summer continues

We turned over a new, exanded garden plot behind the tractor barn this spring.  Keith had fun trying to plow for the first time on the tractor that my parents gave us for a wedding present.  The first attempt was less than perfect, but the tiller covered up the little mess!

Now the garden is in,  and we are in a constant battle with weeds.  The front garden is 30 X 85 and the back garden is 30X 25, so we have a lot of ground to cover.  I let the weeds get ahead of me. Now I am paying for it. 

Also, I gave up on weeding the carrots because they came up so spotty I couldn't justify all the time in weeding them for such a bad showing.  Then on Saturday I went out there to till up the whole mess and found all kinds of carrots up in amongst the weeds!  Dumb carrots!  Now I have to clean them out.

We are very excited about getting chickens in the next month.  Keith's grandmother had chickens when she was a girl.  So when we talked about getting chickens, she jumped right in and offered to pay for us to build the coop and get a small flock started.  We have a good start on materials for the coop from sifting through the barns and sheds.  We found some great old windows with character and wood we can plane down for siding.  We went to the Habitat for Humanity resale store and found some new shingles and a beautiful door.  We will buy new for the foundation, frame and flooring.  

The chickens are ordered and will be picked up from a farm in Ionia.  Our girls, Silver Laced Wyndottes, will be ready to lay around the last of August.  I did quite a bit of reading before deciding on Wyndottes. Wyndottes are very hardy in our climate.  They are layed back and easy to handle and more importantly, they are a great dual purpose bird.  We can get good egg production, but they also make yummy meat birds, so the cockrel will keep our little flock growing so we can have meat too.

I'll be posting pictures as we start building.  We are not carpenters, but we will have some help from friends and family that have a little more experience.  I bough a book, the librarian thing to do, but the hands-on help will make things go smoother and the end result much better.

We finished planting the garden last weekend, well that is not exactly true. The first rotation of crops is in, but we are looking forward to a second planting of beans and putting in a few crops like chard and bokchoi for fall. But it isn't too early for me to begin dreaming of the canner jiggling away on the stove and the musical ping of jars sealing.

This last week I actually got a head start on canning. Seeing strawberries in my future, I froze 9 quarts of rhubarb in preparation for jars and jars of strawberry/rhubarb jam. Last fall my father insisted on juicing gallons of grape juice so I could make him grape jelly, 27 pints of grape jelly to be exact. Now he refuses to eat grape jelly and only wants strawberry jam....go figure!

We are completely out of canned tomatoes. 24 tomato plants will get us caught up, but we have salsa coming out our ears from last year! I think that has something to do with my husband getting on a habenero kick and making the salsa so hot he is the only one who can eat it! This year I will have to be vigilant in guarding the salsa while making a MILDER recipe.

Then there are the green beans, the peas, the cabbage to be made into kraut....on the endless, wonderful list. Starting a root cellar this fall too.

So while the rain comes down today, and I have to stay inside, I can dream of rows and rows of jars to be filled by the growing veggies come harvest.