business

At the farmer's market today I had several people stop by to tell me how much they liked the soap/lip balm/body bar. That is a real compliment to have people come back and tell me they like my products. I'm trying my best to make this little business a success, but I don't want it to take over my life. It seems willing. I really enjoy solving all the sniggly little problems of figuring out how to make this a successful venture, but God's work comes first, then my family, then, somewhere down the line comes the business. I do like having a business I can fit into my life. For example the other night I was labeling soaps and my daughter plopped down to help. We had "All Creatures Great and Small" running and it was a sweet time. The soaps look good and I didn't have to leave my family. Have I mentioned I like this better then substitute teaching?

this and that

I've been running around trying to catch up from being gone for so long. I'm almost (but not quite) back to my routine. It's amazing how much work there is to do when you're out of town for a while. I made three batches of soap yesterday and two today. I cleaned out M~'s room and turned it into a soap room. Or I guess I should call it my business office. The garden has suffered from my absence. I think the potatoes are dead. The chickens got into the cucumbers and there are no more cucumber plants, they're all dead. In the same patch as the cucumbers the chickens scratched out all of the green onions. They obviously don't like to eat onions and we ate them all tonight in a lovely onion-y curry. My beans have a bad case of the bean beetles, but I feed the beetles to the chickens whenever I catch them. They sure like to eat those beetles. We had chinese yard long beans with dinner tonight. They are really good. I cut them up and used them like beans. They taste slightly different than beans, but they are very good.

harvest

I just tallied up the amounts the garden/chickens have produced in the month of June. The total was 83.8 lbs! This is the first year I've been consistent about weighing the food we are raising. The picture is of the garlic. It was super easy to raise and produced quite a bit. It took a long time, but it was totally brainless once it was in the ground. One sad note. While I was on vacation the chickens squirmed through the fence around the cucumbers and ate everything. So I need to refasten my chicken wire and then replant for a late crop.

raspberries and apples

The raspberries were wonderful this year. We had to fence the bushes off so the chickens didnt' eat all the fruit. When I left on vacation I picked as many raspberries as I could, then I removed the fencing. The chickens were very happy to finish the picking for me. They love the raspberry bushes. They give them a place to hide in the shade.

The apple tree has some sort of wasting disease where some of the branches die and the leaves turn all brown, but this tree seems to have survived, with fruit! I'm not sure what the disease is but I know it killed one of my apple trees a couple of years ago. I usually lose a few small branches to the disease each year, but that one year I lost an entire young tree. I love apples. We had an apple tree in our backyard when I grew up and that apple tree played a major part of my childhood. We practically lived in that tree every summer.

beans

Beans, beans the wonderful fruit. These pictures were taken right after I picked a whole bunch of the beans. You can see the strings they are climbing up. The beautiful flower is for Yard Long Beans, which is a chinese vegetable, look like a bean, used like a bean, it's not a bean. The other is a Fortex bean, seeds given me by my mother from her garden. They're doing fabulous and they taste great. I haven't grown climbing beans in a long time, I forgot how good they taste. They're so easy to grow. The only problem I've had is a bean beetle attacking them, but the beetles are easy to pick off and kill.

John Pack

OK, so no one has ever heard of him, but he is on a famous statue, farthest to the right, barely mentioned, but he's right there! We went out to Utah and visited the "This is the Place" monument and looked for evidence of John Pack (DH's only even mildly famous ancestor). We found him, last in line, but, hey, he's in the line, right behind "unidentified pioneer." John Pack was with the very first bunch of people who entered the Salt Lake valley with the pioneers. The monument is at the place where Brigham Young said, "This is the right place."

road trip