House Exterior Paint!

Our house is getting painted finally! A few months ago, I decided I was really sick of it and started scraping paint myself to get things prepped. Once I got to the ladder on the garage only 15 feet up I was scared and did not feel confident doing anything. I was able to convince Cam to get some quotes. And after a good quote from someone and waiting for our turn- they started last week!

Now for some before pictures:

This is a picture from last year.

 Progress!!! The garage face siding and up to the door has been painted the new house color. They did all of the front trim first. The color is Behr Mossy Oak- but was color matched in Benjamin Moore Aura Exterior. It is pricey stuff but is suppose to last longer and save more money in the long run. The trim color is Benjamin Moore- White Dove (also Aura).

We painted our shed the Mossy Oak color last year and so I knew it was the right color for the house and for my taste. It's darker and warmer than the old grey. As you can see in the picture above it is a touch more green.

Here is the side, they did the trim and primed all the bare wood. I can't wait for it to get done. Its going to look so much better.

I will update next week!

Garden Harvest

It's been awhile since I posted anything here! I have been taking pictures as we went along but never got around to publishing them...till now!

 The kids were pretty excited about the sweet potatoes. They came very early. I think I harvested them the end of August. Last year, I harvested my sweet potatoes in October. I do still have some purple sweet potatoes in the ground that aren't ready yet.

 Cruz helped me dig them out.

 He did an awesome job of not breaking them!

 So far my estimate is that we've harvested about 50lbs. I've been getting creative with my sweet potato recipes. I tried to cure them on my back porch and I'm not sure I did it right. But hopefully, they will last in my basement for a while.

 Hales best Melon. These were prolific and sweet. Much easier to tell they were ready than the watermelon.

For watermelon I grew Ali baba and an early variety. The early variety had too many small seeds and wasn't as sweet as Ali Baba. However, I got way more icebox watermelons- probably because they are small when mature. I think we got around 25 watermelon total (I really need to keep a more accurate count so I can compare year over year).

 This is a cushaw squash. I got 11 of these. This was average size!!! I got one big one that must have been close to 40 pounds.

I'm hoping these last a while in the basement too. I did already cook a few and froze them for later. They have a lighter flavor compared to butternut squash. I think I like butternut squash more, but these were super duper squash bug resistant! I made squash soup, squash cookies, squash pancakes and roasted squash so far.

 I dehydrated a bunch of peppers at the end of the season since we were all getting tired of them.