Gardening Report.

Here is how two of Viva's three pots of flowers are looking. (I forgot to get a photo of the third one. It's in the yard against the fence because the plants were so tall they needed more support.):

By some odd coincidence, all three older children came home from church events with small containers of baby pansies. Bentley brought his home in May. I had to transplant the clump of small plants into a larger pot in June. The plants didn't grow at all (or die!) for the first month or more, but then they finally took off and now the pot is full of pansies that are blooming. Jake came  home with a container with a few small plants in it. And in July Viva came home with a small blue pot (maybe she painted the pot?) with a couple of small pansies growing in it. Jake and Viva's pansies have not yet bloomed. 

I am the one (with some help from Viva) who has kept the plants watered and cared for. Despite the boys lack of participation in tending them, they do get a chance to see how amazing it is that a very small plant grows big and blooms. The other plant in the photo is Viva's mint plant. It is doing really well and needs to be transplanted into the ground to see if it will survive the winter.

Jake, Viva and I were going to do more gardening together this summer, but we don't have a good garden plot in the yard so we didn't get our carrots and radishes planted. The lettuce we bought together I put in a pot and the aphids loved it so much we abandoned it. Only one zucchini grew on the zucchini plant--it's hard to fertilize blooms when you only have one plant. Gardening is a lot of work.