And here is a great photo of my daughter's wheelbarrow flower garden (with the house not being done, we didn't want to put in a permanent flower bed yet.)
It seemed the weeding of the garden was endless, but it was worth it! Here are some pics of tomatoes from the 1st of June.
You may noticed the "hoops" that the tomatoes are climbing. Those are 16 foot welded wire cattle panels that we've buried each end in the ground about a foot. An old neighbor taught me that trick. Makes an excellent trellis for the tomato vines, cucumbers, too. Only we just stand panels up and wire them to a few T posts for them.
And here's one of the squash plants;
We had also planted a whole row of marigolds beside the tomato plants, and they did a fairly good job of keeping the bugs away for awhile.
I got pretty good at picking off tomato horn worms and squashing them. I sprayed every other day with insecticidal soap that I'd made up, and sprinkled diatomaceous earth on the squash plants, in hopes of keeping the squash bugs at bay.
By the end of June I was learning how to water bath can pickles. My mother had ALWAYS canned, every year I can remember her making pickles, sweet & dill (the best dill in the world...only she never wrote her recipe down) and green beans in the pressure canner. She'd never let us kids help, and many times she'd shoo us out of the kitchen until the pressure canner had cooled down some. She was always worried about us getting hurt. Now it was my turn to learn how to do this, and it was a HOT job!!! My range in the cabin is electric, and a glass top at that, so any kind of canner would not work. I took my canning chores outdoors. We have a propane grill with a side burner...I canned on it. It took FOREVER for the water to boil! Once it did then the jars went in and the timer started. I didn't make a whole lot, but the pickles and relish have lasted us two years, so I guess that's an accomplishment. :)
Sometime in late May my husband brought my washing machine from the storage units, hooked it up inside the shed with the well, and strung some clothesline between 3 trees. I admit it wasn't glamorous, and it's a lot of work carting the clothes outdoors to wash and then hanging them dry, but the weather made QUICK work of drying them! It was so hot and dry that summer that clothes would dry in less than an hour on the line. We had also estimated at our old house that we saved $50 a month on our electric bill by using the clothesline (I sure miss the nice clothesline Jason built me there). Having done laundry over and over at the laundromat, we were saving even MORE money, because I think I spent between $15 and $20 a week in quarters, not to mention the gas to and from.
Besides keeping the garden watered, we also had to change the chicken and ducks' water daily (ducks make a BIG mess of water). We had 2 kiddie pools we used for the ducks, and before summer was over that became three. We also had a 2 gallon water fount for the chickens, and they'd sometimes go through that twice a day (thanks to the ducks, too). So we got strategic and placed some one gallon founts here and there throughout the yard. The evaporation from the water was cooling, and you'd see the cats hanging out next to them.
Speaking of cats...that cat was NOT our cat...she showed up from the neighbors house with six kittens! The neighbors were really not cat people, and they were looking to get rid of all of them. We took in two kittens: Buster and Wally, but it wasn't long before the mama cat and the rest of the kittens were hanging out here, too. We gave up, gave in, and we gained 7 cats. Sigh...we were up to 19 cats, I think.
Here's a picture of Jason relaxing after work with the kittens crawling all over him. The one on his shoulder is Izzy. Notice how brown the yard is? :(
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