First Harvest!

It's not even June yet and there are things to be harvested in our garden! Yeah! You can see in the picture above our bok choy getting ready to bolt already! So two of these plants ended up in a stir-fry tonight with beef, celery, onions, carrots and mushrooms. There is just something so rewarding about eating things you have grown yourself! We might actually have to eat all this bok choy in the next couple of weeks and plant another crop. I do notice that they bolt really quickly, so it kind of forces you to eat them while young. I also notice that this part of the garden still needs to be weeded. Oh well, it's a never ending job!


There are also radishes to be eating now too, as you can see in this picture. I decided to try growing a variety of radishes called 'icicle' that is shaped more like a carrot than the round, red kind. They taste the same though! Frank was kind of bewildered when he found these radishes drying in the dish rack after I washed them. OH well!

Thanks for reading this first of many more reports of things we've harvested and eaten from the garden! It's amazing I still have faithful readers after all these mundane and boring posts. I'm glad you're hanging in there. :)

Finally Done!

Well, a normal spring in the northwest has conspired against us in our efforts to finish painting the deck. We prevailed, however, and the last coat of stain was completed just in time to dry enough that another spring rain didn't do any damage. Here is Frank doing the last steps. Notice the little white fence at the foot of the stairs. Now this certainly couldn't and wouldn't stop any chicken, but it was enough to stop people (namely US) from forgetting that we couldn't step on the deck for a couple of days.


I took these pictures at 6:30 pm, so the light isn't that great, but you get the idea. I'm sure there will be many more pictures to come of us enjoying this lovely addition to our home. We have yet to add a couple of nice hanging flower baskets, as well as cushions for the bench and a glider. Also, we'd like to hang a hummingbird feeder, as they seem to be all around this spring.


We're off tonight to watch the finale of LOST at a friend's house. I made fresh strawberry crepes to bring. YUM. I can hardly wait for the good company and the good food! See you later!

No Chickens in the House!!

A little background information first: We have a sliding glass door/screen that we leave open on nice days so that the cats and dog can go in and out on their own, instead of making us be their personal doormen every 5 minutes. Generally, this works out well. See the elusive Jake above, hunkering on the corner of the little porch out there, surveying his land and ever alert for something he can kill. (Luckily, chickens, even little ones, are not on his menu.)

So last night Frank and I are enjoying our new porch for the first time by sitting at our new table and playing a game of Settlers of Catan. Then came some tapping from inside the house. First tenative, then more insistent. What the heck? Well, we look toward the tapping and see something so incongruous that it took a while for it to even register...it was Sylvia!! She was in our living room, walking back and forth on the sills of the windows to our new porch!


So, with my faithful blog readers ever in mind, I ran in and was able to snap off this one picture before territorial Katie the yellow kitty decided that she didn't think a chicken should be in the house either and thus commenced the cat/chicken rodeo. Too bad I didn't get any pictures of that but I was more concerned about keeping them apart than capturing the moment! Needless to say, Sylvia was happy to go out the front door that Frank so graciously held open for her. And to answer the question that I know all of you are thinking: No, she didn't poop in the house. Whew!

Painting the New Porch - Day 2

Well, today was LONG with painting but the rewards were great. Frank finished the tedious job of painting the inside of the roof while I did the white posts. Once Frank was done with the roof, he moved on to doing all the white on the higher horizontal wood that I couldn't reach. It's 6:10pm now, and he says he's got a half-hour more to go tonight. We started at 8:30 this morning, so that's a full day of painting...WHEW!


We are done with painting for this weekend. We need to put another coat of white stain on the wood that Frank painted today, and we also need to wash all the horizontal surfaces (benches, railing, deck floor and stairs) prior to staining them. We don't have time to wash it tonight, and since it needs at least overnight to dry, it'll just have to be done next weekend (hopefully!). That's OK, we have neglected the lawn so there is mowing to be done! There's always something!

Painting the New Porch - Day 1

Well, we finally got a stretch of weather promising to be nice enough for us to be able to start our porch-painting project! Poor Frank got the hard job of all the high work, which meant standing on the ladder (or the railing) and doing all the brush work above his head! I didn't think to get out the camera until he was hanging like a monkey painting the outside of the rafters, but you surely get the idea. Poor Frank!


After analyzing the things we did right and the things we could do differently from here on, we agreed to try to find a ladder for the outside stuff. Burke, the man who built the porch, lives just three doors down, and when he came by to inspect our work, he offered one of his many ladders and we're surely going to take him up on his offer. We actually made really good progress today. Frank did half of the inside roof, and I did all of the back sides of the benches and railings.


I also did the ballisters and rail on the steps. I included this picture so you could see the stain we're using and how it looks compared to the unstained wood. The unstained part in this picture will be an opaque white stain, which will match our house. Tomorrow, while Frank finishes the inside roof, I'll be doing all the posts in that white. On Sunday we plan to do the inside benches and railings. The floor of the deck and the outside lower trim will have to be the next nice weekend. Whew!


We asked our builder to make a table for us that would match the style of the porch. We had been looking around and couldn't find anything that we thought would work for us, and he agreed. This is the stunningly beautiful pedestal table he built for us. I stained it today too, and it was still fairly wet on top in this picture. Sorry about the drop cloth being all around the foot...I'll take a better picture of it once the deck is done and it's in its rightful place.


Burke's wife knew I wanted to plant hydrangeas (among other things) around the deck, and she had some to spare, so she dug these up for me. They are patiently waiting to get back into the ground, which will be as soon as we're done with the porch, hopefully next weekend. I also want some peonies, but I'm not sure how well they grow here.

Once the deck is done, then I get to decorate it! I'm thinking about some colorful cushions (red and white stripes?), a glider and a small table, and of course a couple of hanging flower baskets. We've also had some hummingbirds flit through the porch, so I think we'll hang a hummingbird feeder as well. Thanks for looking and I hope to have another installment of this saga soon!

The garden's hardest workers

I know I talked about this last year, but I LOVE bees and what they do for us. Because they are so busy, they are very hard to get a picture of. I stood out by this apple tree for probably 10 minutes and got maybe one bee in every 10 shots. These guys move around quickly! Not easy to catch with a digital camera, but this one will do:


These little guys have had a tough few days with fairly chilly temperatures and a stiff wind, but they persisted and were diligently working to make little baby apples for us to enjoy in the fall. They were also working over the blueberry bushes quite well, too, but pictures of that were impossible to catch. Thank you bees!


As you can see, the peas have sprouted in the garden. Also up are the red potatoes (the yukon golds are still sleeping, apparently), radishes, lettuce and the green beans are just poking their little round heads to see if they want to come up yet. I am having trouble with something eating my tender green transplants of bok choy, basil and cilantro, but don't see any footprints of our resident deer in the garden (plus it's netted) so I'm thinking it's slugs, so I put out some pet-safe Sluggo to see if that would help. The good news is that I planted so early, that I still have plenty of time to replant things that don't make it. The herb garden up next to the house is complete now with a couple kinds of thyme, rosemary, oregano, catnip, and peppermint. I also had enough room to plant two small tomato plants up against the warmth of the house and a couple of artichoke plants just to see if they'd work here. I'll get a picture of that for next time.

A Gardener's Dilemma

Well, everything I had here that needed to be planted, either starts or seeds, is now in the ground. Here's the dilemma: I still have space!! What to do? What to do? I'm actually having quite a bit of fun thinking of what I've not grown before that might be fun to try. The space in the veggie garden is about 6' x 8' (the rectangle on the right in the picture above), so plenty of room to try a few things. There is even some room in the side flower garden and the herb garden as well.


I mostly took and included this picture so I would have a 'before' picture to refer to when things got to looking nice. It looks pretty bleak here now, frankly! The little white fence is one we got to keep the chickens out of the side flower garden, but, needless to say, it didn't work, so now it's the trellis for my peas, which actually I can see poking up above the ground today. Nice.


Here's the side garden with my new little annuals planted. You can see there is room for more. As I was planting, I noticed that, except for 6 little alyssum, there is not enough white. It is mostly pinks and purples, so I think I'll have to get some more white and probably something yellow as well. Oh darn, more things to get for the garden!


Here is the first of what I am sure will be many chicken pictures this year. I just love these dumb peckers, and they've been quite productive lately as well, with 8 or 9 eggs a day. I want to point out the little hen on the left. That's Sylvia, the one we adopted last year from the Braly's. In case they check this blog once in a while, I wanted them to know that their sweet girl is doing fine, doesn't crow or be mean to anyone else (why she needed a new home) and lays a little egg every other day or so. She has been a fun addition to our goofy, mixed flock.


This is Vasco. That is short for Vasco De Gama. She has that name because she is always curious and exploring. I'll go out to the barn and find her WAY up in the rafters just checking out every nook and cranny. Just the other day she got into our shop somehow and I found her on top of our upright freezer. She gets along well with the other chickens, but she is just as happy on her own. Today, I was sitting on the bench on our new porch, sorting through my seed packets, and she had to make sure I was doing it right. I know it sounds dorky, but I think chickens make pretty entertaining pets.


Lastly, it's embarrassing to have THIS out in our pasture, but everyone who drives by gets to see her, so I thought you should enjoy the sight as well. Daisy will be four this July (where does time go) and she is still just as sweet and willing as she's ever been. I had a harness on her several times last fall, and hope to continue with her training and maybe have her in the cart this summer some time. Of course I'll get pictures of that too!

Thanks for sticking with me during the break I took from writing this blog over the winter. I'll do my best to keep it as interesting as possible, but sometimes that's hard because, frankly, we're not that interesting! I am always open to requests as well, so feel free to write if you want to see anything. :)