Thursday, September 26, 2013

Dad's garden


Dad spent the morning working in our little “garden”.  We have two larger planter boxes in the front of our house where we park the car.  One is about 10 feet square and the other is about 2 feet by 20 feet long.  He planted tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions and lettuce this morning.  We will see what comes up.  Everything starts from seed here.  The Todds gave us some lettuce seed from some of the plants in their garden.  I saved pepper seeds and managed to buy tomato, cucumber and onion.  It should be fun.  
This is my little garden area.  I planted seeds in the pots on the wall to start peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers.  I am putting onions around the perimeter and then the tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers will be in the middle.  I might sneak in a zuchinni or two, somewhere.

The lettuce is going in here.  It is a little shady now, but it won’t be in a couple of months.  The lettuce should love the shade.   I hope that growing a few vegetables will be fun.  You can buy about anything in the market for really cheap but what is the fun of that.  (Except the haggling to see what you can get the price down too. )




This is a picture of the front of our house.  There is a little courtyard out here, where we park the car.  There is a gate with spikes on it behind the car.  We have three bedrooms, 1 ½ baths and a long very narrow kitchen that you can almost pass someone in.   The bedrooms and bathrooms are upstairs so you need to plan ahead and not get desperate.  There is a little walled in (like the walls are 20 feet tall) area out the kitchen door.  There is a clothesline out there.  That is how you get to the laundry room where the teeny tiny washer and dryer are.  You can either wash or dry, but never both at the same time.  There is also a little 'room' out there that has a shower hose and a 'bung' hole - we keep that door closed; I think mosquitoes grow in there!!!

There are metal shutters on all the doors and windows here and you close and lock them at night or when you are not home.  There are also metal grates on the downstairs windows.  We also have guards at the gate to the apartment complex where we live, they are always smiling; maybe cause we give them cookies quite often.  The humanitarian couple, the Richards, live next door to us; and the PEF missionary, Sistor Florine, lives four apartments down.  Sister Florine had four young sister missionaries living with her until about a week ago - we got them a three bedroom apartment and have six sisters in that one now.  I think she is enjoying the peace and quiet.

This is a good place to live, the missionaries are well taken care of here - especially us Senior Missionaries!
 


More lemurs and foosa



This mother lemur is carrying her baby around, you can just see it’s head and hand sticking out.  The baby holds on to the underside of the mother and she keeps it snuggled pretty close.  The APs went to the same lemur park about 4 weeks later and they got to pet the baby, they said it was about the size of a small kitten, and the mother wasn’t nearly as protective of it as she was when we were there.





We went over to another part of the Park where the foosas were.  There were about six foosas in a chain link enclosure.  They were amazing to watch.   They weren’t as big as I thought they were going to be, or else they were young ones.  According to Madagascar, the movie, the foosa like to lunch on lemurs.  Sure glad they couldn’t get to the cute lemurs we had been playing with that morning.


They are definitely meat eaters!