Garden and Chicks and Pickles

Our first batch of pickles. I'm putting up more today so that's why I'm trying to get this post written at 4:30 a.m. I uploaded most of the pictures for the post days ago but have been unable to find time to sit and type.

The garden is coming along. Carrots look great. It is the first year for the garden in this spot so I hope the little guys can find room to grow in between all the dirt clods.




I am trying Romain lettuce this year. I'm not crazy about most leaf lettuce, it's too hard to get the dirt off so I have high hopes for this type. It's a little thicker leafed so hopefully easier to wash.



I have a little cantaloupe started. I hope the bugs don't get it!


I think this is a watermelon. We planted the sugar baby type. I hope I can tell when they are ready.


We have lots of little yellow squash coming. Yummy.

I took this picture more than a couple days ago, I better go and pick it today, it's probably huge now.

Our early sweet corn has tasseled. The garden ended up being larger than we planned so this area in the right of the picture did not get manure spread on it. It's amazing how small some of the corn is compared to the left side, really great proof of the power of poop.

It seems so early for the corn, I can't wait to boil some up for dinner.

See the little ear?

It's been really rainy and grey lately, it was like 60 degrees yesterday (I just heard the weatherman say that on the morning news) and today it's supposed to be warm and sunny so the garden should burst.

Here's the later maturing corn. It's way taller and heaver than the early corn. The wind blew it around a little yesterday. I need to try and hoe around it to help it stay up.

Tomatoes thriving. No bad bugs or worms yet.

We really need to get to tying them up, maybe today. I took the day off to spend some time with the kids. I'm taking the youngest for a horseback riding lesson at one o'clock and I have about 100 other things to get done too. Laundry, pickles, brush dog, if it's ready- freeze borccoli, clean, vacuume, dishes, (Uh oh... I just remembered...I need to hurry and let the young turkeys out of their pen this morning, I'll be right back) and a million other things. I want to work on getting the rest of the cupboards painted this weekend.

I am so looking foward to pickled beets. I need to find a tried and true recipe. Anybody have one?

Onions and garlic.

I wish we had planted more dill. I am going to have to use dried dill today for my pickles.

We had our first broccolli out of the garden. Next year we are going to plant much, much more.

I just love Cleome.

We plan to sell our boat. We were going to fix it up but we hardly ever want to leave the farm. We had someone come and look at it but when we got it out and cleaned it off we realized that we did not want to sell it. Kevin is going to go and get the plates and license and I think we are going boating next weekend. We have a tow behind tube that the kids will love!

We planted these daylilies last year and forgot about them. It was a real treat when they bloomed.

The moon flowers are beautiful but not as beautiful as Puppy!

These two hens fought over a nest box full of eggs and finally got some to hatch. Since they both were squeezing into one box they squished most of the babies but this one lived. I finally moved them to a bigger area. This little chick has two very good moms.

You can't see the chick very well in this picture but it's there.

(When I went out to let out the turkeys one of the hens was out of the pen. The lighter colored hen had gotten out so I had to let the baby and the other mom out in the pen with the big chickens and turkeys. I hope they will be all right and the big turkeys don't hurt the baby.)

UPDATE: I went out and put them back into their pen, was too worried.

This hen hatched out three babies. I moved her to a different spot.

See 'em. How cute

I have this awesome weather thing. It gets readings from a satillite so it's mostly accurate. On this day though there was a problem. The high for the day was supposed to be 80 and the low was supposed to be 60 but the current temp was -100. Whatever.

I took a video when I let the turkeys out. I'll try to upload it. It's taking forever, like over an hour now and I can't post this until it's done. I am trying to upload it to youtube instead. It might be too large or something. Youtube says it will take an hour and a half to upload? We'll see...

UPDATE: It worked through youtube ...sorry about the quality. Should have used my Flip instead of my camera.

Til next time,

Beth

Tadpoles and Tree Frogs

We had a birthday party for the oldest last weekend. He decided to have a few friends over and camp out then the next day we had family over for a cookout. It was really nice.

The kids had fun collecting bullfrog tadpoles and swimming.

Little Tree Frog

Kevin's dad (Hi Mike!) found this little guy, actually heard him first, sitting here on this leaf.

I did not realize that geese are mountian climbers. Whatever possesed them to climb to the top of this little hill?

As you can see, they are not very good climbers.

I'm back to work after being layed off for for most of five months. If only they had called me back after canning season. The garden is coming along great- corn, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, beets and beans are really growing good. Cucumbers, not so good, hopefully they'll come around.

Til next time,

Beth

Our Dock, Vegetable Garden and Flower Garden Fix-up

Amy (my sister) and her husband Tom came over Sunday and helped us get a few things done. It's so much more fun when some one's here to help. Tom is a major motivator so we got a lot more done that we planned.

Amy and I went and bought some mulch, I really like the dark mulch better. Everything looks so much brighter against the dark.

Here's my butterfly bushes trying to come back, also some moonflowers.

Here's my row of beans in the garden. We are going to put a row of fence down the middle.

I have three pumpkins. Here's one of them.

I snuck some morning glories into the corner. I'm so glad they came up-the seeds are from last year. My husband only wanted to grow edible items and only practical ones at that. I can't wait to make pickled beets but he's more worried about tomatoes, beans and corn

Cauliflower and broccoli.

The first row is lettuce, the second carrots. He plowed rows so that the whole thing has raised beds. There are low spots here and this way nothing will get drowned. We also mulched everything heavily with some old hay that was given to us.




Corn that needs to be thinned. It will kill me to pull them out. I should have planted thinner and put in another row. All the seeds sprouted it looks like.

Maybe tomorrow I will do it. I think I have to thin to eight to ten inches? Anybody ever leave it closed than that? Hmmmmmmm?

Here's the potato planter almost exactly one month ago.

They are really filling it up. We need to add dirt.

Wow, look at them grow!

And here is the dock waiting for paint.

The front part.

It's getting paint now, paint sprayers are the best!

Front done but not dry.

Everything for the dock we had here, it's all leftovers from other projects or we had free stuff so it didn't cost us anything.


This is some stain we had left over from our deck. We weren't crazy about the color but it was free! It was all gloppy and had some big chunks of dried stuff in it that would have clogged up the sprayer. I needed to figure out some kind of filter.

So I found some screen and an old coffee can. Made some clips with electric fence wires and it worked pretty good.

I had to change the screen after every batch.

See how much it darkens up when dry? Blended the different kinds of wood pretty good.

Top done too.

Installed, the kids are loving it and it is pretty fun to sit at the end and watch the fish.

Til next time,

Beth