Surprise in the garden

Many of the plants in the garden have given us their best efforts which we have gladly harvested. Because all good things must come to an end, we have been busy pulling up the old to plant one last round of things that will grow and produce before the first frost.  While cleaning out one of the raised beds this evening Lisa got the surprise of her life; a nest of snakes. She was digging around with her HANDS, when she saw what she thought was a large worm coming up from the dirt. On second thought, that was no worm.

She ran to get me and we quickly deduced that yep, that's a snake. And as Lisa is fond of saying, "where there's one, there's likely to be more" She was right.

Five in fact. a whole nest full of newly hatched wiggly snakes complete with leathery egg shells. Needless to say, they were quickly chopped up with the shovel and tossed in the woods. Even in death, the little buggers were feisty, attempting to bite anything that came close.  Thanks to our friend Google, we discovered that the snakes were most likely grey rat snakes.  Harmless, but snakes none the less. Needles to say, Lisa was pretty wigged out and concluded that we were done in the garden for the day.

New Gate

The chickens like to come up on the deck so we had been keeping a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs to keep them out. It looked really tacky. A friend of ours at work is a metal artist so we commissioned him to make something we could use as a gate. This is what he came up with.

The base is a 1940's saw blade. He then used a variety of materials to decorate it. If you look closely there is a chicken, an abstract sun and a flower.  The flower is made of silverware handles. The center of the sun is an old ladle. Then he cut out the chicken from stainless steel and copper. Then it was up to Pat and I to incorporate it into a gate. It  is heavy as we wanted to "countersink" the gate so no one got hurt on the sharp edges; so it is actually 2 layers of wood.  We love it. 

The treadmill

We have not been posting much lately because our life has been pretty routine (you can read boring here if you want to) and we thought no one would really be interested. Nonetheless I thought I would give you a run down of what we have been up to. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. We have been boiling them down and making salsa, spaghetti sauce and plain tomato sauce. We still have many batches to go but I see it coming to an end rapidly as the plants have succumbed to stink bugs and tomato blight. Last night we went out and picked every tomato that had potential for ripening. They are now sitting on the back porch waiting to ripen. Any that were too small or already had blemishes got tossed to the chickens. They thought Christmas had arrived in August. The wild mini tomatoes are still producing well, even though the plants look terrible. They are amazing little things.

Edemames have been patiently waiting for us to come out and harvest. A little extra time on the plant does not harm them so we hope to get to them in the next day or so. Fall lettuce has been planted as well as sugar snap peas and radishes.

Green beans are now coming in full bore. We already canned some and more will be done later this week; as soon as a full run is available for the canner. I wait until I have 7 quarts available to can as it just makes sense to heat up the kitchen for only full canners. We have also been eating them fresh which are always the best.

Crowder peas are beautiful this year. We had so many left from 2 years ago that we did not plant any last year. Then we ran out in the spring. So the stockpile is building and Patrick is happy to be shelling them.

Blackberries are coming to an end. They have been so good this year. Last year had soooo much rain and the moisture content made such a difference on the size of the berries. This year repeated itself with adequate rainfall so we once again had plump fruit.

Rainfall however causes us to mow the grass and then turn around and mow the grass again and then we look out at it is getting tall again and we have to mow again. UGH. We find it easier to split it into 2 days so it seems like every 3 or 4 days we are needing to spend about 45 minutes out on the tractor. Of course that also means we need to weedeat. If I were inclined to pay for any yard maintenance it would be for weedeating. It is messy and time consuming and only Patrick is able to do it as there is always potential for poison ivy on the perimeter of the property. That cost is way too high for me.

So as you can see we have been pretty dull around here. We go to work, come home and on second shift we are either in the kitchen or on the tractor. I have been able to get in my sewing room a bit and will share those projects in the near future. I looked at the calendar yesterday and started planning some getaway time. I think we are going to the beach at the end of September. Should still be nice enough weather but cooled off a bit. But until then I guess we will just stay on this treadmill and be thankful that God has so abundantly blessed us that we have plenty to keep us busy.