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Hi Everyone,
Summer has truly arrived here in North Florida, and as I look out over our lush green grass I am humbled as I hear that others have not been blessed with rain and they are very dry and their grass is not green and growing. I thank the Lord that He had mercy on us and sent the rains our way—for we were out of hay and the animals needed grass to eat. May is usually a very dry month here in Florida, but this year we received 9 inches of rain in May, and now the grass is growing faster than the animals can eat it.
Last Monday was Memorial Day and our worker Steve asked for half the day off—animals have to be fed every day of the year, but gardens do not have to be weeded everyday (well, they might look better if they were). Steve headed home as soon as the morning chores were done and Papa mowed the yard and Mom and I headed to the garden. Mom was determined to finish weeding alongside the spaghetti squash, and I wanted to pull up all the forget-me-not flowers. They had died and gone to seed and it was time to pull them up so that I could plant a cover crop there for the summer. The week before I had walked into the flower bed to harvest some seeds and was horrified when I found out that the seeds stuck to me like beggars lice. UGH! How in the world was I going to pull up those plants without being covered from head to toe with seeds? A friend suggested a plastic rain coat, but I thought of something better—Papa’s green Gumby suit. So I put it on and pulled up all those plants and kept my clothes perfectly clean—I only got a few in my hair. To add to the humor of the whole thing—I videoed it and you can watch it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtdwbcrcRJM&t=64s
When I came inside from my garden adventures I spent the afternoon in the kitchen making yogurt, doing dishes and attempting to make an apple pie. At 4:30 I headed to the garden to tell Mom that it was time for her to come in because I had a mess in the kitchen. My crust was not working—it was just crumbling and I need Mom to add her special touch and make it roll out nicely. It took a while for her to accomplish it—but in the end we had a very nice apple pie.
Tuesday morning Papa greeted me with the question, “Mom wants to know what herbs to take for diarrhea?” For some strange reason my mind was blank and I couldn’t think of any herbs—but twenty minutes later when I found myself in the same situation my mind finally clicked in—blackberry root tincture is the number one thing to grab (but we don’t have any), so we grabbed the Slippery Elm Bark powder, yogurt, and raspberry tea. Papa thought that we had food poisoning, and for days I was afraid to eat anymore squash from our garden or the rest of the apple pie. Then we heard of other families who were suffering the same symptoms—and they hadn’t eaten our squash or apple pie, and we realized that we had been bitten by the stomach bug. Mom and I were not too sure how the cows were going to be milked that morning—for we are the only ones who can milk the cows. It was close to 9:30 when we thought that we just might be able to adventure out of the house to milk the cows. We accomplished it—but we spent the rest of the day relaxing inside or on the front porch. It took a few days to recover our strength back and feel like doing much more than paperwork and tidying in the kitchen.
A few weeks ago Mom had a birthday and when Papa asked her what she wanted for her birthday she told him wooden posts. What woman asks for wooden posts for her birthday? A woman who has dreamed up a new garden design so that she can get her grape vines planted! To Mom’s delight—Papa bought her those wooden posts and is even helping her put them in. Last Thursday and Friday they worked in the garden taking down the old fencing and measuring out the design for the new and putting in a few posts and reinstalling a few fence panels. While they were design artists, Steve and I weeded. The first day we weeded three rows so that I could plant some okra and transplant some more lettuce. Then the second day we pulled weeds in a 10 ft. by 10 ft. bed in order to get it prepared to plant our sweet potatoes there on Monday. That bed was overrun with cat’s claw vine, goldenrod, Trumpet vine, rattlesnake weed (Betony), blackberry vine and a host of other weeds. The weeds had ruled that garden bed for probably the last 10 years. Once we tried to reclaim it by digging out all the dirt and covering it with black weed cloth—but that is as far as we got. The weed cloth never worked and was removed a few years back—and the weeds just continued to reign. We have 100 sweet potato slips to plant tomorrow and I had to have a place to plant them—but with most of the garden already full of crops and the other half going to be under construction the rest of the summer I was at a loss of where to plant the sweet potatoes. We thought about planting them in the caterpillar tunnels—but they would still be growing come September when I would need to start the fall garden. We really wanted to grow them in the raised beds—where we could easily keep the vines trimmed so that the plants could focus on producing potatoes instead of vines. So we decided to reclaim one of the weedy beds—and to our delight the frame of the bed was still in pretty good condition. It was a HOT afternoon with temps around 94 and the heat index at 99! I have to say that the best weeding tool we have for overgrown weedy areas is the broadfork—I have no idea how we weeded without it for so many years. It loosens the soil so that the weeds come up much easier. When the day was over we were done with the bed—and we were done in. The sofa sounded good for the rest of the evening—but dinner had to be cooked first.
Saturday we had a list and a half of things that we needed to do: make kombucha, make a pot of lemongrass tea, clean the bathrooms, order some items that we need, change the dining room décor from spring to summer, clean out the fridge (science projects were growing in it as Papa puts it), dust under the fridge (because it wasn’t cooling or freezing properly), and clean up the kitchen (find a storage spot for the jars of peas we had caned last weekend). Mom also needed to mow the garden and I needed to “mow” the house (vacuum the floors). We started in the kitchen but we made a bigger mess than there was before we began and we really didn’t get much of anything else done—besides cleaning out the fridge, vacuuming under it, and making some lemongrass tea. The quest to find storage for the peas resulted in many cabinets being cleaned out and ancient jars being emptied. In the end the peas did find a “home”, but the counters were full of clean empty jars that need to go to the attic. Since the cleaning created some messes on the floor, I did manage to get out the vacuum cleaner. We only got the kitchen and laundry room vacuumed before dinner—but after dinner I vacuumed as much as possible as I worked my way to the back of the house where the vacuum cleaner is stored. I shall have to get the kombucha made tomorrow and get all the sweet potato slips planted—at least I know where they are going!
I hope you are enjoying your summer.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare