This week after nearly a month of disheartening donations, we finally caught a bit of a break. Our dear friend Ann at the local Jerome Food Pantry requested Cheezy Potatoe Soup so armed with maybe 35-40 lbs. of potatoes, at least 5 lbs. both of celery and onions – KW pulled the short stick with onion duty, we set to chopping.
We haven’t experienced a real monsoon season in more than a few years but recently we were breaking records and always surprising oopsies are revealed.
Even in our normal gardening routine, we occasionally meet with a “what’s that?” moment but none has surpassed this swiss chard root passing itself off as a multi-headed mutant of some kind. Look at the size of this beast. It was a veggie root so we investigated the possibility of cooking it but we couldn’t even cut it!
With summer in full swing, we have all sorts of outside happenings and visitors. The Capt. came across a rather UNinvited visitor who joined recently for coffee on his porch – even loving mostly ALL aspects of the Earth Mother, these guys give me the creeps. He departed into lake Ludwig for an eternal swim.
The main water valve from the house-proper area to the upper pond, gardens, and Reunited Resurrected garden is located right at the base of the steps to the left of the lower pond. It serves a unique and invaluable function of providing and conversely shutting off water to all the rest of our property and that connection is over 25 years old . . . ahhhhhhh the joys of dealing with long-term and best-available and affordable fixes, eh?
We elected for Joshua to begin with the absolute worst of the windows knowing that there would be a bit of a learning curve even following our agreed protocol of scrape – sand – fill/repair – prime - paint.
Well, surprise of all surprises. We have been suspecting that Mr. Skunk had set up housekeeping under the honey shack but little did we know he has been up to more than just housekeeping. We definitely have a Mrs. and either 3 or 4 babies!
As planned, Joshua showed up right at 5 a.m. at Tara and Lyle’s to make his attempt to relocate the colony in their water meter. We always move honeybees before daylight or after sunset when the largest number – hopefully all – of the folks will be back in their home for the night.
Through the looking glass . . . Of all the beautiful and artful architectural features of my home, the large number of windows and perhaps most particularly the arched ones, figure prominently in the character of TSH.
We feed the birds multi times daily and with the absence of precipitation along with rising temps, keeping the water bin really ultra-full has become paramount. Every variety of creature is looking to wet a whistle and in the case of our raccoon visitors, more than a whistle seems to be popular.
