We've been having some days the past couple of weeks I like to call, "Now that's what they mean when they talk about Summer in the South" days.
Upper 90° (F) temps, with 90's % humidity....100°+ heat indices - whooo boy!
Just stepping out the backdoor you break out into a sweat. It's like stepping into a Sauna.
I like it!
I've spent more time outside than in, getting more stuff done. It's awesome!
(Of course, hardly nobody agrees with me. They all think it's miserable, the wimps. lol)
The other day I was knocking around out in the yard, and I turned around and saw this:
The picture really doesn't do it justice, it doesn't really capture the intense colors, or the warmth of the sunshine and the coolness of the shade, the soothing sound of the trinkling water of the pool fountain, or the singing and chirping of the birds.
All the bright and dark greens of the yard, my garden, the trees... The blues of the pool and the sky were so gorgeous. My laundry on the line, so bright and colorful, clean and fresh.
I felt like I was looking at Paradise.
Here's a video of the pool fountain:
Sooo nice.
Aaaaand, I finally got chickens!
Only took me...how many years? Like, ten!
Chicken house still wasn't/isn't finished, but what with the recent Avian Virus and talk of a chicken/egg shortage, I was stressing. I told J, I don't care if the coop is finished, I want chickens, TODAY.
We did go in and enclose the inside of the coop where they sleep with wire to keep out predators at night, and built this chicken tractor for them to be able to hang out in around the yard during the day.
We only got two to start with, but plan to get a few more later on.
IN case you missed it in the top chicken pic, you can see one of my five miniature pumpkins I've got growing.
The pumpkin plants really did a lot better than I was expecting them to.
Most all of my tomato plants have green tomatoes. If I don't lose them for some reason between now and ripening, I should have a bumper crop of tomatoes this year.
Not peppers, though.
I lost all but one of my Datil peppers - and the one isn't doing much of anything. I replaced them with Hot Banana peppers, that came with one pepper already growing on each plant. None of them have grown anything since, and the plant itself doesn't seem to be growing.
Have gotten three or four jalapenos from the Mucho Nacho pepper plant.
My Three Sisters garden is coming along well so far:
Or, at least, one side of it is. The side that gets more sun, I guess?
 |
| Corn and beans, then squash, then corn and beans, then squash... |
My Mom sold one of her houses, local'ish to us, so we helped her move her things out. (And brought a lot of it home, eek.)
I cleaned all the scrap wood and junk from the shed porch and rearranged it, somewhat. Ryan's car parts still take up half the room so I'm still not yet able to make it into the "potting porch" I want to.
Cleaned a lot of stuff off and rearranged the back porch so we could use it again. It gets so piled up during the Winter months, when I put stuff there "just for now", and end up never moving it anywhere else. But that's usually due to the reason it was put on the back porch to start with - there is no place else for it.
A lot of yard work. I'm constantly picking up sticks and limbs that fall out of the big trees around here every time we get a little windstorm.
Kevin rides the riding mower, and I push mow in my garden(s) and around the house.
I cleaned up, relocated, and/or threw away a lot of scrap wood and misc stuff piled in the back yard.
Yesterday we dropped everything because I thought we had an electrical problem in the laundry room.
After removing half the sheetrock and the outside soffit to remove a bird's nest....we ended up figuring out the light switch was going bad, and had done all that other work for nothing. Argh!
It's my laundry room, plus pantry, food stockpile, linens, and utility room, so I ended up pretty much tearing the room apart trying to get stuff moved out of the way so they could get to the sheetrock to get it off the walls (it's not finished yet, just screwed up).
So today I worked on getting rid of stuff that ended up in there that didn't really belong in there, and rearranging other stuff to make it better.
And, I made a floor. John helped, but mostly I did it.
I wanted to make a "100 year old farmhouse floor".
I went to HD and got 4x8 sheets of 11/32 pine plywood and had them slice it into 8" planks for me.
I sanded off the sharp edges with my palm sander, and used 6-penny nails to nail them down, then painted it with White Gloss Enamel Floor and Porch paint.
Pine plywood is a softer wood, so as I understand it the floor will get banged up, dented, scratched, and/or chipped, which I think will help to "age" the floor and make it look more "100 year old".
That's about it from here for now.
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