Solstice

Through the troubling times in this country, the one bright spot here on the homestead has been the vegetable garden. Whether it's food on your plate or in the ground, the sight of that kind of goodness always warms the heart, strengthens the spirit and reminds us that no matter what, we all must still eat. 

June has been filled with showers and summer-type thunderstorms. It has not been unusual to see pouring rain with thunder and lightning at 10 am followed by bright sunshine and blue skies by 10:30, or by bright sunshine with simultaneous rain, but it hasn't deterred (and may even have helped) all the desired growth and abundance out in the garden.

We're up to our ears in snap peas, lettuce and onions, all of which performed beautifully in the cool weather. Surprisingly though, even the tomato plants are happy and have been growing like gangbusters. I started everything from seed this year due to March being filled with COVID concerns, so I feel especially proud of this garden, as I usually rely on at least a few (and sometimes more than just a few) transplants to provide a quick turnaround from planting to eating. But not this year.

And last night we sampled the first of our potato crop. My mom told me once that there is nothing more wonderful than a freshly dug potato, cooked and served with some butter and sour cream, and she is absolutely right. Fresh potatoes have a stronger flavor, are creamier and much lighter on the palate than older potatoes are. 

So here's a little photo summary of all the green goodness.

The California Olallieberries are very happy living in Oregon. Plenty of berries on the vines. I'm thinking we could give Linn's in Cambria a run for their money!

We have more snap peas than we know what to do with.

Baby pumpkins, which haven't even blossomed yet.

Some of our tomatoes -- Roma at the rear and 4th of July in foreground. Plus the irrigation system I just finished installing. We'll use it in July and August, mainly.

Some of the onions are going to seed, but we have more than enough so that's OK. I like their cool, spiky alien-ness. 

Wildflowers in one of the beds over the septic system.

Spiderwort with blue hydrangeas in background

I planted five rhubarb plants, and two have really taken off (far right). No cutting any the first year, but 2021 is looking hopeful.

My Yuzu tree, brought from California, is doing great!

And no photo-heavy post would be complete without an image of a deer peeing in the yard.

Summer's End

One of the things I love most about life in the Pacific Northwest is the seasonal changes. No season ever wears out its welcome by sticking around too long. I'm especially happy about that when it comes to summer, whose backside I've never been sorry to see -- even up here. This year we had two days of 100 degree-plus temperatures, a handful of 90 degree temps, but mostly our summer stayed in the 70s and 80s. Perfect.

The lawn at our newly-bought home did turn brown in July and August since the property has no irrigation. Early in August, when we were sick of looking at it, we briefly entertained the idea of putting in some sprinklers, but with .75 inches of rain later that month and the same so far in September, it's all greened up nicely -- and quickly.

There is a three week difference in when these photos were shot. What a difference an inch of rain makes!

The one downside to those mild temps and rain is that my tomato harvest has really come in slowly. This necessitated a new protocol for canning, which is actually not canning this year. Instead of running the water bath canner for just one or two quarts of tomatoes, instead I've started blanching bowls of tomatoes as they come in and then vacuum freezing them. Next year I'm planning on planting a variety of tomato called "4th of July," which as you've probably guessed, is an early ripening variety. Live and learn.

We do have plenty of pumpkins for pies and bread this winter; squash, eggplants and cukes are just about done, so the only thing left in the ground are some late season lettuce and onions. All in all, I'd say our 2019 garden was a success, and we'll expand next year with more raised beds as well as some fun new galvanized troughs for planting containers.

When we weren't in the garden or fixing things around the house we were installing and painting a new chicken mansion for the girls. It's 8 x 10 feet inside, so in the rainy season they will still have plenty of room to scratch and peck. Unreasonable, you say? Nope. Not when it rains 48 inches a year.

La Poulet Mansion

Sadly, we lost two of our favorite hens -- Callie and Chloe -- in that weird 2-day heatwave, probably due to their age. So yesterday I headed to the feed store to get two fall chicks. Ella and Esme will take their place in the flock for spring laying, provided they are both hens, which the feed store only provides a 90 percent guarantee on (so fingers crossed). But for now it's been fun having them peeping and cheeping in the dining room, where they'll live until they're ready to go outside (hopefully before Thanksgiving).

The next and last big push will be to paint our pump house, front door, garden shed and shop before the regular rains set in. We're hoping the painter can paint the house by then, too. But since it's still a little chilly outside right now, I think I'll have a cup of tea, kick my feet up and watch my new chicks explore their world!

The forecast: Foggy, with a splash of autumn.

Celebrating the solstice moments -- finally!

The summer here was long and brutal, and a strange kind of aprés summer stuck around until well after Thanksgiving. When we did our family "frisbee at the beach" morning on Thanksgiving, we stopped running around in the sand after about half an hour or so because it was just too damn hot to play. It was even too hot and humid just sitting in the sand, doing nothing. Not typical beach weather for this area, to be sure. Thankfully, I suppose.

The chickens also had ill effects from the warmer weather, in that they had a longer and more severe molt than I've ever seen them have before. The worst part about that is not the coop, which looks like there's been a massive down pillow fight inside it, but the fact that while chickens are molting, they lay NO eggs. So from about the end of September until last week, we had to resort to buying eggs at the store.

And then it cooled off -- finally -- and winter's magic began to happen.

Chickens once again gave us eggs.

The garden started producing lettuce, enough for salads every single night!

And when it froze hard a couple of nights ago, I was able to begin digging my fall potatoes and they are AMAZING. If you've never had newly dug potatoes with some butter, sour cream and chives on them, you have not lived. Really. 

Our eggplants were harvested just before the frost too, which means eggplant parmesan soon!

In between all that we've been getting ready for holidays and doing a little clean up before we put the house on the market early next spring (probably February, which is spring for us). And dreaming of what next year will look like in our first Oregon holiday season. Not many houses on the market up there right now, but I still look, we talk about what we're looking for, and we dream.

That's where it all begins. But to forget the colorful bounty in the present seems ungrateful, so this year especially, we celebrate the now while looking forward to the "then." Hope you're doing the same!

The View From Here

Was I dreaming?

It's been a long spell since my last post; something that generally happens when there are either things I can't talk about or don't want to. In this case it's both. The ground may be shifting under our feet soon on a personal level -- or not -- and writing from that limbo state of "maybe" is very difficult. It would be bad to put any of it in writing, since it effects other stakeholders (how's that for obtuse?). It's nothing negative for us, though, so no worries there. If it happens it will be a huge and very positive thing. Just a potential big change.

I think the other half of my silence is still being dumbstruck at the time travel back to 1964 our current administration seems committed to doing, environmtenally speaking. I catch the Current Occupant of the While House on television giving himself and his cronies high-fives at press conferences and feel a stab of unbelief that this is all real...that those rollbacks of environmental regulations, clean energy mandates, health care protections, climate change acknowledgement, and animal welfare safeguards is all actually happening.

Sometimes we want someone to pinch us to assure us that we're awake. If only someone could pinch us and we could "come to" and find it's still 11:30 pm on the night of November 7, and that we just dropped off for a little nap when the blue and red board behind the news anchors shifted and changed. "Whew! I had the strangest dream, guys....."

And yet, like any loss, I've processed my five stages of grief, mostly, and have come to that state of acceptance. It doesn't mean some days I'm not back to Stage One (denial) or Stage Three (depression), but I do bounce back. Maybe someday I'll be able to put my finger on what died last November, on a national basis.

On a personal level, things around the homestead are good. There's plenty of spinach, potatoes, carrots. lettuce, asparagus, onions and herbs in the ground and since we had a great water year, everything is growing quite happily. All the trees in the pasture are loaded with fruit, green now but ripening into the shape of a bountiful summer.

Our two new chickens Daisy and Delilah will be integrated into the flock this weekend, which means lots of temporary drama. And we're planning another trip to WA State this summer, because through the good and the bad, life goes on, and heading to cooler climes in July feels like a good idea no matter what the political climate is.

Hope you're well and happy on your own pieces of ground, and living the sweet reality of hands in your garden dirt in this seeming age of magical, crazy thinking everywhere else. Sometimes all you can count on are those you love, the sun rising at roughly the same time each day, and music on the radio. And your land and what it produces for you. 

Not bad things to have in this Very Strange Age.

Mutant

So yesterday I was cleaning up the vegetable beds, getting ready for spring planting when I finally pulled this baby out of the ground.

It has been growing for at least a year, probably more like 16 months if I'm remembering correctly when I planted fall carrots (August of 2015).

Giant Mutant Carrot, as I am calling it, was as long as my forearm and thicker than my wrist. It was left to its own devices in a bed of onions I watered but only harvested a few of, and for some reason it never went to seed and just kept growing.  So yesterday I decided it's time had come. 

It was flavorful and delicious, despite the scary appearance. But since it was so old, I decided to use it in a carrot cake instead of serving it straight up as a vegetable.

It was pure mutant deliciousness!

Homestead Rescue and Hollywood Reality

So I came home early from work the other day and while I was sitting and having a late lunch, I flipped on the TV to see what was on. I stumbled upon the reality television show, "Homestead Rescue." 

Now at the outset I have to say that growing up in Los Angeles, surrounded by friends' parents who were in various behind-the-scenes aspects of showbiz, I already knew that most of what I was seeing was crafted by off-camera script supervisors. Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is real, including so-called "reality television." Real-looking breasts on TV and in the movies are probably not real. 80 year-old women don't look 80; they look like some nebulous age between 45 and 90, depending on the skill of their cosmetic surgeon.

Martha Stewart does not really tend her own garden and can her own vegetables, no matter what she appears to do on her show. Perhaps she did at one time, but she's an empire manager at this point.

Anyway, while I'm sure a lot of "Homestead Rescue" was scripted in advance, as most reality shows are, what did impress me and resonate within me was how hard Mother Nature appeared to be working to foil the plans of the aspiring off-gridders in the show, in weather situations no reality show series could script. Ice is real. Storms are real. Mother Nature cannot be commanded, coached or scripted. She just shows up and does her thing.

And I found I could relate to the show, not because we are off-gridders, but because we've already learned some of what the Raney family (the hosts) teaches each guest family on the show. The other half of the time, I related out of sympathy, such as when one family's greenhouse vegetables got completely destroyed by mice, or when putting up a new fence on the property resulted in two smashed fingers and muscles so sore that chopping more firewood seemed like too much to ask, but it was 4 pm and freezing, so chop they did. 

There are days when this place discourages me -- so much so that I want to pack it up and move into town. If it's not the wind, it's the wildlife eating our food. Or the insects. Or the broiling heat that decomposes irrigation hoses, destroys electrical wire, and blanches and rots wood. We are currently in line for replacing all the irrigation hosing in our pasture (which springs a leak in a new place that must be fixed every single time I run it. Every. Single.Time.). We're also getting a new irrigation timer with new wiring, and looking into how to create a wind break so that our fruit trees stay erect and don't grow sideways. That's this month. Next month it'll be something else, I promise you.

And as I watched the homesteaders in the series attempt to surmount even more daunting challenges, I sympathized, while simultaneously realizing that we don't have it nearly as bad as we could. But the first time anyone gets country property, no matter how many YouTube videos you've watched or books you've read, the land is still gonna hand you your ass on a regular basis -- even if you're just keeping a few chickens and growing some food. (Usually there is a honeymoon period of a few months to a year, just to make sure your guard is down when fate finally comes calling.)

And it's gonna hurt, because you love those chickens and those vegetables and those fruit trees. 

I think that's why most homesteading blogs disappear or morph into something else after a few years...because people finally realize it's just easier to order a pizza and sit inside listening to Pandora.  There is a reason roughly 80 percent of all 1800s homesteads ended in failure, and it's the same reason the newer ones will as well: Mother Nature has no mercy and will challenge you at every turn, continually. There's a learning curve, but as soon as you master one challenge another presents itself.

But for the sake of knowing the reality of homestead life, "Homestead Rescue" is a show I can recommend. Because for all Hollywood's fakery and slight-of-hand script treatments, I know that some of what you see on that show is real, and for that reason alone, it's a pretty decent entertainment/life lesson show. 

As for us and this place, we're putting Mother Nature on notice that we're not going away. Because while sitting inside listing to Pandora or wandering around some suburban lot in town might sometimes look attractive, what challenge is that? Strive on, I say, whether you're on 1 acre or 2000. Just prepare -- not only for starry nights and birdsong mornings -- which is nature's way -- but also for smashed fingers, sore muscles and expensive equipment getting broken, damaged or just disintegrating over time. Because that is also nature's way.

The Race Is On!

Ready...

At the 48 hour mark, it's easy to see who is winning the germination race. It's the zinnias, by a huge margin. But there is also activity in the Sugar pie pumpkins, the Waltrip butternut squash and the Black Beauty Zucchini.

Set...

I love watching seeds sprout. They are each so different in how they grow, but for some the speed with which they germinate and get started is quite amazing.

Go!

There's also a whole mess of transplants in the sunroom, which have had several weeks to grow and will probably get planted next week.

Makin' space!

I am in the midst of attempting to use up food. Luckily the weather has turned cold and rainy, which gives me a great opportunity to make some hearty dishes that use the items I need to get rid of. Those are:

Probably 25 percent of what's in my freezer right now, in order to make room for the Thanksgiving turkey, which we'll buy in another town and bring home to the freezer for a week or so. So the frozen 2014-15 harvest of carrots, chicken broth, onions and other items that I can use to make dinners now will get used quickly, to pick up a little freezer space in the chest freezer out in the garage. I won't completely decimate my stores of the above-mentioned items, just use enough up to create some space for a turkey.

And speaking of turkey, I actually got a summons for Jury Duty the week of Thanksgiving. This could throw such a wrench in the works I'm refusing to even think about it at this point. Keep your fingers crossed for going on stand-by, with no trips to the courthouse necessary.

I also have a LOT of tomatoes hanging around the pantry at this time (I know, "hanging around" makes it sound like they are loitering on a  street corner, smoking cigarettes and harassing passers-by). But the truth is, I actually still have canned tomatoes on hand from 2013. Those, obviously, need to be used NOW....and ideally should have been used last year . That's because your water-bath canned goods should be used within 12 months of the canning date, but since I was the canner and know how careful I was, I'm comfortable doubling that time. But no more than double.  As 2013 was a banner year for tomatoes, we'll be having quite a bit of tomato-based recipes in the days to come, like this goulash (above) I am making for tonight. 

To riff, in a very respectful way,  on The Book of Ecclesiastes, there's a time to can and a time to eat; a time to store and a time to draw down your stores. A time to raid the freezer and a time to fill it. 

It's eating and drawing-down-the-stores time here at the homestead. Yum.

Too many monkeys

The other day I was planting my fall lettuces and in the midst of digging around in the dirt, I found myself muttering, "I am so bloody sick of doing this." I soldiered on through and got everything in the ground, but thought about what I'd said later on.

I was sick of it? Really?

It's a sad fact but sometimes frustration will make you turn on things (and even people) you love. For me, it's been a tough few months with some health issues (a labral tear in my hip socket, not fixable but it is getting treated at this point), some work issues for Big Ag, and an elderly relative going into a nursing home. 

We've definitely seen that for all the plusses about living in a rural area, there are definite drawbacks as well. Medical care is most definitely inferior, and if you want an even slightly complex medical problem solved, you'd better plan on a trip to the big city. If the weather doesn't kick your ass in one way or another, the endless, endless, endless chore list of a rural homeowner will. 

Days off are kind of a joke. Crisis with the relatives? Need something not available in-town? Plan on hours-long trips away to handle it. Big Ag gets one day a week off from his regular job and usually spends it ticking off a honey-do list I've made for him. Not meaningless chores, either. Mainly just doing the things I don't have the upper body strength for but which are absolutely necessary.

Yes, if you want that homestead, you'd better really, really, want it. Because even the ones who desperately want it still hate it sometimes. That's the secret no one tells you in the glossy magazines and pretty homesteading blogs, of which there are many.

That's because a few months of constant busyness can make you hate even the things you should love, because they're just one more "to-do" chore you have to complete by sundown, (which happens earlier and earlier these days  by the way). It's like putting 3 monkeys in a cage in a zoo, who do very well. 3 works. Add 30 more and suddenly even the ones who liked each other before begin starting to attack each other, because there are just too many monkeys in the damn cage.

And so, if you follow the metaphor, if chores and obligations are monkeys, we've just had too many monkeys in our cage of late, and it's even caused us to resent and attack the things we love, like me hating my lettuce (I have since apologized to it). That's a kind of sickness only found in our modern society, but luckily it's one which has a simple cure if we're willing to go into the cage and remove whatever extra monkeys we can.

Today the fog of all the work kind of cleared and I actually had an entire day when I could spend it doing exactly what I wanted. That hasn't happened in weeks. And so where did I find myself? Not in front of the computer, TV or even with a good book on the patio. I found myself in my garden, trellising olallieberry vines and pruning back the summer vegetables. Because, it turns out, that was where I wanted most to be in the world.

And I realized I'm not sick of it at all. I just need more time to do it so it's not the proverbial last monkey that makes all hell break loose in the cage that is my life's work.

Part of homesteading is, ideally, putting together a more simple life, but even the simple life can get impossibly busy if we try and do too much on and/or off farm. When canning, gardening or animal care interferes with work or family obligations, something has to give or you will absolutely resent your time spent in front of the stove, digging in the dirt or hauling hay into the pasture. It becomes the monkey you want to kill, which would actually be the worst thing possible. But your instincts are off at that point, and can't be trusted.When those chores you love are just one more mouth crying to be fed with your time and attention, it is possible to hate anything. Even the wrong things.

I don't know how the next month is going to shape up, but I'm making a concerted effort to bar the door to any more monkey business. But it is nice to know I've chosen at least a few of the right monkeys for my cage, and my goal is to feed and care for them well, enjoy and be entertained by them, but to resist adding any more at this time.

Homegrown

Nothing like shopping in the garden for dinner....which was a generous slice of frittata, made with freshly laid eggs, plus harvested-today spinach and onions.  Over the last decade or so, eating food that was collected or harvested 10 minutes before dinner has gotten a bit more routine for me, and I will admit I don't feel the same beginner's thrill I did when first doing it. 

But I'll tell you what: it's no less delicious than it was the first time.

Cycling Through

Here on the Central Coast (and probably in other places where weather unpredictability is the name of the game), you learn to go with the weather patterns rather than fight against them.  We had our first heat wave of the spring season last week, with temperatures hitting the 90 degree mark.  It was also the week my cucumbers, which I grew from seed, were due to be planted. No go. Instead, I moved them outside into a shady spot to acclimate and held off on planting.

Can't wait to get these cukes in the ground. Mama needs relish.

Our weather tends to come in waves or cycles, and this week was a heat wave.  We also get "wind waves" which are possibly even worse for young plants than heat is. Most places around the country get "cold snaps" which are extremely cold temperatures which are temporary in nature. We get those sometimes, but extreme heat is usually what Mother Nature chooses to "bless" (!) us with.

And it all runs in cycles, for everyone. There are small cycles, such as heat waves/cold snaps, and larger cycles, such as drought/rainy cycles and possibly completely new cycles occurring due to global warming.

Success in growing things means learning to flow with the waves and snaps, not fight against them, whatever their reasons. It's, literally, the same thing as waves on the beach.  Fight the waves and the waves will always win.  Go with the waves and you can usually navigate within them to find your way either out to sea or to the shore, wherever you need to be.

I'm not saying to necessarily lay down and accept climate change without taking political action.  But in the garden, you can't fight it without losing your crop, so best adapt to what's happening and just get on with it. That also gives one a sense of productivity instead of helplessness. Work with what's happening and do what you can with what you have.  There's peace of mind to be had within that, whatever is going on.

So next week will be the time for planting not only my cucumber transplants, but also getting some pumpkins and summer lettuce started, because of course the heat wave also sent my spring lettuce into bolting. But next week the heat cycle breaks for a few days and we'll have seasonal temperatures once again.

In other news, one GOOD thing about the heat wave was that it gave us an advance start on killing most of our back lawn and kicked our baby squash plants into high gear.  Less water on the lawn means a bit more can be applied to the food crops. So, again, working with what's going on rather than against it, the heat does have at some advantages.

Global warming may NOT mean a world covered in water, but instead.....giant squash!?!

A fertile time

Things are going like gangbusters here on the homestead right now, especially where fertility is concerned. I am pleased to report that Ellen is sitting on a small clutch of fertilized eggs which I got from the neighbors across the street.  They lost several hens at once to old age and disease about the same time that Ellen went broody for the third time in her three-year life, and so I took four eggs from their non-broody hens and put them underneath Ellen who is happily clucking and mothering them under her fluffy wings.  

We will see if this pans out; if these eggs hatch I am guessing it should be around May 15 or so (chicken eggs incubate 21 days) and I would love to see Ellen become a mother in her golden years. All the other times she went broody I had to break her of it, meaning she did not get to do what she most wanted to do, which in those cases was hatch a batch of sterile eggs, a pretty useless endeavor for something as energy-sapping as brooding is.  We shall see!

Mama in-waiting.

The other fertilization project is going on outside, in the vegetables.  I have some peppers and eggplant with clear nitrogen deficiencies, but before I start monkeying around with organic fertilizer I am going to try a gentle, natural nitrogen booster, which is our own urine, diluted at a 1 to 10 ratio and used to water the plants around their bases.  I do not use this on anything where we'd be eating the crop either from or on the ground, but with peppers and eggplants this is not a concern. (And it's probably OK to use for other crops like lettuce, I'm just concerned about splash-age and don't want to risk it. 

Urine great shape, vegetables! Or will be soon.

So hopefully we will have green vegetables...and maybe even some chicks running around here soon.  Just two of the reasons spring is my favorite season. It's all about fertility...fertile earth, fertile animals, and hopefully fertile crops.

Barn Quilt project is FINISHED!

They got hung up today.  I have enjoyed making them and am still making two more for the winery at some point, but right now it's just time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor, with much thanks to Big Ag and Groceries for hanging them for me.  We had our first 80 degree day today and took full advantage of it. Cant' wait until the beds are all filled with lovely vegetables, right now it's just onions and some lettuce in the bed to the far left. But soon the garden will look as colorful as the wall.

How long could we live without imports?

I don't know how much press it's getting back east, but here on the west coast there is a lot of hubbub in the news about the port slow/shutdowns that are going on in Los Angeles as well as other cities.  The shutdowns are part of an ongoing labor dispute between the port workers' unions and the companies which control shipping to and from the ports.

A recent news report said that if the differences are not ironed out soon, that we can expect to see shortages of products on store shelves -- everything from plastic Easter egg baskets to canned fish to bicycles, furniture, clothing, and other stuff we so often refer to as "cheap Asian crap,"  which is at least partially true. And the world can expect to see shortages in the things we export -- stuff like avocados, oranges, and almonds, among other things.

But this led me to wonder how much American families would actually suffer in a prolonged port shutdown.  Once again, with so many other things discussed on this blog and others like it, it all comes down to how you live.

Yet, there are products I know my family uses that we would have to learn to do without.  The first one that comes to mind is the sockeye salmon I love, which I use to keep my cholesterol in check so my doctor doesn't insist I take Lipitor. Yes, my caught-in-the-USA sockeye salmon is, most likely, actually shipped in a refrigerated tanker all the way to China for canning, then shipped back across the Pacific to the USA for sale.  That's a long trip for a live fish, and even crazier for a dead one. 

Many other products are things Americans could certainly live without, but would require a lifestyle change in order to do so.  We'd have to do things like start re-upholstering furniture instead of buying new, keep our electronics going for longer instead of replacing things as they break or as we tire of them, and in general just do more repair and maintenance of things our society now disposes of and replaces with great regularity. Most homesteading families do this already, but the majority of American families do not -- not at this point, anyway.

While it will probably never happen, I can imagine a semi-permanent port slowdown where our country would actually start canning its own fish again, building its own furniture, and more importantly, making better use of what we have already bought and paid good money for. I'm sure the port shutdown will not come to such dire straits, but part of me wishes it would, because I would love to see our nation turn back into a country of production rather than a country of importation.

But I do believe everything you grow yourselves, or make, is one more thing that does not have to traverse the great seas to reach us, which saves a lot  of fuel, and reduces pollution. Maybe we could end up taking over some of the work we currently send to China.  Maybe we could be distributing our avocados and almonds right here in this country (and growing less, since us west coasties are currently in a drought.)

And maybe, instead of shipping a dead salmon 12,000 miles back and forth across the Pacific, we might be able to catch it and can it right here on the Pacific coast, just a few miles from where it was caught. The foodie in me says "yum" to that.

So bring on the shutdown. Let's take back our ingenuity, our industry, and our craftsmanship. It's not nationalistic jabber, it's just common sense. And while I might feel bad for the longshoremen put out of work by such a change, I'll bet there would be great opportunities opening up within the upholstery, bicycle-making, clothing and canning industries as a result.

Late summer in photos

 The lettuce and carrots for fall are coming along nicely. They have a white fabric cover ready to go so they can be shaded at a moment's notice and stay nice and cool on the hotter days.  We're supposed to be 100 degrees on Saturday, if you can believe it.

 Our two Granny Smith apple trees bore their first decent fruit this year!  I'll bet we got about 20 apples in all, not bad considering we planted in 2012.

 But we have also had failure.  I have no idea why this Ollalieberry bush suddenly died on us. This will need to be replaced this fall.

 The west-facing wall of Big Ag's shop has been painted sky blue, to provide heat neutrality. The barn quilt will go on this wall, along with a couple of trellised plants on either side to further keep things cool, temperature-wise.

And we're still getting an abundance of summer goods, including plenty of tomatoes and eggplant (plus a few fall apples thrown in for good measure).

Life Goes On

Hmm ... eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini -- and herbs too.  Such delicious possibilities!  Ratatouille?  Farmer's Market sandwiches? Veggie lasagna?

It all sounds good. Now is the time when we pick up the pieces, dry our tears and go on.  Hard to feel bereft with so much edible bounty surrounding us, and so much of creation's beauty at our fingertips.

I did not make my friend's Celebration of Life service, which was several hours away by plane, but while working yesterday I did get a visit from this beautiful creature, who flitted and danced around me (not my image, but the same kind of butterfly).  

She reminded me that we are all just caterpillars, waiting to become eternal butterflies. And in the meantime....life goes on.