Well, Blow Me Down!

Last week, Sweet Pea went over the neighbor girl's house to play. At supper time SP can skipping home covered head to toe with mud.
"What happened?", Lady Di shrieked as she slammed the storm door.
"G and I were making sculptures.", SP responded.
"You were making a mess with mud.", I countered.
"No, we were sculpting with clay.", she protested.
Which is partially true. Our ground is all clay. Not modeling clay, mind you, but greasy, sticky, muddy clay. It's awful if you need to dig a hole after a rain.

Here is a display of SP's artwork. There are a couple of pinch pots, a Popsicle, two puppies and a bunch of stuff that looks like something we would find in the yard after we let our dog out.
Right away SP said she wanted to take the 'puppies' up to her room and put them on her dresser. Right away Lady Di said, "No mud in the house!"
"But it's clay!", SP whined.
Then, to avoid a monumental clash of the titans, I asked SP if I could decorate my garden with her sculptures. They both thought this was a great idea.

So with my clay decorations nicely melting with the rain, here is an updated crop report on our pumpkin patch. The warm weather and my daily watering diligence have yielded promising sprouts.

I planted eight mounds with seeds and so far six of the mounds are showing signs of life. If I can get at least one pumpkin from each mound I will be happy. But I will accept more too.

Other changes in our yard are not as positive. Last Wednesday, we were visited by strong winds. One of the gusts blew over one of our larger dead trees. Which isn't all that bad except when it fell it knocked over two other trees, one of which had one of our hooks for the hammock.

Here is the big one that snapped off in the wind. It's about eight feet off of the ground.

Here's our poor hammock tree that got bullied down by big tree.

And here is the entire gruesome scene.

The good thing is that we now have bonfire wood for the next ten years. The bad thing is after spending an afternoon with the chainsaw, I have a Paul Bunyan sized back ache. Now, does anyone want to split logs for me?