Update

Things are really starting to happen fast now. This Wednesday we sign our house over to the State. This will give us a nice fat check which we will use to help pay for our replacement house. We have gotten proposals from two contractors to do the whole thing and are waiting on a third.  Truth be told, I believe we are sold on the second contractors as they really seemed to get what we wanted and their proposal reflected those wishes. They're in our financial ball park and they can build it in 6 months. We hope to be able to stay in our current house until the new one is built so we're keeping our fingers crossed and our prayers said that this will work out. So are we sitting around basking in the glory of all this finally coming together after five years? Heck no, we're up to our eyeballs in details and of course the garden is still calling our names. We're including some pictures to let you see our successes and a few trials as well. So here goes.

Lisa is harvesting some of our lettuce, I think it's the third time so far. We'll be taking some to share at work tomorrow. The colors are equal to the flavor of this stuff. We are enjoying salads every night and Lisa takes one for lunch most days. The beans are also doing well. and the miscellaneous greens between the two are various flowers we are growing from seed. They should help attract beneficial bugs and just plain look pretty.

Lisa staked and caged our tomatoes this week. We have three varieties, Cherokee Purple and Pink Brandywine for eating and Amish paste for sauce. Right now they're fighting for space with our potatoes and some more flowers we planted to attract beneficial bugs. You'll also notice some new fencing we installed this week due to the unwanted attention from some bunnies and one ground hog who should be counting his days on this earth.

If you look closely at the fencing to the left of the wooden post in the center of the picture, you will see a very neat rectangular hole which was chewed by our way-too- friendly neighborhood ground hog.  If you also look closely, you'll see where he ate the tops off of all our soybeans in this bed. Surprisingly, he ignored the peas which grow right next to the soybeans. We aren't giving him another chance as we used rabbit wire to wrap that end of the fencing until we can install a more effective way of keeping him  on his own turf (Lisa would prefer he go to groundhog heaven and she'll be glad to help him along!).

This last photo is of some our plants we moved from our current home. These Sedum once graced our front flower beds and now will help us fill in the bank at the back of the barn. Our friend Pedro helped us out again and cleaned up this bank which was horribly over grown with weeds. The piles at the bottom of the bank are a testament to his weed pulling ability.