Cooler temps and routines

21 August 2012

 Beautiful blue skies have been the choice of the week with temps in the mid 80's. This is kind of unheard of weather for Oklahoma in August but hey, you ain't getting any complaints from this department!! I love it and so do the birds and the garden.

 Biggest news of the week and change to our household, our son moved into the dorm at college. He's in an honors dorm so hopefully they all have good work habits and study before they party. You never know though, they are college kids alone in the world for the first time. I can't really blame them for trying things out occasionally. I hope his room stays at least this clean for the remainder of the semester. Ha!

Built a new garden bed this week. 3 x 10 and 12 inches deep. We used recycled feed sacks from the poultry feed as ground cover. It's porous but heavy so water can get through but weeds will have a hard time. We have one more of these beds to build in the next week or so and then we'll have to reframe the greenhouse we built last year to accommodate it all with our other beds. Don't know how we'll heat more space but time will tell I guess.

And the other big news of the week, our toms are sure strutting their stuff, puffing up and booming. They've even started to follow the girls around some. The fair is just around the corner but we had to clip Boyd's wing today as he came out of their pen, flew the length of the yard, flew over the greenhouse, over the fence, and into the neighbors yard. Luckily it was in the neighbors yard with the empty house and not in the crazy neighbors yard. We didn't want to have to ground him but it's too worrying to have him flying over fences so home he stays from now on.

We finally got most of the apples put up from our friends tree. Best deal in the world for us. They have two apple trees. We keep them picked and supply them with a couple of jars of apple butter and we get all we want. Their pear tree is almost ripe too but I'm hoping to get the last two bushels of apples we picked this weekend put up before we start on pears as well. My dining room table is covered with boxes and buckets already. We also need to get the new pantry cabinets built for all these canned goods and dried goods. Our bedroom, the coolest room in the house, is almost out of storage nooks and crannies. The apples have been made into applesauce, apple butter, apple pie filling, and pectin so far. Just got a good recipe for apple juice though without having to press the apples so we'll be trying that this week. Then the pears will be made into pear preserves and pear honey. Yummo! Pear honey is the nectar of the gods as far as I'm concerned.