August 2020, Week 1
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years ago
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slowpoke_gardener
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March 2020, Week 1
Comments (88)Jennifer, I have started seeds--about two weeks ago. Getting ready to pot them up to larger cups this week. I am so hopelessly behind on this thread, y'all, because we have had the granddaughters here for a few days and that is where all my time and attention has been going. I may be behind on gardening and everything else, but we have made slime of all kinds....color-changing slime, glow-in-the-dark slime, crunchy slime, glittery slime....you name it, we made it. I know all of you are jealous of our lovely slime collection. lol. I wish I could find a gardening use for slime since we have so much of it. Yes, the Weston tomato press is the one I've used forever. I watched for a good deal on it for a long time (you may not have that same luxury of time since we probably can assume it is imported from someplace and supply chain disruption is such an issue now) and got it with the set of 4 screens for basically the same price as buying it with just the one screen, which I think is the sauce screen. It cuts the time spent processing tremendously and I cannot imagine life without it. Back in the day when I still was trying to make Annie's Salsa for everyone who worked for and with Tim, I canned up to 600 jars per year of tomato products (not just salsa, but sauce, canned tomatoes, ketchup, chili base, pizza sauce, etc.) with it. That never would have been possible without the tomato press. Even though I can less now, it still is a big part of canning efficiently. Our Saturday was lovely. We took the grandkids out for lunch at noon before heading to the Y for Lillie's birthday swimming pool party. It was amazing to see how much taller/older all her friends have gotten since last year. She turned 11 and some of her friends are already 12 and look like they've grown 6" since last year as some of them (too many!) now are taller than I am. A bunch of giggling girls at an indoor pool party with a heated pool...they had such an awesome time....and we adults somehow survived all the laughter, screaming (hilariously), shrieking (poor lifeguard---having to listen to it all), giggling, and chattering. It was sort of sensory overload for our 5-year-old granddaughter at times and she had one meltdown before calming down and realizing all the noise and horseplay was in good fun and not mean-spirited. HU, I agree we all need to be growing and canning more this year as it the coronavirus is pretty much worldwide now and we don't know what effect it will have on the food supply or supply chain in 2020 or beyond. I've already been stocking up on canning supplies (vinegar, canning salt, Mrs. Wage's mixes, ReaLemon, pickling spices, citric acid, liquid pectin, powdered pectin, etc.) now before the stores run out like they did in 2008 when a lot more people planted gardens and took up canning during that little economic downturn. I've always got a lot of jars and lids, so have been focusing on the consumable items that you need once the canning starts. I remember how hard it became to find any canning supply item of any sort in 2008 so stocking up in advance will be a huge time-saver, and will eliminate a lot of frustration this summer. Amy, Despite my best efforts to keep things labeled, I end up with mystery plants too. They grow as well as the labeled ones and it is fun to see what you get. I switched from flimsy black flats to silver aluminum roasting pans long ago, and even those can get too flimsy once plants are potted up to 16 oz. or 20 oz. Solo cups, but then I just double the roasting pans to get a little more strength. Larry, I hope your doggy is doing well. All of ours had one health problem or another once they hit doggy old age, and we just dealt with each situation as it arose. It does get expensive. We only have one old dog now---Jersey is 13 and still healthy so far, but really slowing down and spending most of the day sleeping now. She still loves to go for walks with Tim on the weekends and it seems to put an extra spring in her step. The other three dogs are 5 and 1/2years old or younger. I still refer to the 5 year olds as 'the puppies' because they were puppies when they came to us and our other dogs all were so much older. It disappoints our youngest granddaughter when I call the two 5 year olds 'the puppies' because it makes her think we have brand new actual puppies, and then I have to tell her no, no new puppies, just the two younger dogs that she loves so much. Nancy, That's a gorgeous new round bed. I'd be all excited too. I'm fine, just busy with the grandkids. We waited a long time to have grandchildren so spend every minute with them that we can. Aurora still remembers living with us temporarily last year while they were buying their new home and constantly tells me she's going to come back and live with us again 'forever' one day. I'd love that, but it isn't going to happen. lol. Rebecca, Spring has sprung here, but we still are having a couple of nights a week with low temperatures around 33-34 degrees here in our cold microclimate, so I'm not getting overly excited and planting much in the ground yet. Soon, though, soon. What is truly awful is all the tree pollen in the air. I just hate it as our allergies have ramped up, but eventually all the trees and shrubs will be through flowering and pollinating and the pollen levels will decline. Blooming fruit trees are losing their flowers and putting out leaves now. It is amazing how quickly that happens. Soon tiny fruit will become apparent, and hopefully a late freeze won't get the fruit. Larry, Your place always is going to look amazing. I know it will. I agree that getting older takes all the fun out of work, but I know you'll keep going as long as you can because you love doing it so much. So will I. Nancy, I'm so glad you are there to teach your new best friend. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, right? I haven't been in the grocery stores this weekend to see if we are having many bare shelves yet, but our Wal-mart has been out of hand sanitizer for weeks and weeks, and cold/flu medicine and OTC painkillers, rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide are very low and sometimes nonexistent on the store shelves. When I see some, I buy them, but I'm not seeing a lot lately. I've been trying to think of what we'll need for the summer months and have been buying it now while the stores still have it....sunscreen, insect repellent, swimming pool chemicals, Chigger Rid, cortisone ointment for itchiness, etc. Oh, and band-aids for all the kids' (and adults') little boo boos and owies. Jennifer, Thanks for the shopping report. I'll have to let y'all know what we find on the store shelves (or don't find there) today after our shopping trip. Bleach has been hit or miss lately, and the same is true with water. They never run out completely so far, but the stock gets low at times. Toilet paper has been low on the shelves at times, but not sold out yet in local stores, except for at Costco, which apparently is where America goes to stock up on such things. I have seen all sorts of photos and videos online of huge lines to get into Costco stores this week, especially in Washington state, New York and California and am thankful it is not like that here yet. We're not planning on going to Costco this weekend, so it could be bad down there and we wouldn't know it. We only have time to do local shopping today due to a full schedule today. I probably would stockpile eggs in case things do get bad. You can freeze them (without the shells) you know. Just crack each egg into one section of an ice cube tray and freeze the whole tray. Once the eggs are frozen solid, you remove them from the tray and they do pop out pretty easily. Put the eggs in zip-lock freezer bags and store them in your freezer, using as needed. Everyone should have a garden this year! You know, like everyone had Victory Gardens back in the WWII years. None of us can know at this point what coronavirus does now that it is here in the USA. Will it be relatively contained? Will it run wild? Will it affect our farmers? Will it affect the truckers who move the produce across the nation? Most of us here on this forum are spoiled because we grow our own produce during the garden season anyway, but I think hoarding of fresh produce will hit new highs among the general population if it becomes short in supply and people panic thinking that there might not be more produce on store shelves the next time they shop. If everyone had a veggie and herb garden, they'd know that they would at least have some fresh produce on hand. Unfortunately, a lot of brand-new gardeners may not understand how to plant for the weather they have, and may plant some crops too late in spring to get a new crop, so I hope they are researching as they go along and avoid having that issue. To follow onions, one can plant any type of warm-season crop. I tend to plant southern peas and lima beans heavily, but you also can plant more summer squash/winter squash and pumpkins, okra, roselles, cantaloupes, muskmelons, watermelons and other miscellaneous melons, sweet potatoes (a bit late if they follow onions but not insanely late), yard-long beans (which are more like southern peas than beans), more peppers, more tomatoes (for an autumn harvest), and warm season greens like Egyptian spinach, New Zealand spinach and red or green Malabar spinach. Swiss chard does well for me all summer as long as I remember to harvest the leaves when they are younger, smaller and more tender. I can plant kale late and get a great crop as long as I keep it in morning sun and afternoon shade, and keep the chickens away from it because they will devour it otherwise. Because of all the coronavirus cases on the west coast, I had become increasingly uneasy about Tim and some of his employees traveling to Las Vegas in mid-March for some sort of huge law enforcement conference, but I never tried to convince him to cancel the trip. They send a handful of people to it every year and I guess it is a big thing for them to go to it. I figure he's a grown man and he can make his own decisions, so I kept my mouth shut and hoped he'd make the right decision. So, Thursday night he told me he'd talked to his boss and cancelled the trip. Yippee! I felt relieved. Then on Friday he talked with his employees who were scheduled to go on that trip to tell them that he had cancelled the trip for all of them, and every one of them expressed relief that the trip had been cancelled as they had been feeling uneasy about attending a convention right now too. Then, later in the day, Tim got a message that the entire conference had been cancelled by whatever organization puts on the whole thing, which I think was a wise decision. This just doesn't seem to be like a good time to be hopping on an airplane and traveling anywhere. And, at his work, they are implementing the same stringent financial cutbacks they had to implement after 9/11 due to less planes flying (drastically less) which means a lot less airport income from landing fees. I think they are smart to have done this as early in the situation as they have and it indicates upper airport management is at the top of their game and being very proactive. Airline bankruptcies are not out of the question in the coming months as the airlines operate on fairly thin profit margins even in the best of times---it is a really tough industry to succeed in these days. So, it is Sunday and a new week, and now that I'm caught up on the old week, I'll go start the new weekly thread if someone else hasn't already beaten me to it. Dawn...See MoreJune 2020, Week 1
Comments (90)Haileybud, I've never heard of either of those two onion varieties, but regardless of that, yes...daylength will initiate bulbing. Onions need to be planted shallowly because they won't bulb up if planted too deeply. Generally the deepest you'd plant the transplants would be 1" below the soil surface, so yes, as they grow they will look like they are popping up out of the ground and literally sitting atop the soil, and that is normal. It was the same at our house as it was at yours---May definitely felt like April and then June arrived and feels like July. It is like we totally skipped June and I don't like this quick switch from cooler than average to hotter than average much at all. Marleigh, I don't have any oxblood lilies but grew up around them---they are tough old passalong plants in Texas, handed down from one gardener to another seem to tolerate all sorts of soil and growing conditions. I think they'd do great for you. I'm glad you know enough about computer and phone stuff to help Nancy because what I know about both computer issues and phone issues could be written on the head of a pin with space left over. dbarron, I knew if you spent any time at all on the Plants Delights Nursery website, you'd find something you wanted. I'm the same way, but I haven't ordered any crinums yet. That doesn't mean that I won't, just that I haven't had quiet time to sit and look at them. Have you ever visited the webpage of Jenks Farmer? They sell crinums too, and enabling is what I do best. Jenks Farmer---Crinum Lilies Jennifer, Congrats on learning to can tomato sauce. See how easy it is? Now you can go nuts and expand to canned tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, salsa, etc. They're all easy. For most veggies like beans and peas, we prefer frozen fresh from the garden to canned. I like their texture better when frozen, and I like not dealing with the big old heavy pressure canner. The things I like to can mostly are those that can be canned in a boiling water bath, like tomato products, jams, jellies, and some fruit products. They are quick and easy and even when the BWB canner is completely full of filled quart jars, it isn't nearly as heavy to lift as the much heavier pressure canner. I am completely over lifting the heavy pressure canner and have no intention of using it any more, but I hang on to it in case I change my mind. I used the pressure canner a lot in the 1990s, but not so much since then. Of course, having 3 freezers helps. Green beans must be pressure canned or can develop botulism, which is invisible and doesn't give up an odor to alert you. A decade or two back a nurse who thought she knew how to can green beans canned them in a BWB canner and poisoned herself and her child. Well, probably it was 2 or 3 decades ago because it might have been even before we moved here in 1999, but I never have forgotten her and her child....as an example of what not to do. Fortunately our power almost never goes out, and it has only been out for 'a long time' once since we moved here. That was just a year or two ago and it was out for almost 4 hours. Still, we have a generator so we could keep the freezers going if the power went out. My grandmother froze her green beans and they were mushy. I loved her green beans....mushy, cooked with lots of onions and black pepper and enough bacon drippings to make them taste divine. They were true southern green beans and I adored them. I never could cook mine down long enough to get her texture though, and by the time I had questions about why, she was gone. So, one day when I was sitting with my favorite uncle, a very talented gardener himself, discussing gardening and preserving food, I complained that I couldn't get my frozen green beans the same texture as Mamaw's. He just grinned real big and said "I bet you are blanching your beans before you freeze them" and I confirmed that I was. He said she never blanched hers and that was why they were mushy. Well, who knew???? One of these days I'm going to freeze some without blanching them first and see if they give me green beans like Mamaw's when I cook them. Amy, Have fun with the grandkids! We have been enjoying ours so much once they were allowed to come over again. Do you like your bottom freezer? Our previous refrigerator had one and I didn't like it as much as I thought I would, but I think the whole freezer part of that refrigerator was a lemon and we'll never buy that particular brand again. It constantly melted down and defrosted itself just spontaneously here and there, ruining everything in the freezer compartment if you didn't catch it on time. After that happened several times and no one could explain why or fix it, we were done with that thing and bought the one we have now. Of course, with Tim being a pack rat, he has that big old fridge sitting out in the garage and one of these days he is going to fix it and use it out there. Sure he will. When pigs fly. He's really bad about hanging on to stuff like that to repair because, surely, it must have some good years left, (ha ha) and yet he never does anything with them. If Chris is lucky, our detached garage/shop will burn down spontaneously shortly after Tim and I die so he doesn't have to deal with his father's lifelong junk collection. Rebecca, It is your choice with the onions but they are not well and truly mature until the leaves have completely turned yellowish-brownish and withered and died. Until then, even with limp necks, the leaves are still sending energy/nutrients to the bulbs and enlarging them. Some gardeners just don't care and harvest them just whenever they get ready, but for maximum storage, they do a lot better if allowed to fully mature before being harvested. They're your onions so you should do whatever pleases you. Why is Fatboy still alive? Is there nothing that can kill that little beast? I guess Audrey is not a squirrel hunter? Pumpkin is a squirrel hunter, and he tries, but the squirrels elude him every time. We had a chicken disaster overnight and lost one of our few remaining hens. Tim closes up the chicken coop when he comes back from taking Jersey and Jesse for a walk after dinner. The timing of the walk works out perfectly as the free-ranging chickens usually are still out when he leaves to walk the dogs, but have put themselves up in the coop by the time he gets back, so he just takes a minute to close and lock the door. Sometimes I even ask him "Did you remember to close up the coop", when he comes inside but just asking the question annoys him because it seems to imply that I think he might forget to do it. (We are happily married, I swear. lol) So, during the night, the 2 dogs who sleep downstairs in Tim's office started having a barking fit, which is not that unusual. They'll bark if a skunk, coyote, bobcat, fox, coon or possum wanders by or whatever, but they'll stop barking if you tell them to hush. They woke me up, I went into the office, hushed them and they looked at me like I was nuts and starting barking and carrying on as if Godzilla was stomping around outdoors. I cautiously opened the front door and peered outside and couldn't see or smell anything, but heard a chicken screaming (in that way that a chicken screams as it is being carried off in the mouth of a predator) and the rooster hysterically calling out to her. The noises from the poultry were coming from south of the house.....not where the coop is located. I ran back upstairs to wake up Tim and he grabbed a flashlight and gun and ran outside.... So, we lost a chicken, and he found the rooster outside frantically searching for her. Whatever had taken her was long gone, and this morning we couldn't find a trail of feathers, so it must have been a large enough predator to carry her off easily. It took Tim a while to calm down the rooster enough to get it back into the coop, and this time he closed and latched the coop door. This means we are down to one hen and two roosters, and the hen that is left is the bravest one of the three. She has been out free-ranging around the yard all day while the clearly-traumatized roosters are hiding inside the coop. We have so much more trouble with predators than we used to, and I'm through inadvertently supplying poultry to them. After these last three birds are gone, we aren't going to get any more, even though we love having chickens. We just cannot keep them alive here as the woodlands provide too much cover for predators. I couldn't fall back asleep after all that middle of the night excitement, so today I am totally running on empty. Dawn...See MoreAugust 2020, Week 3
Comments (51)Amy, We've always had various brown stink bugs in Texas going back as far as my memory goes, and the brown marmorated ones are a relatively new invasive species. I am sure Oklahoma has some of the same native ones we had in Texas. I see various brown ones here all the time, and not necessarily brown marmorated ones although I sometimes see one of them here and there. I think one reason that all the talk of the brown marmorated stink bug (and they truly are huge home invaders in the northeastern USA so I understand the concern) arriving in OK a decade or so didn't bother me because we've always had to deal with brown stink bugs...so, eh, what's one more? If a person already has worked (via caulking and such) to keep out the invasive Asian lady bugs, which we have had to deal with ever since moving to OK in 1999, then their efforts will keep out the stink bugs too. There's a great webpage of Texas' Brown Stink Bugs, and though I looked, I could not find anything similar for OK. Here it is...look at all of them. Some are common, some are rare, but they have to have been seen and documented in Texas to make it onto the webpage: Texas: Brown Stink Bugs I'm pretty sure the big box stores here don't get the brassicas until sometime in September, and perhaps not until October. I'll start watching for them and let you know when I see them. They almost arrive too late here. I really think they should be in the stores right now for proper timing of planting them to beat the cold, but they usually aren't. I believe the wholesale growers and retailers might be afraid no one will buy them in the typically vicious August heat, but that is when they need to be planted. If the cats were pretty big, maybe they've just moved on to the next step in the process. Wasps will get a lot of them though, and so will birds. I've never interfered in the process because I don't want to disrupt the food web, but butterflies are incredibly plentiful here in our rural area so it is likely we have enough to go around. In a more city-like setting where there's fewer cats, I understand why people might feel the need to protect them. Rebecca, I agree with you on fall tomatoes needing a pretty early start. I like to have them growing by mid-June. They won't necessarily set a lot of fruit in summer, but they'll be big and flowering when the August cool-down arrives. Coleus is very slow from seed. Takes them forever to sprout and forever to grow. Just press the seeds lightly into a fine, sterile, seed-starting growing medium and do not cover them up---they need light to germinate. If you're sprouting them at 70-75 degrees, they should sprout in 7-14 days. Larry, I am glad you and Madge are getting out a little bit. I actually think right now is a pretty good time to get out---the numbers of cases from the big July resurgence are falling and the fall/winter cold/flu/Covid-19 season is not upon us yet. Tim and I went to the Olive Garden about a month ago when we were in Sherman to shop at Sam's Club. It was wonderful! We hadn't been in an Olive Garden in years and enjoyed it so much, but it definitely felt odd with all the mask-wearing, social distancing, etc. About once a month we try to go to some sort of restaurant to sit and eat a meal as if things are normal, which they aren't. Back in June we went to Red Lobster, and that was enjoyable too. Honestly, as empty as these restaurants have been when we have been in them, I don't know how they are doing enough business to survive. We do try to be there at 11 a.m. when they open up, figuring that's the healthiest, safest time to get in early and eat and beat the crowd. Maybe they are more crowded later in the day. At the present time I feel safer in a relatively uncrowded restaurant than in a crowded grocery store. Nancy, I have made sweetened condensed milk from scratch using artificial sweeteners so it is not as intensely sweet as the version made with sugar. Enjoy all those potatoes. There are so many different ways to fix potatoes, so at least there's a lot of possibilities with them. Amy, I don't specifically take B-12, but do take a B-Complex vitamin that contains it. A couple of years ago, someone on the Oklahoma Gardening FB page said that after they started talking a B-complex vitamin daily, the mosquitoes started leaving them alone. I was skeptical, but figured for the cost of a bottle of B-Complex vitamins, I could find out for myself. Tim and I have been taking the B-Complex vitamins for a couple of years now and the mosquitoes leave us alone 98-99% of the time. It is as close to a miracle solution for mosquitoes as I've ever seen. At one point, late last summer, we ran out of the B-Complex tablets and thought we'd just wait and buy a new bottle the following Spring. Ha! Within days, mosquitoes were all over us and biting us, so when we were at Costco I bought their huge bottle of B-complex vitamins and we've been taking it ever since. Mosquitoes will buzz around us but 99% of the time they won't even attempt to land on us. I don't know if it works for all people, but it works for us, and I've been a huge skeeter magnet all my life...until now. As long as it continues working, we'll continue taking it. Was a vitamin B deficiency the reason mosquitoes always have flocked to us? Who knows? However, having plenty of vitamin B in our bodies seems to repel them from us now. Jennifer, Yes, the ones with the blue-black horns are the actual tomato hornworms. They are much more rare in OK than the similar tobacco hornworms with red horns which feed on all the same plants that they do. Hu, Getting a fall garden started in July and/or August always is the hardest part, isn't it? The heat and the grasshoppers both hang on forever some years and make it virtually impossible. I've started skipping gardening in August for the most part, but that's because it is rattlesnake season. A friend of mine here killed a huge rattler in his yard yesterday, a nice reminder to me to keep my eyes on the ground and to watch carefully for them. Larry, I'm sorry you are not feeling well. Getting older is hard---the body wears out and hurts more, and seems less cooperative. The energy level changes as well. I sure am learning to pace myself better as I get older. Those glorious days of working in the garden from sunrise to sunset when I was in my 40s and early 50s...yep, those are so far gone that I can scarcely remember them now. All the news from here, y'all, is not really good news. I am laughing at myself though because yesterday felt like Monday instead of Thursday since the girls had been here for a couple of days mid-week and we took them home on Wednesday afternoon, making it feel like Sunday. So, it felt like Monday all day and then I discovered it was Thursday when the weekly newspaper arrived in the mail, and thus I was overjoyed to discover it was almost the weekend already. (grin) All these August days just run together. Jana had a very tough day on Thursday, in what was already a very stressful week as her senior year of nursing school resumed this week and there's tons and tons of clinicals scheduled, some of them left over from the spring semester because Covid-19 interrupted that semester. The kids started back to school. They already were having a crazy week, and then it got even crazier. Somewhere around mid-day, Chris called to tell me that his father-in-law had passed away unexpectedly. I don't know his exact age, but think he was a bit younger than Tim and I. We had met him a handful of times and I really liked him but we did have the advantage of meeting him when he was sober (which he usually was not). Chris and Jana were up in the air all day trying to figure out who was going to travel to claim his body, make his final arrangements, etc. and neither Jana nor her siblings had any clue about his finances, whether he had life insurance, a will, etc. so they didn't even really know where to start. He was up in OKC visiting a relative, so that relative headed south last night to bring down the house keys so Jana and her siblings could search his home for paperwork to lead them in whatever direction for planning his funeral. Clearly this is a topic they'd never discussed with their father. Then, about 4 or 5 hours later, Chris called again, this time to tell me that Jana's great-aunt on her father's side had just passed away due to complications from Covid-19. This means that since December, Jana has lost her grandmother (her father's mom) to whom she was incredibly close, then her father's sister a couple of weeks later, and now her dad and her grandmother's sister on the same day. Every time Chris called me yesterday (a month's worth of phone calls in one day, I think) , the plan had changed and the grandkids were coming here to stay while he and Jana drove to OKC, then they weren't, then they were, etc. I just told him "whenever, whatever, however" to emphasize that they could drop off the kids here anytime 24/7 when and if they needed to and we'd take care of things here on this end. Oddly, just the other night at dinner on Tuesday, Aurora was talking about how great-grandma (my mom) died last August and she misses her, and then she mentioned that Great-Grandma Ruth (Jana's mom) had died last Christmas and she misses her too. She also reminded me that she hasn't seen all her Texas cousins (my sister's grandkids) in a long time and she misses them, and I reminded here that it is because of Covid-19 and we just have to be patient and wait for the virus situation to get better. We spent a substantial amount of time at dinner that night discussing how we keep them both alive in our hearts, souls and memories and I was impressed at how well an almost-six-year-old understands death. We never could have imagined she'd be losing her grandfather a couple of days after we had that discussion. The cool nights and early mornings here have been heavenly and it is nice the HVAC system has been getting a bit of a break. The heat was forecast to start cranking back up yesterday, but it really didn't do it. There's no rain in our forecast this week, so I need to keep watering everything, but there's two Tropical Depressions headed for the Gulf Coast and expected to make landfall early next week, and one of them ought to send rain up across Texas towards Oklahoma after it makes landfall, probably near Houston, as a hurricane. I'll be watching for that. It seems we always spend part of August down here hoping for a hurricane because it might bring us rain, though we certainly are hoping for a minor hurricane that doesn't damage coastal areas too much as it makes landfall. I am awake in the middle of the night. I went to bed too early because I was so worn out after a couple of really fun days with the girls, but then apparently my body decided it had had enough sleep and awakened, feeling refreshed, at 3 a.m. There is not much you can do at 3 a.m. except try to be quiet and not wake up your spouse and the dogs. I'd like to think I could maybe fall back asleep for a while, and I think I'll try that now, but the odds are that about the time I fall asleep, Tim's alarm clock will go off to wake him up...and it always wakes me up too. That makes falling back asleep seem pointless. I'm sitting here looking at the thermometer and it shows it is 68 degrees outside---a huge change from earlier in the month when we would awaken to overnight lows around 78-80. Have a great Friday everybody! Dawn...See MoreAugust 2020, Week 5-September 2020, Week 1
Comments (63)Yay for the violets, Nancy! And...you still have summer squash? The bugs killed ours long ago. Even the C. Moschata. I am pooped. So tired. We shopped today and I don't have to tell anyone that shopping is very unpleasant right now. However, Dillards allows you to try on clothes and I found a dress. It's not exactly the bohemian/fairy princess dress that I wanted. But it fits nicely and its a forest green color...and it's Robin Hoodish (not really), so I bought it. Paid more than what I wanted to pay, but it's done. DONE! Came home around 3 and sliced, breaded and froze okra. Then figured out how to use my pressure canner as a water bath canner and pickled some okra. On my own. The lids sealed so hopefully we're good. My house is getting to the point that I am very unhappy. I know a clean house isn't the most important thing in the world....but I enjoy a clean home. It just feels nice to me. However, a clean house isn't anywhere in my near future. I am hoping the robot vacuums are cheap this Christmas. That will at least help. We are celebrating Mason's BD tomorrow and that will be fun. It's at a very good restaurant that I haven't been to in a long time. Then grocery shopping and then maybe starting more lettuce seed. In between all of those things is animal care. Lots of animal care. There's always one of them doing something they shouldn't be doing or somewhere they shouldn't be hanging out. One of the fat buff orpingtons has figured out how to get out of the chicken yard. And she isn't swift. She is dumb--beautiful but dumb and wanders over by the dogs. So, I'm constantly leaving whatever task I'm working on to catch her or entice her back to the yard. And everyone is always hungry all the time. The 3 young pullets mingled with the main flock today. It went very well. Having a good rooster helps with that. They're roosting in their own coop, though. It will be a gradual thing as always. Momma Blossom will be tired of her chicks soon and those two chicks will need to move to the pullet coop at that time. Although, at least one of those chicks is a cockerel. Tom may or may not start doing meat birds and these two could be the start of it. They won't be THE meat birds, but they might be the parents of. I've named the one I think is a girl. Her name is Gwendolyn, which is sorta funny because Gwendolyn (actually related to Jennifer/Guinevere.) means white ...and Gwendolyn is a dark cornish. I'm simply rambling now....See MoreRebecca (7a)
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