Halloween Fun!

I know that it is almost Thanksgiving, but I just had to post some pictures from Halloween. Ryan and the kids did pumpkins this year. (They came out of our garden!) Ryan would draw out several different eyes, nose, and mouths for them to pick from and then drew them onto the pumpkins. He then helped the kids cut them out. They all turned out so cute! This year Stephen was Optimus Prime (a Transformer for those of you who don't already know), Jenny was Tinkerbell, Zack was a firefighter, and Alyssa was a very adorable black cat. (None of the pictures seems to do Alyssa's little costume justice. I may have to put it on her and try to get a better picture or her!)

Mystery Squash

OK, so I know that I was going for one blog a day to get caught up, but I think that maybe I had better just shoot for one a week! I have taken so many pictures lately that the battery on the camera is dead so I will just start by writing the text while I have the time, and then upload the pictures later when I have another chunk of time.

The first blog for now is about our garden. As many of you know I had a garden this year with a friend of mine in our apartment complex. Part of the way through the summer one of the other neighbors who had planted a garden moved, so we took over her garden too. Now, due to circumstances last year at harvest, two of the gardens were just allowed to go grow wild and everything not picked was left to rot. When things started growing this spring, we discovered that we had tomato plants where we didn't plant any and a number of squash plants that were not in the locations were we planted ours this year. (Although we originally left them to grow because we weren't sure if they were coming up in odd places because we had little helpers while doing most of the planting!) By the end of the summer we had an outrageous number of tomato plants and several what we termed mystery squash. You see we didn't realize it until later but many of the vegetables that were left to rot last year had self germinated and ended up cross pollinating with what we did plant! (We planted zucchini, spaghetti squash, and pumpkins, and last year we aren't sure but we think there were at least crook necked squash, and butternut squash.) It is always interesting to see what comes of such a mix. Well here are pictures of the results! (The one in the center was actually a honeydew melon, the other two seemed to be a cross between butternut squash and pumpkin. We also had several that were spaghetti squash or a spaghetti squash, zucchini mix. They looked more like the honeydew melon though more oblong in shape.) I hope that you find the situation almost as funny as we did!