The Current Bain of My Existence

And by "current," I mean, it frequently changes. However, I imagine it won't change until I can get rid of these awful things:


If you can look past the dirty fingers and bad manicure (or haven't-had-one-in-a-couple-of-years manicure), there's a catepillar on that leaf. Many, many of them on my fruit trees and the weeping cherry, and the blueberries. And the bees? Totally ruling my world in that I chose not to use non-organic pesticides on anything around here. So what am I doing? Picking all those worms off by hand! Someone please shoot me in the face.

Garden 2010

I finished getting the okra in today and pretty much just got everything else squared away.


It looks kinda sad at this point. I also put straw over the strawberries to help with the weeds and hopefully hold some moisture in - they are pretty parched.


You can't tell a thing about that picture.

Of course, while I was busy working outside with the planting, the kittens were inside starting a garden of their own.


They decided to start with cucumbers and cabbage.

Time Flies

The kittens are almost a year old. This was last year, shortly after we got them.


This was yesterday morning.


Oscar has lost a considerable amount of weight and the kittens have, evidently, gained it all.

A Tin Roof and Dairy Products

Its been a busy two weeks with Jay taking off work to try and help Matthew and his crew get the tin roof on. Neither of them had any previous experience with tin, but by-jiminy they have figured it out and are making serious progress. Although, I'm not certain the progress should be going so slow. I guess you can't hurry perfection.

They chose the week of spring, where we had record high temperatures, to be up there on the tin and Jay is still recovering from the sunburn. Even tho he wasn't on the roof as much as Matthew was, he was still catching the reflection from what was laying around on the ground.

They've still got a bit more to do, but it really looks awesome!


The warm temps have everything blooming like crazy (more so than the eleventybillion other blooming things I have posted). The fruit trees in the orchard have (mostly) all bloomed - I think I pruned a peach to the point where it had no blooms on it, only a few leaves. Note to self. We planted 3 apples trees, 2 Virginia Beautys (gifts from dear friends) and 1 Golden Delicious.


This is one of the pear trees. See how tall and skinny it is? Mostly all the fruit trees are small enough that when it frosted a couple of nights ago, I was able to slip pillow cases over the trees to protect them from the frost. Probably won't be able to do that again next year. I'm sure the neighbors will appreciate that.

We've worked on the berry patch and the garden spot. After last year, I realized that I had too much garden and we made a considerably smaller plot. We also moved it away from the road. Jay tilled it yesterday and we put a load of mushroom compost on and then he tilled that in as well.


I planted today - tomatoes, onions, peppers, corn, beans, cucumbers, beets, squash, sunflowers and about 10 million zinnias. Tomorrow I'll try and get the okra in and see if I can't get pictures. I have this coming week off and a whole list of things to do. I wish getting a manicure was on that list - I could seriously use one.

In the past, Jay and I have discussed livestock. It's always been a brief conversation because 5 pets tie us down enough. We've talked about miniature jersey cows. You'll have to look them up to see how cute they are because I seriously could not figure out how to post a picture here from the internet. Pure genius. Anyway, we always get back to having to milk the things 2 times per day, every single day for the rest of our lives - or at least as long as we can keep the cows alive.

We could have fresh milk, butter - I might could figure out how to make cheese, because, you know, I don't have enough to do already. But, we just don't seem to want to make that commitment. Besides, I would say we've probably got enough cheese around here as it is.