Old Time Root Cellar

Well, the big question waiting to be answered is "Do we clean out the old root cellar this year or just build a new one?"

Years ago, the old homestead here had a root cellar, but someone before us threw a bunch of junk into it. Trees have also grown on top of it. I love the fact that it was built by hand.

I think it would be neat to clean it out and do what the owners of this land before us did--fill it full of root vegetables and especially potatoes. I wonder how many tornadoes drove the early owners to this old cellar as a place of safety? What kind of stories could it tell if it could talk?

Couldn't help but throw in this picture of the red bud tree up by the old cellar also.

Burn, Baby, Burn!!!

The boy's Poppy  decided it was a good day to burn the brush pile that had gathered "stuff" over the winter. He also took the tractor and loader and hauled the dead limbs and large trees that had fell around the yard and barn up to the pile to be burned. I always love it when we burn the brush piles because I hate brush piles cluttering up my scenery.

New Way To Plant Potatoes

I read about planting potatoes above ground in tires or barrels and as the potatoes grow, you add dirt as you go. So why not make planter boxes and add additional layers as the potatoes grow?


So Poppy  got out the handy old tool belt and we headed down to the greenhouse. He built two planter boxes, put down some black plastic and then headed to the mulch pile to find the most decomposed mulch.


On top of the black plastic was put a fairly thick layer of straw. The kids loved throwing the straw in their hair but it won't be so funny once they start itching.

Poppy  dumped the mulch into the planter and leveled it out with a shovel. Of course he had all kinds of help as you can see.







Then it was time to plant the potatoes. We may have planted too many potatoes in each box, but we will see. The potatoes that I planted in March must have washed out or drowned from all the rain we had because I only have a few plants coming up. Lot of work for so few plants! So I am counting on getting lots of potatoes from these beds. According to the magazine article, potatoes grow on the stems of the potatoes , so if you keep adding dirt as the potatoes grow, then you will have potatoes growing all the way up the plant that is under the dirt. Then when the potatoes are ready to dig, you just start taking down the planter boxes one level at a time. Much easier than digging with a potato fork--assuming it works. We shall see.
















I couldn't help shooting this picture of my grandson playing the part of a plumber as he played with his truck.

Happy 90th Birthday Great-Aunt Myrtle!

Interview with Myrtle:
I was born on April 25, 1918 in Missouri. My parent’s names were Maggie Ann Frye and William Clarence Frye and they chose the name Myrtle May Frye for me. I had three brothers named Charlie, Earl, and Leslie. I also had a baby sister named Velma who died from double pneumonia and whooping cough when she was a year old. Charlie disappeared in his 20s on the way back from California and was never heard from again. We wrote to the sheriff in the last town he called us from, but no one there had heard of him and they were unable to find any trace of him.
My family lived through the Great Depression and that has affected the way that I have lived the rest of my life. My father fought in World War I, and two of my brothers fought in World War II.
While in high school, I worked as a secretary and walked to work everyday. One day a man pulled up in a car and he offered me a ride. I accepted and after that he always drove me to and from work. He was several years older than I was and his wife had been killed in a tragic car accident and he had 2 sons who were my age. We married on August 27, 1937.
Grant worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and he built miniature trains as a hobby. He also built other children’s rides and we set them up in our yard and let the children in the town have rides. In 1953, we started Kiddie Land in Pittsburgh, Kansas. It was a children’s amusement park with miniature rides. Grant built most of the rides there, including a miniature Ferris wheel and train that drove around the park. We ran the park for 8 years until we sold it in 1961. It is still open during the summers and many of the rides are still the originals that Grant built.
One of Grant’s other hobbies was fast cars, he always had to have the newest and fastest cars there were. He even wrote a letter to the Studebaker-Packard Corporation in Detroit and told them that their new car didn’t go as fast as they said it would. Grant bought me my own pink Cadillac and I drove it everywhere. We also had matching Indian Motorcycles and took lots of road trips in a day when it was not common for women to ride motorcycles, much less drive their own.
In 1942, Grant and I took his motorcycle and sidecar to the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. We traveled all over Colorado on the motorcycle and I was stung by bees and yellow jackets while riding in the sidecar. We went to the Royal Gorge and the highway was almost all down hill and rocks were sliding down the sides of the hills and onto the roads. I held my breath the whole way down. We went out on the bridge and I carved our names on it, while standing on it I could feel the whole bridge swaying in the wind. We spent one night in a cabin where we could see Pike’s Peak, which is named after one of Grant’s relatives.
Grant and I never had any children of our own and we spent our marriage working on Grant’s hobbies, traveling and spending time with our families. Grant died on New Year’s Eve 1980 and I have “adopted” Grant’s nephew’s grandchildren as my own. (Interviewed by one of Myrtle's Great-Great Nieces)

Call Down Those Squirrels

My grandsons love getting down "poppy's" binoculars and looking out the glass door to see what they can see. A couple of days ago they were out in the yard chasing a squirrel. The oldest grand-child was doing his version of a "squirrel call" that someone had taught him and lo and behold , the squirrel was coming down the tree. Maybe it was just curious to see what the kids were doing, but coming down the tree it was. The littlest one just stood there and giggled and giggled. When I went out there to check it out, the squirrel spooked and ran away. It is also the same squirrel that I found atop my bird feeder up next to the house. So we had their Poppy  get us some corn so we could feed the squirrels that and maybe they will leave our sunflower seeds alone. When it started getting towards evening and the kids had to come inside , Koda cried and cried.

Time To Restock The Pond

We use to catch some pretty big fish out of the pond, but it has been a few years, so we decided to do some restocking. We ordered channel catfish, hybrid bluegill and a thousand fathead minnows! Sounds like a lot but the minnows came in a pretty small bag. It's the little things in life that make it special and we want the grand-kids to enjoy watching the fish come to the surface and "beg" for food. When my daughter and youngest son were little, we had a neighbor who stocked his pond and every night he would go down to the dock and throw out the fish food. How they loved watching the fish come to the surface and have a feeding frenzy!

The day to pick up the fish dawned warm and beautiful. We loaded the big black tub into the back of the truck, filled it with pond water and off we went. The kids had been waiting for the big day so we picked them on the way back through.  Poppy dumped the fish in the pond while the kids watched with excitement.



They could hardly wait to go fishing!

Too Precious For Words!