Joyful Honda

The Yokota sister missionaries asked us to take them and an investigator to Joyful Honda on their P-Day. We were happy to do so -- we'd been hearing about this store and wanted to visit it ourselves as well. Joyful Honda is a huge home center -- gardening center, lumberyard, hardware, florist, school/office supplies, crafts, antiques, jewelry, pet store, pet grooming, bicycles, plus a large food court. It's two full stories, each floor easily the size of our Home Depot store in Logan, and then the garden center is a separate building and yard.  It's not far from our apartment, which is a good thing--since our initial visit on Monday with the sisters, we made three more trips (in four days) because Bruce has a project!

Our apartment has sliding doors from the dining room leading out to a small patio. We are on the ground level, right next to the street, but our privacy is protected by a hedge that surrounds the patio, similar to the shrubs we had out by the fruit trees in Washington. The previous senior missionaries had left a couple of plastic pots and a bag of potting mix, plus one rectangular pot where a sad geranium and ivy vine were struggling to survive. We started watering the geranium and ivy right away and were encouraged by how well they responded to a little TLC -- so we decided to take gardening to the next level here.

 We had fun deciding what to plant, based on pictures on the seed envelopes. Hope we guessed right!

 Have you ever test-driven a roto-tiller? Here you can!

A beautiful, unfamiliar (to us) variety of hydrangea -- which we didn't buy....

Along with seeds and starts, of course Bruce needed tools!

So here's a saw, a drill with bits (Bruce keeps calling it a drill motor, when actually it's just a drill -- he's the motor!), and a screwdriver and screws.

Can you just feel how happy this man is right now? :-)

And here's the almost-finished project -- these planters don't have drainage holes, so Bruce wants to put a landscaping cloth along the bottom before filling it with potting soil. This means another trip to Joyful Honda!

And an early birthday present for me! It has wilted since we repotted it and we may lose those beautiful blossoms -- but there are more coming on and we're hoping it'll do well on our little patio!