kept us entertained. We named him fatty. Looks like he's saying "Hey baby"