Saturday, 5 November (Gardens, mangos, and froggies, oh my!)

     In America, Mom had a garden.  A big garden, one with lots of yummy food.  But never beets.  For some reason, Mom always had difficulty growing beets.  However, she planted beets a week ago (ish?), and they're already starting to come up! In our garden (vegetable garden), we have beets and chinese cabbage and potatoes, butternut squash and pumpkins, and tomatoes and sunflowers and peas!  Then, on the rest of the property, we have pit fruit with fuzz, pit fruit without fuzz, raspberries, two citrus trees (one of which is lemon), some unidentified fruit-bearing plants, and And AND a MANGO tree :).
     Mango trees aren't indigenous to the area, but it is possible to grow them if you bring them inside for the winter.  Of course, we were very willing to do that in order to have a mango tree.  Mango!  Mango is well loved in our family.  It's a small tree at the moment, but it has about 10 mangoes on it.  In order to be able to move it around, we had to put it in a pot, and then put the pot on wheels.  A couple of minutes away from us is a company who deals in business plants, so they have a lot of extra pots.  Although it took a couple of days, Mom finally got to talk to the lady who could sell her some of these pots, and we got two pots with wheels already attached for R20 each.  That's a little under 3 dollars each, a much better deal than we would have gotten in the states.  Mom has also been growing her own mushrooms.

     As anyone who's been reading my blog knows, we live out in the 'country', or as close to country as you can get for Johannesburg.  We also have a pool, which equals a lot of water.  Add the two together, you get frogs!  Lots of frogs, that sing very loudly.... rather, croak?  It was annoying the first few nights, but we got used to it.  Last night, Dad followed the sound of the croaking bullfrogs, expecting to find them all floating in the coy pond - which happens to be right next to the pool.  Maybe there were frogs in the coy pond, maybe there weren't, but there were at least 20 having a pool party!  Regardless of the fact we were lying on the rocks goggling at them, they kept right on singing, only swimming away if we moved within 6 inches of them.  20 bullfrogs croaking, with their throats moving in and out, in and out, make a lot of noise!
     Thursday, Esther and Becca played a softball game and won, 14-6.  (Go Kings!) Jonathon also had a cricket match.  Friday, Becca had a friend, Kate Strauss over; I'm friends with her big sister, Megan Strauss.  Today, we're having guests for dinner: Adriane and Nathan, who stayed with us for a few days a couple of weeks ago, and Dad's boss, boss's husband, and boss's kids.
     And these are a couple of pictures of our dogs!