Found Not Lost

We had just dozed off to sleep when my daughter bursts into our room, in a panic. The washer and dryer, located just by her bedroom, she claimed had sprung a leak and water has spilled onto the floor. My husband jumps out of bed in a frenzy. This is all we need, another problem with the plumbing after we just fixed a thousand dollar problem with the main line.

He comes back to bed after a few minutes and exclaimed, “Girls! It’s always a drama.” Luckily, he says the pipes didn’t bust as we initially assumed. What happened was, someone (don’t know who it could be ) fiddled with the handles on the faucet leading to the washer and didn’t sufficiently tighten them shut. He swore he’ll get one of those industrial handles to replace the flimsy one that’s on there now. I went to sleep.

If you haven’t visited our backyard in a while, please drop by and see what’s been cropping up. It is the height of summer, and the garden is in its prime. We’ve not only been harvesting a good share of vegetables: green beans, swiss chard, long beans, beets, zucchini, summer squash, crook neck squash, buttercup squash and opo squash are just a few of our favorite things

My husband has been doing some improvements around the yard too, but the long awaited water feature is still just a concept. My husband claims it would be too complicated to get the power wired out there for the pond pumps. We think he just doesn’t want to dig the hole for the pond. I don’t blame him though he’s the only one who does all the hard work in the garden and this year he just re-did two of the biggest bed, digging them up, shoring up and replacing some of the border and amending the soil by carrying compost from one end of the yard to the other.

My job is easy compared to his. I just photograph the fruits of his labor. So go on and visit my backyard and give us some love

I am extending the giveaway for the book, Blue Like Play Dough by Tricia Goyer. You will have another week to enter so get on over there and leave me a comment or click the reTweet button. It’s that easy! It is really a great and inspirational book for every mom or mom to be.

It’s the height of summer and you know that usually finds us puttering in the backyard. We’ve been busy battling bugs and pests but we’ve also been busy harvesting and cooking green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, squash, greens, peppers, swiss chard, sweet potato tops, etc.

My husband has been working on a few building and renovating projects in the backyard. He’s built pent sheds, a compost bin and several trellises for the squash, beans and cucumbers to climb on. Visit us in our garden! I’ve been trying to post more photos regularly.

This guy is a regular visitor in our garden. Once in a while when he has a chance to escape, he’ll make a bee line for our backyard. He’s our neighbor’s pet.

This last visit, he even was comfortable enough to come and sit by my chair as my husband and I were sitting outside with our morning coffee. But then, he started scratching and even turned his stomach up to be scratched. When he did that, I saw his belly was crawling with fleas. Yuck!! I really felt bad for the little guy. It looked like he has a collar but I can’t tell if it’s a flea collar. Even if it is, it obviously is not working very well. His owners need to revisit the pet supplies store in that case.

And speaking of owners, they soon showed up from behind the hedge looking for their pet. As adorable as he was, we were glad to see him go home. My husband took out the pesticide spray as soon as they were gone.

I was at Home Depot at 7:30 last night, dressed in my baggy sweat pants and t-shirt. What would compel me to go out that late and dressed as such, you ask (because my life is just that interesting, I know). Well, I was out there that late because my ten year old daughter has a school project due on Friday, that, because she asked her father to help her, has grown into something a lot more complicated than it needed to be. If you ask me, this little native american dwelling could have been built out of cardboard. Instead, they are building the whole thing out of balsa wood and using terms such as rafters, foundation and molding. I tried to stay out of the conversation and out of their workspace. My only contribution was to take her to Home Depot for a last minute supply run. Other than that, the older girls and I perched ourselves on the bar stools and munched on some Mexican food. LOL!

Which, I have to mention… remember the tamales I made last month? We pulled some out of the freezer and steamed them for 20 minutes last night. They were as delicious as the day we made them! We’re definitely making these again.

Critics claim that clothianidin is to blame for devastated bee colonies. Charlotte Observer File Photo

Bayer CropScience, is on the defensive because of the effect one of its best-selling pesticides has had on honeybees according to this article on the News and Observer. Bayer is accused of deliberately downplaying studies that showed their pesticides harmed the environment. The effect was noticed after the number of bees started to decrease dramatically.

My husband was just commenting at the beginning of the summer that you don’t see bees as much anymore. When we first moved to North Carolina, there was so many bees in our garden that they were almost a nuisance. Every year that we kept a garden though, we noticed that they kept dropping off. There were less of them year after year. Then the last couple of years at least, we’ve noticed that our garden’s output of zucchinis and other squashes seem to have been also going down. This year we heard a tip on one of the local garden channels to manually pollinate the squash flowers with a small brush. We did that this year and lo and behold, we got a bumper crop of squash!

I’ll have to tell my husband here’s the reason why he has become our resident pollinator instead of the bees.