Cherry Pickin'

In spite of going to bed early last night, I did not sleep well. So I decided to take a nap with Ethan today. Just as I was waking up, I hear a knock at the door. It's really not a usual thing for people to visit us, so I figured I would just ignore it since I wasn't exactly presentable. If it was a friend, they would get back with me, and if it was a salesman, so much the better. Well, the person just kept knocking, and it woke Ethan up. So I finally took our groggy selves to the door. I found two bicyclists parked on our lawn picking cherries. The older one saw me, apologized for waking us up, and then asked if they could possibly come back to pick a bucket of cherries. I was rather taken aback by this forwardness and wasn't quite sure how to answer him. I told him we were going to pick them tonight, but I supposed if there were any left that he could reach he could have some. I concluded that it was a very good thing we were picking the cherries for Family Home Evening, because otherwise whatever the birds didn't get to would be picked off by strange people passing by!

Our cherry tree is loaded this year, which is nice because we didn't get any the previous two years. It's a little frustrating to see the branches covered in cherries way up high, past the reach of a ladder or even a climb. Even so, there were plenty that we could reach. Yum! We are going to try drying some this year since we don't seem to eat the bottled ones very much.

This is just before we started picking. As you can see, Ethan got a little spoiled today. Our friends the Murrays were getting rid of a bunch of toys, and they stopped by to see if we wanted any of them. They certainly helped keep him entertained while we were busy! Grandma watched Ethan for us, switch out bags, and gathered cherries we dropped.

 Ethan thought it was pretty cool to see us way up high, and he had a lot of fun eating the cherries and playing with grandma. I think we'll be seeing a number of pits in his diaper soon, though. . .

 I spent quite a while getting all the cherries I could reach from the roof. I think the back of my legs probably got a pretty good tan. ;)

 Doug's station was on the ladder. He told us stories of his parent's orchard.

 And Terral was our monkey for the day. :) No surprise there.

It feels good to have the majority of the picking done. Now we just have to take care of the fruit! Somehow I don't think we'll have any problem getting rid of the excess. . .

Community Supported Agriculture

Oooh! I am so excited! We just joined a CSA! What is a CSA, you might ask? Well, if you read post titles, you might have guessed that it stands for Community Supported Agriculture. And you would be right. It's kind of like subscription farming.


I have really been trying to better our diets, but have felt kind of stuck. We decided not to do a garden this year because it turned out to be too much work last year with the little one, with not enough profit. When we have our own property we will resume. Until then, I thought we would be stuck with store-bought produce, which is sometimes okay and other times really not that great.


Last night I came across this website via another blog. If you live in the US, you can use it to find local farmers, CSAs, and farmer's markets. Very cool! I was really excited when I found this farm so close to us. And they have just recently started a CSA! Perfect timing. :)


Getting a weekly basket from them will cut down on what I need to buy at the store, making shopping less stressful for me. I like supporting local businesses—especially if they do something so beneficial—and I'm really excited to have locally grown, seasonal produce. Oh, the goodness!


Now we just need to find a good source for bulk grains.

Finally Fence

We finally got a fence put up around our garden! Chris's dad got some free chain link from someone at the beginning of the summer, but we didn't get posts until a few days ago. The boys did a lot of work putting the posts in. We girls helped too, of course.

The plan is to put some barbed wire between the chain link and the top poles--then it will be finished. Oh, and the gate still needs to be attached. In the mean time our garden feels so much safer! No Deer Allowed!

One of my Passions

So, if you can't tell, I like gardening. I like it on so many levels I get a little tongue-tied when I try to explain it. So I won't try to explain it right now, but I would be very remiss in my blogging if I didn't tell you about our gardening adventures this year. So here you go.

This is a picture of our garden from the north side. Terral's sister Heather lives in her in-laws' basement, and this is their (the in-laws') plot of land. Heather and Chris were nice enough to invite us and Erin and Corey to share the space with them. Our section is what you can see over until the road posts that are strung with yarn. As you can see, there is quite a bit of bare ground in our section. We didn't plan it that way. We've had a few challenges this year.

We were spoiled with imported soil in raised beds last year. Sure, we had to do some MAJOR weeding in order to get to the beds, the earwigs almost completely destroyed our beans, the birds got most of our small yield of strawberries, and we had to replant our beets and carrots-- but we really had it good.

This year we've gotten to know the native clay-filled soil. We really struggled with keeping our plants watered at first, mostly because the water just didn't sink in. But we made it past the critical stages. Then we started getting attacks from the bugs. Now we have deer. (Tomatoes are their favorite.) But the worst has been the disease. It has affected our beets, tomatoes, zucchini, and chard. It completely wiped out our spinach.

If you look on the other side of the furrow and past the peas, you can see that our chard is doing okay. Spinach is definitely something we'll try again. It was sooo good while it lasted!

Our cucumbers are another fatality. I love cucumbers. We planted two to begin with. (Six was a bit much last year.) One died right away. The other gave us false hope by lingering on for a few weeks. This last one we got for free at the Ladybug Nursery open house. It struggled for a while, revived and grew blossoms, and finally it, too, succumbed.


Not all has been doom and gloom though. Our pepper plants, which seemed most likely to die in the beginning, have been doing quite well. Peppers are an acquired taste for me. My mom doesn't like anything "spicy", and even sweet peppers fall in that category. So I never really had them until I was older. I love them now!

We decided to try the rainbow variety this year. We ended up with green, yellow-green, and purple peppers. The purple peppers are quite small. This one got stuck in between two stems! (Forgive the lack of focus--my camera wasn't cooperating with close-ups in that light.)


Here's a picture of one of our latest yields. Terral likes to call that thing in the top/middle our "butt squash"--excuse his french.


I leave you with a view of our garden from the south. Terral's smiling because we are excited about the harvest of our valient surviving plants!

By-the-bye, what you see in the background is the houseboat that Heather's father-in-law built himself. That's right. Terral is inspired. No word yet on whether or not that's a good thing. ; )

Mmmm

Today I made a sandwich using our first green pepper and tomato from our garden. So delicious!

Don't Mess With My Garden

I am a Bug Slayer. At least my husband thinks I am. Last year he was surprised at the ferocity I suddenly showed when I found some bugs eating MY VEGETABLES. I still surprise him at times. Like tonight. I was inspecting our poor spinach plants when I spied a grasshopper calmly munching away. Not wanting to let it get away, I quickly reached out and squished the fat insect with my fingers. Yes, it was gross. But I learned at a young age some evils have to be dealt with even when it's unpleasant.