Chicken Coops

Our new chicken coop still has not been built.  However, it is a priority this year to get it done.  We have several projects that need to be tended to and this is one of them.  Unfortunately, we are buried under about 2 feet of snow at the moment, so I have lots of time to plan!

First on our list this year is an arbor for my daughter’s secret garden.  When my husband built my soap shed, that created a little space about 4 or 5 ft wide and about 18 ft long behind it.  My neighbor behind me, built a beautiful rock wall with a cedar fence on top.  It is beautiful.  So my youngest daughter decided that she would claim that space as her own and it would become her secret garden.  For several years she has longed for an arbor with a gate at the entrance.  The ones we liked in the stores are very pricey and so we have not been able to purchase one for her.  I have made them in the past out of PVC pipe and that vinyl lattice, but it would be hard to attach a gate to it.  We did do that in the front yard, but my husband could not install the gate onto the arbor.  He had to install two posts directly behind the arbor and attach the gate to that.  Since she wants her gate in the front of the  arbor, that would look kind of funny.

So I came up with an idea the other day.  We are going to use 4×4′s and make a frame out of those and attach wooden lattice to it on the sides and top.  Then make a garden door out of lattice on the front of the arbor.  It will look adorable.  We need to repaint our house and shed this year and I am thinking of going with sage green and cream trim instead of the current mocha and chocolate trim.  In either case we will paint the arbor either cream or a very light mocha to match the house and shed.  I already have a Newport Fairy climbing rose-bush planted at the edge of the shed and it is just waiting for an arbor to climb over.

Our second must do project this spring is to build a small deck in front of my pantry.  You may recall that I took a small shed that was attached to our house, moved my husbands tools out of it into a larger shed and converted it into a pantry.  This is working out very well, however, there is a substantial drop from our back deck to the ground in front of the pantry.  My old knees take offense to this drop each time I have to step down or up.   So that will be done right after the arbor.  This will also make the trek over to the clothes lines much nicer as well.  It will be a nice, gradual drop.  And even if I eventually move the clothes lines, (which I am considering doing because I would love to put in an outdoor shower or some bee hives where the clothes lines currently are)it will be nice to have a gradual decline into the yard instead of just jumping down!

Third project is to finish up our cobblestone paths.  What my husband has done so far looks great!  Now if I can just get him to finish them.  Our daughter wants a cobblestone path in her secret garden as well, so he has a lot to do.  Our neighbor Charlie has offered to loan him his cement mixer so I am hoping he will take him up on that offer and get them all done.  It isn’t that expensive to do and with the cement mixer, it would save his back and arms!

Fourth and Fifth projects are our chicken coop and goat house.  Last summer we did remove the old chicken coop and pen.  Since the goats are currently dried off, we converted the milking room into a chicken coop and put them in the yard with the goats.  This works out great as long as the goats don’t get in the chicken coop as they eat all the chicken food!  What weirdos.  Anyway, the chickens are doing a great job at eating the bugs and we had almost no flies last year at all.  They also eat some of the alfalfa as well as their own lay crumbles, corn and all the kitchen scraps we can give them.

I saw a really cute project online the other day.  Some one had turned an old set of 6 nest boxes into a planter.  I am considering doing this on the side of my new chicken coop.  It seems that a  new coop should have new nest boxes, so I could paint the old ones and attach them to the coop.  I could use them to plant lettuce and other veggies for the chickens.  I could close in the space underneath and use that to store extra feed.  I can’t wait to get started on my new coop and goat house!

Name Change

You may have noticed that I changed the name on the blog from Ivywood Cottage to Cobblestone Cottage.  I will explain why.  Our first house here in the mountains, we named Ivywood Cottage.  We loved that house.  When we had to sell it in 2004, we had been using that name so long it was hard not to.  We tried naming our current house Ivywood Cottage as well, but after being here for 6 years now, it just isn’t Ivywood.  It is Cobblestone Cottage and as such, I decided to change the name of the blog.  However, my soap shed has now become Ivywood Cottage and so I will leave the address of the blog as ivywood.wordpress.com so those of you who follow this blog can still find it.  Ivywood Cottage will always have a special place in my heart and so it seemed fitting to  name my soap shed that.  I have attached my original sign that used to hang in the arbor as you entered Ivywood Cottage, on to my shed.  It is an appropriate name for my soap shed as I have ivy growing all over it.

As we have been working on the yard, we have been putting in cobblestone paths.  I also noticed that our little cottage is the exact shape of several English cottages I have seen pictures of, or blueprints for.  It seems to lend its self to that old, cobblestone English cottage design, so that is what we are going for.  It is my plan to get the rest of the paths in this summer.  Down the road we will then begin adding river rock to the actual house.  Not sure exactly where on the house yet.  Cost will be a big factor.  I have seen pictures of stone houses in Ireland and love that look.  Who doesn’t want their house to look like it just fell out of a Thomas Kinkade picture?  Anyway, Cobblestone Cottage is a much better fit for this house.  I am sorry for any confusion this has caused anyone.

Vicki

I’m Back!!!!

I am not sure what happened here, but I seem to have been absent for a couple of years.  Shame on me!  So here I am again and I will try not to be so remiss in my blogging from now on.  Life has changed quite a bit since my last post.  I will try to catch you all up.

I used to sit and blog while my youngest daughter was doing her school work.  You all know we are homeschoolers.  It gave me something to do while she was working.  She isn’t a great self-starter, so sitting with her worked better than leaving her work on her own.  After we closed the business, my part-time job began giving me more hours.  My daughter is now almost 16 and is in the 11th grade.  I no longer have to sit with her while she does her school work and I am now working 4 hours per day.  By the time I get home, it seems that I have much to do and very little energy to spare and so the blog took a back seat.

In January of 2009, I began taking harp lessons and that has been very exciting for me and I try to spend 2 to 3 hours a day practicing and learning.  It is extremely challenging and my teacher tells me it takes a minimum of 5 years of lessons and experience until you are fairly good at playing.  I am only 2 years in so I have a loooong way to go yet.  My goal is to not only play for my enjoyment, but to eventually earn a part-time income from playing gigs around town.  I will eventually make a harp blog to let everyone know what is going on with that and so I don’t blog this blog down with harp stuff.

We closed The Cottage Bathe on Dec. 31, 2008.  It was a wise choice.  It was getting harder and harder to keep up with it both physically and financially.  Prices on raw ingredients have risen so dramatically that it really didn’t make sense to continue on.  We did not want to expand further than we already were as it would have involved renting a new production space and buying ingredients by the pallet.

As far as the house and the garden go, money has been tight and we have not achieved nearly as much as we had hoped to.  I will update with some current projects.  We still have 5 goats and 9 chickens.  Our last batch of chickens have not been that great and several have already died off.  I am hoping to order a few more in the next month or two.  We still have not been able to build our cottage chicken coop, but it is high on our to do list for this spring, so hopefully now that I am working steady, some of these projects will come to fruition.  I will be posting pictures and our progress.

I want to thank everyone who continued to find this blog and read it during my absence.  I am getting back in the saddle and hope to post regularly from now on.

Vicki

Prop 2 Passed!!!

Election Day has come and gone and I am so happy that Prop 2 passed. Hopefully this trend will spread throughout our nation. It is time to say no to factory farms and they horrible practices. Here is a blurb from the Humane Society of The United States.

The People Have Spoken: YES! on Prop 2

Friends, take a bow. Open the window and give out a whoop. Don’t hold back. Let fly the corks.

In big, bold, indelible letters, you just wrote history. Proposition 2 passed with an overwhelming majority (now more than 62 percent, with 40 percent of the vote in), despite a massive, multi-million dollar campaign by the opponents.

© iStockphoto

Life is going to get better for millions of farm animals.

And that’s thanks to so very many of you—those of you who voted for California’s Prop 2, those of you who donated time and money and support in the campaign, as well as the countless others of you who cheered from other states. This is the most ambitious ballot measure for animals ever undertaken. The energy that propelled us to victory was incredible—and that’s not overstatement. From the thousands of people who helped gather the petition signatures to put Prop 2 on the ballot to those who staffed the phone banks and knocked on doors to get out the vote, this was a show of grassroots might.

As a result, you’ve brought forth a new, more compassionate age.

Giving farm animals a little extra room to stretch their limbs, to move like animals should, is a small matter for us humans. But it’s a very big thing for a hen who would otherwise be confined with a half-dozen other birds in a cage about as big as a filing cabinet for her whole life. It’s a really big thing for a sow who would otherwise be stuck in a crate so small she couldn’t turn around. It’s a way big thing for a calf who would spend life chained inside a miserably tiny crate.

© Tony Chang
With hundreds of Prop 2 supporters gathered in Los Angeles.

Prop 2 will phase out those inexcusable confinement systems and usher in a new era. No state in the U.S. and no Agribusiness titan anywhere in the nation can overlook this mandate: people do not want their farm animals treated with wanton cruelty.

Now we also need to move on to changing local ordinances to allow animal keeping. We need to follow the lead of cities like Seattle WA, which allows chickens and miniature goats within the city limits and Madison WI, which allows chickens and is home to the group Mad City Chickens. While they only allow 4 chickens, (which in my opinion isn’t nearly enough to supply a family with eggs, especially in the winter) it is a start. How about Albuquerque NM? City planning regulations there say barnyard animals, such as horses, cows and chickens, are allowed in most single-family residential zones. Lots of one-half acre are required and must provide sufficient space for each animal. Yeah Albuquerque!!!!!

We need to start demanding that we be allowed to go back to some of the old ways which include vegetable gardens and livestock in our yards. Keeping chickens is easy and fun and doesn’t take up a lot of your time. The eggs are so incredibly wonderful and so much better than anything you are going to get from a factory farm that keeps battery chickens. Edible landscaping is beautiful and much more productive than grass. The satisfaction of eating eggs from chickens you raise, drinking milk from your goats or cow and eating fruits and vegetables that you grew is like nothing else. I would encourage everyone to grow something.

So let’s not stop with Prop 2. Let’s keep fighting for the rights of animals and for the rights of humans to keep them. No animal deserves to be abused by humans for any reason. Even animals being raised for food deserve to live happy, healthy lives while they are here on this earth with us. It is our duty to properly and lovingly care for the animals we have custody over.

With the price of land now a days, buying a couple acres is out of reach for most. So allowing people to raise chickens, goats and yes even a cow on their small holding (as long as they provide adequate space for the selected animal) is the way to go. If I want my front yard to be a vegetable garden, that should be my business and not the concern of my neighbor. If we all go back to some of the old ways, we will all be happier and healthier for it. I share the fruits of my labors with my neighbors and they love it. We can all work together and make our lives and the lives of animals richer and more fulfilling and healthier as well.

Re-purposing

I love finding new uses for old things or things that I no longer have a use for. For example, in my kitchen I hung and old wooden ladder above my stove that I hang my pots and pans from. My daughter’s small 3 drawer dresser that she out grew is now in my kitchen and holds dish towels, all my teas and other items. It also gives me extra work space. I put my knife block on it and found a cutting board that fits on there perfectly, so I now have a space to work when I am at the stove. Pine paneling from an old cabin has been turned into dining room benches by my husband and a pie cupboard from my larger kitchen now does duty in the laundry room as a cupboard for supplies.

So now I have been faced with the challenge of what to do with my daughters big, wooden swing set/play house/ slide. You know the ones. They sell them at the home stores and they are big and heavy. But at 13, she has grown to big to fit in the play house and has little desire to use the swing set. Since we have grandchildren now as well, we are hesitant to get rid of it as they enjoy it, but it is showing it’s age and we are afraid of it becoming unsafe. It currently sits on a narrow piece of land which is really an easement and that space is not large enough to have room to swing and to attach the slide. So what to do with the monstrosity.

It hit me the other day. We are going to take the swing side off. We have been wanting to put up one big wooden swing for the kids, but didn’t know where. So if we take the swing side off, all hubby has to do is build legs for the side that is currently attached to the play house. He will move it to our front yard and cut it down to fit between two very big pine trees we have there. He will remove all the plastic, icky looking play stuff and make one or two really nice big wooden swings. He will also clean it up and re-stain it. So that solves the swinging problem.

With the swing part removed, we can then turn the play house part side ways and move it down between some trees, which will make it seem like a tree house and we will have the room to attach the slide. Under the play house we used to have a sand box and we can re-do that as well. We will clean it up and re-stain or re-paint it and it will be grandchild ready. I really want the kids to enjoy coming to grammy and grandpas house in the mountains. I am going to see if we can at least get to the slide part this weekend. It might not get re-painted, but perhaps we can get things shifted around and make a start so come spring all we will have to do is paint or stain them. I just love it when I can think of a new use for something.

Chicken Coops

Ok, it is the end of Oct and the cold weather hasn’t even hit yet. And what am I doing? Planning projects for next spring! I haven’t even accomplished the projects I wanted to accomplish for 2008. I still need to get one of those outdoor storage closets for the back deck and a new shed for hubby so I can turn his man cave into my pantry. The money hasn’t been flowing lately and so several projects are still waiting to be done. Inside I still need new shoe racks for the laundry room and pillows for the new dining room banquet we built this summer. With the summer garden now behind us, it is time to look at outdoor projects that usually include some sort of building or hard, physical labor.

When we moved into this house, my husband literally threw up a barn and coop for the goats and chickens. It does the trick, but it is on the ugly side. With only a 1/5 acre lot and being very visible from the street, our animal keeping habits are closely scrutinized by all who go by. Now we have nothing to hide as we take excellent care of our animals, but I do believe that anything in my garden should be pleasing to look at as well as perform it’s task well. We have known all a long that we would be building new animal structures within a few years and I am getting the itch to get started. I have been looking at coops online and have a bad case of chicken coop envy.

So I am going to plan the perfect chicken coop! We have been keeping chickens since 2001 and have had 3 different coops now. With all this behind me, I now know exactly what I want in a coop and more importantly, I know what I don’t want. We know exactly where it will go and we know that we want it about a foot off the ground. I also want it right by the edge of the driveway so it is easy to get too in the snow. It will be a wonderful spot for them with oak trees for summer shade and plenty of south facing sun in the winter. It will be visible from our living room and the dining room and easy to get in and out to gather eggs and cleaning and feeding. I want room to hang their feeder and waterer inside. I am tired of frozen water and lugging hot water to the coop each winter morning. It will also have a solar motion sensor light so we can see at night when locking them up and so on. It will also alert us if something is prowling around the driveway. I am thinking about installing a heater as well, but not sure if I can find a solar one. But at any rate, it will be well insulated, including the floor and roof. Luckily we don’t get sub zero temps here and it rarely gets down into the single digit temps.

We will use the 6 nest boxes that are in our current coop. I also have some vintage windows that we rescued from a cabin that was being demolished this summer. I have the wire to make screens for the windows and insulation for the walls. I could also use the door I have on their current coop but it will need fixed up and fitted with some plexiglass and new wire screening first. I also want to get rid of the floppy chicken wire that currently keeps them in their yard and replace it with wooden lattice that is lined with wire screening. I then plan to put netting over the top.

So I am off to a good start, but there will still be much to do and buy. I have visions of a little storybook cottage type coop. It will be called “Le Poulet Chalet.” Not that original I know, but I like it and it has a classy French ring to it. We are considering using metal roofing for this one and I want to put rain spouting on it with some rain barrels for water collection. I also have two large green pots to put on either side of the step we will need to get into the coop. I also think window boxes are a must have. I know I tend to go a little over the top on projects like this, but with it being so visible I do not want to run the risk of people calling code enforcement for my ramble shack chicken house. They are much more accepting of things like chickens if the whole thing is pleasant to look at. I also put an old claw foot tub on the left side of their pen, which will stay. I am planning to plant a small Japanese maple tree in it come spring.

So, it will be quite the project. But we kind of know what we are doing this time and we are of to a good start and have a few things already. I do need to decide how I want the outside. I will probably use the same siding that is on our house, unless I can find someone giving away cedar shingles. Sometime you can and sometimes you can. Time will tell. I also have in the back of my mind to eventually host a chicken coop tour for the local sustainability group and if that ever comes to pass, mine will have to be up to par and worthy to be on a tour. So how many weeks until spring?

Holiday Traditions

Like many others, my family and I have our family traditions that we do year after year after year.  Since it is October, it is the time to visit the apple orchards.  If we didn’t live where we do, we would want to live where these apple orchards are.  Every year we go to the same shops, to the same place to watch them make cider, to the same petting zoo, the same restaurant for pie and to the same places for our picnic lunch.  I don’t know why, but doing these same things every year gives us a sense of the season.   If you skip doing the tradition, it doesn’t seem like that holiday.  Even as an adult, I look forward to the holiday traditions.

Now that isn’t to say that you can’t change them up once in a while.  For instance, I used to love to have people over for Christmas Eve dinner.  I did this many, many years in a row.  Then I became a lector at my church and suddenly I had to be at church on Christmas Eve.  Since Mass was at 7 pm, I cooked up dinner prior to going and we ate when we got back.  However, serving, eating and cleaning up a large meal at 9 o’clock at night was getting to hard to do.  Maybe my age is showing, but I just didn’t have the energy to do it any more.   Since  going to Mass on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning became a tradition and cooking a large dinner wasn’t, we were at a loss as to what to do.

Some years we go to a friend’s house for a late dinner, which is wonderful, but we needed something that we could do as a family.  Since we usually go visiting on Christmas Day, I found myself in the position of not being able to cook for the holidays.  So I came up with the idea of a Dickens Tea on Christmas Eve afternoon, prior to heading off to Mass.  This has worked out so nicely.  We do it as just a family, so there isn’t the stress of getting the house company ready.  The menu is fairly simple, but the same every year.  Since we eat around 3 or 4, we are nice and full for church, but not so full that we cannot enjoy a small meal afterwards with our friends.  Of course, on the way home we have the usual driving around looking at lights, however, in our neck of the woods, there isn’t much to see.

So once home, we all get into our jammies, grab a cup of hot cocoa and settle in to watch Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol.  By the end we are all snuggly on the couch and sleepy.  Our daughter heads off to bed and my husband fetches the gifts I have hidden out in the shed or car or one of my other many hiding places and  we get to work playing Santa.  With only a 13 yo at home now, I do miss the days of the surprise in the morning at what Santa left.  But as one phase or tradition fades, others take their place.  So as the holidays approach, enjoy your family traditions or make a new one.  It is so enjoyable for the whole family.

Oh joy, it’s autumn!

Well here I am still having a hard time getting back into the swing of blogging regularly.  I will try to improve on that.  Now I find that it is autumn and am wondering where the summer has gone.  Is it just me or does time fly by this fast for everyone?  It seems I get less and less accomplished each year that goes by.  Each morning I get out my to do list and it seems to take days or weeks to get a couple things crossed off.  Not sure what to do about that.  However,  I do keep plodding away and hopefully someday I will see some progress.  I do love autumn though and I am very glad it is here.

With the arrival of autumn, my thoughts naturally turn to home and the holidays.  We decked out our house with a hay bale, pumpkins, and all sorts of harvest decorations.  The mantel is all decked out as is the book case and the back door.  The nights are cool and the days are sunny and warm.  The leaves are starting to turn.  It has been the perfect October so far.  Next will be Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the joy those holidays bring.  I can smell the turkey cooking as we speak.  One thing about living in the mountains is the smell of wood burning permeates the air.  Our currently home does not have  a wood burning stove as our other home did, but we plan to install one at some point.  I do miss the wood fires.  They keep the house so much warmer and cozier than any other type of heat.  We currently have a propane stove which looks like a wood burner and for now, this will have to do, but it just isn’t the same.

Our little maple tree

My little corner bird garden

Our hay bale display in the front of the yard

Our little mantel above the propane stove

Our back door

So what exactly have I been up to you might wonder, besides decorating for fall.  Good question and I ask that of myself frequently.  I have been busy in the kitchen, although the garden results were not as spectacular as I had hoped for.  But there is always next year.  Here are some of the things I did get accomplished.

I got a few jars of green beans actually canned and we had steamed green beans on several ocassions.  The chickens also got to partake in some green bean eating as well.  I also learned how to make homemade apple butter.  We were lucky to get some fresh apples from the trees at my work and viola,  I made applebutter.  I must say I am quite pleased with myself as it is delicious and I had no idea I was such a good applebutter maker.

Fruits of my labors!

The tomatoes did fairly well this year, which was a blessing after last years diaster.  We had blossom rot on every single tomato last year.  It was truly depressing.  We were really getting into making spaghetti sauce with our crop this year and then weekend before last it happened.  It got cold.  We had sleet, frost and snow.  That was the end of our garden.  So now we are trying to ripen about 10 dozen green tomatoes.  Wish us luck.

The zucchini did ok, but not as  well as expected.  I think I had them in too shady of an area.  Next year they will be moving up front to the claw foot tub I just put out there this weekend.  We did get quite a few though and I have a stock pile of zucchini bread in the freezer as well as about 2 dozen packs of grated zucchini frozen for future use.

My claw foot tub in it’s new home in the front of the house.  Soon to be home to zucchini with blueberry bushes on either side lining the fence.

The cucumbers did ok, but we didn’t get enough to make pickles.  My husband ate the whole crop so there was no loss there.  The corn did nothing.  It barely got knee high, so it will be moving from the front to the back next year as well.  I didn’t do that well last year, but it did better than it did this year.  The cantaloupes grew and grew but never got any fruit on them.  Big disappointment.  We actually got on watermelon, but it never developed enough to eat.  The pumpkins and squash got tons of blossoms, but not fruit either.  Is this a bee issue?  I don’t know, but we are considering going into beekeeping in the near future.

The herb garden did fairly well.  I have lots of basil dried and stored.  One can never have too much basil.  The rosemary is flourishing and we have parsley, sage, thyme and oregano drying as I speak.  The spinach didn’t do well at all and the lettuce did ok, but I think I had it in too hot of a spot.  We also got a few carrots, but none of them grew to more than bite sized.  So we have had some successes and some disappointments, but we will press on and try to do better next year.  We have plans for installing some permanent trellises and I am hoping to get in an arbor so we can add grapes.  Our raspberries are growing well and I am thinking that next year we may get more than a handful of berries.  We also have blueberry bushes on our spring list of plants to buy and as always, we keep trying to expand our strawberry patches.

So all in all, it was a good  year.  Lots of room for improvement though.  One thing we really need to get going is a compost pile and a rain collection system.  So lots to do and lots to think about.  I am trying to track down some 55 gallon drums so I can get started on my rain collection system.  I eventually plan to have every roof collecting rain water.

Back to School

Well it is that time of year again.  Time to get the old homeschool back in session.  We started on Sept 1.  I was very organized this year and had all of the books we needed purchased by the beginning of Aug.  Starting school always goes much smoother when you have all the things you need.  I can’t believe Emily is in high school now.  She is starting 9th grade and the time has just flown by.  It seems like just last year we were just starting our adventure in homeschooling and now we her graduation just down the road.

I will be very sad to see her graduate.  I love homeschooling and have the kids around all day.  I have been able to spend so much more time with them by homeschooling them and it has been so much fun to see them learn.  The look they get on their faced when they get it, is just priceless.  We have sacrificed a lot in order to do this.  There have been no vacations and money has been tight at times.  But I would do it all over again.  No amount of money and no vacation could ever make up for the time I got to spend each day with my girls.  I only wish I could make the twins young again and have a do over with them.  LOL!!!

So keep us in your prayers as we venture into another year of school and the first year of high school.  I know we will get a lot of flack from those who think my daughter is missing out by not attending regular high school.  But that is ok.  We know we have been called by the Lord to do this and our kids have benefited from it.  To all you other homeschoolers out there, it is my prayer that you will have a graced filled year and that you will grow closer as a family as you share in the many blessings and joys that homeschooling your child will bring.

Progress in Le Petite Potager

The garden has been interesting this summer. We got a freak snow storm over Memorial Day weekend. This pretty much did in all the blossoms on the strawberries and we got virtually nothing to harvest. Now the ever bearers are producing a few hear and there, but I am very disappointed as I did not get any strawberries to make jam with.

This snow storm and cold weather also prevented us from putting our plants in the garden until early in June. This is very late and we were not sure how things would transpire. Shortly after we put the tomato plants in, we discovered we had a gopher. Yikes! He has a clematis, hostas and columbine from my cottage garden around my soap shed. He then set his sites on our veggie garden. He got 3 heirloom tomato plants and one roma. He also at some herbs. We tried various methods to get rid of him naturally, all to no avail. We finally had to kill him off with poison. Luckily, he had made his front door under our deck and away from the garden, so it only took one dose and he was gone. While we are very much pro wild life in our yard, these types of critters are destructive and had he been left unchecked, we would have had no garden at all.

Once he was gone, we had no more problems. Now it is Sept. and the tomatoes are starting to ripen. We are finally getting cucumbers and the zucchini are coming a couple a day. One strange thing though, we have had tons of blossoms, but not even half of it is turning to actual vegetables. My husband thinks it is a lack of bees. I don’t know. I have seen some out there, but perhaps not enough. We had so many zucchini blossoms that I thought we would be knee deep in them by now, but we are not. Same with the cucumbers and the cantaloupes. We do have two very small watermelons growing, but at this late date, they won’t amount to anything. The pumpkins and squash experienced the same thing. Tons of blossoms, but no fruit.

On the positive side, the beans seem to be faring well, however, the peas didn’t do that great. The broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower never came up, but the lettuce has done well. We had lots of basil and I am drying it and storing it for winter use. Same with the oregano. The rosemary is doing well also and so are the chives. Next year I hope to get onions in and potatoes as well.

Plus we have only had rain once this whole summer, and it wasn’t much to speak of. It has been a long, dry summer. Luckily August hasn’t brought the high temps that July did, so at least we have that on our side.

I am still hoping to make spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce from the romas. They are starting to ripen, but I need lots of them to ripen all at the same time in order to make sauce. Meanwhile I watch and wait.

Here are the beans, roma tomatoes, cucumbers, carrorts and cantaloupes

Some oak leaf lettuce

Zucchini

French Beans