Whine: I'm Depressed

Don't you love it when you tell someone you're depressed and their response is, "You need to cheer up!"?

Kind of like a while back when I told my parents that every decision I've made in my whole life has been the wrong one, so now I pretty much just don't make decisions anymore.
Their advice?
"You need to start making better decisions."

Really? Gosh, wish I had thought of that myself, it would have saved me a lot of regret and heartache.

I know people mean well, but if it was that easy, don't they think I would just "cheer up", or would choose to make the right decisions instead?

I don't know why I'm depressed. I don't want to be. I pretend I'm not. I tell myself I'm not.

I love Summer, the hot weather, my backyard. I just want to enjoy it and be peaceful.
Is it too much to ask?
Especially when there's nothing really wrong. Or nothing new, anyway.

Anyhow.
I mentioned a few days ago that deer got into our garden and ate a lot of tomatoes.
I put a stop to that, and have been getting some tomatoes now, about 3-5 a day. I've canned 6 pints of stewed tomatoes now, for chili and vegetable soup this Winter.

Have gotten some peppers, too, but the Salsa making hasn't worked out so far. Just can't seem to get my ducks - or rather my tomatoes, peppers, onion and Cilantro - in a row.

So, the deer found the 3 Sisters garden and pretty demolished the corn.
But, it doesn't matter because that garden was failing anyway.
Apparently you're supposed to make holes in the weed barrier fabric underneath where you want your plant to root, it doesn't bio-degrade.
I guess the corn couldn't get through the fabric to root in the ground, so when the pole beans started climbing, over the corn went.
The corn wasn't growing very well anyway, I guess because all it had to feed it was the mound of compost/topsoil on top of the weed fabric.

Why don't I know these things?  My people were farmers, FFS.

Oh well, I'm learning.
I've been keeping up with my Gardening Journal I actually started this year, so next year I'll actually be able to remember the things I've learned this year.

I mentioned before that I've tried to grow pumpkins for, like, years, and something always happens to them.
This year I planted little "Jack-Be-Little" miniature pumpkins - and thought they were a fail before they even started growing.
They ended up doing okay - not great but, given my track record, pretty darn good.

I got about 10 little pumpkins altogether, so I think that's pretty good for me.

My vines quit producing - not sure if because of the heat, or if they got squash vine borers - anyway today I pulled up all the old vines and replanted new seeds. All goes well, I should have some more little pumpkins for Halloween.

Speaking of Halloween, lol, I ended up in the "Halloween Spirit" somehow the other day.

What was funny about it was, the next day my Sister saw my Pins on Pinterest and she was like, that's funny, she was looking at Halloween stuff, too, getting some ideas to make decorations and had even ordered my niece a Halloween costume.

I spent several hours on Pinterest looking at Halloween ideas (reading Boards and Blogs)(regretting the $5 bassinet I passed up last month that I could make into a Creepy baby thing).

I saw some pictures of black cats/kittens on or with pumpkins and such, and as you may remember, we just got a black kitten a couple weeks ago.
By October she's not going to be as little and cute as she is now, so I decided to drag the Halloween stuff out of the attic and set up a photo shoot.

Ryan helped. We're not the best photographers, and Kiki won't hardly be still or pose nice for the camera.
The pictures still need editing, also some of the pictures were taken using a green screen so he can add in backgrounds, but he started his new job this week and hasn't had time to work on it...

Anyway, here's a sampling:

I grew those little pumpkins!

Summer Day Video Clips

I love the sounds of a sunny Summer day, as heard from my back porch:


And some Live Action chicken video, The Girls hanging out in their chicken tractor, doing their chicken thing - eating bugs.

New Addition

Meet our new little rat catcher kitten, named...uhh, Kiki, I guess.

As in, "Heeeeeere, Kikikikikiki". lol.

We're not too good at naming our pets apparently.
Our last cat was called Kitty.
He had had a name at the pound where we got him, "Tod", but Santa brought Kitty as a kitten to Kev for Christmas that year, so we left the naming up to him.
We had a bet he'd go with "Snowball" since Kitty was all white, but he fooled us, he picked "Snowflake", LMAO.

Anyway, we never called him Tod or Snowflake, just Kitty.

Speaking of which, "The Girls", aka "Chickie Chickie", says to tell you all, "Bok bok".

Oh, Deer

 Man, oh man, Summer is just flying by. Kids go back to school in less than 3 weeks! Holy cow.

Thank goodness all mine are out and I don't have to worry about all that anymore...even if it does make me old.

I've still been spending a good bit of time outside, soaking up the heat.
Haven't really gotten anything, any yard or or outside projects, done or even worked on much, though. I just piddle around mostly.

One day I was hanging out out back, snapping some pics, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with them, what was missing.

Eventually it dawned on me - Sky.  Beautiful blue sky with fluffy, white clouds.

 I have to tilt my camera at a certain angle for it to pick up the sky, which darkens and/or cuts out most everything at the bottom of the pic.

Oh well.

So, my (tomato) garden was doing really well. Had a bumper crop of tomatoes coming on. 

Big ol' maters, big as my hand.

I was able to pick about a dozen, give or take, enough to can 2 pints of stewed tomatoes.

And then, Oh, deer!

Probably the almost last thing I expected.
Squirrels, yes. Rabbits even possibly.
But deer?

Hello, deer, we live in neighborhood, with houses on all four sides...eight sides if you want to get technical...most of which have dogs. Big dogs. Scary dogs.

What the heck, deer?

Really, it was a dumb thought - or maybe just wishful thinking - on my/our part to think it/they wouldn't come over here.
We know there are or were deer that live in the woods behind the house two streets across from here.
We know they have come into the hay field across the road, and in fact, a deer was hit by a car right out here in front of the house a couple years back.

But otherwise, we've not ever really seen evidence of the deer coming into our yard, especially not our back yard.  The year we had collard greens and cabbage planted out back, they didn't bother it.

If I remember rightly, I think John even tried to bait them over here with corn or something one time so he could get pictures of them on his trail cam, but it didn't work.

Plus, now, the people that live in that house across the street/field/street have three big ol' mutt dogs they let run loose all over the 'hood, crapping in people's yards, so it figured they would chase or scare off any deer around there.

At any rate, it or they showed up the other night, and ate a ton of my tomatoes. At least a dozen, if not two.

Oh well, they were polite about it, and didn't destroy any of the plants, or leave a mess behind. If I hadn't known how many tomatoes were out there before, I almost wouldn't even have known anything had even happened.

So, I figure it's been going on for a little while. I know there's been other days I'd go out and think, "Wait a minute, wasn't there a tomato there yesterday?", then, "Hmm, I must be misremembering."

Dang deer making me thinking I'm crazy. (More crazy than normal.) Ugh.

J wasn't here to build a sturdy wooden fence around the garden - not to mention, I don't want a fence around the area, since it's my regular back yard when it's not garden season - I really didn't want any kind of fence at all, because it makes it hard/impossible to mow/till the garden - but I had to do something, so I read on the internet for some other solutions.

I ended up going with running a fishing line all the way around, and hanging empty cans from it, to make a noise and scare them away if/when they run into the fishing line.

I used my potted Hydrangea and Chocolate-Mint and some other potted plants I had outside anyway, and then some decorative yard stake things I also had for a long time.

I guess it worked last night. They didn't get into the garden.
We got some thunderstorms, rain yesterday evening, not too bad, though, I don't know if that would deter deer from traveling around or eating.

I saw some new piles of fresh poop, so I think they did come over in the yard, but hopefully the rig-up scared it/them off. 

Sigh.
It's always something.