A True Summer's Day

Mother Nature must have gotten tired of hearing all my whining about needing warmth and sunshine for the garden.  This may be the only day of it we'll get this summer (!), but warm it was!  I think we must have hit 90 degrees in the garden because the thermometer on the north side of the house in the shade read 79.8 degrees.  It felt like an oven out there, but it may have been just what the garden needed.

I took a couple of pictures from Papa Pea's upstairs office window to give you an overview of some of our growing areas.  Above are the 26 raised beds, although a couple are hidden by the cold frames.

Over to the right a smidge is the field garden.  That bare looking spot with the bit of greenery in the middle is my pumpkin patch.  We've been talking for a couple of years of plowing up more area for the field garden as I don't have as much room as I'd like for rotation of crops each year.  

The strawberries are coming on so hot (really hot today!) and heavy, hubby has suggested we take out about half of them.  This is just the third year for the three varieties I've planted (only the second year we could harvest them) so I want to keep track of quantities and flavor for at least another year before eliminating any of them.

Our three haskap bushes have really sized up.  That's the three of them with three rows of blueberries (hiding) and the raspberries behind them.  I think they're lovely and would even be attractive for landscaping.

And the quantity of berries is heavy this year.  But most importantly, how do they taste?  Awful, just awful.  I've been talking with someone who's had experience with them for several years and he tells me I have to find the right variety for our location in order to get berries that aren't so sour they make my eyes cross and ears wiggle.  Papa Pea seems to think the berries might make good wine.  But who the heck around here has time to learn how to make wine?  Not me.  Nope, I'm not taking on one more new project until I have so much time to spend in my quilt room that I'm bored.  (Tee-hee, won't ever happen.)

Dear husband helped me pick the strawberries today in that blazing heat.  Some of them are currently in the dehydrator in the form of (experimental) fruit leather.  Some made it into a Strawberry Cream Pie.  I sliced up some for fresh eating.  Depending on how the fruit leather turns out, I may make more tomorrow or I'm thinking of trying strawberry juice for the first time.

Tomorrow I have three more heads of broccoli ready and I'm not sure how many heads of cauliflower to harvest and prep for the freezer.  The haskap berries may get picked, too.  (Raise your hand if I can send you the whole batch of them.)

We actually took the day off yesterday.  Yep, we did.  We did only the necessary chores, spent a leisurely morning sipping liquids and reading in the living room.  It was so nice to do that at a time of day when we both weren't yawning and falling asleep.

In the afternoon, we took a ride to a lake neither of us knew much about and learned the lay of the land there.  We checked out the public landing (and a very nice one it was) where it would be easy to launch either our sport boat with motor or canoe to spend a day puttering around the lake.  Actually being as big as the lake is, it might take us more than one day to adequately explore it.

While we were standing on the nice dock that went out into the lake, down the shore we spotted a buck deer come out of the woods and wade out into the lake.  He meandered along the shore line for a while sometimes going into the water so far it was up to his belly.  We'd never seen a deer in the water like that.  A moose, yes, but never a deer.

Busy day again today, and with the heat we're not used to, I'm drained.  I don't even have the oompf to go into my quilt room tonight.  It's a shower first and then I'm hitting the couch.  Y-a-a-w-w-w-n!