Gardening and Puzzles

 I took a bit of a break from cross stitching.  It is finally summer weather here in my part of Canada.  Dave & I have been busy every day planning and planting annual flower seeds.  Some of the seeds I collected from my flowers last summer.  I love the satisfaction of growing my annuals each year from seeds.  Dave retired at the end of April, so he has more time to spend in the garden this year, we added 2 raised vegetable garden beds to our backyard.  We started planting vegetables from seeds (peas, beets, yellow beans, carrots, radishes, lettuce and herbs) and a few tomato and pepper (sweet & hot) plants from the nursery. We still need to start the corn.

Here are the 2 metal raised vegetable garden beds we bought and assembled.  The lettuce was bought at the grocery store. They were hydroponically grown, so they had lots of roots and we just transplanted them into the ground.

They had to be covered for several weeks when we still had frost every night.

I buy lots of wall garden art at the dollar stores.  We used magnets to stick the sun onto the metal.

We also tried one of the Ravensburger Escape puzzles.  This is the one we chose, called Space Observatory.

It only has 759 pcs, so we thought it wouldn't take us very long to build.  We were so wrong.  It is the first time we built a puzzle and didn't complete the border first. Some of the border pieces can fit in different places and because it is a lot of dark colours it was very hard to see any patterns.  We built most of the border and then added pieces next to them to make sure they were in the correct spot. We still had to move some around half way through. We enjoyed the assembling part of the puzzle. It was challenging enough and we enjoyed the image because it doesn't look exactly like the box cover. 

Here is a close up of the box image.  I won't show a photo of the completed puzzles in case someone is interested in assembling it themselves.

Dave & I both didn't enjoy trying to solve the puzzles to escape. We used the hints on the website. Some of the puzzles, we understood how they got their answers, but a few of them we didn't.  We both decided not to spend money on another one of the escape puzzles. 

We will continue buying new puzzle designs we like or just re-do the ones we already own.