A wall of passion vines

Last year I started some passion vines from seeds from a couple Whole Foods passion fruits. I planted the little guys along side our patio last year, and they've been doing well since then. We had some old metal trellis placed along the patio, more to keep the dogs out of the edging than for their aesthetic nature.

So I asked Jeff to build me a wall of trellis for my passion vines.

After we put it up, we spent about an hour carefully removing the vines from the old trellis, and winding them through the new one. I'm planning to put glass pieces into some of the squares, but haven't gotten to it yet.

Hopefully this year we'll have a wall of passion flowers and fruit!

My attempt at an herb garden ... again.

Each year since moving down here, I've puchased various potted herbs including cilantro, basil, lavendar, oregano, various kinds of mints, and rosemary. Each year, I lovingly plant these herbs in new pots to place along our patio ... and then promptly forget to water them. Each year, my herb garden dies only to be started again the following spring. This year, I did a little better because we have installed an automatic watering system for our back yard and patio. This helped and my herb garden was doing great, until the sprinkler system sprung a leak and stopped watering for us. Since it's set to water before we get up or when we are at work, we didn't notice ... until my herb garden wasn't looking too healthy. So I decided this year, I would put an end to the cycle ... I've planted all of my herbs in an area of the edging that I recently cleared, and here they will live from now on ... free from drought (providing the sprinkler system works when mother nature doesn't provide us with the usual afternoon thunderstorm) and free from Baxter's annoying habit of choosing my potted herbs, out of all the plants in our yard, to lift his leg on.

Fall Fuddpuckers

At the beginning of October, Jeff and I planned to go to the fall Fuddpuckers tournament as our vacation, so we reserved a condo for the week at Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. I was supposed to play with my team from the spring tournament, but due to some injuries and relocations, our team decided not to play. This was actually a nice treat, because it meant a lot of laying around on the beach relaxing. Though our condo was just a small apartment about a block off of the beach, we were able to use the pool and lazy river at one of the hotels/condos some of our NOLA friends were staying at.

Mom and Dad generously offered to come down and dogsit for us while we vacationed, so we got a nice visit in with them also, including a mandatory trip to Elizabeth's for breakfast.