+I was glad I had an entirely free weekend to spend hours in the kitchen putting away food from the garden. +I made five jars of spaghetti sauce, three jars of marinated peppers (and more will be made using this recipe further down in the UC Davis guide), and put away seven vacuum sealed bags of beans to the freezer. I’m completely out of freezer space, attempting to be creative and tuck things in places, but I’m plumb out of room. Good news is that our small dorm freezer is coming in our POD sometime next week after we move into our new house! +Speaking of houses, we’re closing at…

Summer is officially here in Texas. I know, we have a few more weeks until the solstice but the heat is dialed up, the rain is getting sparse and my tomatoes, I believe, had their peak harvest last week. Summer has arrived! This summer is incredibly full already. We are closing on our first house at the end of the month! It is exciting because we’ve really waited 10 years for this—-oh, and our 10th wedding anniversary is next week! It might have been possible to buy a house if we’d stayed in the Melbourne/Space Coast area of Florida in 2004 and not moved to south Florida when the housing…

+These days I feel like most of what I do is garden related, whether it is being in the garden or doing something with the harvest. A couple of days ago I pulled out 21 lbs of food from our garden, carrying it out in one of our black reusable bags—a first in awhile because I always forget and have to pull used plastic grocery bags from the garden shed—worrying that the straps would break on the way to the car from the pressure. Inside I had many fistfuls of endless long, purple Chinese mosaic beans, more cucumbers than I need at the moment because we’ve pickled ourselves into a…

+When I get out of the natural rhythm of life it always takes me several days to bounce back. +Last weekend I drove to east Texas to visit one of my best friends Michelle. Her daughter’s 4th birthday was this weekend—I can’t believe that one! I came to Texas a few weeks after she was born 4 years ago and met Kylen as a tiny baby and now she’s this tall, long haired, spitting-image-of-her-momma kid! It was fun, there were cupcakes, balloons, meeting Michelle and J.P.’s extended family and friends…it was great! Now that I found an easier way to get there, (I took a different way to get there,…

Rosemarie and me with our friends Robert and Eric. They didn’t go to TAMUG, but Eric sailed on the Texas Clipper II in 1998 with us. Rosemarie and me. Another Rose from TAMUG! Hi Rose! One of my best friends, Erika, and my first college roomate Marsha. When my 10 year high school reunion came up four years ago (!) it didn’t seem that strange, it did feel like I’d been out of high school that long. Well, it has now been 10 years since I’ve been out of college and that does seem strange. Ten years ago I walked across the stage with most of my friends at the…

+Digging through my photo folders and found this from a few weekends ago when we harvested the last of the snap peas. We saved several pods and dried them for use next Fall. +Still trying to catch up from being gone last weekend. It always takes me several days to get caught up. +And getting caught up involves going through and processing all the photos I need to write the many blogs I’m working on. +Looking forward to a very creative weekend, hopefully. I hope it involves lots of writing, some quilting, and finishing and art project. Maybe throw some reading, gardening and chick-flick/period drama movies in the mix. How…

I started going through photos I took several weekends ago in Austin and came across this photo of a prickly poppy. I loved it so much but wondered if it was good for anything other than a nice quote. I’d read and article regarding Thoreau, about the change in bloom times in many species of plants in New England. Thoreau had kept an excellent record of the flora and fauna in Concord and now scientists are comparing his data to data they are collecting now. It is very fascinating stuff, phenology. Thoreau was on my mind and so I chose the quote above. I’m over at Sprout Dispatch today….drop by…

I spent some time this spring working on my galleries on my section of our website. When I put everything together in late Fall 2010 I was rushed and hadn’t thought it through. I’ve taken so many more photos since then and while I haven’t put all of those up yet, I have re-organized the website into better galleries. I’ve also created an image index because our galleries aren’t easily searchable. I also wanted the words to be able to be pulled up in a search engine and this way they will. The headers of each listing should be linked to the appropriate gallery. I still have a lot of…

+The boys really enjoy the doors being open so they can soak up the sunlight. Samson especially is missing his ability to hang out for hours on end on a porch. We had a screened in porch everywhere we lived in Florida (very typical of Florida) and thus here in Texas that isn’t available and he gets disappointed. Leo was never really allowed to wander out on the porch because he makes a ruckus of things, but he too loves the sun. +Our Sunday was anticipated to be full of hiking but then the weather said it was supposed to be 70% chance of rain and t-storms. That never developed.…