The Week Gone By

Lots of rain this past week which has made working in the garden . . . sporadic.  Yesterday we had a storm roll through (again) and two real gully washers came down, one of them accompanied with 1/2" hail.  The hail didn't last long enough to do real damage in the garden.  As far as I can tell.  But I haven't made a close inspection yet.

The toddler geese didn't seem fazed by the heavy rain, just walked in their typical "follow-the-leader" type manner from one spot to another looking a bit puzzled.  I kept yelling at them to go in their house for shelter . . . to no avail.  When it started to hail, they had the sense to bee-line it for the shelter of some pines with low hanging branches.

There was a note on our local Internet community "bulletin board" this morning of someone on a nearby lake looking for two sections of his dock that blew away in the storm.

Now this morning I see we had more rain overnight which definitely means no work in the field garden today.

My potatoes need to be hilled up again.  Along with the rain we've also had unusually hot, humid weather, and the taters have been growing by leaps and bounds.  I can't seem to keep up with them.

The garden is giving us as much wonderful lettuce and salad greens as we can eat.  My big planting of radishes (I love 'em) is coming in with a vengeance.  There are blossoms on the two cherry tomato plants.  The strawberry plants are absolutely loaded with berries but no red coloring is showing yet.  I'm hoping they will start being ready to pick in another week or ten days.

I harvested a bunch of garlic scapes this past week and have a jar of them fermenting on the counter.  Also did a jar of radishes.  It will be into this coming week before we can sample either batch.

There is a young fella in the area this year who is baking bread in an outdoor brick oven and selling it at our small farmer's market on Saturday morning.  I try to bake my own bread regularly kinda/sorta as often as I can but summertime is a hard time to keep up with it so I've been buying bread from him at the farmer's market.  He makes a wonderful ciabatta (my fave) and an all-whole wheat sourdough to which Papa Pea has become addicted.

I took advantage of the stormy weather yesterday to clean house.  Boy, did it need it.  Of course, it always feels sooo good when that task is done and everything is spic and span . . . which seems to last about half a day.

Hubby and I have both been short of sleep lately and were exhausted (so what's new?) last night.  Maybe it was the atmospheric pressure, but we crashed before 9:30 and slept this morning until . . . holy cow, seven o'clock!  Other than having a slight, dull headache (I think from sleeping so hard), I feel great this morning.  Seriously though, we need to start winding down earlier each day (how many kajillion times have we said this?) so we can get to bed earlier.  We're both morning people and would be delighted if we could get enough hours of sandman time each night to arise ready to whip our weights in wildcats (and that's a lot of wildcats) around 5:30 each morn.  Wish us luck.

Well, once this weather settles, we will have lots of weeding, mowing and weed whipping to do.  Speaking of which, we're waiting for my very own weed whip to be delivered.  I can't manage the one Papa Pea uses as it's about 15 feet long (okay, maybe a smidge shorter) and heavy.  So we did a little research and my dear husband ordered one I should be able to handle.  Is he good to me or what?