In The Garden :: First Day of Spring

On the first day of spring, Mom and I walked around the garden and decided what our plans should be for this year.  We bought travertine pavers for a walkway-that's-never-going-to-happen about 2 years ago and after fighting weeds beyond measure in between the beds last year, I decided we should put them down in the veggie garden.  I did quite a bit of research on Pinterest about laying paver paths and I realize this is going to be a major endeavor, but I'm excited about it.  We laid some down on top of the soil just to get an idea while we were out there.  The first row of pavers is going to be just straight down the sides of the beds so that we can easily pull them up to get to the PVC pipe underneath, and then we'll do some sort of pattern down the middle.

The strawberries had decided to abandon their beds and grow all over the ground instead, so cleaning out the beds and getting the strawberries back in there is a top priority.  Mom was so excited about it that in the past couple of days she's already gotten a lot of it done!  We had so many strawberries that she's started cleaning up the flower beds close to the house and is putting the leftovers there.  And the rhubarb is also starting to come up already, which is a strawberry's best friend!  I'm imagining pies and cakes and tarts already...

The tops of the beds that are inside the fencing are getting pretty old and most aren't screwed down anymore, so we are probably going to get new wood for them and re-stain all the wood that needs it.

Last year I had troubles with watering the beds.  A couple of soaker hoses split, then as the summer went on most of the soaker hoses got clogged up with algae from the irrigation.  I did some research on better watering systems and found a genius idea on Pinterest using PVC pipes.

I plan on building them to fit the beds and then attaching them to the underground system with small hose sections.  Since you just drill holes in the PVC, if it gets gunked up this summer I'll just take the drill out and clean out the hole!  Mom was worried that there wouldn't be enough water pressure, but I don't plan on having the water on like a sprinkler, more like a good healthy drip.

Other than that it's just the usual clean up of weeds in and around the beds and maybe we'll get to laying some straw between the long beds to keep the weeds from growing too quick!

Grape Pickin'

Yesterday Mom called me at work and said, "Wanna go pick some grapes?"  Of course I said yes!  She'd been looking for concord grapes to pick ever since our friend took out his grapevines and had finally found some down in Wapato.  They were going to go through and harvest all the grapes left on  the 20th, so we only had a few days to get there.  After bringing a change of clothes for me (not gonna get grape juice on my nice clothes!) we drove down to Kreuger Pepper Gardens.  They have more than peppers, of course, including squash, garlic, onions, watermelons and right now concord grapes!  We had brought our own boxes and pruners, but we were informed the grapes around the U-Pick were all pretty well picked.  They directed us down to another vineyard they owned and we had to get past the security...

...but luckily we weren't hassled much.  (Sweetest dogs in the world, they just hung out while we picked.)  We had the whole vineyard to ourselves, there wasn't another soul around!

Isn't that beautiful?  Miles of vineyards with velvety Eastern Washington hills in the background?  This is why I love where we live.  The grapes were thick too!  Mom and I picked and picked and didn't make it three feet in either direction.

There may have been some pretending I was a nymph of Dionysus with all those grapes around...

Too bad I can't Photoshop a toga and some laurel leaves on that pic.  :)

When we'd filled our boxes to the top we trekked back out and drove back to get them weighed and pay.  I picked up some butternut squash, because ours didn't do so well this year, and also some garlic and peppers.  At the farm stand they told us about getting a steam juicer to process the grapes into juice to make jam or just drink.  My coworker had also mentioned getting one, so we bought a fairly nice one on Amazon with 1-day shipping.  Mom had spent all theses years doing it the centuries-old fashioned way with a potato masher and cheesecloth.  This should speed up her processing time greatly!  She figures one box for jam and the other box for juice.  Or possibly wine...she's already started research.  And speaking of spirits we had to pass field after field of hops.  If you never knew where all those Yakima hops were grown to make your favorite craft brew, then behold the majesty...

You know your from Eastern Washington when the smell of hops makes you instantly think of fall!

**I didn't have my nice camera, so I had to make with do with my iPod.  The pictures aren't too bad, but I know they could have been better.**

In the Garden :: June and July

June and July in the garden isn't very exciting because it's all about growing.  You end up weeding and watering and waiting.  But when you finally do see the first bit of produce show up all of the work that went into it seems to disappear. 

Baby chickies arrived in late June after we got back from the cabin.  They are always so cute and entertaining.  Fluffy and sweet for two weeks before they start to get scraggly as their real feathers start to come in.  Then it's out to the coop for more room to run until they get as big as the adults.  By the fall they'll be all mixed in and you won't be able to tell babies from adults.

Beans were the first to be harvested.  We had so many bags of string beans that there was no way were we going to eat all them even if they were part of every breakfast, lunch and dinner. A few years ago before Mom retired, she bought a pressure canner so that we could preserve the excess beans but never had the time to use it.  This year we got to can some of those yummy beans for later.

Zucchini are always early as well and as you know from a previous post we've been trying to stay ahead of those too.  Some got too big and went to the chickens and I took a few with me when we visited Nicole.  No sense in not sharing the bounty!

We had planted the potatoes in April and it was time to pull them out of the ground.  The tops were starting to die back and that was a good sign that they were ready to harvest.  Mom had a good morning doing that and even remembered to take pictures!

There were portions of a bed that I didn't have any plans for this year, so we ended up sowing a crop of oats.  I had done some research on crops to grow to as cover crops for years when I didn't have plans for all of the beds.  Oats will keep the soil from eroding and adds organic matter to the soil.  We can harvest the heads and try making our own rolled oats, or just give them to the chickens as oat hay by cutting the entire head off.  In truth they are so pretty I may plant them every year!

Other than that all the other fruits and veggies are coming along.  The tomatoes are still green...

The pumpkins are starting to turn orange...

Watermelons are small, but coming along...

And the peppers are getting bigger.

We also have produce growing in the orchard and vineyard.  Make no mistake, our "vineyard" is only five grape plants planted along our fence line, but as they grow they should provide enough for what we want.  They are all Concord grapes for making juice and jelly.  This year we only had a couple of bunches, but we are keeping the birds from them.  We'll see if they just end up straight in our bellies.

And the apple trees we planted a few years ago are starting to produce as well.  I think this may be the tree that provides cider apples...

Beyond all that we got a cow.

Okay, it's not really our cow.

But we feel like we've adopted her.  Whenever Mom goes out to work in the yard or mow she will come to the fence and ask for the weeds pulled or the grass mowed.  Her name is Love Game, but we call her Lovey.  One day when Mom was pulling weeds around the grapevines by the fence she heard a loud snuff, looked up and was eye to eye with the cow.  Now Lovey comes to the fence to watch us in the yard and walk along waiting for nummies.

I feel like overall I abandoned the garden this year.  The weeds grew overmuch, the plants weren't watered well enough and I didn't pay enough attention to it.  I'm really hoping to put bricks down between the beds in the fenced in area to reduce the amount of weeds in there and I am also looking into watering options for next year.  This year we put in a lot of new soaker hoses, but they seemed to get clogged up and not provide enough water early on.  It was also very hot in June, 100 degrees and over for two weeks straight, and I think that affected everything.  All the fruits and vegetables seem small and spare.  There's still plenty of growing time left, however, and a garden can surprise you!

To the Cabin...

We headed up last Friday to The Cabin.  For those of you who don't know about our cabin, it's not the nice, well kept cabin on the lake that you're seeing in your mind.  This is a four-walls-and-a-roof-no-glass-in-the-windows-walls-don't-really-reach-the-ceiling-in-some-places-home-to-packrats-more-of-the-year-than-people kinda cabin.  But it's ours.  Since the weekend was forecasted to have highs in the 100s we decided to buy dry ice to put in the food coolers so it wouldn't spoil in the heat.  We headed up to Ellensburg where we stopped at the Fred Meyers to pick up the dry ice.  Uncle Fred said that they'd have some and we'd called to check and they said they carried it.  They didn't say that anyone ever checked to see if they'd ordered any.  When Mom went in and the lady took her to get it they unlocked the chest and it was empty.  So then we drove over to Safeway, but they didn't carry any at all.  Our last stop was at the Super 1 Foods and the third time was a charm!  We put 5 pounds in the "refrigerator" cooler and 10 pounds in the "freezer" cooler.  Then we headed out on the drive up to Wilbur to meet David and his fiancee Jennie.  Last year as we climbed the hill on the other side of Vantage we had a tire start to fall apart.  This year all went well with our tires but there was an accident on that same hill.  It looked like a little red sports car clipped a white suburban and they did such an excellent job of it that the back axel on the sports car broke.  The back passenger wheel was sitting at quite an angle.  It hadn't happened long before we got there because there were people in the road stopping the traffic all the way across our side of the high way.  There was only a semi-truck in front of us so we had front row seats to the action.  Lots of guys from the semi-trucks and vehicles came forward and they pushed the sports car off the road.  While they were doing that however, idiots started driving in the ditch up the side of the road to get around the traffic jam.  A semi-truck a few cars behind us started to pull out too and Mom and I were like "Really?!"  But he was just blocking the side of the road so those a**holes couldn't cause more of a jam than we already had.  After the suburban got itself off the road too the traffic started moving again, but there was one car from the jerks-r-us train left on the side of the road and you better believe not one of us let them in.  The rest of the drive was uneventful and we met up with David, Jennie and Tayla at Doxies in Wilbur.  We had to eat outside because we brought the dogs with us and they couldn't be left for a moment in the truck.  We made it to the cabin around 5 PM and it was really hot, probably around 100.  The door had been left open and it was full of crap from packrats.  There was probably a whole tree in there.  David cleaned it out and Mom burned the debris in a small fire because we were afraid of any sparks getting caught up in the wind and it wasn't like we needed more heat!  After getting the camp set up we ate our dinner of hamburgers and hot dogs and fell into our beds.

I couldn't stop taking pictures of the moon...

Jennie, Mom, David and Tayla

Saturday morning we got up and you could feel it was already getting hot.  We ate our breakfast and then David and Jennie went up to get trees for cutting up to bring back for firewood this winter for us.  Mom and Tayla went in to Colville to get wood for a deck that we had decided to build at the front of the cabin.  I stayed and removed the old concrete blocks and tried to get the new blocks in place.  When they got back, Tayla went up and helped her dad and Mom and I set to work building deck.  First we put up a blue tarp and moved David's canopy over so the place was shaded.  When we put up the tarp a whole bunch of wasps started swarming at the end of the cabin's roof.  We sprayed them but there were a couple that still would come back and pester us but at least most of them were dead.  Then we leveled the blocks and got the frame made.  We had to move the blocks at this point because we didn't have them placed correctly.  We were going to do two framing posts in the box of the deck, but we didn't have enough brackets to do that, so we only put one in.  When we laid the boards across the top it seemed to give in places and was going to be too weak.  So then we used the L brackets we had and put in two more posts, ending up with 3 instead of 2!  Somewhere in the middle of doing this it felt like to me that all of a sudden the heat just really built in, like the temperature had risen quickly in just a few minutes.  Mom had brought a thermometer with us to be able to see just how hot it got.  It was around 2:30 PM and the thermometer said it was 103.  By the time we were getting tired, Leslie and Justin had showed up and so they and Jennie helped put the screws in the top boards.  Then we all brought chairs up and admired the new deck with some front porch sitting.

On the way to the creek we found some fauna...

Justin showing us up at carpentry

The high temp on Saturday

I french braided their tails to try to keep them clean

When we were doing the calculations the night before we thought we would need another step for getting into the cabin, but once it was all put together we didn't need a step at all!  The deck was perfect.  As a present to ourselves we set up the shower and each took one to cool ourselves down.  It didn't take long to heat up the creek water to lukewarm for the showers.  Dinner that night was spaghetti and it was delicious and well earned.  Through dinner we started drinking and got Justin and a few others of us drunk and had a blast trying to teach Justin how to dance.  We also roasted marshmallows and ate smores and had a rocking good time.  Leslie and Justin stayed the night with us, so Mom and I slept on the queen bed together and gave Leslie the "matriarch" bed and set up another cot for Justin.  When I got into bed and settled myself in, it sounded like something cracked under me.  But when Mom got in and settled herself, there was a definite crack and things falling under the bed.  We thought it was the plywood and just slept carefully that night.  Both of us clung to the outside because we knew the framing boards were still good, but the mattress dipped in the center, which made that difficult.  We both slept poorly that night because of the mattress and because it was so hot.  I slept in a tank top and shorts, mosquitos be damned.

Sunday morning most of us rose early as it was supposed to be even hotter.  You could tell it was getting warmer earlier than the day before and Justin and David ran off to cut up the trees David had brought in.  Mom and I wanted to go up to the beaver pond, so while Leslie and Tayla ran into town to get more ice we went off.  The pond was REALLY low!  It looked like the beaver were gone and you could hear a lot of water going over the falls.  The dam looked pretty much intact and we couldn't see where the water was going through.  I took pictures and we walked a bit around the perimeter and then headed back.  It was getting hot.  

The beaver lodge almost out of the water

Next we climbed up Mom's mountain to the circle of rocks and I read the readings for Sunday.  A little church in the mountains.  Then we headed back to the camp.  We were really sweating and the temp was at 99.  

Justin and David cutting wood

We sat on the deck and placed wet rags on ourselves to cool off.  The heat was rising and we kept drinking water and wetting rags.  I'd brought two little fans and a solar powered battery, but eventually we turned them off because they were just blowing hot air.  I would take my rag and wet it in the ice water in the cooler and then put it on the back of my neck.  We were just completely soaked.  Your entire body was sweating and you couldn't do anything but sit there.  Eventually everything just looked hot, it was like the whole world was tinged with yellow.  The temp got up to 114 that day.  We talked and read some magazines but couldn't do much in that heat.  That afternoon we lifted up my mattress and found that there wasn't any plywood under the springs, just some framing in the middle which had broken.  So Justin and I cut a new piece of 2X4 for the center frame and created a post out of the broken piece to strengthen the frame.  

The high temp on Sunday

He ripped off the sleeves of the shirt and made a headband...and he's burping.

Copper wire LED lights make it look so home-y

Innehecute?!

Leslie and Justin were going to leave that day, so after help fixing the bed they took off and Tayla went with them.  She was not doing well in the heat and really needed to go back to some air conditioning.  But not 10 minutes later they were back because Justin felt really bad about leaving his dad to load all that wood.  So we made hamburger stew for dinner as the temperature started dropping.  After dinner Leslie, Justin and Tayla took off again and the rest of us made smores and I worked a little at my wood carving.  It started getting really dark so we headed to bed and another hot night, sleeping with all the windows in the cabin open.  During the night or early Monday morning it rained a little and you could really feel the temperature drop, thank goodness.

Monday morning we got up and it was cloudy and a really nice temp.  We ate breakfast and David wanted to take Jennie up to the Madonna tree.  Mom and I hadn't made it up there the day before so we went and saw both that and Grammy's tree.  

We eat well at the cabin

The Madonna Tree

Tallest tree in the forest folks

Grammy's tree

Then I had wanted to scout out this path I'd seen in the meadow near the cabin to see if it went around the other side of the beaver pond.  I'm looking for a new place to possibly build a new cabin in the far future.  It did come out on the other side of the pond and David and Jennie were on the dam, seeing where the water was going through.  There was a big hole under the dam where it looks like a big rain storm washed it away.  Because the water was so low you could see an old sluice on the other side of the waterfall and some manmade piece of what was an old dam.  We worked at putting some branches in the hole so that other debris would start blocking it up again.  

Pieces of a manmade dam

See the old sluice?

Mom and I found a pretty nice flat place above the pond that could be a good spot for a new cabin.  There isn't a creek, but it wouldn't be too far down to dig a well.  As Mom and I headed back to the cabin and David and Jennie went up to the mill building and the other cabins.  Then it was time to pack it up.  We got it all broken down and headed out around 2:30.  I wanted to stop and pick up some slate on the side of the road that I'd seen on the way up, so Mom and I stopped while David and Jennie headed on to Sandy's Drive-In, where we were meeting for lunch.  While I was looking through the rocks a truck with a single light on the top turned towards where Mom was parked on the side of the road, took the road behind her, paused and they were sort of watching me, then turned around and took off really fast.  I thought, "Great I'm going to be arrested for picking up rocks on the side of the road," and so I grabbed the few I'd picked and put them in the truck including a really heavy large one that would have made my Grammy proud.  Then we took off back on the road to Sandy's.  I saw a couple more cars pass us heading the other way and thought maybe they were going to turn around and ask me to give up the rocks.  But I managed to avoid the coppas this time!  We ate lunch and then all took off our separate ways.  Mom drove back down to Wilbur and then we switched drivers and I drove home.  Around Almira you could see this hanging smoke cloud extending out over the wheat fields.  In the far distance there were giant smoke columns and as we drove out of Ephrata to I-90 you could really see how big the fire was.  We found out the next day that was the Sleepy Hollow fire near Wenatchee.  We could see the smoke cloud and columns more than 100 miles away.  And now we are set to break a record number of days with highs at or above 100 degrees.  The old record was 7 and we met that today with the forecast looking like we could have up to 5 days or more of 100 degree weather.  What a sticky way to start summer...

Teepees on Soap Lake on the way home