Pioneer Woman at Heart

  The laundry has dried so much faster with the heat wave.  I love our solar dryer.  Free!  Smells great!  I get exercise. Wild black raspberries are on now.  I'm picking daily, and will use them for simply eating or making fruit smoothies for a cold lunch.  The best part?  It's free!  I forage for them, and some plants have been planted closer to the house by birds.  If there is an abundance, I will freeze some, but the lack of rain and heat wave may say otherwise. I received some free merlot heirloom lettuce seeds, so we are trying something new with this heat index skyrocketing - planting lettuce indoors.  I'll let you know how it turns out, or if it does well.   I decided to plant two kinds of lettuce, and a tray of microgreens.  If it all does well for our meals, I'll start more later this week. The mulberries are also on the trees, but they are not all ripe yet.  I did get a mix of berries a few days ago th...

  The wild black raspberries are on early this year.  They are small, but tasty.   I have a lot of plantain in the flower beds, and I am happy to say I have a wild growing mullein plant again.  So happy for that. The heat if finally letting up a bit, but no sign of rain. My husband took the truck to work the other day, so he could get the gas can refilled.  A deer jumped out of the ditch and smashed into the side of the truck.  I'm still waiting on the collision repair guy to call so I can take the truck in for repairs. I sure hope it doesn't take a year to get an appointment. I finally baked us a chocolate angel food cake.  It's good and light, but there is not much chocolate flavor to it.  I don't get to make one very often, but it's a nice light dessert for this hot weather.

I'm back!  I have discovered how much I can get weeded when we have no internet, ha ha!  Woke up to no internet on Wednesday morning.  Five phone calls later we were in town getting a new modem, only to come home and not have internet.  Again.   I got a text message yesterday that said "your system was restored etc."  It was not.  Ten minutes later I get a phone call to make an appt. for this coming Sat.  Last night the dogs alerted us and we find our internet provider in our driveway.  Hubby ran out to see what was going on.  He said something happened with their "system" and it sent a power surge to many homes knocking out their internet (hm?).  He was sending a ping to the modem.  Internet is back on finally. Got another text message.  It was correct this time, and to reply to cancel our Sat. appt.  Sigh.  Anyway, glad it's back on, but it made me realize that if we all went out, our quick and easy commun...

My mother wants to know why she hasn't heard from me.  You probably laughed at that, right? And here is why.  Grab a cup of your favorite beverage....it's sort of, kind of, a long post.  Or come back when you need an excuse to just sit for a spell. Aside from that mess of a barn we have to clean up (felled tree #2 is still on the ground too)... We picked up 4 quarts of fresh strawberries.  We used to pick up 12, but we are well stocked with strawberry jam right now. Thankful for that too.  Even if I have miss-counted, we have more than enough of the other fruit jams.  And we are needing to stock up less with the shrinking household. Three quarts went into the freezer, and 1 quart went into a fresh strawberry pie for Father's Day.

We have nothing but thistle growing in one tomato patch.  We put down a heavy layer of straw this year to prevent weeds and grass, but the thistle is up everywhere.  I, like the dummy I am, walked through to check on my butternut squash mounds, and to weed them out.  My feet were in flip flops of all things.   Yes, the thistle gave me a rash, somewhat like the itchy burning rash you get from fire ants (only the blisters are filled with clear liquid).  Oh, did it itch.  To get rid of it I used what we typically use for poison ivy.  Our milkweed is not up or visible yet. 

I've been having what I call "apron days" here lately.  Starting my day in the "garden" apron, then the "canning" apron, then my "housework" apron, and ending it in my "cooking" apron.  Today's my day starts with draining more cheese.  Mmm!  Tonight we'll enjoy some with either hot pepper jelly, or port wine jelly, on crackers.   What we will get more of:

While checking the garden I saw one plump shell pea pod.  I picked it to see check the size, so I know when to start picking them.  We even tasted these gems of goodness.  I can't believe I haven't grown them before, but you can't grow everything.  Or can you?  Hopefully, in a few more days, I'll be blanching our first shell peas for the freezer.  I took the pea pod out to the goats, to see if they would like it, but they all turned their noses up.    The berry picking continues.  I should have enough to start canning jam.   Looks like a dry day today, so maybe weeding will continue.  I saw one jalapeno on one plant yesterday, but no green peppers just yet.  One zucchini plant is dying.  Hopefully the garden will have the chance to completely dry out and catch it's breath.

The rain brought the wild black raspberries into harvest early this year, and it's hot, humid and miserable to pick them (as always).  Our first day picking was done together.  Most of the time we spent slapping ourselves (thank goodness for chickweed salve), hollering out at the prickers and blowing bugs off us as we picked as fast as we could.  One time I heard "Awww, I dropped it!"

You are probably tired of hearing about it, but it continues to rain.  I woke up to the same wet ground again.  It has rained either during the day or night here, every single day. It was dry most of yesterday, but too wet in the vegetable garden to even step into it.   You can see in this photo, how tall the weeds are in the broccoli and cauliflower garden.   If the sun stays out today, I may be able to get into that garden late today yet. Halfway through the day yesterday, I started on the front flower beds.   This is one corner I was looking at from the porch.  This is what I was looking at afterwards.  This is just a snippet of the front porch flower bed. (just one corner of the front porch flower bed)   Here is how far we got with mulch, before we ran out.  I guess we'll get more.  We have already filled the rose bed, the mailbox bed, and two other rose beds with mulch.  There seems to ...

Ideally, if we don't get any of one vegetable or fruit, we just do without.   However, we picked up 12 quarts of strawberries.  I took care of six quarts yesterday, but only canned jam once.  Many went into the freezer.

Sunday the humidity was terrible here.  Even so, I canned one batch of wild black raspberry jam, got caught up with laundry, garden work and even got dinner made before going to the movies with Son and the family.   This is a "grab a cup of java" kind of post.  I beat my son up this morning.  How?  I have no idea. Ha ha! We enjoyed our first green and wax beans this season at dinner too.  Yum. 

Hubby spent most of the day wrestling with the mower.  He did have to order a part, which should arrive in a week or so.  I continue to wrestle the weeds in the garden.

On Wednesday I noticed a few ripe wild black raspberries.  I picked those, and later checked another location.  It took a while to cut down brush to get to them, but I found many more ripe ones.  It was hot, humid and I was picking them in jeans and muck boots.  I wasn't taking a chance this time on getting poison ivy.

Everyone needs a "watch cat" right?  Ha ha!  I guess Sapphire thought the top of Hubby's truck was the perfect spot for watching. Good kitty.

It's rained here almost every day for a week now.  Yesterday, was my first chance to weed the garden.  I was only out there for about 1 hour, and Hubby called.  He had to work late.   This meant, stop weeding, go pick up our youngest who was at a sleepover, come home change clothes, go to the store, come home, make dinner, and change clothes and go back out.  Phew!  Did I just put that all in one sentence?  I think I stayed out there until 8pm. I woke up to fog, which is much thicker now since I took the first (top) photo.  It rained again last night.  My hair is like a Brillo pad, and my body aches like nothing I've felt before.  Or maybe I have, and have forgotten what it felt like.  You know, like child birth pain?  You feel the pain, then afterwards forget?  I wonder if we suffer garden work like that. Most of the family has been picking wild black raspberries, and I've been canning jam - 15 jars so far...

If Hubby had said to me, "let's not grow a garden this year" I would have said "okay."  Then I would have secretly done the "hallelujah" dance when he wasn't looking.  Honestly, I think he feels the same way this year. Seriously.  Look what's next - wild black raspberries.  I decided to skip making mulberry jam.  The birds are too quick for me, and the pie pans in the tree are not working in my  favor. I admit it.  I have garden burn-out syndrome this year.  And it has just begun.  I think it's the 95° heat index, and the humidity.  Mom sent me an e-mail sharing her "Snapdragon" days.  It starts out with a nice photo of snapdragons in a garden.  Then it gets funny, with a turtle looking haggard.  I laughed my bum off. It said, "Part of me has snapped, and part of me is draggin." Ha ha ha ha! We're allowed to feel that way.  Or should I be saying "shame on me?" It's going to be another "...

We gathered about 10 cups of wild black raspberries and will go back for more.  I have already canned 6 jars of wild black raspberry jam this week.