Weekend Harvest

This weekend as well as more house painting, we did some garden harvesting. The vegetables are very happy this year, especially our Uncle David's Dakota Dessert Squash. It's muscling out everything near it as you can see!

Squash blossoms closer up. The plants seem picture perfect this year.

Got beets? We sure do! This week we'll be processing and pickling many beets. Estimate is about 40 pounds worth this particular harvest.

First storage potato crop brought in as well, and curing before going in the back pantry. One of these days we hope to add an old fashioned cold cupboard to better preserve things and for longer storage life.

Pickling onions, cukes and dill as well as some carrots not shown all went into a batch of fridge pickles.

We used this Refridgerator Dill Pickle recipe and in as little as 2 -4 days this jar of goodness will be ready to eat... Mm-mm!

The tomatoes appear to have a new resident... can you spot her/him in the picture?

Here Fergus is trying to figure out if he should be jealous of "Tame Chicken". She's one of our new hens and seems to love people, running over whenever we are in the area. Naturally she gets special privileges, such as hanging out with us in the yard.

Or even better, lap time with hugs.

Strange Ordinance

While on vacation we visited a local gravel pit in order to do some shooting. There we found this strange ordinance... someone's bottle rocket special with a shotgun shell finish. Just hope no one was below if it really went off!

We also ran into this melon bandit...


Guess he tried to rob the wrong bunch of hombres.


Returning to life on the farm... this is the 2nd best of the two barred rock roosters we have from the spring chicks, also known as "Number Two". We placed an ad in the local Craigslist for him [there can be only one], and he went to a new flock elsewhere for the tidy purchase price of $10.00. Who says a farm can't be profitable! We just probably won't be quitting our day jobs anytime soon... sigh.



And the painting project continues. Here J is at the midpoint on the front exterior wall. At this point we now have the house competely washed, calked and nearly the entire first coat on the outside walls... second soon to follow. After that it's just the trim paint. New gutters are also on the horizon, when the budget allows as we'd much prefer a color that matches the darker trim over the current white ones. The old gutters will probably get recycled for use on our run-in, and the remainder are spoken for by a neighbor who'll use them on a shop.

Here D screws off the last flashing on the renewed back porch roof. We tore off all the aged, badly installed panel roofing that leaked, reinforced then painted the framing, and installed clear polycarbonate "Tuftex" roofing. The rain was just starting to fall, so job was finished not a moment too soon. Eventually, the back porch will be enclosed to be a bit more user friendly in the winter months. You can see more old white guttering here that simply has to go, especially once the fascia has the darker bronze paint.

We took enough time out from house repair to do a garlic harvest. This year we managed almost 60 plants at harvest, so we could nearly go the year if we didn't use too much over a full bulb per week. Not too shabby. Some of these plants were, simply put, huge! We placed them in an area manure was piled during the winter, then left to compost all summer. By last fall when we sowed garlic, the pile had turned into some dark uber-rich soil. We'll definitely have to use this method again.

Of course no post at Seven Trees is complete without some kind of critter pic. Here Crichton demonstrates the proper form of "sleeping in". Thanks, Crichton!