Notes from the Weekend

This past weekend was busy with lots of different activities mixed in with the usual outdoor stuff.  My brother Dan stopped by on his way back from a camping trip with his boys.We had a nice visit and got to show off our little piece of heaven. 

Seeing as it's the weekend, we like to get the chickens out for a little exercise and so they can eat bugs and grass and such and so we can clean their coop while they out enjoying the fresh grass. We have a fence we move around so they don't strip the yard bare but have discovered that chicken's don't handle hot weather too well.To help them deal with the heat,  we set up our pop-up tent over the top of their fence so they can stay cooler in the shade. They also got their wings clipped as they were starting to take a fancy to flying whenever the notion entered their heads (there's not much else that's going on inside a chicken's head ).  The tent serves as a barrier for that as well as they don't have room to get between the top of fence and the tent.

 Club Chique

Things are going really well in the garden.  Lisa planted the last bed of beans on Saturday while the tomatoes and potatoes all have blossoms on them. One of our solutions for dealing with the need to water our plants is pictured below.  It makes me think of Hydra from Greek mythology. We have a brass water manifold with four faucets facing into the garden.It sits at the base of the fence and short hoses come off of it to each of the soaker hoses we have buried in the beds. It gives us the ability to water any or all of the beds at one time which keeps us from watering the paths and minimizes evaporation.  it also keeps us from soaking the leaves and making them susceptible to mildew. We did have a visitor of the four legged variety today, although Lisa swears it only had three. A ground hog found his way to our garden in broad daylight and my .22 dissuaded  him from hanging around.

 The garden in full swing. 

 Hydra

Finally, we are working on the dry river bed solution to our drainage problem. This is pick and shovel work and is not going to be done over night. although, if we were to wake up tomorrow and it was magically done, i wouldn't feel bad at all. we have about 30 feet of it excavated with another 100 or so to go. It will probably rain some on Tuesday which will let us see how we are doing so far and maybe do a little work for us as well. There is still some heavy digging and lifting ahead of us but if it turns out like we' plan, it should turn out pretty neat. 

The beginnings of our river bed.

We also mowed the grass this weekend including the new stuff. I never so looked forward to cutting grass as I did this patch.  It was done with the push mower and will probably continue that way for a couple more weeks until the grass gets really established.  I don't want to crush the new roots with our tractor just yet.

Finally, Lisa baked bread and started a batch of home made yogurt while I washed and waxed her car and cleaned the leather seats; something I hadn't done in almost a year. It looks great and is one more milestone that indicates that we might be  getting close to a lifestyle that doesn't include another 40 hours after our day jobs each week.