Easter Weekend at The Farm: Potatoes
April 12, 2009
I’ve just uploaded 30 photos from our weekend in West Virginia…and I’m struggling to figure out how to break them up for a series of posts. Going with the, “If you don’t know where to start, start anywhere” approach, I’m going with “potatoes.”
Potatoes.
As in “potato gun.” Benton and I made one a couple of years ago, have shot it on a number of occasions, and took it to Julie’s dad’s farm some time last year and just left it there. We’ve shot it a couple of times since then. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a PVC pipe construction that has a chamber into which you squirt hairspray and then ignite with a flint-based igniter. It will launch a potato 100 yards, easy.
This weekend, the kids went through two 10-lb. bags. Benton and his cousin, Tyler, really got to perfecting their technique:
Benton and Tyler have been a pretty good pair for several years now, and the fact that they see each other more often since we moved to Ohio seems to be tightening that bond. They were inseparable all weekend.
Not that Benton just hung out with Tyler. He also spent some time sighting in a pair of binoculars:
Birdwatching perhaps? Counting deer off in the distance? Um, no. Sorry, Mom. He was prepping to make sure he could focus in on the potato…that his cousin Meg was shooting at with a BB gun:
I did say I was going with “potatoes” for this post.
More from the trip to come in future posts.
Posted in Benton
April 13th, 2009 at 10:01 am
That is a bird house in the background, though…right? And surely Bob still hangs and fills his hummingbird feeders, even without Jack to keep them full daily? Hope springs eternal (but Carson definitely seems to be our greatest hope in terms of a next-generation birder). That’s a great shot of Benton and Tyler sitting on the creek-river edge, by the way – kind of says it ALL.
April 14th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
[…] Easter Weekend at The Farm: Potatoes […]
May 26th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
[…] the hairspray-combustion style — over the past few years. While out in West Virginia and shooting one last month, Benton came up with the idea that we should try to make a mini-marshmallow shooter of the same […]