Water, water, everywhere...and same with vermins

I saw the best quote the other day from Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar:
"We all make mistakes in life. The thing that separates successful people from others is how we handle those mistakes."  It's the one lesson I hope the kids come away with if they remember nothing else I teach them.

Speaking of lessons for my kids, one of the ones I keep reminding ds#1 of is to not waste water:

Source: eLocal.com

Clean water is something that we should never take for granted.

~~~~~
We've enjoyed several meals of yummy sweet corn...

until the evil raccoons somehow got into our fenced garden (something they'd never done before) and destroyed the rest of that one bed. Luckily, we still have another bed, or two. One of those is surrounded by an electric fence, so they should fare better.

Raccoons, or some other pest, also swooped in on our Asian pears. One day our 2 trees were loaded with fruits, nearly ready for picking, and the next day, not a single fruit was left on either tree. Nada. If we catch the culprit, it is stew meat! Grrrr. The tree branch in this photo was so loaded with fruit that it had snapped off.

Luckily, there are other things we are able to harvest and process - more basil, for instance:

And here's hubby making the pesto, after I washed all the basil and the jars and lids, and the kids stripped the leaves.

A good friend, Tia, brought over two pullets that they didn't want anymore after her girls were done with their 4-H project. Meet Vader (guess what that was named after?) and Tawny (as in Sigourney Weaver's character from Galaxy Quest). Ds#1 gets the credit for these names. Do they look like they're doing a Rockettes' dance or what?

Our old hens had pretty much stopped laying due to the heat and their being broody, so we look forward to finally having some homegrown eggs again. Thanks, Tia!

In other exciting news, we'll be getting a new tractor soon - a lovely red Kubota! Hubby had looked at John Deere, but the dealer in town was surprisingly unresponsive, with the manager acting like he didn't really want to make the sale. The Kubota dealer in the town south of us, on the other hand, was so helpful and eager that hubby decided to go for it. Plus, the size and features that he wanted were cheaper with the Kubota. Can't wait!

Do you have any exciting gardening purchases?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Get ready to be inundated

Because it's always feast or famine, people!

No, sorry; it's actually because I tend to put things off and then throw everything into the pot...or the blog post.

So, let's rush through our Vancouver trip. Luckily for you, unlike some of my friends who are good about taking a million photos each time they go on vacation, I think we (the kids, hubby, and I) took a total of maybe 30 pictures. And I'm not sharing all of them - you'll be grateful to know that, for example, I'm not sharing the photo of the dead caterpillar ds#1 found in his salad or his stunning photos of various slugs they found while hiking.

Speaking of hiking, no trip to Vancouver is complete without a trek to Lynn Headwaters in North Vancouver:

Now that ds#1 is feeling more confident with birding by ear (and is really good with IDing by sight), we're doing more and more birding outings.  We went to Whytecliff Park, which we hadn't been to in years, and were rewarded with lovely views and some unusual birds.

Hubby likes to bring the boys to wholesome places for birding too (click to see larger photo):

That place (Wreck Beach, in case anyone wants to know) is pretty gorgeous though:

We also went to check out my mom's headstone at her grave site.  My sister and I helped our dad order the tombstone back in November. It arrived in February when I was already back home, so this was the first time I've seen it.  Dad wrote out the Chinese characters that they used to make lettering with.  I think it looks pretty nice.  And I think it's pretty generous of dad, who is an atheist, to honor mom, who was Catholic, by putting religious symbols on the stone.

Besides Lynn Headwaters, a trip to Vancouver would not be complete without eating authentic Chinese food...and lots of it.  My kids have gotten really fond of chicken feet now, so we order it at every dim sum:

This next item was a first for the boys (and hubby) - and a warning to the squeamish: you might want to skip down to the garden photos - care to guess what it is?

If you guessed "duck tongue", you are absolutely right!  Most older cultures still adhere to the "waste not, want not" ideal.

The funky thing is that inside of a duck tongue is some sort of bone or cartilage which makes the tongue stiff.  Consider this is your anatomy lesson for the day.  Traveling is very enlightening. 

We're back home now, in not-as-exotic southern Indiana.  But, we have fresh food back home, so even if we don't have anything unusual, it is all tasty.  Here's hubby between the broccoli and corn:

And what was hubby doing with a pitchfork, besides posing as model for an American Gothic revival? Digging potatoes, of course!

A few more random garden photos...summer squash that got too big while we were away in Vancouver enjoying the duck tongue:

More corn because we can never get enough:

The frisee, gone to seed...but look at how pretty the flowers are!

Not as pretty as the frisee flowers, but lovely in its own way is the asparagus forest:

Hubby put our indoor banana tree out in the garden where it's been enjoying the killer heat and humidity. I'm glad something is.

Aren't the cherry tomatoes adorable?

Well, enough of my babbling for one post. I plan to post shorter, less gross posts more regularly.  (Was that confusing to use less and more within 2 words of each other?)

If I've not already visited your blog, tell me about your vacation/summer/garden, and I'll swing by for a look-see!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Because my brain is in the shop...

...I'm going to subject you to some random firings of the handful of neurons they left behind to hold me through the week. :}

We had a couple of weird and unexpected hail storms a couple of weeks ago. The one that woke us up in the middle of the night produced marble-sized hail. (Incidentally, the leaves are large sycamore leaves, not maple leaves, so the hail is bigger than you think) -While Annie (Imagine & Create) is watching out for polar bears - doesn't that sound exotic? - we're watching out for the copperheads that have decided to take up residence under our blueberry bushes right next to the house:I just saw some pretty tomatoes over at Cake's blog (Rake Shovel Hoe), which reminded me that I'd taken photos of our own red beauties:
And while we're on the subject of veggies, I had the kids harvest about 10 pounds of corn yesterday. After I shucked them, I decided that they were too pretty to go without a photo:A few weeks ago, dh decided to try making a ratatouille because we were over-run with eggplants. Before baking:
After bakng: It looked better than it tasted, so he went back to making borani with the eggplants we harvested later.

This year has been a bumper-crop year for chanterelle mushrooms. This is just one of the many grocery bagfuls dh and the boys harvested:After cleaning the bag of 'shrooms up, and laying them out to dry:Dh cooked them various ways: sauteed in butter, sauteed with green beans, and, my favorite way, cream of mushroom soup!

It's been too hot to do much baking lately, but we had a piece of carrot cake for dessert when we had lunch with my FIL over at his assisted living home, and that got us hankering for more, so I made one. It was very tasty!Do you have any odd, random thoughts for me? Any grand plans for the rest of the weekend? I hope to read the wonderful stories that Blonde Duck (A Duck in Her Pond) sent my way as part of the gift swap back in July!

Happy Sunday to you!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Our garden, a little tour

I promised I'd show you some pictures of and around our garden, so here goes...

This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:The corn is doing splendidly too:We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:One of our green bean beds:The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams