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.

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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

An old post I forgot to publish...

I'd written it back in early July before our trip to Vancouver; so, this will be your Monday treat...hahaha!

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I've never liked snow peas (I know, what kind of Chinese person AM I??), but have always loved other kinds of peas, our favorite being the edible pod types because of less waste. Until such time we get a hog to raise, I don't think we'll ever grow shell peas. It pains us to throw the entire husk away. Look at these lovely little edible pod peas!

This was our first big basil harvest; we made 9.5 pints of pesto.  Good eats ahead!

Not all is hunky-dory in the garden though.  There's something wrong with our onions. They have mottling on the green parts, making them look like aloe plants, and aren't growing very well.

Anyone else have problems with their garden this year that they can't attribute to insect pests?

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

A birthday wish, and a bevy of goodies

Firstly, it's dh's birthday today...47 and every bit as adorable as when I married him 20 years ago. And he's such a hard working dude too. It may be his birthday, but instead of sitting around wanting to be treated like a king, he spent the morning weeding and harvesting with the kids, and, now, after lunch, he went to the office to work for a couple of hours even though he didn't have to teach today.

We'll probably go out for his birthday dinner tomorrow, but tonight, I'm making him one of his favorite desserts: creme caramel (recipe courtesy of our wonderful neighbors...have I mentioned yet how glad I am the previous owners moved to the East Coast?).

We've been having lots of fun with ceramics lately. We made some new and different things that we're quite happy with. I created a tree shaped container:You lift the leaf lid and the trunk of the tree is a cavity in which you can store jewelry or whatever treasure you want!

Ds#2 made, with his teacher's help, a pen/pencil holder; the Old Brick glaze is quite attractive:
Ds#1 decided to make a stylized earth star bowl. For those of you not mycologically-inclined, earth stars are a type of fungus (puff balls, in fact).
Not to be out-done by us, dh cooked up some wild Alaskan salmon for dinner on Saturday. He made his own charmoula sauce, and whipped up his usual yummy Greek salad:
I know you never get tired of looking at our tomato photos...hah!And from these tomatoes, we canned another 14 quarts of sauce.What else have I been working on? Well, after seeing the cutest post at Lorie's Be Different Act Normal blog, I decided to whip up a bandana apron myself. Haven't gotten too far yet. I put some pleats in the black bandana for the bodice and attached it to bottom half. I am a messy person in the kitchen, and if I didn't have a bodice on my apron, I may as well not wear one at all.
And speaking of aprons, go check out and enter Amber's Ambry's 200th post giveaway!

All right, last but not least, and then I have to get back to reading the biology textbook and lab manual (for the lab class that I'm leading for some homeschool teens, including ds#1...again, many thanks to Meg!!)...we made and froze another 9 pints of pesto. Here the boys are, "de-foliating" the basil that dh picked and I washed:
I hope those of you who have Labor Day off today are having a wonderful holiday weekend! Are you doing something fun and out-of-the-ordinary?

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

Random Tuesday...thoughts and stuff

With any luck, by the time you read this, I should have arrived in Vancouver without getting too sick on the airplanes. Doing my annual visit-the-folks trip is always fun and stressful at the same time.

Wanted to leave you with a few pretty pictures of our harvests. This is our gai lan (Asian green; related to broccoli, I believe) that we blanched and froze:Just look at the cute (and tasty) flowers on it!We also harvested a large black trash bag full of basil - regular Italian, plus lime and lemon basils. I washed them, and you can see the boys' hands in this photo as they picked all the leaves off the stems.Dh did most of the actual processing work making the pesto, using up a whole bottle of olive oil (we like the Spectrum Organic ones), and about 6 lemons. Yum!! Here it is, in its blurry glory (darn shaky hands):What have you harvested or processed in the past week or two? I know some of you have already made luscious jams from various berries!

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