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Hi Everyone,
It happened, and it happened two weeks earlier than it did the last two years. Does it mean that we shall have an early winter? Yesterday morning as I was setting up the milking equipment I heard the Phoebe bird. They spend their summers up north, and arrive in our neck of the woods in October. The last two years my calendar says that they arrived around the middle of October, but this year it was at the beginning. I fell in love with the name Phoebe over 20 years ago after reading a Louisa May Alcott book where one of the servant girls name was Phoebe, and she was known to sing as she worked. I love to sing when I work—when I am alone, or think no one is around. It was close to fifteen years later before I was actually introduced to the Phoebe bird. I was working in the garden when I heard a bird singing “fee-bee, fee-bee”. I followed the sound until I caught sight of the Phoebe bird on the fence.
I had plans to go grocery shopping on Monday—but Mom suggested that I wait until after payday. So I worked in the greenhouse all day. I planted more cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, Dinosaur kale, and lots of spring flowers. I love pansies in the winter, but I do not like the bold, dark colors—I want the pastels. This year I decided that I was going to find my own seeds—finding the pink ones was a breeze, but finding a light blue was a different story. A month ago I was watching a Gardener’s World with Monty Don—a gardener in England. He showed these beautiful light blue pansies that he was growing, and he gave their name—Adonis. I finally had a name to search, and I found it—in England. Those companies didn’t ship to the USA either. I kept searching, but no one in the USA carried it. By now I had my heart set on the flower I wanted, and I wanted it—so I kept searching. Then to my delight I found an eBay listing that had the seeds for sale. YEAH!!!!! The bad part was they were in Lithuania; the good part was they would ship them to the USA, so I ordered them—and waited, and waited, and waited. The pink Panola pansies arrived very quickly, but I had to wait for about a month or more for the Adonis pansy. Monday I was talking with a friend, and I shared with her that I was fixing to plant some pansy seeds and that I was waiting for the Adonis seeds to arrive. When I got off the phone and headed outside to the greenhouse I saw the mail lady leave. I wondered if just maybe . . . so I went and checked the mail. Let’s just say I was very ecstatic—and called my dear friend back to share the good news. It didn’t take me long to tuck some of those seeds in some dirt and then place the seed tray in the cooler to give them a cold boost. I took them out of the cooler today and moved them to the greenhouse. Now we wait, and hope they germinate. Many of the seeds that I planted on Monday have already sprouted. It is so exciting to see the new life emerging from the dirt.
Monday night I had a roast cooking in the oven, and I thought that the perfect side was some white sweet potatoes. They are ready to harvest in the garden—and I hope to get to them this week, because the rats have already found them. Anyway, I went out to the garden and harvested some white sweet potatoes for dinner. Come Tuesday I thought that I could make a soup with the leftover roast beef, and I could harvest some more white sweet potatoes to go in it. That afternoon Steve, Mom and I were having an egg party—because it was raining outside. We got to talking about what we were cooking for dinner, and when I said beef soup Mom gagged. It is honestly her most hated meal, but I do forget. I thought that I might go ahead and make a casserole with the leftover beef instead. When we were done with the eggs, Papa needed someone to drive him down to his tractor (he had run out of diesel). So I drove him down in the golf-cart, and shortly after we started it began to rain even harder. By the time I got back to the house, I was pretty wet and all I could think about was a hot shower. Before I headed to the shower, I checked my recipes for a beef casserole. To my dismay the recipe I had, called for cheese—but we ran out of cheese two weeks ago, and I didn’t get to go shopping on Monday. So I decided to make a quiche—but it calls for cheese too. UGH! I decided to take my shower and ask God to give me some dinner advice. I considered the soup anyway—but the sweet potatoes were still in the garden, and it was raining, and the carrots were in the walk-in cooler—and it was raining. We had used up all the vegetables in the house, and my extras were in the freezer next door. UGH! So I had a brilliant idea—dinner would be created from whatever was in the house! I grabbed an onion—thankfully they had been moved from the walk-in cooler to our house fridge a month ago—and I sautéed it in butter with the shredded roast beef. Then I scrambled some eggs—of which we had just refilled the bowl on our counter—and I added them to the meat and onions along with some herbs and I did manage to find one teaspoon of cheese in the fridge. To go with our egg scramble, I baked some pumpkin muffins.
To my delight I got to spend Wednesday afternoon sewing me a new jumper. When the weather turned cooler I started to reach for my fall clothes—but only found two. I knew that I had material for another fall jumper in my sewing room, so I was grateful to be able to get that done. How thankful I am for the challenge I received over 20 years ago to be able to sew a jumper in an hour. It is very handy to know that I can have a new wardrobe in just a few hours.
Thursday I was determined to go grocery shopping—but alas the weather was so beautiful that Mom said we needed to work in the garden. Papa had gotten us a trailer load of woodchips, and we needed to weed some walkways so that we could spread out the woodchips. So after the milking was done, we weeded in the garden. Shortly after 1:00, we started in for lunch. I headed over to check on the luffa sponges first, and to my horror I saw that the neighbor cows had eaten all the luffa vines off the fence—and smashed the fence down to get to more vines. OOPS! Our luffa sponges have gone wild this year. I planted about twelve plants in hope to get a few vines to cover the fence around the leaf mold compost bin. In the past my luffa vines have not really thrived. I get luffas but the vines have never completely covered a trellis. This year was a different story—they covered the fence surrounding the compost pile, they covered over the compost, they ran down the fence around their bed, they ran across the grass to the garden bed ten feet away, and they ran across the grass to the neighbor’s fence, and they ran over the neighbor’s fence into his pasture. They were everywhere, and if you tried to walk through them you were constantly stepping on a luffa sponge that was buried in the two feet tall grass that Mom has not been able to mow because of the vines. Seeing the smashed fence we knew what our job was going to be after lunch. When we got back out to the garden, we pulled all the vines off the neighbor’s fence first. Then we cut the vines back to the compost fence, and removed them from the grass so that we could mow before the first frost. Before we headed back to the garden I checked YouTube for some advice on when a luffa sponge is ready to harvest. The lady we watched told of the year she got 100 luffa sponges. Well, we gathered luffa sponges and tossed them in a pile, and gathered and tossed, and gathered and tossed, and gathered and tossed. When we counted them we had over 150 sponges, and we haven’t even harvested all of them. Yikes! Once we had them all stacked to dry in the tool shed, we stood around the Gravely peeling the skin off some of the sponges that were already dried out. Steve said that he had never peeled a luffa sponge before, and I laughingly told him that he would get to do a lot more this year. It was after 4:00 when we were done, but Mom and I were too tired to go to town to get groceries. Mom also had the island in the kitchen covered with oatmeal that she was letting dry out. We usually store it in the freezer, but Mom has been working to get them vacuum sealed in half-gallon glass jars.
Friday we milked the cows—who are giving us more and more milk now that they are in the pea fields. Then we spent the rest of the day in the Poultry kitchen processing chickens with the Durmaz family. How grateful we are for their help! When the day was over we decided to watch a movie that was sent to us via email. Have you ever wondered if there was any scientific proof that the Bible is true, and that the events it mentioned really happened? Well, there is a filmmaker who decided to use science to investigate and see what he found. He can be found at www.pattensofevidence.com A few years ago we watched “The Moses Controversy”—did Moses really write the first five books of the Bible? Friday night we watched “Exodus”—did the Israelites really live in Egypt, did the plagues really happen, and did they really escape slavery for the Promised Land? The movie does a great job answering those questions.
By the time Saturday arrived the list of places to go in town had grown: I wanted to go to the quilt shop to get more material, and to Walmart to get a few shirts, Mom wanted to go to Lowes for more fall flowers, we needed to go to Home Depot to get paint and stain for my bedroom—I finally have a color (Pesto Paste—an olive sage color), then we needed to go to Publix to get some much needed groceries, and to the health food store for more cheese. Alas we were prevented once again, and this time because Mom had caught the stomach bug. I took advantage of the afternoon in the house by setting up my ironing board and ironing while we watched and episode of Monty Don’s Gardener’s World. Later on we got a call from the neighbor wondering if we knew why the buzzards were flying around—of which we didn’t. So we went for a drive in the golf-cart looking for something dead. We found nothing—but a trail in the weeds. When I looked on the other side of the road I saw deer tracks, and coyote tracks. I guess we found the local wildlife trail from the woods to the pastures.
It looks like rain is in the forecast for most of the week. One project we have is to move the ducks out to pasture—they are creating mud around the concrete driveway, and they are eating the porch flowers. The good news is that Daisy started laying eggs this week. I guess we shall get 7 eggs a week until the other 10 start laying.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare